Sep

4

VMworld 2011 – My Take

Filed Under Uncategorized, vCenter, Virtualization, VMware, VMware View, VMware Workstation, VMworld | Leave a Comment


My VMworld 2011 points

Now that VMworld 2011 is over, I wanted to share my experience of this year’s virtualization main event.
There were a couple of key points I wanted to make sure I got out of the conference. First, I wanted to get a further technical understanding in some areas I did not have alot of exposure to such as vCloud Director, vCenter Operations, and vCenter Chargeback. Second, I wanted to get a better understanding of  how VMware is innovating around the application layer and the technologies associated with  that area such as the vFabric product family. …And on one other note, I was very excited and impressed about the VMware AppBlast announcement. I can’t wait to dive in and peel back the layers on this technology to better understand it!

These areas were important to me because I believe it is going to be imperative for the many VMware Engineers out there to have an understanding of the Management & Automation capabilities and the Application layer technologies. The hypervisor is the foundation layer but it is going to be the layers higher in the stack that are beginning to really drive Cloud technology and innovation. This is apparent in VMware’s announcements and offerings. I’ll save further discussion on this topic for another blog post.

Social Scene

VMworld is an opportunity not just to attend sessions and labs but to meet people and become active in the virtualization community.
I had a great time meeting some of the key contributors in the VMware community. Although I met many in VMworld 2009, there seemed to be so many more two years later. In fact, several people I was hoping to bump into became just impossible with the enormity of the conference and busy schedules.

One nice thing is that the awesome VMUnderground party, Veeam party, CXI and others helped in meeting new people and seeing twitter friends etc. Outside of attending sessions and gaining knowledge, I think this is what VMworld is about..the virtualization community.

The VMworld party was super crowded and The Killers were AWESOME!!
I didn’t attend the after pool party. Rather, I went and enjoyed a nice steak and wine at Delmonico Steakhouse to cap the evening. I just couldn’t bring myself to be herded to the pool area with 20,000 other people. BUT it would have been awesome to see @jtroyer take that dive into the pool! :)

Last thoughts

This was my second VMworld (2009 was first) and it seems to get better every year. There are definitely some pain points with a large attendance of 20,000. Overall I thought VMware and the Venetian did a great job. The logistics behind this must have been incredible.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to attend VMworld this year. Once again, I want to thank Greg Stuart and sponsors for the opportunity to win the trip!

I hope to be a bigger contributor to the community and give back  some to so many others that give so much in this community.

I’ll see everyone in San Francisco next year!

 

Aug

4

Exchange 2010 – The real driver to virtualized Exchange environments

Filed Under Exchange, Virtualization | Leave a Comment

With Exchange 2010, there are so many new features and capabilities from management, performance, HA, and more!

E2k10 is  a lot of information, and I’ve been slowly “ingesting”.
One of my favorites is the new Database Availability Groups “DAGS”.

The Exchange Engineering Team has completely re-engineered the capabilities for HA. Hats off to them definitely!!

 Yes, there are is no more Exchange clustering, SCR, LCR, CCR and all of those things you might have heard me speak about in the past.
These were such touted follow ups (from Exchange 2003) in Exchange 2007.

The new features in Exchange 2010 offer great benefits and build a great case to further the virtualization of Exchange deployments.

With Database Availability Groups (DAGS), Exchange Admins will be able to replicate and failover databases instantly whether locally or remote.

There are no more restrictions on the Exchange roles that can be installed for HA purposes. With Exchange 2010 you have the ability to get your environment going now and adding DAG capability later with little restrictions. This is concept is known as incremental deployment and breaks down the barriers that Exchange 2007 has with its HA and recovery features. Also, you can failover a single or multiple databases without having to failover the entire Exchange Server and much more!!

Not to mention, the great performance and I/O reduction in Exchange 2010 will definitely be a virtualization case builder for transitions and migrations to Exchange 2010. I believe these new capabilities will yield fast benefits, facilitate, and further drive virtualized Exchange environments.

Here is a video performing a database switchover using DAGS.

Enjoy!