So I've finally arrived back home in North Carolina after my first trip to VMWorld and I've had a day now to rest and recharge (sort of) and collect my thoughts on my experience over the past week. As I mentioned in my previous entry this was not only my first trip to the conference, but also my first trip to California as well so it was pretty intimidating the past couple of weeks and I was pretty nervous about the whole thing. I did the best I could leading up to the conference to try to keep myself relaxed including several trips to the gym with some pretty heavy cardio and I also had a massage the day before I flew out but there was still some unsettling feelings leading up to our departure. Once I set foot in San Francisco and had a look around the city things started to settle down for me and I was able to relax and enjoy the ride and it was one heck of a good one.
Note: This week went by quick and it would be tough to write about everything that I saw/heard/did so this will mostly be a summary of my experiences and not everything in its entirety. I mean ain't nobody got time for that.
Pre-Conference
I arrived a day early which gave me some time to check out San Francisco and that I did. Along with my former co-worker / current Varrow superstar / always awesome friend Thomas Brown and his wife we set out to check out some of the awesome things that San Francisco had to offer. We were able to spend some time in Chinatown, the area around Golden Gate Park (where we randomly ran into a guy on the street who was from Raleigh and recognized my Hurricanes shirt - love it), the Golden Gate Bridge/Presidio area, and Fisherman's Wharf. Seeing the Golden Gate Bridge was a highlight for sure:
We also trekked through the Presidio to make it over to the offices of Lucasfilm where we tracked down the rumored Yoda statue that we had heard about:
The next day we spent most of our time hiking up to Fisherman's Wharf and checking stuff out up there before sailing out to Alcatraz island. We were disappointed that there was no guided tour of the facility but we were able to take an audio tour and we also listened to a speaker who talked about various escape attempts and that was really cool. I didn't have any pictures of myself taken inside the prison because it really didn't feel like the appropriate place to do that, but we did get a nice shot on the way back sailing across the bay with SF in the background. My hair certainly enjoyed the ride:
The Show!
Sunday night was the welcome reception in the solutions exchange where we spent most of our time talking to some vendors and checking out some of the stuff they had to show. We also ran into pal / former colleague Josh Atwell who was manning the VCE booth and I also got to briefly meet Tim Jabaut and we talked about what was up with the Raleigh VMUG (looking forward to that getting back up and running soon).
Monday started off with the general session and the formal announcement of vSphere 5.5 as the next big release of the platform. The two big things discussed along with this were vSAN (or is it VSAN? I still don't know for sure) and the big one - NSX. I'm not a big networking guy and while I do know some of the basics the finer points of networking escape me so I'm not entirely sure what to think about NSX at this point. From what I saw/heard it seems to be VMWare's answer to "Software-Defined Networking" as it will allow you to control your network stack at the software layer. I don't entirely know how this is going to work exactly, but I am intrigued for sure and very curious to learn more about what this is going to bring. I heard that the NSX lab was one of the most popular choices at the HOL this year which I intend to try out once it gets posted onto VMWare's HOL online if it hasn't been already.
vSAN also sounds like an interesting concept and seemed to me like a tip of the hat to companies like Nutanix that have been doing Converged infrastructure for a while now. The general concept is that you can pool your local storage together living in your ESX hosts and use it as a virtual SAN for cluster shared storage. It sounded to me like an apology for the needlessly complex vSphere Storage Appliance which I don't think was terribly successful as I never heard much chatter about it and I never talked to anyone who actually ever tried to implement it. I did notice and enjoy this quote from Jason Nash during the vSAN portion of the keynote:
@TheJasonNash Bet the @nutanix people have a smug look on their face right about now…. #VMworld
The rest of the day was spent bouncing between breakout sessions and the solutions exchange. I had the privilege of attending the top session of the entire conference: PowerCLI Best Practices - A Deep Dive with Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens. Not only did they show off some cool PowerCLI stuff but they also gave a quick look into an upcoming fling called webCommander. This fling is a web interface that provides an "App Store" style interface for scripts that you can publish for others to use and also execute from the web. I am VERY interested in utilizing this at my company and will be checking this out as soon as it's available. Automation was a big theme of this year's VMWorld and I am looking to find new ways to automate the things that I typically do manually and PowerCLI is a great way to get started in this direction. I've been working with it closely in the weeks leading up to the conference and I will continue to do so as much as I can.
In the solutions exchange I spent a lot of time at the Tintri booth learning more about their product and speaking with their employees/customers to find out as much as I could. One of the first things that they'll tell you about is how easy their systems are to manage. There are no file systems to set up or LUNs to create or anything like that. Every Tintri system gives you one NFS datastore that can be mapped to your hosts and is designed with one thing in mind: running VMs. They also give you per-VM level policies and performance statistics. If you want to take a snapshot of all of your VMs or just a single VM you can do that. You also have the ability to see performance statistics at the per-VM level so you can quickly identify where you may have issues or bottlenecks in your environment and hopefully diagnose the problem much faster than you could with traditional storage. One of the guys I had a chance to speak at the booth was Jeff Greenfield from Calvin College about his experience implementing and running Tintri storage and he had many great things to say about it. I recommend checking out the video linked here as well as some of the other videos they have posted of various customer experiences to get a feel for how folks are currently using it and how they feel about it. One of my goals coming out of VMworld is to learn more about Tintri and hopefully get a chance to interact with one and take it for a test drive.
I've already composed quite a bit here and we're only through Day 1 of the conference! I think i'll have to break this entry up into two parts so it doesn't get too crazy long here. More to come on my first VMWorld trip hopefully in the next few days!
No comments:
Post a Comment