What a long day. I’m beat. I’ve been in San Francisco for a week now. I had to fly in last Monday for my VCDX defense in Palo Alto…. I’m already starting to feel drained from being on the other side of the country from home. Today was the first day of VMworld, you know, in case you haven’t heard. Along with a couple of sessions I wanted to attend I was also hosting two sessions which added to the stress and workload. Overall the conference is having a rocky time. VMware shifted to a “no reservation” system for sessions this year. Unlike other conferences where you can reserve a place in a session it’s first come, first serve. You can build an agenda on www.vmworld.com but it’s only for your reference. It doesn’t hold your seat. This has lead to a number of problems. First, lines to get in some sessions are huge and you may stand in line for 20 minutes only to be turned away. By the time this happens the other sessions you may be interested in are also full. To me, this penalizes the people that plan ahead and get their schedule in order. Along with problems getting in this has lead to people leaving sessions 10 minutes early so they have a better chance to get in the next session. I think VMware had very good intentions….but it’s just not working out.
VMware did get a number of things very right this year. A big one for me is that all sessions are being recorded and will be available online. This takes a lot of the sting out of missing a session if you don’t make it in time, or have to make a tough choice between two things that interest you. It also has me considering skipping some of my sessions tomorrow and hitting the labs that are getting rave reviews. There are a crazy number of labs available this year.
To start the morning Joe and I headed to the TA8361 Future Direction of Networking Virtualization session hosted by Howie Xu, R&D Director for VMware. As stated by the name of the session, this was really a futures discussion around some things VMware is thinking about….he made sure to mention several times there was no product announcement or even serious talk of a product but it was basically the outline of the vChassis initiative at VMware. The idea is the extend the existing virtual networking in to upper layers of the protocol stack and also provide more network services and automatic provisioning. In the end it was a good session, but light on details due to the nature of the topics being discussed. It’s exciting, especially to a network guy like me. It just shows how VMware is continuing to innovate and extend their lead over the other players in the industry.
My next session of the day was TA6720 Troubleshooting using ESXTOP for Advanced Users hosted by Krishna Raja from VMware. This was a really good session and went through some of the more advanced options that esxtop offers for troubleshooting performance and provisioning problems on a host. It’s pretty impressive what you an do with esxtop and to be honest, it can be very daunting. It’s a complex tool but can really show you things you can’t find any other way. A highlight of the session was coverage of the new features in esxtop 4.1. For example, it now shows SCSI Reservations as well as SCSI Reservation Conflicts which can really help troubleshooting storage performance problems. VIAA and NFS counters are also now available. For anyone looking to dig in to this I highly recommend the esxtop bible available here.
My third session of the day was..well…me. TA6841 Cisco Nexus 1000v: Architecture, Deployment, and Management by Jason Nash of Varrow. Here is a picture of my room before the session:
By the time my session started it was full..somewhere around 400 people. I thought it went well…No one booed me or anything and the response has been good. I’ll be doing the same session tomorrow at 5pm. So if you’re interested in a technical overview with deployment and troubleshooting tips please stop by the second session.
My 1:30 session was going to be on the vSphere dvSwitch but I misread the schedule and thought there was something else I wanted to see more. When I got there I found out it wasn’t until 3pm and since I had already gone over to Moscone West I didn’t feel like walking back so I ducked in the SP9663 Optimizing Virtualization Using Advance Memory and Storage Technology session. For me, waste of time. It was a Samsung commercial session talking about their SSDs and memory. Some of the power saving notes on the new denser memory modules was interesting, but nothing I haven’t researched before in other roles. They were hyping SSDs, which is no surprise. SSDs are great. They just need to come down in price before they are more common. Everyone wants the IOPS..they just can’t be the standard right now with the $/GB. I ducked out of that session early and walked over to a General Discussion session with Howie Xu, the same person that did the virtual networking futures session in the morning. Howie was hosting the casual discussion and I wanted to see what questions he got as I was hosting the exact same session at 3pm.
I’m really not sure why VMware decided to put the two Networking General Discussions back-to-back. I’m also, honestly, not sure why they chose me to go on right after Howie…the R&D Director at VMware. That’s not cool! While I had close to 90 people put that session on their agenda maybe 25 showed up. We talked through some common issues and concerns and thankfully Howie stuck around for half my session to lend a hand. Very nice of him. It was a good discussion but I think it could have been better with some better planning by VMware. I’d like to see a few people hosting these and be more of a casual panel discussion. I think it would also be good to have the attendees submit and ask the questions instead of asking the host (on very short notice!) to submit the questions.
Tomorrow is another day! I’m doing my Nexus 1000v session at 5. Since I’m a designated expert at VMworld 2010 I’m also available for 1-on-1 sessions starting at 12:30 tomorrow in the Expert lounge. Feel free to stop by and talk 1000v or networking in general…or EMC storage or whatever!
