VMworld

VMworld 2011 Snapshot Series

October 7, 2011 by Josh Townsend Leave a Comment

Did you miss VMworld this year, but want a chance to get a peek at the exciting new technologies on display at the show? The VMworld 2011 Snapshot Series is your chance to catch the excitement of VMworld in a city near you.

Please join VMware for this complimentary half-day event to get a taste of VMworld 2011 and learn how VMware and our partners are enabling organizations like yours to understand the true value of cloud computing and business agility. Cloud computing is an organizations strategic weapon-not just for IT, but to enable full business transformation, and will eventually change how the business operates. Attend, participate and learn from our Subject Matter Experts on how to modernize your IT operations. Improve, simplify and save with VMware. Topics to be discussed:

VMware Keynote Review / General Session Highlights

Build and Own Your Cloud: vSphere 5.0, vCloud Director 1.5 vCenter SRM 5 and vShield 5

Desktop and End User Computing Strategies

This is a unique opportunity to learn and understand more about infrastructure, applications and end user transformation that is happening today making organizations more automated, competitive and agile. Hear from our subject matter experts, see live demos as well as network with your peers. This is your VMworld Snapshot. This is your Cloud. Own it.

For the folks here in Washington, DC with me, the VMworld 2011 Snapshot will be on October 18th.

VMUG Advantage Program

April 13, 2011 by Josh Townsend Leave a Comment

VMware has been investing in the VMware User Group (VMUG) program over the past year, adding new benefits and opportunities to an already great program. In addition to local meetings where you can interact with fellow VMware professionals, the VMUG program offers other great benefits – the latest is the VMUG Advantage program. The VMUG Advantage program offers the following benefits:

$100 Discount to VMworld
20% Discount on VMware Instructor Led Training
20% Discount on VMware Certification
1-Year Free Subscription: All Access eLearning Courses ($750 Value)
30% Discount on Workstation and Fusion Software html Licenses

The VMUG Advantage program has an introductory price of $170 for individuals (with corporate/multi-user discounts available) until May 21. Not a bad deal if you plan to attend VMworld in Las Vegas (Aug 29 – Sept 1), complete a certification (VCP, VCAP, VCDX, VCA-DT), or take some instructor led training through VMware. Heck – the eLearning subscription alone more than pays for program subscription cost!

As a VMUG member be sure to login to the new www.myvmug.org and update your profile or add an picture or avatar. Over the next month you’ll see exciting new benefits added to the website, including VMUG Community Pages, Event Listings, and Education Resources.

If you’re not already a VMUG member, go ahead and sign up at www.myvmug.org to learn about local/regional events and to get access to the other great benefits like the VMUG Advantage.

VMworld Lines, Long Lines and Damn Long Lines

August 30, 2010 by Josh Townsend 5 Comments

I’ve heard some grumbling about the long lines popping up at VMworld with folks blaming the new first-come format for admission into the various sessions. A few folks have asked me my take on it – here’s what I’ve got:

– Yes, the lines are long but they seem to move fast. Whether that’s because people are bailing out or because the staff here is efficiently moving people into session rooms as they open up I don’t know. I suspect a bit of both.
– I anticipate lines getting shorter over the next few days as the Solutions Exchange opens up a ton of space and activities for VMworld participants.
– As people get a feel for the flow of the event, things will start moving along better. Rather than jam-packing as many sessions into their schedule, people will start to balance vendor time on the Solution Exchange floor, Hands-On Labs, and other activities.

What has your experience been so far? Any suggestions for improving the VMworld experience? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments!

VMworld T-Shirt Count

August 29, 2010 by Josh Townsend 2 Comments

Way back in the day (we’re talking way back in high school here) I worked my summers away at a Six Flags park in Western New York. Every fall the park hosted an International Food Festival. Let me tell you – the perogies, sausage and gyro’s slid down like nobody’s business. But the real prize was the Italian bakery’s cannoli’s. The 5 or so folks that shared an office with me decided we should track our cannoli consumption. We did (like you do a drug or spin up VM’s just cause you can) something like 126 cannoli’s in one weekend. We called it the Cannoli Count – kept a tally o a whiteboard in the office. Sickening, right? So, what does this have to do with virtualization, you ask. Well, not much really, but here is where I am going with it. T-shirts are handed out like nobody’s business at VMworld, and they accumulate like a pack-rat’s pile of newspapers in my dresser drawers (I still have a high-school wrestling t-shirt that dates back to 1994 in the rotation). My VMware Widow wife hates them, so I figure I’ll see how many more I can collect this week. With two already in my hands after VMworld check-in, enter the:

Josh’s VMworld 2010 T-Shirt Count
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I’ll keep the running tally going throughout VMworld – let’s see where this ends up (besides me cleaning out my dresser to avoid sleeping on the couch when I get home).

VMworld 2010 Labs Preview

August 29, 2010 by Josh Townsend 2 Comments

I was fortunate enough to be offered a sneak peak at the VMworld 2010 Hands-on Labs setup this morning, and let me tell you – I am impressed. A lot of hard work has gone into planning, architecting and deploying the Labs environment, promising to make it the most user-friendly VMworld Labs setup yet. Here is what you need to know:

Location: The Labs will be held at Moscone West, on the corner of 5th & Howard St. This is a change from last year.

Format: There will be two types of hands-on labs – instructor led (they’re calling these Advanced Lab Tutorials) and self-paced.

The instructor labs are more of a tutorial for those who want to be walked through the lab manual by a subject matter expert in an open discussion format. The Advanced Lab Tutorial sessions support 250 seats. The Advanced Lab Tutorials will be useful for preparing for the associated self-paced labs. Take the Advanced Lab Tutorial first, then head downstairs to the Self-Paced lab.
The self paced labs are designed with a ton of flexibility, allowing you to choose what and when you work through the material. For an overview of the Lab topics, check out the VMworld 2010 Program Guide.
When you arrive at the Self-Paced Labs area, you will register for the lab you want and head to a nice waiting area if no seats are available. When your number is called, you will be lead to your seat and will fire up your lab. You’ll have an hour to work through the lab. If you need more time, ask.

Technical Specs: The VMware Core Team has obviously put an enormous amount of thought and time into improving the lab experience. For those who attended VMworld 2009, the lab experience folks a bit disappointed due to some technical glitches and scheduling issues. This year’s Labs are built with a ton of redundancy and allow for a much smoother, user-directed schedule. The scale and scope of the labs is astonishing to say the least. Here are some stats I gleaned on the lab setup:

There are 30 self-paced lab topics, each demanding their own unique environment.
There are 480 seats available for the self-paced labs, in a stadium seating configuration. This allows a huge number of people to flow through the lab environment efficiently, with minimal wait time. The lab schedule has some 40 hours of time for you to get in and work over the next several days. This equates to more than 20,000 lab-seat hours (up from about 5000 hours last year).
The labs run from one of three data centers: Miami, FL (Terremark); Ashburn, VA (Verizon); and locally in the Moscone Center. This provides a great deal of redundancy and positions the labs as a cloud offering to fit the theme of this year’s VMworld. The Miami and Ashburn sites have been running for a while, and will be reused for VMworld Europe next month. This is a change from last year where the gear was fork-lifted in for the show (remember all the racks at the bottom of the escalators?). This has given the team more time to work on the setup and iron out any problems.
The self-paced labs are based on VMware’s Cloud Lab infrastructure, purpose built for VMworld Labs. Cloud Lab provides a slick interface for provisioning labs to participants while doing some really smart things in the background to enhance performance and flexibility.
It is estimated that more than 100,000 VM’s will be provisioned in Labs this week – more than 5000 VM’s built and destroyed per lab hour! <- Read that again. Astonishing, no?
The gear driving the labs is provided by HP, Dell, EMC, NetApp, Cisco, and Xsigo. Xangati is used for monitoring performance of PCoIP to the Wyse thin clients at each seat.
There are 4 racks of compute power and 2 racks of storage per datacenter.
The storage environment is mostly 10GbE. EMC FastCache and NetApp Dedupe are both in use. Storage is mostly NFS-based.
The memory footprint required to run the labs is some 36TB.
Labs are running a few levels deep – ESX nested inside of ESX with VM’s running inside.
Host Profiles are heavily leveraged to ensure a consistent environment.
Twin DS3’s provide Internet connectivity for the Labs.
In true cloud fashion, the Lab Cloud product dynamically pre-populates lab environments based on demand. As some labs rise in popularity, the Lab Cloud will stage up environments based on that demand. This will reduce wait time for the lab environment to be readied. In years past, students would wait 5-7 minutes for their custom lab environments to be readied (building, deploying and booting a unique Active Directory, vCenter, ESXi, nested VM’s and associated products takes some time). No guarantees that there won’t be some wait time, but this is a huge step in the right direction.
There will be some 150 moderators ready to help with Self-Paced labs. Moderators are subject matter experts. If you request help through the Lab Cloud interface, a moderator who is a SME in your topic will be dispatched to help you.

A few more things to note:

There will be prize drawings for those who do the most labs, as well as those who complete the labs the fastest. Prizes will include a full pass to VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas.
Lab manuals will be made available after the show.
Some of the labs look really cool. You can find a list in the VMworld 2010 Program Guide. I am excited to see the VMware vSphere Sandbox lab – an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink setup of as many products as they could cram in. This provides a playground for you to see all of the VMware products working together, where you can create, destroy and otherwise play as you wish.
I would love to see this environment be made available for other uses after VMworld. I think VMUG’s could really benefit, as could VMware’s partner community.

Special thanks to Adam Zipman who leads the team putting this together, Dan Anderson (Dan is the lead architect behind this massive operation) and Curtis Pope who led development of the Cloud Lab interface. Also, thanks to John Troyer for setting up this morning’s breifing. I appreciate your time today, guys.

I hope you all are as excited about the labs this year as I am. I am planning to spend a good chunk of time working through the lab environments.