This was a panel discussion going over the history of the vSphere hardening guides, current state, some common issues, and future direction for ensuring compliance with regulations such as HIPPA, PCI, DoD STIGs, etc. Upshot is that VMware really listened to customers with there vSphere 5.0 hardening guide and it's...
This session was extremely technical and went over the inner workflows of HA. For a better and more in-depth details, I would strongly suggest getting the VMware vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive book. HA protects against three failure modes: Host/VM failures; host network isolated and datastore PDL; Guest OS hangs and...
Speakers: Davi Ottenheimer, Matthew Wallace. Book: Securing your Virtual EnvironmentThis session was an overview of security considerations you need to keep in mind when virtualizing your environment. In fact, most of the recommendations apply to physical IT systems as well. The speaker went through the 10 chapters of their book...
Speaker: Pete BooneThis session covered various aspects of a virtualized infrastructure that need to be looked at when optimizing performance. The basic four food groups are memory, CPU, network, and storage. Benchmarking and Tools Consistent and reproducible results Important to have a baseline of acceptable performance Determine baseline of performance...
Speakers: Josh Gray, Jeff HunterThis was a great session for real-world HA tips and tricks of the trade. Everyone should be using vSphere HA, so theh tips apply to everyone. For more information check out the most excellent vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive book by Duncan and Frank. Recent Enhancements in...
Speakers: Frank Denneman, Valetin HamburgerThis was a great session covering the ins and outs of storage DRS. SRDS is a great feature of vSphere 5.0, with a couple of minor tweaks for vSphere 5.1. But understanding how it works, when to use it, and when not to are very important....
This session focused on VMware's concept of software defined everything, and in particular for this session, software defined storage. The session wasn't all just vaporware PointPoint slides. They had a pre-recorded video of configuring their "distributed storage" and showing how storage profiles worked. For example, I could set the SLA on...
This session recapped how vMotion currently works, enhancements in vSphere 5.1, and a "future" version. The biggest news for vSphere 5.1 is Unified vMotion, which requires no shared storage. Now on-par with Hyper-V 3.0. Future vMotion capabilities are very cool....in short, live vMotion any VM anywhere around the globe. Session...
This session was an overview of where VMware sees the direction of storage for virtualized datacenters. To keep with the theme of 'software defined' everything, they also have a vision for software defined storage. It is a radical departure from how we view storage today, and the concepts of LUNs...
This session covered the best new features in vCenter 5.1. For a point release, vCenter has undergone some major change, and as VMware releases more of their roadmap, you see how features coming out next month will be leveraged for way cool features in the future such as global live...
Day two of VMworld 2012 in San Francisco kicked off with a key note speech. Steve Harrod, CTO, kicked off the day. Today his focus was end user computing, be it mobile, tablet, or PC. VMware is trying to bring together management of VDI, mobile devices, and deliver applications to...
Jason Nash, VarrowThis was a great session that delved into the depths of the VMware VDS that ships with vSphere 5.0 and 5.1. VMware has put a lot of new features in to the 5.1 VDS. Development on the standard vSwitch has pretty much ceased, so you will need to...