I finally managed to get into a session by one of the VMware rockstars, Frank Denneman, who has co-authored several books that I highly recommend. Frank stated this topic could be a four day class alone, and this was just an hour, so it went quite quickly and just scratched...
This session focused on the Cisco distributed virtual switch, the Nexus 1000v. The speaker was very knowledgeable and a great presenter. Lots of great details, but as fast as he was going I didn't get all of the details. You can check out the his blog at jasonnash.com.Highlights: The VSM...
Today while I was walking around the vendor expo at VMworld 2011, I saw a very interesting product from Cisco. I was familiar with the datacenter UCS product, but a mini version caught my attention. Called UCS Express this is a micro ESXi server that slides directly into their ISR G2...
vCenter is a business critical service that when it goes down can cause substantial chaos, although VMs will happily keep running while it is down. Using VDI? Forget spinning up new VMs, or rebooting VMs. Using vCD? Forget doing anything while it's down. HA? Yes that will keep working (for...
This session was quite advanced and had a lot of troubleshooting examples which are hard to adequately capture without the slides, so I'll just touch on some of the counters he used during some troubleshooting examples. Maybe in future posts I'll focus on one subject like storage stats and recreate...
This session was a bit more high level and basic than I had hoped for, but here are the highlights: Virtual Port ID load balancing is the default option and the least complicated option. IP hasing is more advanced and requires Etherchannel to be configured on the switch VTS (virtual...
This was a pretty advanced session about the vCloud Director, which is a complex product. The speakers were very, very good, but given the advanced nature of the discussion it will be hard to recap the session in full and some of the concepts need more explanation than I can provide...
This session covered some of the major performance enhancements in vSphere 5.0. The presenter flew through the slides at 100 MPH and didn't spend much time on the bullets so I wasn't able to capture all of the highlights. But here's what I did capture: 32-way vCPUs with 92-97% of...
Unlike the last session I attended, this one was very good and had quite a bit of great technical material that went beyond common sense most IT guys have. SRM 5.0 is a major release that addressed many of the shortcomings of the 4.x releases. Highlights include: Customers need simple,...
This session was a bit higher level and more common sense tips, so I split after 30 minutes and went to another session. The speakers had 8 best practice tips, and both of them were from Dell/Compellent. So they had a few minutes sales pitch before they started the meat...