VMworld 2009: The Big Picture from an EMC perspective

Many great sources exist for a general summary of VMworld.

My quick take?

• Clearly not a year of massive announcements from VMware – many smaller ones, but no big ones.
• Clearly a year showing massive execution against strategy from VMware.
• At VMworld Europe mere months ago people looked at Paul like he was an alien when he talked about the importance of cloud.   This year, it was all everyone (vendors including EMC also) was talking about. 
• This year, people looked at him like he was an alien when he talked about the importance of not only serving the “traditional apps” (which the private could strategy does), but also the class of next-gen apps built on cloud frameworks.   What will everyone be saying/doing next year? :-)

Seriously, it was awesome to see so many VMware partners starting businesses around vSphere and the vCloud APIs – including several willing and able to take your credit card right there in exchange for online compute services.

In the more mundane – but eminently practical world of the datacenter, every vendor (again, EMC included) is tripping over themselves to show how their server/storage/management/security gizmo integrates and extends VMware.   This is also good.   The fact that we’re all doing it, and 12,000 customers came to see it highlighted to me that VMware continues to lead the revolution they started.

My favorite part is meeting and talking to so many EMC customers.    It’s interesting – as much as I’m trying to introduce new concepts/tools/best practices – I find often they don’t know about the old ones (for example, not every customer knows about the free EMC Storage Viewer, but they should).

My favorite quote from one customer (as I’m thanking THEM) was “no thank YOU – you guys have made our lives easier!”   To everyone in all our field and corporate offices, as we slog through every challenge – just remember that customer comment.

THANK YOU – to every EMC/VMware customer out there.  I hope we’re serving you as well as we can.  If we aren’t, let me know – and I’ll always try to do something about it.

So – every year, we pick up the pace on our EMC coverage of VMworld.   This year was quite something – so much so, I needed to make several posts and have them all link together off this one.

THANK YOU – to every EMCer and VMware employee (and our partners, and even our competitors) who worked so hard to make VMworld 2009 such a success!

To see everything we did (including downloadable demos if you’re a customer, EMCer, or EMC partner), softcopies of the session presentations, recordings of the EMC sessions, and of course the parties – read on!

I’m going to leave the topic of keynote coverage to others that can do it better than I.   Here were our EMC announcements around VMworld:

EMC Expands Midrange Storage Leadership In VMware Environments (in a nutshell: VM-awareness in native array tools + replication tools + array-awareness in vCenter plugins)

Iomega Announces High Performance Yet Affordable Four-Drive NAS Appliance (in a nutshell: awesomely functional yet unbelieveably inexpensive NAS/iSCSI VMware-Certified platform)

EMC, VMware Expand Business and Technology Alliance; Helping Customers Accelerate Virtualization (in a nutshell: EMC Ionix + Appspeed – all available as a package from EMC = killer combo for customers lookig to move virtualization into mass production, where SLAs are critical)

EMC Acquires FastScale Technology, Optimizes Application Image Management (in a nutshell – REALLY cool tech for system/VM image managment – you literally "build a recipe” for an system – including a kernel, an OS, applications, server elements, and it gets built “on the fly” using only the bare-bone elements.   At VMworld, I saw a system build and boot in 30 seconds, and was only 10MB in size as opposed to 3GB)

(there were a couple of other EMC announcements that week that weren’t VMware-related – like the acquisition of Kazeon)

This is a quick tour of non-announcement items (which are just as important) from my perspective!

Topic 1) The Datacenter.  

Dan Anderson says it best here in this interview by Richard Garsthagen:

Supporting this means every vendor needs to work together – it’s as much a plugfest as anything else.   And it’s not just the big folks, it’s everyone.  On the storage side there was  OpenFiler and Lefthand VSAs being used right along side EMC CLARiiON, Celerra, V-Max and NetApp arrays.

My favorite two “behind the scenes moments” were:

the “night before xmas”:   it was late Sunday night, and all through the house - not a creature was stirring, but the kilowatts and BTUs were burning :-)  Ed Bugnion (from Cisco and I) were walking in to check in on all the stuff (Dan’s if anything conservative in his “capital investment” estimate) right after doing our dry run of the VMware/Cisco/EMC super session.   The wave of heat at the top of the escalator was quite something :-)  Here’s the video.

“oh the irony”: Nothing is ever perfect, and if you imagine putting this all together over a short period with new gear – then moving it all (in some cases more than once), in an environment where the use case is… funky… well – you inevitably have hiccups.   The key is what you do, and after a few bumps, everyone pulled together and we got it done.   At one point, one of the VMware folks came by the booth wondering if we could help with a spot of storage – about 4TB worth to act as a huge syslogs dump for all the gear – having it all in one place would be very handy.   BUT – they didn’t want to touch any of the existing storage (which were all allocated in standard ways for the hands-on-labs, self-paced labs, and vSphere labs).   So, we repurposed one of the iomega ix4-200d’s in the EMC booth.  Was funny to visualize that MASSIVE datacenter, all dumping content to this little toaster of a storage array :-)   I’m using the ix4-200d now at home.   It’s incredible.  Integrated right with my PS3 and Xbox360 right out of the box – so I can get all my music and videos all in one central place.  Oh, and if I didn’t have what I already have, NFS and iSCSI for VMware.  It rocks!

Topic 2)  The show floor

As always, after the first day, your ears just buzz after being on the floor.   This year was no different – just hopping.   Loads of great customer dialog, was great to see people who are friends at partners and competitors.   EMC (to me at least – though I’m always sensitive to the taste of koolaid) had a very strong presence.   We merged several booths together (EMC’s Platinum booth, the EMC Ionix booth (focused on management tools), an EMC/VMware partner pavillion (this was awesome – key partners from both companies came and showed their solutions) so they were one LARGE booth.   The Data Domain booth also had the employees sporting EMC logos, and in my time talking with them, seemed genuinely pumped about the opportunity that lays in front of us.   Speaking as an “acquiree” – I can vouch for that!   I also visited the FastScale booth (we acquired them the week of VMworld) – and it is just killer technology.   It represents yet ANOTHER order of magnitude in capacity efficiency – but more importantly, a transformational way of building clients, servers, virtual and physical machines.  More on that another day.

The Segways were a blast to scoot around on – who has that photo of me on it?   Get it to me, and I will post it :-)   Also, the iomega ix4-200d is a GREAT giveaway.  I think we’ll do that again.   I gave away one in SS5140 by throwing out a frisbee, and it was crazy – to dudes started to wrestle for it :-)

Here’s a walkthough of the show floor – keep in mind that this was during a QUIET TIME :-) - and forgive my jibber jabber – I couldn’t walk 5 feet before stopping :-)

And a shot of the Data Domain booth (which was always busy!):

Topic 3) The EMC team

I was fortunate to have the support of the executive team to pull out the stops on VMworld coverage.  In the end, there were about 280 EMC folks there in all sorts of capacities.   A veritable sea of blue shirts.   We had a 2010 planning (and awards for 2009) session on the Sunday before the show.   If you’re an EMC competitor and want to see what (and more importantly whom) you are up against, these are the people – and I’m VERY lucky to have them on our team.    The focus, the effort, and the execution on all fronts is something else.   Always room for improvement – but there’s always time to celebrate.   My hat is off to each and every one of you!

Topic 4) The EMC/VMware Sessions

one of the ways that was simply crazy this year where the number of EMC-related sessions.   There were 19 at final count.   Now, I wouldn’t go and make a press release out of that, but the sessions are some of the most valuable content at the conference - if the vendors avoid making them into commercials.   I tried to do that with the sessions I covered (6), and inspected some of the others to make sure the “commercials” were minimized, and “demonstration”, “customer experiences” and “technical best practices” were brought to the forefront.   Would love feedback – if you attended an EMC session – how did it go?   What did you like?   What could we do better?

Now, in that 19, I’m not counting ones where EMC had a part to play (supporting the VMware Sharepoint session for example).   For competitors – don’t get bent – we play by the rules, and VMware enforces them with us.  As a platinum sponsor, you get a certain number (I think it’s 3), plus your super-session.  

I’m committed to post details on every session we did, and am almost done with the ones that I covered.   Will get the rest from the rest of the team.   Any one that has a hyperlink, just follow the link for a detailed post with the content, and in most cases a recording and high-resolution demonstrations.

• SS5140: EMC/VMware Super Session (Steve Herrod and Chad Sakac)
• SS5240: VMware/Cisco/EMC Super Session (Ed Bugnion, Scott Davis and Chad Sakac)
• TA2259: Ask the Experts: Virtualization Design – session #1, and session #2
• TA2467: Best Practices for Storage Availability and Throughput
• TA3105: Long Distance VMotion
• BC2412: Site Recovery Manager in concert with application discover and storage replication – Protecting SAP ERP Virtualized, Federated Landscape
• BC2425: Using CDP for Cost-Effective Application Recovery in vSphere environments
• BC2425: VMware Site Recovery Manager and SRDF: A Customer Experience
• BC3223: Planning for Optimized and Cost-Effective Storage utilizing deduplication and Virtualization technologies
• BC3396: How VMware uses Site Recovery Manager for it’s Own Disaster Recovery
• BC4440: Increase consolidation ratios in vSphere environments while simplifying and improving backup/recover: Customer Experiences
• DV2181: Leveraging SRM with VMware View – lessons learned
• EA2436: Efficient and High-Performance Virtualization of Oracle Database Environments using vSphere
• EA4403: VMware IT: Exchange 2007 at VMware
• TA2381: Warehouse in a Box (a really cool customer case study – using VMware and EMC to standardize hundreds of remote field offices)
• TA4242: Panel: Securing the Virtual Datacenter in Enterprises and Clouds
• TA5360: Enabling the Virtual Datacenter with Symmetrix V-Max
• VM2440: Deploying vSphere management automation technologies: Dependency Mapping, Root Cause, Configuration, Compliance, ITIL
• VM2648: Managing Compliance in Virtual environments.

Topic 5) The Parties

And of course… The parties :-)   We had our hand in many :-)   To see people enjoying a night of fun after days and weeks of work, check out the pictures here…

So.. In conclusion, phew – VMworld 2009 – we hardly knew ye :-)    Thanks again to all the friends I saw and the team who helped make it all happen!

One great joy I have in my job is seeing out a bit further ahead than we can say publicly – but I’ve always been an advocate of putting what we’re working on OUT there.   Some say “but then your competitors know, and will FUD you!”.   Personally, I think we are the leader in most (not all, but most) of the categories in which we play.   Our primary competitor is ourselves – being fast enough, nimble enough, and willing to sacrifice sacred cows if the world has moved on.

Re the EMC/VMware dynamic?

1. we understand in a crisp and clear way how much it is transforming our customer’s datacenters, heck even their IT model
2. we understand with 100% clarity how important it has been, and continues to be that VMware operates across the partner community in an open way.
3. we understand what it takes for us to be the best partner for VMware and customers in this space – and are committed to investing those resources continuously.   Putting aside go-to-market support and focusing on engineering, of EMC’s ~$1.7B R&D budget last year, about $500M went to project that are directly related to the internal, external, and private clouds – areas where VMware integration is central.
4. The number of VTSPs, VSPs, and VCPs within EMC is now astronomical.  I’ve stopped counting.

No one should be confused about VMware’s independence, but likewise, no one should be suprised at EMC’s focus in this area.

In every VMworld I’ve done (starting with VMworld Europe 2008), I’ve always telegraphed what EMC will be doing 6-12 (and in some cases 18) months out in the VMworld super-sessions.   go back and check them out, and you’ll see.   Start applying that filter against the stuff in SS5240, SS5140 and TA3105 – it will be a VERY exciting 2010!

I think Rodos’ video here says it best (watch Scott, Duncan and I at the end) – I **DO** have the coolest job in the world!

Vmworld 2009 Hello Freedom from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

Comments

[Aran]

EMC Storage Viewer? I have never heard of this? I did a search on Powerlink and only came up with a few references. I couldn't find it browsing through the Documentation or Downloads menus either? Can you post links to more documentation on it?

[David]

In powerlink go to, Support, Product and Diagnostic Tools, Symmetrix Tools, Symmetrix Tools for Vmware.

[Aran]

Awesome, thanks David!

We only have ESX clusters on our CLARiiONs right now and have not deployed ESX to our DMX so I didn't even think to look in that location. Kind of an odd place for it though seeing as it supports CLARiiON and Symmetrix arrays.

[sopkaj]

Remember altho EMC Storage Viewer is posted on PowerLink under Symmertix Tools for VMware it works equally with CLARiiON.

[Chad Sakac]

Agreed guys - the tool was originally developed by the Symm team, though has become a defacto tool across the EMC portfolio (and we are continuing to develop and innovate around it).

Agreed that the location isn't optimal. Let me see what I can do about that....

THANK YOU FOR BEING EMC AND VMWARE CUSTOMERS!!!

Btw, the product teams watch this (as I do) - feedback on the tool, good/bad/ugly - all is welcome!