Wow this session was a riot. The speaker (Greg Shields) could easily double as a stand-up comedian, much like Mark Minasi. Beyond the entertainment, the session was quite technical and had great content. I had a hard time writing everything down he was going so fast. Before he got into...
This session was pretty good and covered many use cases for long distance (metro) vMotion for DR/BC purposes. Highlights include: Planning for BC/DR is imperative and if you don't and a disaster strikes, statistically you could be out of business in less than a year. New technologies are enabling disaster avoidance,...
Contrary to the title of this session, I didn't think the content was too "advanced." The speaker covered typical SAN features such as snapshots and clones, and how you can leverage them for a virtual environment. Highlights include: Snapshots are an on-line and point-in-time. It could be of a datastore...
This session was a panel discussion with several industry experts and representatives. Panelists included Texiwill (Ed Haletky), the Catbird CTO, a VMware employee, and others. Topics of discussion included: There is no ETA on a DISA STIG for vSphere 4.x or 5.0. DISA is stating that they are relying on...
This session covered the future direction for Site Recovery Manager, known as SRM. SRM 5.0 has some major enhancements, and will ship "soon." Among the current and future enhancements are: Simple, reliable DR which replaces manual runbooks Array integration with a wide range of vendors, currently supporting 28 arrays SRM...
This session covered a product which is a result of an acquisition last year, and has since undergone some significant enhancements. vCenter Operations is a product that provides operations intelligence for your virtual infrastructure. Major points in this session: The speaker stated that 90% of performance problems for virtualized applications...
Here I am again at VMware VMworld, and I'll try to blog about as many sessions as I can. Unfortunately the way VMware has structured the schedule it's not very conducive to a lot of blogging but I'll do the best I can. This session was a very high level...
When building vSphere VM templates best practices would recommend that a number of security lockdowns be incorporated into the template. There are a variety of sources for recommended lockdowns, such as the VMware vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide. But what if you already have VMs in production that you need to lock down, or...
Among the licensing kerfuffle surrounding vSphere 5.0, VDI users may have overlooked some interesting information that VMware posted about VDI and vSphere 5.0 today. Myself and other bloggers like Brian Madden have done some analysis on what vSphere 5.0 means for VDI, mostly for non-VMware products such as XenDesktop. However,...
The story I broke last week about impending licensing changes to vSphere 5.0 turned out to be spot on. In fact CRN published a story about the impending licensing changes and referenced my blog. Today VMware made an official announcement of changes, which you can find here. CRN just put...
Update: VMware made an official announcement on August 3, 2011 and I've covered it in detail here.Since the announcement of vSphere 5.0, and the new licensing terms, much of the focus on the launch has sadly not been around the great new features but the changes in licensing terms. In...
Among the various license changes in vSphere 5.0, the way you can license VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) has also changed, or rather, now gives you more options. Specifically, if you are a XenDesktop or non-View customer, keep reading. If you use VMware View, then it's pretty much status quo from...