Psst... Wanna see something cool?

EMC World 2008 was a couple weeks ago - and was a huge hit.   There were just shy of 10K attendees, and it's growing every year.   EMC World one of the few of the industry giant conferences these days (VMworld, TechEd, Oracle OpenWorld, and Cisco Networkers being the others that immediately come to mind).   VMware had a great both (great work VMware Alliance teams!) with VDI demonstrations, VMware and EMC's management tools all integrated (this is SUPER cool), simple/inexpensive "all-in" Remote Office/Branch Office solutions, Tier one applications like Exchange 2007 and SAP,  VMware backup solutions and deduplication, and of course Site Recovery Manager.

So - I thought the event as a whole was good.   We try to make it technical only (it is run by the engineering teams), but the occasional marketing/sales pitch makes it in there, which is always frustrating for me.

BUT the highlight for me was Steve Herrod's (he's VMware's CTO) keynote.  You've GOT to see this....

The whole event was great - but what really stood out was the live, no net demo.   What did they show?   They demonstrated Site Recovery Manager in a VDI disaster use case, right there up on stage in front of thousands of customers.   That takes cajones - or put more politically correctly - confidence.

So - here it is...   I'd of course suggest watching the whole thing (some really great stuff in there on our joint scaling testing and running tier 1 apps on VMware), but if you want to fast-forward to the demo, I don't blame you - it's about halfway through.

NOTE: I think this was perfect as is - the VMware team, however are perfectionists (a good attribute), and wanted me to point out a couple things:

1. The error that occurs in step 1 of the recovery plan (failure to shutdown protected VMs) is normal and expected.   What happens is that the first step in the recovery plan is to try to shutdown the VMs on the protected side if they are still reachable.   If the protected ESX clusters are up (i.e. this isn't a disaster per se, but rather a "datacenter move"), then this makes VM guaranteed to be in a clean state.   This example was a real disaster, so the step is attempted, times out, then continues.
2. That isn't Jay's real password (man I hate it when that happens :-)

Here it is:

 

You can download it here: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/movies/Herrod_EMCW08.wmv

Oh, and FAR less cool - but hey, you at least get a chance to put a face to the faceless author of this blog, my 10 minutes during Dave Donatelli's keynote is here:

 

 

You can download it here: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/movies/SakacWorld08.wmv

 

All the keynotes - some are fantastic - Joe's shows you EMC's strategy and vision, Dave's gives a broad base of where we are investing and innovating on our storage business, and Howard gives insight into an area which we think is critical in Virtualized environments - Management.

You can find them here in full: http://www.emcworld2008.com/keynotes.shtml

 

Can't wait for VMworld.... :-)