VMworld

If you were thinking about going to VMworld but can’t make it due to finances Gestalt IT is running a contest where the winner gets airfare, hotel, and a conference pass. This is a very compelling contest, and to win: Entrants must explain how they plan to “pay it forward” if they get to go to VMworld. Will you start a blog? Write some tutorials? Contribute to a forum or online community? Present to your local VMUG? Get creative and spread the wealth of knowledge you get from the event! Our panel of judges is made up of none other than the most-excellent roster of past Tech Field Day delegates! They’ve proven themselves to be independent-minded and knowledgeable, and we’re …

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Public voting is open now for VMworld 2010 sessions. I’ve already gone and voted for my own session, “Tuning Linux for Virtual Machines – TA8102,” in the Technology & Architecture track, as well as a number of other heavyweight presentations by Duncan Epping, Scott Drummonds, Mike Laverick, David Davis, Steve Chambers, Chad Sakac, Edward Haletky… I’m missing a lot of people in my list here, but the point is that there are tons of presentations by people who really know what they heck they’re talking about. If you are thinking about going to VMworld this year you should go and pick the content YOU would like to see in the conference. It’s pretty rare that attendees get to help set …

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Vaughn Stewart posted this morning that the VMworld Call For Papers closes on Friday, April 9. Last Friday, I posted that it closed, well, last Friday. I think it’s safe to say that both of us encourage you to get moving! You don’t need slides prepared yet, just a 250 word or less session description, three takeaway points you want to convey, a short biography for yourself, a short description of your speaking history, and knowledge of your own mailing address. 🙂 Took me 30 minutes to do. As for the date, I guess it depends on where you look! The main VMworld page says there are two days until things close. The “Key Dates” page says April 2: I’m …

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Heck yeah, I was approved to go to VMworld 2009 today. In case you’re still trying to convince someone you should go, here’s the approach that has worked for me for the last three years, amidst constant budget problems and skepticism about virtual environments: 1. VMworld is the best opportunity & best value for VMware software training in the United States during the year. There are hundreds of sessions, labs, and other hands-on opportunities. You’ll learn better ways to do what you’re already doing, good ways to start doing things you want to do (like implementing vSphere 4, SRM, Lab Manager, View, etc.), and be able to talk to people who are already doing it to find out how well …

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It’s budget season where I work. We operate on a chargeback model, so this means that I get to guesstimate what I’m going to need to spend next year, look into my crystal ball to see what I’m going to bring in, and then figure out if I can keep my chargeback rates the same or not. Infrastructure folks like me are at the bottom of the budgetary food chain, so changes to my rates have serious implications for people higher up. It’s been pretty nice to be able to drop the chargeback rates of virtual machines year after year, as hardware gets faster but the workloads remain fairly constant. Dropping your prices is definitely easier than raising them. Something …

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Dr. Stephen Herrod is the featured speaker of the VMworld 2008 day 2 general session. He’s the CTO & senior VP of R&D. This post will be more notes than a coherent piece. I’ll follow up with some thoughts later today. Goal of the infrastructure layer is to aggregate resources and be as efficient as possible. vCompute layer: things like FlexMigration. Focused on the VM, making it as powerful as possible. Grown from 2 vCPUs to a future 8 vCPUs, 40 Gbps, 256 GB per VM, 200000+ IOPS. Next generation of resource pools, up to 64 nodes in a single cluster, 4096 processor cores, 64 TB of RAM, 6 million IOPS, all running under DRS. Distributed Power Management continuing in …

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Considering that VMware was founded in 1998, 2008 is definitely the year when virtualization became a teenager. Announcements at VMworld are indicating a certain level of maturity in the thinking of vendors, in that they are solving problems and wrapping up a lot of the loose ends that have plagued virtual infrastructure implementations. By wrapping all those problems up it frees time to work on more interesting things, like clouds. On stage at VMworld 2008 Paul Maritz’ outlines the VMware strategy going forward. He commented that we’re moving away from a device- and hardware-centric world to one that is information- and people-centric. We’re also starting to think of our IT infrastructure as one giant computer. This is the basis behind …

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Wondering if that other person in the elevator with you is a VMworld attendee? There are lots of clues: 1. Have they forgotten to take their conference badge off? A dead giveaway, for sure. 2. Are they carrying their blue & black VMworld bag? Also a dead giveaway. 3. Are they holding a folded piece of paper, twirling it around as if they are trying to find ‘north’ on a map? While IT folks like myself are usually used to not being able to see the sun the lack of right angles in the Venetian interior sometimes confuses us. 4. Are they wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts? IT folks live in climate controlled environments and this 100 degree weather, …

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Three days until VMworld starts! Heck yeah! I’m looking forward to blogging from the conference. I am also working with TechTarget to judge the Best of VMworld 2008 awards. That should be great, there’s a lot of new stuff being announced. I’m in Tonopah, NV right now. If you look at the map the big gray spot south of us is Area 51. We traveled down the Extraterrestrial Highway (NV Highway 375) last night, but all we saw was a closed Little Ale’Inn, some deer, and a bunch of hares. No aliens. 🙁 Today’s agenda: back to Vegas via Death Valley, and the Pioneer Saloon in Jean, NV. Photos to come shortly.