Jason Nash’s Blog

Early in the week I wrote a post about the beginning of VMworld this year but then the days started to run together and roll from one to the next.  Events, parties, meetings, dinners, and sessions seemed to just merge together.  Now I’m flying back home to Charlotte and looking back on a very busy week.

Overall the conference was great.  Congratulations to VMware for hitting over 17K attendees to this event.  I have to say, that really surprised me.  Just a recently I was in Las Vegas for Cisco Live and there were 12K attendees, which I thought was a lot.  Considering the market and number of product lines that Cisco has I would never have estimated that VMworld would draw almost 50% more people.  Amazing.  It’s a testament to what is going on in the industry and the push virtualization is making in to almost every organization.  You can see the rippling impact across all other domains such as storage, networking, and management as well.

Many of the other attendees I talked with after my sessions or in my 1-on-1 meetings were not your typical server or virtualization administrators.  They were networking and storage focused.  It’s further proof that other players in the data center are stepping up and figuring out how they can best support what is happening in the compute sector.  Cisco, HP, EMC, NetApp, Compellant, Dell, 3PAR, Xiotech, and more made numerous announcements and showed products and technologies with very deep virtualization integration.  It’s no longer an afterthought or last minute addition to keep up with a competitor.  If you don’t play well in this field you won’t have much future in the data center.

Speaking of my 1-on-1 sessions…  If you’re designated an “Expert” for the conference you get to host small meetings with people looking for advice or answers on certain topics.  My topic was Networking.  I had a lot of fun doing these meetings and you get interesting questions and a chance to teach others.  During one of my two sessions I had a real “one of these is not like the others” moment when Chad Sakac was sitting to my left and John Arrasjid was sitting to my right….  ”What am I doing here?” I wondered…

On Tuesday I completed my second session on the Cisco Nexus 1000v.  It was a late day session at 5pm but very well attended with a lot of great questions at the end.  People are really starting to see the value in the product and technology.  Cisco announced the coming of a new addition to that line, the Virtual Secure Gateway, which will add firewall and other functionality to the 1000v that excites lots of people, me included.

There were many really great sessions this week.  Nick Weaver did a great overview of modern networking in the virtual world.  Scott Lowe was as good as always in his session on EMC’s VPLEX offering.  I don’t think many people really see the effect that VPLEX is going to have.  My last session of the week was even better than I expected.  I stopped in the session on Storage I/O Control by two R&D developers at VMware and was given a very good technical deep dive on how this new system works.

Everyone is talking about how amazing the labs were this week.  If you don’t think cloud computing is really here yet you missed an absolutely stunning demonstration of it.  The main hands-on lab hall had over 400 stations and served up over 15,000 labs during the week.  Just think about that.  15,000 quality labs.  These weren’t simple labs with basic functionality either.  You would be assigned a seat and go sit at a console with a Wyse thin device and two displays.  The display on the left had your working console and the one on the right had your lab guide.  You would go through the GUI and select one of 30 labs.  Once selected your lab environment was provisioned and deployed from scratch.  When you finished it was all torn back down.  Chad has some details on the infrastructure for the labs here.

The events after the conference just seem to be getting better.  VMware did a great job on the main party Wednesday night.  Before that Joe and I headed to the VMware CTO event for vExperts and some others.  You don’t often have a chance to talk and meet with the CTO of VMware and the principal engineers, not to mention the most well known social media characters.  If you didn’t make it to the Veeam party this year you need to do it next year.  You can’t miss out on doing vodka shots with those guys.

Finally, VMware and especially John Troyer went above and beyond all week.  The bloggers lounge was a nice refuge.  The media and coverage coming out of VMworld was first rate.  John did a great job with those as well as the CTO/vExpert event and I don’t think I saw him rest once all week.

It was great to see everyone and it was great to meet many of you for the first time.  I look forward to doing it again.