Eric Siebert

The subject of one of the emails that I received this week from VirtualizationAdmin.com caught my eye:

[important]VMware vSphere ESX – Voted VirtualizationAdmin.com Readers’ Choice Award Winner – Hypervisors
Date: 20 Aug. 2015 | Author: The Editor
VMware vSphere ESX was selected the winner in the Hypervisors category of the VirtualizationAdmin.com Readers’ Choice Awards. Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer were runner-up and second runner-up respectively.[/important]

My first thought was: ESX? How could a hypervisor that was retired by VMware many years ago be selected today as the most popular hypervisor? If you remember your vSphere history the ESX hypervisor was dropped in vSphere 5.0 (2011) and ESX 4.1 Update 3 which was released on 8/30/2012 was the last version of ESX available. ESXi which was first introduced on 1/10/2008 with VI3 version 3.5 was the sole hypervisor available in vSphere 5.0 and onward.

I find it a bit humorous how many of us VMware old timers still cling to the past and use the ESX term to this day for the hypervisor thereby refusing to acknowledge the death of ESX after the birth of it’s successor, ESXi. I’ll admit I slip up and still use the term now and then as ESX is still roaming around in my head as the hypervisor that I grew up learning virtualization on. I even find it to this day in many documents and presentations from both VMware and its partners. There are even websites still named after it (Vladan 😉 and the landing page on VMware’s website for ESXi still has ESX in the URL.

These days I’m pretty careful to not use the old term in anything I publish either in on my blog or in the docs I publish and maintain at work as my urge to be technically correct overrides any desire to use the old term. So when I saw it pop-up in that virtualizationadmin.com survey I had to wonder what they were thinking using that old term. Either they were being ignorant (doubtful), not thorough with editing (possibly) or funny (maybe).

Who knows, either way long live ESX, the hypervisor that changed the data center and continues to rule it to this day!

VMworld is upon us and once again you must pick which sessions you want to try and see. With so many sessions (over 750+) and so few time slots (maybe 25 max) it becomes a real challenge to try and pick the sessions you want to see. In general I choose based on the topics that I’m interested in and more importantly who the speaker is. So below are my top picks, some of them may be full already but you can get on the waiting list or just show up and try and get in. You can also watch them online after VMworld once they are posted. One thing to note any session that has a SPO in the session number indicates a sponsor (paid) session that made it in outside the normal voting process.

Virtual Volumes sessions:

Virtual Volumes is VMware’s hot new storage architecture for external storage arrays and there are a lot of good sessions on this topic. Being slightly biased of course I have to start off with my session. Ken & Patrick are great VMware technical resources for VVols, Howard Marks is always worth a watch and I’m curious as to how backup vendors are integrating with VVols so the Symantec session sounds interesting.

• STO5888 – Top 10 Thing You MUST Know Before Implementing Virtual Volumes (VVols) – Eric Siebert – Thurs – 10:30-11:30
• STO5522 – Virtual Volumes Technical Panel- Ken Werneburg (VMware), Eric Siebert and others – Wed – 1:00-2:00
• STO5822 – Putting Virtual Volumes to Work — Storage Best Practices for vSphere 6 and Beyond – Howard Marks – Wed – 8:00-9:00
• STO4649 – Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive – Ken Werneburg, Patrick Dirks (VMware) – Wed – 11:30-12:30
• STO5844 – Benchmark Testing: Making Backups Better Than Ever Using Virtual Volumes – VMware/Symantec – Thurs – 10:30-11:30
• STO6552-GD – Meet the Virtual Volumes Engineering Team with Patrick Dirks – Wed – 9:30-10:30
• STO6553-GD – Meet the Virtual Volumes Product Team with Ken Werneburg and Ben Meadowcroft – Mon – 1:30-2:30

Virtual SAN sessions:

Virtual SAN has been around for a while now but there is some new stuff being announced that should be interesting. You can probably guess one of the new things from one of the session titles below. Cormac, Rawlinson and Duncan are great technical experts so the sessions should be very good.

• STO6050 – Virtual SAN: The Software-Defined Storage Platform of the Future- Rawlinson Rivera – Wed – 9:30-10:30
• STO5333 – Building a Stretched Cluster with Virtual SAN – Rawlinson Rivera/Duncan Epping – Tues – 11:00-12:00
• STO5336 – VMware Virtual SAN – Architecture Deep Dive – Rawlinson Rivera – Wed 3:30-4:30
• STO6228 – Monitoring and Troubleshooting Virtual SAN, Current and Future- Cormac Hogan – Wed 8:30-9:30

Other sessions:

A lot of these are based on people I know and enjoy seeing such as Chris Wolf, William Lam, Scott Lowe & Mike Foley. I also like deep dive technical sessions so the ones on vMotion and Compute/Memory look interesting. I’m also curious about the emerging container (cloud-native apps) space that should have a big focus at VMworld this year. I also noticed VMware plans on releasing a VM encryption solution so that should be an interesting one. I’m not much of a networking or VDI person so I tend to avoid those but there certainly looked like a number of great sessions in those areas as well.

• STO6631-SPO – GreyHairs on Storage – The Podcast Live on Stage – Howard Marks/Ray Lucchesi – Mon – 2:00-3:00
• INF4528 – vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Best Practices & Tips/Tricks- William Lam – Mon – 5:00-6:00
• INF4936 – Insight Into vSphere 6 vMotion: Architecture, Features, Performance and Debugging – VMware – Wed – 2:30-3:30
• NET6606-GD – Container Challenges with Scott Lowe – Tues – 5:30-6:30
• INF4758 – vSphere 6 Security Update – Mike Foley – Tues – 12:30-1:30
• INF5177 – VMworld 2015 – vSphere Security – Fact .vs. Fiction – Mike Foley – Wed – 4:00-5:00
• INF5701 – Extreme Performance Series: vSphere Compute & Memory – VMware – Thurs – 10:30-11:30
• INF5093 – vSphere Web Client – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow – VMware – Wed – 11:00-12:00
• INF5339 – Protect your VM data with VM Encryption for vSphere and vCloud Air- VMware – Wed – 8:00-9:00
• CTO6121 – VMware and the ‘Internet-of-Things’ – Chris Wolf – Tues – 5:30-6:30
• CTO6455 – Future Meets Present: Insights from VMware Field CTOs – Chris Wolf, Paul Strong, Joe Baguley – Wed – 11:30-12:30
• CNA5698 – Building your Next Infrastructure Specifically for Cloud Native Apps – Eric Gray/Michael West – Tue – 5:30-6:30
• CNA6647-GD – Provisioning Containers to vSphere with Benjamin Corrie – Thurs 10:30-11:30
• CNA6649-S – Build and run Cloud Native Apps in your Software-Defined Data Center- Kit Colbert – Mon 3:00-4:00

If you’re attending VMworld this year come see my session to learn everything that you need to know about implementing VMware’s new Virtual Volume (VVol) storage architecture. Unfortunately they stuck me on the last day (Thursday @ 10:30am) so after you recover from your hangover from the VMworld party Wednesday evening come on by to my session. Right now I have over 450 people registered for it. My session also made the list of Virtualization Review’s top 5 VMworld sessions to attend. You can find it in the session catalog by searching on my name.

Also be sure and check out the VVols technical panel (STO5522) hosted by Ken Werneburg from VMware and featuring myself as a panelist along with representatives from Dell, NetApp, HDS, IBM & EMC on Wednesday at 1:00pm.

ServerWatch recently published a list of the Top 10 Virtualization Experts that you need to follow and I’m honored to be included on that list along with some other very distinguished people that deserve to be there. I can’t dispute any of their choices which includes a dream team of virtualization superstars: Jason Boche, Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac, Rick Vanover, Stephen Foskett, Alan Renouf, Duncan Epping, Chris Wolf and Vaughn Stewart. My only comment is that there are plenty of other people that deserve to be there as well and if you want to see a larger list check out my Top 100 list that I published 6 months ago.

David, Simon and I recently got together for a new vChat episode and the topic of choice was my favorite topic these days, VVols. We also give updates on what we’ve been up to recently and we promise to be recording more vChat episodes on a regular basis. Also check out David’s link page that references the topics we talk about.

I did a post a few years ago on VMworld bands that I’m updating after the band for this year was announced. Much to my disappoint they failed to get a big name band in favor of two lesser known obscure bands, Neon Trees and Alabama Shakes. I’ve been attending VMworld since 2008 and the official parties have always been a fun way to unwind for a bit and escape after a busy week of hard core virtualization. VMware has had a variety of different bands to play at the party over the years that are listed below:

VMUGs are great events for VMware professionals to interact and learn and the MyVMUG team has done an excellent job executing the UserCon events but I wanted to comment on something that I have seen this year at the VMUG events. I’ve been a VMUG Leader in the past and am currently with a partner who sponsors VMUG events so I have perspective on both sides of the fence.

The only way VMUG UserCon’s can happen is through sponsor funding from partners which ranges from $3,500 to have a booth at the event up to $9,000 for a platinum sponsorship that gets you a speaking session and some other perks. Depending on the size of the event which varies by city there can be anywhere from 25-75 partners sponsoring a single UserCon event. As these events are at larger venues such as hotels and convention centers they get pretty expensive to execute for everything such as signage, travel, giveaways, food, drink and more. The sponsor funding is what makes these events possible and covers all those expenses.

The VMUG UserCons have multiple session tracks throughout the day where anywhere from 3 – 8 sessions are going on simultaneously that users can choose from. The sessions at VMUGs are encouraged to be technical and educational and partners have to submit an abstract that must be approved by the local VMUG leaders. A lot of sponsor sessions focus on the sponsor’s products and many sponsors do a good job of making them technical and educational but sometimes they can turn in to sales/marketing pitches. Depending on the attendee they may or may not be interested in hearing that but they have multiple sessions to choose from.

Gold and Platinum sponsors all get a 45-min speaking session at the event. In addition to sponsor sessions, VMware is brought in to spice up the event and make it more educational and interesting so you can hear VMware employees talk about VMware technology subjects. This is good as it makes it more attractive for attendees to come and also entice them to stick around throughout the day. However the problem comes when you start mixing together sponsor and VMware sessions in the same time slots.

If an attendee has a choice of hearing VMware talk about what’s new in VSAN or a deep dive on vCenter or vCloud Air or hear a sponsor talk about storage or backups, 8 times out of 10 they will choose the VMware session. As a result this screws over the sponsor which has paid over $5,000 to have a speaking session and ends up having a mostly empty room as everyone is in a VMware session instead. There is a simple fix to this that was implemented years ago by separating the VMware sessions from the sponsor sessions so they are not mixed together in the same time slots. However the discretion to schedule sessions is up to the local VMUG leaders and despite the MyVMUG staff highly recommending it be done this way the ultimate decision is up to the VMUG leaders.

I can point to two events this year that prove the impact that this has on sponsor session attendance. I was at the KC VMUG a few weeks ago and did a very technical deep dive on VVols that I thought would be well attended. However the KC VMUG leaders chose to mix together VMware sessions with sponsor sessions as shown below and as a result I had maybe 20 people in the room as everyone else was in VMware sessions.

Fast forward to the Seattle VMUG today, the VMUG leaders there chose to keep the VMware and sponsor sessions in separate tracks as shown below and as a result the same session that we did on KC was completely full with standing room only.

This clearly illustrates the impact of mixing VMware and sponsor session in the same time slots and the negative impact it has on sponsor sessions that pay a lot of money for the opportunity to speak to attendees. I have getting screwed at the upcoming Indy VMUG to look forward to as the VMUG leaders there have also chosen to mix sessions together. As the sponsors are the only ones that make the event even possible, it’s a shame that they get screwed over like this as it kills the value of sponsoring the event for us.

So if you’re a VMUG leader I encourage you to carefully consider this and schedule accordingly. I personally will be asking ahead of time now and may choose not to sponsor an event if the sessions are going to be mixed together. I’m sure other sponsors have recognized this as well and may re-consider sponsoring these events. As a VMUG leader your budget for the event is dictated by the number of sponsors you get so its advantageous to you to make the experience for your sponsors as good as possible so they will come back next year.

If you’re a partner and want to express your concerns send the MyVMUG staff an email as I have already done at sponsors at vmug.com.

VMUGs are excellent events that bring together the VMware community and I’d like to see them continue to have value for both the attendees and the sponsors. Hopefully VMUG leaders will help improve session scheduling to give us sponsors a fighting chance and have the opportunity to have bigger audiences at our sessions.