EMC World 2011–vLabs = aka the miracle in Las Vegas :-)

I’m going to do a first today, and do a guest post.  This post was authored by Chris Horn, who leads the vSpecialist Tech Enablement team – who were the folks who made the EMC World 2011 vLab hands-on-labs happen.

BTW – I know some folks question whether I do my own blog posts.   For what it’s worth, I write them ALL.   I produce a lot of the demos on my own lab systems.   Occasionally, someone else on the team produces a demo, and I will link to it (though in those cases, I always try to credit the source).

At EMC World, a lot of people ask me how I find the time to blog.  I mostly author posts in advance, and then just post at the moment.  

I do have a several advantages that I leverage.  

1. While at my core, I’m a geek through and through, I am also a senior executive at EMC and deeply plugged into EMC and VMware engineering, which means there’s long-window awareness of many things well in advance.  For example, my EMC Greenplum Hadoop and Project Lightning blog posts from last week were something I started on months in advance, and finalized the week before EMC World. 
2. There’s a huge volume of information to digest.   I’m lucky to be a speed reader, so I can suck it up pretty fast.
3. I usually write on the plane.  It’s ideal “downtime” to put down thoughts.  I capture screenshots, demos, etc, and put them up on Youtube and other things in advance, then compose while in the air.   Since I fly a LOT (500K miles travelled on Air Canada alone last year) – it gives me a lot of time to write.
4. My role enables me to do several days of “in the lab” time after a sprint of several weeks – I find that lab time to be a key part of keeping “whole” – both to return to a calm Zen state of mind, but also to keep my chops fresh.

I’m not complaining – but my deepest professional insecurity is loosing my technical edge as I move into more senior roles (today, there are several hundred folks on my staff).  So, I work hard to avoid atrophying technical muscles, and am perhaps hyper-sensitive to the possibility of becoming a talking head :-)

So – without further ado – except one more heartfelt THANK YOU to Chris, his core team (Tee, Simon, Nick), Nancy Wilga on the EMC events team and everyone else who did their part to support the EMC vLabs – here we go!

Read on for the “Chris Horn report” on BEHIND THE SCENES (including hardware/software, stats, logistics) of the EMC World vLabs!

I’d highly recommend watching this video Nick Weaver posted – captures some of the “sense of being in the middle of it”.   As a Canadian I don’t entirely understand my American brothers and sisters love of shooting guns as shown in the video, but must confess that it DID look fun :-)   Also – the Ocean’s 11 ending bit (right around 17 min) is AWESOME, Nick :-)

EMC World 2011 from Nicholas Weaver on Vimeo.

A couple of people on the team have also written their own blog posts on the experience here and here.

(Author: Chris Horn) EMCworld 2011 in the books! Only thing between me and home is a broken seat on the plane and a maintenance delay as they repair it, ah the joys of traveling for a living… As I sit here on the tarmac of the Las Vegas airport I thought I’d take the time to reflect back on the last 12 weeks and the road to get to EMCworld.

All I can think of to summarize this entire experience is WOW! It was January 7th 2011, VMware Partner Exchange in Orlando. I had just taken over the vSpecialist Tech Enablement team and we were knee deep in a 6 seat EMC HoL featuring a few of the EMC and VMware integration points. I had worked with VMware’s GHETO team on their 480 seat VMworld 2010 HoL and thought, “EMC has a ton of great technologies, I would love to bring those labs to EMCworld.” So I approached Chris Jeffords with Wyse and said “How many Wyse terminals could you loan me for EMCworld?” He replied 300, and I said “good, let’s do a 300 seat HoL at EMCworld.” And so the journey began….

So how do you go from a 6 seat HoL at Pex (see picture below) to a 200 seat vLab (also pictured below)? After all, the biggest HoL we had done to this point was 12 seats, so what could possibly go wrong? J Oh and by the way, I am informed (thank you Chad, we love you J) that I have to support 6 keynote demos, Chad’s World live, the main EMC booth and the Partner Pavilion with only 4 full time Tech Enablement members. Nothing short of a super human effort!

Picture of PEX Hands on Labs

A few months later – that idea on steroids at EMC World – the vLabs.

I really do believe the stars aligned to make this happen. This effort was full of challenges, a lot of obstacles were cleared out of the way, and there are some I never would have thought we could have overcome going in to this. First obstacle, where do you get the gear to run a 200-300 seat lab? From working with the VMware GHETO team on VMworld 2010, I knew it took them 3 NS960’s to power 480 seats. (CHAD NOTE: And, not to take away from the awesome work the GETO folks have done and will do, but we had the additional challenge of a ton of the stuff depending on virtualized physical hardware assets!) All I had at the time was few Dell servers and some NS22’s. Solution? Chad introduces me to Matt Coviello and the EMC Demo Cloud team, what a phenomenal group of guys! They had been running what they called Demo Cloud I for the last few years, hosted at a EDS facility in Sacrament, CA. However, they had just purchased a fully loaded vBlock 1 for their Demo Cloud II to run out of the new EMC Datacenter in Durham, NC.

Picture of Matt’s guys in one of the many huddle sessions we had! Gabe Tubbs (@gtubbs on Twitter), Jason Thronbrugh (@HaHaOnlySerious on Twitter), Tim McCann, Roy Crisp, and my favorite Russian friend Stanislav Palashkevich or (Stas) as we call him who had never had a steak till he came to the US for this project :-) Stas – Matt or I would be happy to buy you as many steaks as you want the next time you come to the US! You rock dude!

Matt’s guys rock! We could have never done it without you! Thanks for all the hard work over the last 12 weeks!

Picture of vBlock I in Durham, NC

So I said to Matt, ”we’re going to need VM’s, lots of VM’s!” J See the picture below to understand the Matrix reference.

First challenge resolved, I have gear; thank you Matt and team! Now, how do I get all of it to Vegas? EMCworld 2011 is all about Cloud and Big Data, so I think shouldn’t we host this in the Cloud? Yes! I begin discussions with EMC IT and Rich Dunn, who make all the behind the scenes stuff work; network, firewalls, Internet. This is Rich’s 11^th EMCworld, so I was confident he was the right person to help us with the next challenge. We estimate it will take a 45meg DS3 to run the vLabs and we need to have that in less than 12 weeks and it has to be extended from Durham to the Las Vegas Sands show floor. After some back and fourth discussions, it was settled, the circuit ordered and we set off to build a Private Cloud. I can’t thank Rich, Kai, Jerry and the entire IT staff enough for their support and effort in helping us to pull this off!

Next step, build the EMC Private Cloud on a Vblock 1, load custom Cloud Automation software and build content for 10 to 12 brand new labs. No problem, right? :-)

The next biggest hurdle was getting the right people for the job. I have to thank Mitch Burke for letting me permanently borrow Nick Weaver! :-) For those of you that don’t know Nick, he is an absolute ROCKSTAR and I’m lucky to have him on the team! Check out his blog at nickapedia.com or twitter @lnyxbat.

With Nick and the rest of the guys in hand, we lock ourselves in a room at building 176 in the EMC corporate offices. From those meetings came project Bottle Rocket! See the picture below of Nick outlining the project.

Project Bottle Rocket outlines the entire process for custom cloud automation and how Nick will control the Cloud Software, labs and content. Simply amazing is all I can say of Nick’s work! I truly believe the code he wrote “40 thousand lines in 6 weeks btw” will change the way EMC does Cloud, Customer Meetings, EBC’s and many other things I don’t know about right now. See the below pictures and video of the end results.

Video on the assignment console: http://vimeo.com/22243873 Pass: BottleRocket!!

Lab guide video http://vimeo.com/23289438 All vLab guides were done as XAML’s.

For additional details on the entire build, please see Nick’s post on EMCworld here.

http://nickapedia.com/2011/05/15/emc-world-2011-aka-the-last-3-months-of-my-life/

So Nick is on his way, locked in a dark room with only 5 hour energy, Shirley temples and chicken finger s (inside joke, we love you Nick! :-)), Only to emerge looking something close to the guy from the hangover, minus the sunglasses and baby Carlos. See the picture below for comparison; I’ll let you make the call. Only one question Nick, was the Venetian pager friendly?

Now on to the 10 to 12 labs we have committed for the show. Cue the teams own Kiwi, Simon Seagrave. Simon was my right hand man though all of this and I couldn’t have gotten though the massive amount of coordination it took to pull off something like this without his help. From the branding of vLabs, lab guides, logos, power requirements and many other things I can’t think of because I’m too tired right now. :-) However, one thing I have learned, there are a MILLION things that go in to making these types of shows happen and without Simon, it would not have happened!

One example of “the little things” are in the below pictures. Simon and I were sitting around the lobby of the EMC Hotel in Hopkinton, many of you know it as a Courtyard Marriott, but we call it the EMC hotel due to the number of EMC’ers that stay there each week. While doing some of the prep work for the vLabs I said to Simon, “lets photo shop Chad onto Elvis as a promotion for the vLabs,” so the picture below was created as we chuckled away. :-) Little did I know, it would be used as the main advertising for Chad’s World Live and posted all over the hotel and conference center! Great work Simon!

Besides all of the above and countless other things, Simon somehow found the time to blog and do vChat’s. Check out his blog at www.techhead.co.uk or twitter @kiwi_si. You rock dude! Now you can have your show badge and passport back. Simon has been in the US close to 5 weeks, helping us make this happen and the running team joke has been that I took his passport when he got here. J

Another crazy idea of mine, while thinking about giveaways for the vLabs, let’s make a vChad bobble head! I had NO IDEA how popular a bobblehead would be, I literally had to fight people off from taking theses and almost every EMC executive wanted and got one. I even saw Chad autographing them on stage after Chad’s World Live. Who would have thunk it, Chad? I guess I helped you make it to the big time with your very own bobble head doll. J See the pictures below and learn how you can get your own vChad bobble head at VMworld 2011!

Also, a special thanks to Nancy Wilga (Chad Note: YES, THANK YOU NANCY – you have always been a huge help at EMC World and VMworld!) from EMC marketing for helping me to make the bobble heads a reality. Without her help, many things would not have happened! Speaking for all the guys, you are the best!

Oh yeah, back to the labs and content.  Simon, Tee Glasgow and myself led the charge around the lab content, which included the guides as well as the VM’s, but I have to say one of things I’m most proud of during this entire journey has been the entire company effort around making this happen. Simon, Tee and I could not have done it alone and I was so happy to see people from almost every product group step up and help with VM and content creation; this was a true team effort by everyone. Here are just a few of the many, Jase McCarty, Jim Ruddy, Erin Banks, Tarik Dwiek, Stephen Hunt, you guys absolutely rock! I would list them all out, but there are just too many to list, I thank you all for helping us to make this happen!

What did we end up with? 19 Unique vLabs featuring almost every EMC product virtualized and running in the EMC Cloud!!! Not only was this the second largest Hands on Lab done at a show, behind VMware’s HoL at VMworld. I believe it to be largest HoL ever done by a primarily hardware company! The bar has been raised, HP, Netapp, IBM and others. If we’re all going to sell Cloud, which I believe in, we need to figure out new and interactive ways to run our products in the Cloud. With the EMCworld 2011 vLabs I truly believe we have done that and I’m very proud of everyone’s work! Below is a list of the vLabs we had.

As mentioned earlier in my post, we had all this plus the keynotes and booth support. In that light, I want to call out another ROCKSTAR on my team, Tee Glasgow. Not only did he work tirelessly to help us with the vLabs, he also led the charge on the Iomega Keynote demo for Chad’s World and coordinating all the technology and support that went in to the main EMC booth and Solutions Pavilion! Awesome work, man!

Now to the build show floor build process. I found it fascinating how you can go from an idea in your head to something like pictures below in less than 3 days.

First Visio of the vLabs after the napkin drawings :-)

First day of the vLab build, cables on the floor.

Off to the vLabs to begin setup

Carpet being laid in the vLabs

Monitors and Wyse Terminals being laid out

Plan B (Very happy we didn’t have to use it!)

Final product! EMCworld 2011 vLabs open for business!

The good the bad and the ugly! The good, we pulled it off!!! The ugly, we didn’t get much sleep and ate way too much junk food. The bad, we had a major technical glitch that caused some type of VMware locking issue, in turn caused some of use to not sleep for 48 hours straight L Still more to come on the topic, but we are in the middle of a post mortem as we speak. A special thanks going out to Clint Kitson (@clintonkitson) and Rick Scherer (@rick_vmwaretips) or “Tips” as we call him, for coming up with a solution that got around the locking issue and saved the day!

The keynote, vLabs and booth support, all of it worked! We had some hiccups along the way, but we were pushing the envelope and it’s to be expected. Below are some of the stats from the vLabs and the 12 weeks running up to EMCworld.

• 3500+ VM’s provisioned and used
• 1100+ vLabs completed
• Total IO 1,188,161,619
• Total MB 24,837,473 (23.7TB)
• Reads 425,909,689
• Writes 762,251,930
• Writes 762,251,930
• Write MBs 5,666,454 (5.4TB)
• 220 cans of Monster Energy drink consumed, about 50 of those by me J
• 2 cases of Redbull, 4 cases of 5 hour energy, 25 Pizzas and countless other junk food
• Most popular vLab? VNX 283, it’s a core EMC show after all.
• Second most popular? VPLEX with 165.
• Third most popular? Isilon with 125
• Hours worked by my team and Matt’s team in the last 12 weeks? 9245!
• Hours of sleep I got in the first 4 days of the show, 9, yes that’s a 9 J

See Nick’s video for more detailed information on the stats http://vimeo.com/lynxbat/emcworld2011stats

With the EMCworld and the vLabs and Keynotes complete a few of the guys decided to go to a local gun shop in Vegas to blow off some steam. Well deserverd after the 12 weeks of hard work!. Below are some videos and pics of our killer time at the range :-)

Very funny video from us picking out our gun to shoot at the gun shop.

http://goo.gl/8RHkY

The boys after some shooting! In orange, Dan Bogda from Cisco who was a tremendous help and a big part of the vLabs and Keynote success! Thanks again for all the help Dan!

Very cool video of me shooting a WWII 1919 machine gun. Incredible to think what I vets went though as Tee Glasgow highlights in this Blog post http://teehasadream.blogspot.com/2011/05/1919.html

Thank you to all the Vets on my team and all around the world!

ftp://ftp.emc.com/outgoing/chorn/photos/emc_world/Gun%20Range/IMG_2584.MOV

In the end, it was a great project! We learned a lot, grew as a team and and next year will be even bigger and better! I truly feel that what we accomplished will live long past EMCworld and will change many things for EMC, EMCworld and our customers! Now off for some much needed rest and then on to VMworld. So long from Vegas! Viva Big data!

-

(end Chris’ post)

THANK YOU to the whole team who made this part of EMC World happen!   A great shining example of what can happen quickly with a small group of passionate folks, who get help from the whole company.

Comments

[Thevaporwareblog.wordpress.com]

CHorn and team, Congratulations! That was truly an amazing feat of engineering you guys pulled off! One had to see it to believe it. I salute you guys. I hope you are not reading this right now because you all should be on a tropical beach somewhere, mai tai in hand, with no cell reception...you guys deserve it!!!!

[BasRaayman]

The labs were indeed awesome, and for me it was the experience of a lifetime to be part of this team. And I'm sure my own experiences ( http://basraayman.com/2011/05/14/post-convention-melancholy/ ) will only be blown away by the next time I'm lucky enough to work with you all! :)

Chris has done a great job writing this up, and even though I was there for part of it, I really enjoyed reading this writeup.

[Randy Keener]

Hey guys,

I will take being the target of your labs standard as a compliment! You guys did a great job documenting your accomplishements this year. Very impressive.

The guns. Almost the best thing about Vegas...

Wish I coulda been there.

Keep it fun!

-randy
Founder: VMware GETO Team ;)

[k]

Do you have the top#100 users? I have a chad buddy and i want to know my rank :)

[Fabio]

Happy to see that Lord Tanner is part of Plan B :)

Fabio.