VMworld 2009 – Save a few $$ and find out what EMC is doing

It’s that time of year again!  VMworld 2009 rapidly approaches – August 31st-September 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.   For fun, we recorded this little gag video :-)

If you haven’t registered yet – if you register here, (post a comment for the secret discount code!) there’s a discount! 

If you’re an EMC customer and willing to share your story with other customers, while we have customers coming already for the sessions, I’ll always try for more!  you can get my email from the “about” page – drop me a line!

We’re furiously working through the logistics – which for a show like this are massive.

1. Last week we put in the order for about $20M of  EMC equipment to support the event – the HOL, as well as the EMC and VMware booths.   There will be all of EMC’s goodness – ranging from large scale V-Max configurations, CX4s, NS-960s, Recoverpoint, all working with Cisco Nexus and UCS gear and supporting vSphere and other VMware software.
2. There are announcements GALORE – many treats in store for our customers.   Clearly – I can’t talk about that now, but I think you will all be very happy!
3. In the EMC booth, there will be:
   • tons of hands on with engineering and product management.  It’s a great opportunity to see, test drive, and give feedback directly to those folks that build the solutions for you.  
   • We’ll have a whole bunch on 10GbE and FCoE – two technologies who’s time is now, including live performance workloads.
   • We’ll be giving away lots of goodies – including iomega ix2’s and also a grand prize at the end of the show
4. We recently found out what sessions we submitted were approved.  There are 12 VMware/EMC sessions so far.  The agenda tool isn’t live yet, but wanted to put these on people’s radar screen.

Of course I’ll be there, and we’ll have some early copies of Mastering vSphere 4 (Scott Lowe’s book, I authored the storage chapter), and I’d love to meet YOU!

For more detailed info on the sessions – read on….

Currently, there are 12 EMC sessions planned.

As a platinum sponsor, there are 3 sessions provided on that basis.

• Keynote – VMware, Cisco, EMC – building the Private Cloud
  • We’ve done this session for the last 2 years, and people have started to figure out.   It’s the time where we can allude to the things coming in the 6-18 month window.  If you look at the past, we telegraphed V-Max, vSphere details, UCS, and much, much more.    This year, were going to be talking about the vSphere generation (not just 4.0), and joint engineering, and what to expect from EMC and Cisco.
  • Anyone who has seen these knows why they are popular – we tend to be open, transparent and frank, and also demo lots of neato things that are out there now, and some of the stuff from deep in the bowels of engineering.
  • I’ll be presenting, along with Ed Bugnion and Scott Davis
• Increase consolidation ratios in vSphere environments while simplifying and improving backup and recovery
  • This session will focus on how best to backup and recover files in VMs, VMs themselves, and entire sites.
  • It will include the latest on the vStorage APIs for Data Recovery
  • It will include the current and near-term solutions from EMC that integrate
  • It will include customer experiences and best practices
  • And demos, of course :-)
• Deploying vSphere Management Automation Technologies: Dependency Mapping, Root Cause, Configuration & Compliance
  • This session will focus on how best to leverage the new management capabilities in vCenter 4 and how to further extend those capabilities
  • With EMC’s acquisition of Configuresoft (which I alluded to earlier), we have a remarkable management suite – from application SLA, networking, root cause and correlation, configuration control and compliance, and storage of course.   While it’s not what people think of when they think EMC, come and see – I think you’ll see that it’s a “best of breed” focus from a single vendor – and the “100% virtualized datacenter” has been quietly steering our M&A on this for the last 2 years.
  • It will include the current and near-term solutions from EMC that integrate
  • It will include customer experiences and best practices
  • And demos, of course :-)

The rest of the sessions are ones that were submitted by individuals and the VMware committee selects the ones based on all the submissions they get.

• BC2425, “Using CDP for Cost-Effective Application Recovery in vSphere Environments”
  • This session will detail use of heterogenous replication and CDP to lower the cost of disaster recovery using Site Recovery Manager.
  • The session will include demonstrations of how it all fits together.
  • The presenter is Rick Walsworth
• BC2537, “VMware Site Recovery Manager with Enterprise Replication - A Customer Experience”
  • This session will be a customer’s experience (good/bad/ugly – all in) with SRM deployment at large scale, with enterprise scale configurations.
  • It’s a great opportunity to share experiences!
• EA2436, “Efficient and High Performance Virtualization of Oracle Database Environments using vSphere”
  • This is always a very popular topic (was repeated 3 times in VMworld past and has been updated with all the latest)
  • It covers solution testing results/findings for Oracle 10g and 11g (and 11i apps) on vSphere
  • It will discuss the latest re: Oracle support and workarounds/options
  • The session will include demonstrations of how to configure, and optimize
  • The presenters is Jeff Browning
• TA2467, “Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput with VMware”
  • This was a very popular session (#9 of 300) in VMworld in Cannes (and has been updated) that covers how to optimize all the storage configruations in a vendor-neutral way.   The focus is on multipathing and loadbalancing (both block and NFS)
  • It covers the Pluggable Storage Architecture, Native Multipathing improvements and PowerPath/VE
  • The session will include demonstrations of how to configure, and optimize
  • I’m presenting this one.
• BC2443, “VMware IT's use of SRM in concert with EMC RecoverPoint and Replication Manager for Exchange 2007”
  • This session will detail VMware’s own experiences with virtualizing their Exchange 2007 environement, and deploying a DR solution using Site Recovery Manager and EMC Recoverpoint.
  • The session will include demonstrations of how it all fits together.
  • The presenters are Bob Plummer (VP, IT Ops, VMware), Michael Tan (who runs our EMC Santa Clara Briefing Center lab – and who does a lot of solutions integration), and Michael Lozano – one of EMC’s Microsoft Certified Exchange Master Architects (formerly known as “Exchange Rangers”) that worked on the joint solution design.
• “Leveraging SRM with VMware View” (don’t have the session number yet): 
  • This was a very popular session in VMworld in Cannes (and has been updated) where EMC and VMware jointly share DR solutions in the VMware View context.  While View Composer and SRM don’t work together, there are some cool workarounds.
  • The session will include demonstrations of how it all fits together.
  • The presenters are Tommy Walker (VMware) and Stephen Spellicy (EMC)
• BC2412, “Site Recovery Manager in Concert with Application Discovery and Storage Replication--- Protecting ERP Virtualized Federated Landscape”. 
  • This one focuses on very sophisitcated use cases of Site Recovery manager, including SAP and Oracle.
  • It will include demonstrations of how it all fits together.
  • The presenter is Michael Tan, who runs our EMC Santa Clara Briefing Center lab – and who does a lot of solutions integration.
• TA2381, “Warehouse in a box – A Customer Experience”.
  • This is an interesting one – a customer will be sharing their experience of deploying data warehouse applications on VMware.
• TA2259, “Ask the Experts”. 
  • This one will be fun (and we’ll work hard to make it useful).   It’s an open panel with Scott Lowe, Rick Scherer, Tom Howarth, Duncan Epping and myself.   You’ll be getting four of the voices of the VMware-related blogosphere in one place, and all questions are welcome!

Comments

[David Robertson]

I am trying to get some passes for me and a co-worker, I havent gone to a vmworld yet, been to 2 EMC world's so looking forward to it.

[Justin G.]

I'm still working on trying to make VMworld this year. It would be good to go out there and see the latest from EMC and discuss our planned design for our hardware refresh, which will be Celerra NS-120 and Cisco Nexus 5010 switches.

[Dave Hopkins]

The video was cheezy but effective. ;^)

I liked how Chad wore the suit on the beach and was drinking hot coffee. Truly Geeky.

[marc farley]

Nice vid! Chris, you always did look like a playuh!

[Chad Sakac]

BTW - I'm not really this uptight in real life :-) We just thought it would make for a funny contrast, and I always get made fun of for wearing my suits :-)

And Wade would never need my help configuring iSCSI at a customer (insider joke - both Chris and Wade who are great guys on my team are former EqualLogic folks)

[NickC]

I'm kinda struggling to justify the trip out to the US for VMWorld this year - what do you think will be the top "don't miss" sessions ?

[Chad Sakac]

@NickC - if you ask me, the sessions that are worth their weight in gold are the App best practice sessions.

I mean, I hear you on one level. Going to see neato demos, and 3rd party product launches (don't get me wrong, we are going to have some AWESOME EMC stuff - if you're a EMC customer - that alone might be worth it) - I mean that stuff you can kind of get at home.

But, if you're virtualizing tier 1 apps - to share best practices with people who do it for a living, and see what lots of customers do right, and do wrong - that could easily save you the $$ of the admission - in fact could do it many times over.

[Tony]

Hoping to see you guys at VMworld. Haven't gotten confirmation yet that I am going.

[Roger Lund]

I would love to go to VMworld, however, being a IT Admin, and with the economic down turn, my budget has been cut, so no VMworld for me this year. I am disappointed, as it would be a chance to learn, and to meet some of the fellow blogger's, and VMware admins I talk with on Twitter.

Roger Lund