Official Unofficial 2012 VMware Storage SurveyCool Stuff

The best parts of the Official Unofficial 2012 VMware Storage Survey are the open ended questions – some of the things people put in there are really interesting, funny, eye-opening, heck sometimes offensive :-)

The first open-ended question in the 2012 survey was “What are cool things you are doing?” – and indeed – I got hundreds of examples. Personally – I find them inspiring. Read on past the break and judge for yourself…

Cool things people are doing:

Looking @ Scale-out NAS storage as alternative to NetApp FAS. * FASTCache instead of FAST-VP
-)buidling our first private cloud -)integration of EMC plugins in our environment :-)
100% virtual exchange 2010 on sata
3 datacenters, more coming.
3par space reclaim/zero detect. Works well, custom scripts zero out luns if its worthwhile.
4-node Microsoft SQL Clusters stretched across 2 sites, virtualized
90% storage replication reduction with Riverbed.
99% diskless desktops
A stretched cluster over a Campus with 2 FC Storage Arrays
AD / EXC / Inter-Sites consolidation / SQL improvement / Firewall / Backup
AD Stuff, 3rd level support
About to remotely setup a VMware environment.. Let's see if that works ;)
Accelerating VDI
Active Active between two datacentres on campus - great for DR.
Active/active stretched cluster storage virtualisation. Very large RAM based caching.
Adding 10GE capability
Alas, nothing too exciting right now.
All kinds of projects
An implementation of Veeam for backup/replication in our environment.
App-v application virtualization
Application Virtualisation
Application virtualization
Application virtualization Programming Implementing CAS
Application virtualization, Remote Access
Architecture planing, performance tuning
Arduino vm counter
As part of transformation project, convert Physical Machines into VMs.
Async SAN Mirror across 200+ miles
Auto Deployment. Systme owner managed Backup. HA Application clusters.
Auto provisioning VM's (not working 100% as yet). VMware Capacity IQ
Automatic failover
Automating capacity planning based on constant inputs and mathematical formula.
Automating server provisioning with Orchestrator
Automation
Automation - Powershell rocks!
Automatization view Pools and use vcloud directory
Avamar
Avamar backup for all of the VM's
Avamar!
BC/DR
Backing up my VM using Avamar with DataDomain with huge dedupe ratio.
Backup and replication using Veeam to provide DR.
Backup stuff with EMC Avamar. Completly happy with this.
Block-based replication to facilitate DR and our global datacenter split.
Blogging, Drumming, Dancing, RPG ;-)
Blogging, Implementing SRM5, Testing VSA, UCS
Boot from SAN using FCOE
Brocade VDX - FcOE and VCS
Building Internal Private Cloud
Building Private Clouds
Building SAP on VBlock 100% virtualized and common integration cloud
Building a green-fields vCD cluster for pre-prod/testing team.
Building a private cloud
Building a whole new world of fun.
Building cloud provider
Building flexpods to be deployed internationally.
Building hosted solution (company not specifically me)
Building more datacenters and clouds.
Building my own SRM
Building our own cloud automation platform from scratch for running demos.
Building own datacenter
Building router/security/NAS appliances based on ESXi on common mini-ITX platforms.
Building the military cloud @ DISA
Bus crit apps on shared VM clusters. 95% new x86 goes on VM. Exploring VMDC.
Buying new storage
CISCO UCS
Can't talk about them... Sorry.
Can't think of anything
Cannot tell, under NDA
Centralized backups of remote offices by storage replication.
Centralized backups of remote sites with array based replication
Cisco UCS
Cisco UCS and vBlock POCs :)
Cisco UCS blades and looking into vBlock.
Cisco UCS vmpassthru and overall consolidation using VNX, Cisco UCS, and Cisco Nexus.
Citrix AppSense, Avamar
Citrix XenAPP
Citrix, Scripting
Cloud
Cloud based offering for SMB space
Cloud computing
Cloud storage
Clustering
Community junk
Configuring RP and SRDF properly for VMWare. This is something that is always overlooked
Configuring VDI in production with SSD storage project
Considering a SAN-less infrastructure (www.nutanix.com)
Constantly growing
Cool things? One mans cool is another mans dull numb pain.
Correct re-sizing of existing VMs using CapcityIQ & vC Ops Manager suite
Correlating SAN events to vCenter performance statistics with Virtual Instrument's VirtualWisdom
Covered it all in your questions.
Creating a hybrid cloud
Creating THE vcloud
Creating a View environment using a Cisco UCS.
Cross Site Storage Replication for DR High Availability of applications through clustering/FT
Currently building out the whole vCloud Eco-System components to work on developing IP for BC/DR.
Currently deploying XenDesktop to 18k users, moving toward private IaaS
Currently eval new storage vendors, 2012 will be eval VDI and vCD
Currently fiddling with SRM and SAN based replication.
Currently have RFP out in the wild for new storage. VNX x4 sitting at the top of the pile :-)
Currently testing FusionIO drives
Custom SRM, contact me if you need more details.
Custom booting PXE solution using windows deployment services
Custom written programs to help with VDI implementations.
DB Security
DPM, and basing colo costs on total power usage.
DR testing with various DR solutions Application virtualization and management
Data center automation
Data center refresh proposal. Lots of capacity planning.
Datacenter move
Datacore
Datadomain for backups
Dedupe, replication, storage level snapshots
Delivering desktops with XenApp in large healthcare environments.
Deploy Exchange in Virtual environment
Deployement on demand of apache.
Deploying Ganeti cluster for low cost high availability VMs.
Deploying NAS to virtualize file server directly on SAN rather than through Windows server
Deploying Nexus 1000V in a DMZ environment
Deploying Virtual Desktops with Oracle VDI :-)
Deploying a global cloud offering.
Deploying a new backup product.
Deploying and planing the whole vmware environment. Planning and ordering the storages also.
Deploying multiple VPLEX clusters with RP.
Deploying vPLEX for multiple sites.
Designing Architecture Citrix XenApp/Desktop environments.
Designing Data Center infrastructure (servers, networking, storage & virtualization)
Designing most of Vmware env to customers
Designing vSphere infra's
Developing Cloud Management solutions
Developing cloud solutions
Developing orchectrator workflows for all things VMware
Did VPLEX 5 GEO BEta and loved it, but left the company at the end of Sep.
Doing SRM for free with PowerCLI scripts
Don't really know :-)
Draining the life out of vSpecialist because they ROCK !!! ... and I want to know what they do!
EMC Atmos as a Service,
ERP Upgrade with custom integration points with our legacy systems
ESXi upgrades, HP Blade migration, SAN migration to new HDS VSP & AMS arrays.
Embotics V-Commander
Enabling VAAI right now. I love it!!
Energy Saving DataCenter Project
Evaluating vBlock
Evaluating vSphere 5.
Evangelizing other teams
Everyday learning and enjoyi g the technology.
Everything already mentioned
Expanding all over the world, trying to move oracle from SPARC to Linux x86
Experimenting with open source stuff
Exploring host based read caching
FAST, FAST Cache, Tiered Storage, SSD tier 0
FCoE to Nexus 7000 to Clariion. ESXi remote sites will soon be using VSA.
FCoE, thin on thin storage
Fast cache
Fast vp. Testing vmware swap in ssd.
Fighting fires and rescuing people!
Files are just much easier than Physical servers.
Finding a replacement for Dell Equallogic!
FusionIO is cool, been testing it for VDI.
GEO IAAS Arch
Gearing up to migrate to vSphere 5
Geo distributed datacenters
Getting a Vblock to host our IaaS Cloud.
Getting rid of TSM backup and introduce disk-to-disk backup. :-)
Going to build an active/active datacenter on 2 locations hopefully with vplex:)
Google Apps
Grails, Gemfire
Grid technologies for Virtualization.
HP Blade in place for datacenter consolidation. IAAS is in testing phase. Private Cloud model
HP Blades , FCOE
HP's Virtual Connect
Having a stable environement in itself is already cool.
Home-grown NAS clustered storage; no-spindles, all PCIe-based NAND flash.
Honestly, vCloud Director is the coolest thing I'm doing.
Hope to do an evaluation of Private Cloud management software in Q1 2012
Hoping to start the VDI kick-off next year.
Hosted Video Surveillance
Hosting Cloud infrastructure for clients
Hosting VM's using Dell compellent.
Hosting client Vm's in our environment.
Hosting for companies
Hosting legacy apps via Xenapp. Hooray.
Hyper-V CSV Live Migration and Storage Migration
Hyper-V, the cost versus VMWare for what I really need is making me leave ESX/Vsphere
I am a cloud service provider. How cool is that?
I am one man show so I am doing it all I can.
I bringing to life my old Porsche in meanwhile ;)
I don't have time to do cool things.
I live
I love hyper9 now SolarWinds
I make these really neat table candles...
I manage everything in my company (network and servers)
I think Virtualizing 120 Mixed OS/workload Servers in 6 month, was cool and success.
I wisb I could get to the cool stuff.
I wish I had time to do cool things ...
I wish there were some cool things - Just hte day to day grind
I wish!
I'm a storage consultant, getting to play with different vendor's hardware is nice.
I'm not allowed to do cool things. Cool things cost money.
I'm playing with VEEAM Backup
I/O Virtualisation through Xsigo
I`m woring for a system integrator, that`s why my answers are kind weird.
IaaS/PaaS, vCloud, EUC
Identity management, mobile device management
Implement all new goodies that EMC & VMware has to offer.
Implementing EMC VNX and migrating from EQL is by far the coolest thing going on :)
Implementing SRM5 and VIEW5
Implementing Site Recovery Manager and Heartbeat in both VDI and VI vCenters
Implementing VBlock for Microsoft Exchange - WIN!
Implementing VMWare ESX geo cluster in Switzerland based on VPLEX Metro (~4ms R/T)
Implementing a SSD based storage.
In IT I also manage the backups.
In the process of building my own home lab :)
Install ESX/ESXi hosts on unsupported hardware.
Integration with Avamar Single pane of glass view into VMWare with vFoglight
Integration with ucs, nexus1k
Internal SAAS implementations that integtrate with VMware.
Internal cloud offerings
It's a homelab for all this .... not sure what more cool stuff I can do :).
Iteratively streamlining DR process by tweaking Replication Manager and SRM.
Jack of All Trades - so VMware, Netapp, Exchange, Sharepoint, and want to do SCCM next
Just bought new storage (3par), still getting to know each other ;-)
Just doing virtualization at all or considering VDI in a SMB environment.
Just focusing on a life of a huge bank, 'as is'.
Just implemented FusionIO cards on in ome hosts....those rock!
Just installed Cisco UCS
Just thinking about a vBlock/Pod design concept as the foundation for our private cloud.
Keeping sane...
Kicking Hyper-V's butt!
Learning about the various product (lines) of EMC
Learning for my VMware Certifications
Learning more about all the possible features in View 5 and ESXi5, vSphere5
Linked vcenters with san based replication
Linux Cluster Design and Implementation based on opensource products
Linux administration
Looking a virtualization our telephony infrastructure.
Looking at AppBlast, and other EUC stuff from VMware currently...
Looking at Layer 2 Span across Data Centers for Geo-Clustering
Looking at Openstack and Cloudstack for private cloud.
Looking at SRM. Using VSC backups.
Looking at a monitoring system like Hyperic and Operations Manager
Looking at open source tools to help us manage and plan capacity.
Looking at other replication technology besides storage and VMware for business continuity.
Looking at pure ssd storage
Looking at using VPLEX for Active Active Metro Data Center Design with VMware
Looking for a LabManager replacement.
Looking into Isilon for possible VMware storage
Looking into Site Block Replication
Looking into migrating our hosts to Vsphere 5 and using VCB.
Looking to buy a VMAX soon!
Looking to implement fast and consolidate everything on the VMAX
Looking to leave this environment
Looking to move to cloud computing
Lot of testbed.
Lots of VDI
Lots of fcoe and ucs
Lots of scripting
Lots of users with VM's used for staging customer enviorments for product development.
Love VEEAM for replication and backup. Saves my ass.
Love using VMware Workstation to build labs for customer demos.
Love your blog and show. Watch them all.
Loving using NetApp dedup and vmware thin provisioning together to obtain a ton of disk space.
MEssing with the fusion-io cards is pretty cool.
Mainly scripting for automation of processes.
Mainly server consolidation right now. Investing the whole cloud space (mainly private).
Making material handling equipment self-sufficient.
Management & Orchestration products in Vblock.
Managing Citrix XenApp
Managing VMs not LUNs End to End bottle neck visbility
Managing the environment through Excel
Manual vcb, datarecovery, USB Virtualisierung
Many :)
Many things I wish we were doing...
Masive client consolidation.
Metro Clusters 16core AMD mega clusters
Metro clustering with netapp
Metro vMotion tesing with v-plex was cool.
Metrocluster
Migrating and updated to vSphere 5 to utilize VASA
Migrating from EMC DMX to VMAX, VPLEX & VDI mainly.
Migrating to EMC :)
Migrating to Netapp Metro Cluster, NFS. Expecting lots of benefits.
Migrating to blade servers
Migration to new data center. New VMware blade chassis.
Mostly figuring out ways to provide HA and DR.
Mostly holding steady at this point.
Mostly looking forward to working with vCloud director
Mostly on the network side with LB and stretching DCs.
Mostly using virtualization for web farms and database used
Moving from local drives to SD cards for ESXi installation.
Moving some of my test vms to the cloud
Moving to 10gb and testing cool features like RoCE with physical boxes.
Multi Tennancy, Hybrid Cloud
Multi-Site HP P4000 SAN with ESXi running a streched cluster.
Multipathing, FAST, Reclamation
Multiple datacenter consolidation and long distance replication.
Multiple site replication/failover
N/A
N/a
NDA
NA
Na
Nearing 100% virtualization.
Nested ESX as training ground. Mobile ESX under Workstation, poartble ESX server for training
NetApp FlashCache
NetApp Virtual Storage Console/Backups
Network RAID using local host storage is awesome. No need for additional hardware for SAN.
Network admin
Network security.
Network troubleshooting
Networking (labs are a lot cheaper than storage labs)
Networking (think Global WAN)
Networks
None
None really
None. :(
Not a lot. Work in a deliver deliver deliver environment.
Not enough. I want a blog that can show me cool things.
Not much
Not much I can do...my hands are tied down
Not much else
Not much really. The setup and team is just brought alive.
Not much unfortunately, lack of time is killing the inner geek.
Not much! :(
Not much. Simple setup, no remote rep
Not much...the environment is pretty standard.
Not really, we are providing stable (and boring) services
Not sure
Nothin'much
Nothing
Nothing Special
Nothing as cool as vSphere :-)
Nothing at all.
Nothing at the moment other than my blog. ;-)
Nothing cool, behind the times
Nothing cool, just runnin our business
Nothing cooler than VMware
Nothing creative I am afraid
Nothing exceptional
Nothing in particular
Nothing major - Keeping it simple and stable
Nothing much cool in the virtulisation space
Nothing much yet, just getting started with virtualization and trying to find my way
Nothing new by now
Nothing really, pretty cut and dry compared to past environments.
Nothing special
Nothing special, traditional stuff.
Nothing too cool other then looking at the open storage model to help lower costs..
Nothing too terribly cool.
Nothing yet, we're pretty small-scale
Nothing, because all we do is fight performance problems in the VMAX.
Nothing, too small of a shop to play around with cool stuff...
Nothing.
Nothing. :-( We're pretty small compared to most out there.
Nothing. Waiting on funds
Nutanix
Nutanix Client (laptop) proof of concept
Offering DR and cloud backup to customers using 3rd party software: CommVault
Offsite iSCSI targeting for remote clients backup and replication
Old school cluster with FC
On the cloud voyage
OpenFiler appliances Celerra VSA
Optimizing replication costs (i.e. replication without SRM) on EMC and/or IBM.
Orchestration
Organizing concerts and play with my 2 kids at home! ;-)
Overclocking.
P2V
P2V Backup
P2V and V2P with just reboots (flips middle finger at Oracle)
P2V for backup and V2P for verification regularly.
POC's, Hadoop
PXE
PXE deployment
Performance Rest between several storage vendors
Persistent VDI implementation
Physical / virtual cluster
Planning a public cloud offering for my company
Planning a stretched cluster using Cisco OTV
Planning data center solutions for our customers
Planning for the future so we can replicate SANs between sites
Planning on using Linked Clones via Orchestrator
Planning self service solutions for storage
Platespin protect, Cisco Nexus 100v
Play with vFoglight Storage
Playing with PowerShell
Playing with SSD's & megacache solutions.
Playing with using Storage DRS and VASA storage
Playing with virtual apps. Business continuity
PowerCLI
PowerCLI, perl APIs
Powercli automation everywhere. Testing new arrays Building provisioning protals
Powershell based failover replacing SRM because SRM has too many small issues GUI wise
Powershell scripting for reporting and configuration
Powershell, Perl, Cisco UCS
Preparing cloud services for big transport company's in the Netherlands
Preparing to be a private cloud provider inside our company. VDI View proof of concept.
Preparing to upgrade the production clusters to vSphere 5 and View 5.
Pretty straightforward installations
Private , Hybrid cloud solutions with colo
Private cloud service
Private cloud, active / active DR redundancy
Providing IaaS to SMB.
Provisioning virtual citrix terminal farm
Public and private cloud as a service. We're are an MSP.
Questionnaires to win stuff!
RDM for Oracle ERP
RVtools
Read.
Recently put in an enterprise class storage array; reducing vendor count from 5 to 1.
RecoverPoint Replication CLR with SRM and Replication manager
Remote backup services using Veeam Lots of VDI with XenDesktop vSphere 5 upgrades :)
Replacing VMware Lab Manager with vCloud director and VSM Provisioning manager
Replacing our SAN
Replacing stretched clusters from HP SVSP (Abandoned product)
Replicating all with EMC RecoverPoint, probably the best solution from EMC.
Replicating internal storage with DRBD
Replicating our local and remote site over a dedicated 10G connection.
Replication Manager Recoverpoint with SRM is planned
Replication to a DR site
Replication; integration with 3-d party monitoring tools
Researching VDI implementation for our environment.
Right now i'm not at work.. so thats pretty cool
Running UberVSA's to test SRM
Running VMWare within Openstack
SAP Migrations from physical to virtual
SQL Server Tier-1 performance on VMware with lots of EMC hardware!
SRDS, non-disruptive background vfiler migrations (between physical hardware chassis, NetApp).
SRM
SRM - Mirrorview/S FASTCache SSD FLARE LUNs LabManager CapacityIQ
SRM 5
SRM, Disaster Recovery of our Data Center..i think it is enough :)
SRM5 w' Hyper Visor based replication Checking out View 5 Implementing Stonegate vIPS'
Script the hell out of ESX and SVC, and combine both (scripted)
Scripted linked clones for test/dev with Linux VMs.
Scripting with Powershell and PowerCLI
Scripting! PowerShelling !!
Secure multi tenancy for customers using vcloud.
Self Encrypting Drives in the SAN
Self healing with storage array metrics + vcenter to auto scale applications
Server P2V and VDI
Site recovery manager withou VMware site recovery manager
Snap
Snapshot
Software Replication
Some bitchin network shenanigans.
Some homegrown replications
Sorting out backups directly from storage. VMDK files etc etc
Starting a new job with World Wide Technology, Inc. as a Technical Architect.
Starting to look at metrocluster scenarios using VPLEX
Starting to play with Gluster file system, virtualizing databases, not the server.
Storage Federation
Storage Virtualization
Storage as a Service
Storage reporting tools.
Storage tiering with FAST
Storage vMotion to upgrade arrays - no downtime necessary.
Streched Virtual Datacenter
Stretched Clustering Virtualize XenApp als a desktop virtualization solution on a huge scale
Stretched cluster between two sites on opposite sides of the road.
Stretched clusters, SRM implementations
Stretched layer2, IP address abstraction for DR, full stack provisioning
Study Cisco UCS
Studying for VCP
Studying for my VCAP
Surviving!!!
Switching from hyperv towards esx
Sync two way replication
Taking the role of a "vmware evangilsit" in my and other organizations I work for.
Tasks automation with scripts (provisioning, re/configuring...)
Technical Scuba Diving :)
Testing 2 tier homebrew storage using gpfs against VSA
Testing Cisco UCS as a way to virtualize on all hardware levels.
Testing Citrix w/ VMWARE
Testing L2ARC with ZFS. Using SCST to create FC targets on Linux.
Testing Nutanix
Testing TIDAL
Testing VAAI
Testing VSM and Orchestrator interop Using our T&D for DR
Testing View and using vmax for encryption
Testing a solution of cloud for our customers with Fuji CS800.
Testing apps in a VM, before installing in production
Testing new things like View 5, SRM and Cloud Director
Testing of Storage Appliance
Testing snapshot backup with Commvault.
Testing storage and virtualization products
Testing stretched HA clusters
Testing the Avamar Virtual Edition
Testing vsphere5
Testing with Operations Manager Enterprise
Testing with VNX and Celerra VSAs. Thanks!
The other cool things are planning for the vcloud and to play with it in the environment
ThinApp
Thinking about VMWare 5 in our public cloud offering space.
Thinking about replacing EVA with Netapp or EMC :-)
Thinking about using a Data Domain
Thinking of testing sort of Virtual storage Appliance to use internal storage.
Thinking of upgrading production site to vSphere 5
Thinking of using EMC vPlex
Thinking on Geographic Cluster with a synchronous storage-replica within 200 km
Tiered storage with esx5.0's built in functions...nifty stuff!!
Tons of PowerShell scripting to create automated tasks.
Tons of powercli.
Toying around with automation re: vCO
Trainer for VMware
Training
Trialing recoverpoint replication across WAN for VMWare VMs.
Trying to fill the gaps with powershell and powercli
Trying to find out where iPads fit in the modern business? Building a new data center/
Trying to get hands on every feature of VMware
Trying to get my VCP 5 :)
Trying to hack together a CX500 from parts found on eBay
Trying to keep my head above water.
Trying to keep up with all of the changes
Trying to score an EVA 4400 for my home lab, the VNXe would be a lot nicer :)
Trying to sell Xsigo stuff to our customers. Xsigo has coolness written all over it.
Trying to use ThinApp more
Trying unsupported thing in lab
UCS + multiple City vCloud = Uber hotness.
UCS, Unified Fabric, 3rd Party Plugins for Storage and Virtual Networks..etc
UPS integration
Unfortunately, not a lot. I'm just a hobbyist user of this stuff.
Unfortunately, very little
Unidesk
Upgade to vsphere5 stretched cluster
Upgrading hosts from 4.1 to ESXi 5 now. Also working with resource pools
Upgrading/Migrating to ESXi4.1U2
Using Avamar for full image backups of VMs.
Using CISCO UCS for CNA and automating a lot of things without buying tools.
Using CommVault and Snapshots to backup the entire environment.
Using Data Domain to backup VMWARE and using DDUP
Using HP Blade Systems c7000 and Avamar Backup solutions.
Using PlateSpin products for dedup(big mistake)
Using PowerCLI to automate administrative tasks, the possibilties are virtually (heh..) endless.
Using Recoverpoint for local CDP, Avamar with Datadomain Integration for VADP Backup
Using SSDs as read/write cache in front of ZFS. It has amazing potential.
Using UCS as a plateform and Nexus 1000
Using VMware Orchestrator
Using VMware as an intermediary layer to ease our change from one platform to another.
Using View for iPad clients.
Using Xangati & vCOPs and loving it.
Using drobo as a backup to our backup.
Utilizing easy-to-use interfaces for monitoring of storage usage and optimization.
VCOPs for performance management / analysis
VDI
VDI
VDI / teminal services on HyperV
VDI POC with VMware View
VDI and VCloud
VDI design for up to 65,000 desktops and laptops
VDI over VDI (View Client inside a View VDI machine)
VDI, Cisco UCS and many other cool stuff.
VDR backups
VDR backups temporarily until NetBackup supports vSphere 5
VIBE
VM deployment automation, Working on Large scare projects to Virtualize SAP as Service
VM provisioning on Storage Arrays, not LUN provisioning, like Tintri.
VMAX / VPLEX / FAST VP / VDI / VAAI / VASA
VMDK backups with Avamar
VMware Clustering (HA/DRS) Storage DRS Distributed Switches
VMware Data Recovery
VMware Data Recovery;
VMware Orchestrator. Workflows and Development
VMware SRM, vCD, etc EMC VNX, etc
VMware View Pilot
VMware View Public Cloud
VMware vCloud Director futures ;-)
VPLEX METRO, YEAH BABY!
VPLEX stretched Metro Cluster - I love it!
Vblock
Vblock baby!
Vblock deployment for oracle as a service and Citrix xendesktop.
Vcloud director
Vdi
Vdi and srm are big growth opportunities with lots of options...
Veeam
Veeam - love it.
Veeam Backup
Veeam Instant Recovery - Love it!
Veeam backup
Veeam backup makes VMware Data Recovery look like a sad little joke.
Veeam backups rock.
Veeam deduplicated backup + off-site replication
Veeam replication, VPOWER NFS, QNAP replication of backup files to each site.
Veeam, commvault snapprotect wit exchange/equallogic
Veeams cool
Very slowly moving towards becoming a government IaaS provider.
Very vanilla shop! If it's too cool then it is too expensive or it hasn't been fully vetted.
View link clone with remove vm when log off
Virtual SRM lab, Cisco UC, Vblock 300FX on wheels!
Virtual data center for customers
Virtual storage appliances solve a lot of problems
Virtualization in casino gaming
Virtualize All The Things!
Virtualized Cisco Call System
Virtualized JD Edwards
Virtualized SAP on HP-UX virtual machines tied to CX4 and VNX. That was VERY cool
Virtualizing MSCS clusters
Virtualizing Microsoft Lync
Virtualizing Oracle and build a cloud for my customer.
Virtualizing all desktops and inhouse vdi
Virtualizing as much as possible
Virtualizing high-performance medical imaging servers.
Virtualizing large Oracle Servers
Virtualizing more servers.
Virtualizing our casino gaming environments.
Virtualizing train control operations
Virtulize Exchange 2010/Lync 2010
Virtulizing the Network
Visualization
Visualization first
Vkernel tools
Vmware view local mode with apple support :-D
Vplex metro over fcoip. vmaxe. Recoverpoint. Avamar.
Vsphere Upgrade, New storage adding to datacenter and will move all VMs to this new storage.
Want to deploy PCaaS but running into Msft licensing constraints (Service Provider licensing).
We are building a new greenfield container terminal in the uae.
We are getting ready to start planning for vSphere 5 and SRM.
We are playing with VMWare VDI, and loving it. The versatility of our Compellent SAN is amazing.
We are pretty cool all around.
We are proud to run 24/24 and 7/7 industrial production environment on vmware.
We have build a IaaS and PaaS internaly based on vmware.
We have started offering out our infrastructure as a managed service to partner organisations
We use a migrate LUN connected to each VMware cluster for mobility in moving around workloads.
We're a cloud computing provider
We're a pretty basic VMware shop, not really doing anything too fancy.
We're about to start testing Long Distance vMotions with EMC and F5 on the back-end.
We're running a multi-tenanted hybrid cloud.
We're trying to expand to a VDI environment...
We've deen doing virtualization now over 6 years and are almost 100% virtual.
Web-based intranet application for student information system in a k-12 school district.
Whatever the client needs.
White boxes, private clouds
Wish I was doing other cool things...
Wish we could do cool things
Working building an ITaas infrastructure for several related departments.
Working my ass off 80 hours a week, hoping somehow my work day becomes 50 hours or less. Pray...
Working on a active active data center design.
Working on both a XIO array installation and a VNX 5500 / Avamar implementation.
Working on implementng a private cloud.
Working on proof of concept to present SRM benefits to management.
Working on something to collate and interpret dive computer data.
Working with Exchange, Citrix
Working with Unidesk and trying to virtualize large development vdi vms
Working with local nonprofits as an unpaid IT consultant.
Writing custom scripts
XP VM for apps that are incompatible with win7. RDP FTW.
XenApp 6.5 Farm
XenApp 6.5, HPUX, Data Backup & Recovery. It's a small group here, so we do many tasks.
Xenapp, Recover point implementations, VNX implementations etc.
Xsigo Virtual Infrastructure
Xsigo Virtualized I/O
You mentioned them all ;-)
adabas - no that's uncool. nada i guess.
admining
architecting virtual infrastructures
automatic nightly re-composition of view desktops
automating and securing the virtual environment
automation essentially
automatization Vmware view pools using orchestrator
backing up vms as images, microsoft clusters
backup, commvault
blade servers, FCOE, Nexus
block alignment
block replication
booting linux servers inside vmware via pxe
building a DCI to run metro stretched vSphere cluster
building and destroying my own homelab, riding my bike and running like a maniac :-)
building low cast off the shelf storage
cloud,dr
cloudfoundry is at the top of my cool list right now
compellent vmware plugin
considering something like vplex
consulting and engineering in vmware and emc products.
consulting, training, integration - always cool
converged datacenters
create Infrastructure Designs and Solutions for our customers
creating a poc Cloud director 1.5
creating integration software for mac, ubuntu and windows for our small office
customer support
customized vm deployment
data center automation
data centre burst
datadomain
datamover failover
developing software :)
doing cisco ip telephony on top of our vmware testing lab.
dooing some tests with whiptail/Tintri/Cloupia
eh, it's work.
everything is so easy :)
filling out surveys ;)
getting a demo environment for SRM solutions
getting my vcdx finally ^_^
getting to vcap
i ve to design esx cluster without phy storage
i'm working on project for migration all full desktops to a vmware view enviroment
iSCSI multipathing
implement vsphere replication in virtual env. (esx into esx)
initiating a community cloud project for the region
interstate replication with RPAs and RM
investigating xendesktop on vnx
investigation in to pNFS and how it will effect ESX clustering
ioTurbine (local host caching)
iscsi
joking about frustrated xen server admins
just moved a datacenter with over 300 VMs using SRM. That product rocks - saved my butt.
looking
looking at VDI
looking at VDI and storage is a big factor
looking at vplex
looking into host based replication technology eg zert0
looking into somehow replicating the vm's up to amazon s2 for dr site
lot of powershell
lots of custom powershelling coolness
love vaai love sioc
making a vcloud based service.
making pure SSD array (no teiring)
managing hosts (hard/software), doc
managing people
migrations, linux admin
mirrored storage
moving away from SVC ;)
n/a
na
nada
nagios
netapp consistent snapshot of whole lun with vm's and SnapManager software is amazing!
netapp rapid cloning for test and dev
network and security/firewall
networking ( cisco )
no other cool things, sorry :-)
none
not a lot
not much
not much else as far as "cool"
not much, too many features that I still need to implement and re-architect for vSphere 5
nothing
nothing only VMware
nothing really exciting
nothing special
nothing, bored as hell
nothing, just administrating Vmware
offsite/thin building -- all servers for Prod and DR are at 2 separate data centers
pNFS for internal Linux farm ZFS
planting the seeds for vmworld 2012 to my boss
playing with cloud technologies
playing with other DR options other than SRM. VPLEX is pretty cool to demo.
playing with stretch clusters
powercli scripts lots of.
powercli, vmturbo, zerto hypervisor replication
powershell
powershelling
prepping for a global upgrade to vSphere 5
purchasing 2 new vmax's
raising newborn twins while trying to work
remote access and other damn things
rolling out thin laptops, going to use view as default office pc, etc.
running a large Citrix XenApp farm on VMware... and it's pretty much working!
san replication between sites over 8Gb fiber, 10Gb fiber between dc and dr
saving the world with cheese pizza
setting up public cloud
sizing future VDI infrastructure choosing roaming profile and folder redirection technologies
software RAID1 in a VM across vmdk's on different storage units.
some linux system administration
staying afloat
storage virtualisation
system administrator over Linux server
testing multi-site vcloud director implementations
testing vsphere 5, looking forward how much goodies it will bring into the work place
thin apps for view
thinking about converged IO adapters
thinking about implementing fast
tier 1 cluster
trying to find a solution for the storage as being a SPOF
trying to start VDI soon
uber-align celerra vsa vnx vsa - really appreciate these tools for srm testing
unified communications
using Avamar and Datadomain
using VAAI is great, fast and easy
using capacity manager and data protector
using replication manager to replicate and mount dbs on another vm for backups.
using script to control SAN replication
using third party (TrendMicro) system anti virus management for VMs
using vmware, what else is cool?
vADP onto a deduplication device
vApp and OVF templates for scripted deployments.
vBlock/FlexPod cloud scaling.
vCD, replicated rdms, testing vxlan
vCenter Mobile Access. vDR backup appliance. VMware Update Manager.
vCloud Director
vCloud Service provider
vCloud as IaaS
vCloud director 1.5
vCloud director tiered based testing for different provider DCs
vCloud roll out - very exciting
vMotion, LISP, OTV, etc
vShield rocks!
vShpere 5 + vCD1.5 and SRM
vSphere 5 rollout. Conversion from Hyper-V R1 and Hyper-V R2 to vSphere 5
vSphere 5 upgrade planning =)
vSphere on isilon head
vcloud as a service
vcloudirector
veeam
view IPAD client, Android Client
virtual design and architecture
virtual storage ie VSA
virtualised DMZ.
virtualize ESXi/Xen in the vmware guest
virtualized everything but the backup server.
virtualizing ESX on ESX to keep our lab environment clean
virtualizing EVERYTHING!
virtualizing machines to deploy to physical environment
vmware
vmware SRM alternative
vmware view over srm
whitebox ESXi & unraid (test env)
working to automate compliance and provisioning
working towards a full iaas cloud solution internally.
working with application virtualization
Everything I am doing I am doing at home right now in VMware Fusion. I use to do this stuff at my previous job but don't at my new job. :(
Virtualisation of all popular desktop OSes (Mac OSX, Windows 7, Linux) for programming development.
With Xiotech's Geo-Raid and Active Mirroring we are able to replicate our storage and split our environment between 3 data centers to make our environment redundant with out the need for SRM.
Wish we could do more, but even with Virtualization we are under staffed. Also Virtualization doesn't fix politics.
Well, as an MSP there isnt a great deal of cool stuff that we do - but our software dev arm tends to do some cool stuff in .NET and is developing cloud solutions for all manner of private cloud offerings.
I'm trying to get budget to do cool things. I have inherited an infrastructure with no backup solution if that tells you anything (!!!!).
Testing local SSD on host for Oracle/SQL caching, Was to aslo use local SSD for improved VDI performance. Improving capacity utilization
I think just running the new vShpere 5 is cool. We went from 8 physical servers down to 4. That is a space and energy saver. I l think that is cool.
Creating ITaaS demands for 4 business units to prevent them going to the interweb with proprietary code. Network isolation with VLAN and vShield Zones to prevent all outbound traffic while allowing RDP, Web and UNC traffic inbound. Using vShields 1 but looking to upgrade to vShield 4.1
Migrating to Ent Plus licenses and enabling more of the cool features. Looking at all the additional products available (SRM, Director, Operations)
Trying to convince our other staff to VM high end servers like exchange and get me cool new tools like iPad to test new products
We use Cisco UCS, so the integration with Emc and VMware allows us to deploy and. Irtualize any application our company uses.
10GB Ethernet in crossover environment. With few hosts and one storage platform it makes sense, as 10GB switches are beyond the price points of many customers.
Development of automated cloud workload optimization to ensure resource availability and identification of unused resources that can be released.
building a very cheap storage using off-shelf harddrive and SSD with ZFS and accomplish very high IOPS comparable to EMC's and Netapp's offering.
Migration of a main SQL server to VMware will push us to vCenter 5 and, initially in that environment, vSphere 5.
Working towards 90-95% virtualization, looking at virtualizing desktops, planning for hardware refresh in 14 months.
We don't have resources to implement many of the "cool" things. We have been 80% virtualized for 3+ years and are still using backup agents in guests.
Use NetApp snapshots of RDM's to refresh monster Test/QA databases in minutes instead of hours/days.
From a partner perspective, it's all about simplifying the stack (from an Infrastructure perspective) so that customers can accelerate deployment (ala VCE), but we're also dipping our toes in to PaaS as this is gaining momentum. IaaS is being ironed out but is slowly maturing.
Virtualizing our arrays with Datacore is great but we need to keep up with increased perfomance demands. Because of this we built scripts to get infos from vcenter and the array and aggregate them!
Isn´t all the VMware stuff cool enough :) ? It´s seems there will never be enough time to play around with all features / products :|
VM data stores snapshot-based fan-in replication for multiple customers on $60 regular ISP links (with static IPs) for multiple locations. Deduplication and compression allows that now.
-Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter since our ESXi host are Dell. -Nexus 1000 10GB incorporation. -Stateless ESXi.
Trying to push for 10gbe/fcoe/infiniband - lack of networking is blocking the last few big ticket items going virtual.
Virtualized Oracle RAC ~3 years ago and loving it. Starting PoC to look at shared cloud resources for all public higher education in UT with vCD. Starting PoC/shootout for View/XenDesktop/XenApp for ~1,000 lab machines and 2,500 faculty/staff.
Streaming apps - the ability to give a user access to an app by adding the account to a group is awesome. Being able to use incompatible 32/16 bit apps on 64 bit Windows 7 is awesome as well.
instant VM "power on" from provision request to up and running in less than 15 sec (a business req)
Kitesurf, climbing, wake boarding, mountain biking. mountain climbing. Managing 100 servers, and have time to do a whole concept og adding wireless services as an ISP. Only possible because og vmware ;-)
PLaninng a migration from some old vmware machine to a new one, and also testing out novell platespin on this.
It's supposed to be a secret cos we haven't signed the deal yet but we're building a sort of DaaS solution.
Provisioning shared NFS volumes from our NAS directly to multiple RHEL VMs. Using snapshots as backups with scheduled aux to another array/tape (copy on redirect, woot). This includes self-service file restores.
vSphere for Live stuff, using HyperV for Developer stuff since their MSDN has licenses of Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter
http://sudrsn.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/emc-fast-cache-increase-performance-while-reducing-disk-drive-count/ http://sudrsn.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/fast-cache-and-vdi/
I have been working on vSphere for a long time And one of the important and challenging task I am facing is the vm performance have been working on it to wrote some scripts to monitor and measure performance
We're toying with xsigo and IO virtualization. We're a partnered with most of the big names but there hasn't been much demand for xsigo yet.
Orchestration integration with other cloud tools. Looking at how we can combine storage in the cloud with hybrid cloud computing resources. We want to see the reality of it prior to the launch of long distance v-motion
Created a Powershell multi-VM snapshot tool. Create snapshots for multiple VMs at the sametime with same name and description. Essentially, snapshot at a vApp level. Part of this is a scheduled task that will delete VMware snapshots like a DVR automatically after 2 weeks if the option is selected with the multi-snapshot tool.
Using the NexentaStor (CE) for archival purposes. I'm also planning on using it (or similar) for my home lab.
We are extensively playing with EMC RecoverPoint and replication manager to improve vm recovery (e.g single vim recovery). Getting crazy with SAP virtualization.
upgrading a 300 + ESX production host environment that spans multiple sites around the globe. layering on VDI for more than 5,000 users
Experimenting with building our own SAN implementations based on ZFS & SSD caches. Researching a local, elastic Amazon EBS alternative
Playing with KVM cloud infrastructure and coverged networks. And doing some experiments with dense-optimized virtual datacenters.
Now building a DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) for complete site failover for customers with virtualized office enviorment , private clouds.
In the near future, I hope to take the hardware from an older (now decommisioned) VMware cluster, and build an OpenStack cloud. I don't know if it will be a very good fit, but it is very different from what we're currently using and I think I'll learn a lot.
We boring, but we get the job done. We use EMC Celerra NAS replication to copy our VM clones to our DR data center. We use Celerra checkpoints on them so we have older images available.
Because of the limitations of the free ESXi, there aren't many things you can do, but the one that pops out is snapshots for test environments for developers and tweakers for webservers. awesome.
Getting ready to install our VNX ranges in the new year and dedicate our existing CX4s for Dev/Testing! Deploying UCS, Nexus DataCentre Switches, VMware SRM, View. Lots of cool stuff.
We are a VMware Authorized Traing Center and use PowerCLI to automate much of our lab deployment processes.
Looking at tiering of hypervisors to drive the cost of desktops down, as well as giving different internal SLA's to different class of services.
Auto building configurations, VM's, and software within them daily using Lab Manager and Electric-Cloud. Then pushing copies of the VM's to our Amazon cloud as Demo's for Sales team to use and upgrade tests for current customers.
Playing with full SAN virtualization using HP P4000 VSA. Some difficulty in updating multiple hosts due to in-ability to enter maintenance mode with virtual SAN's running. Still, very cool!
Just building a hybrid cloud model internally for my organization. Not ready to go whole-hog public cloud, for a lot of reasons.
Nothing unusual. Deploying VC Operations to help with determine performance problems and Chargeback to determine costs and show back to business.
3 datacentre migrations. First MIS rollout in Canada for vendor (Meditech) on 4.1 with their new MIS.
ZFS, DTrace based metrics and visualisation broken down by VM/vmdk for all storage related aspects, prvided direct into VCops
Work with ISP to create there IAAS we can use later and at the same time learn how to make our own internal portal.
We are taking the SMB virtualization / shared storage market by storm in our geography. Our VMware/EMC practice is growing, which is enabled mostly by great products like vSphere and VNX/VNXe!
Stretched clusters, integration of storage, SRM, vShield and VCM, Automated infrastructure and app provisioning
Using Dell OpenManage VIM so not having to boot into BIOS all the time; crazy amount of clustered databases from lots of vendors
Evaluating consumer mobile phones/tablets in corporate environment. Building new datacenter in Hong Kong. Completing migration to new VNX.
Completely automated server deployment via Bladelogic (ie. build template, build software packages on top of that)
Manually scripting VMware Fusion to test mass deployments using Vyatta configured with vmnets and gpxe running on Thunderbolt based Pegasus R6.
Cloud sourcing VDI in testing stages to allow access into our network for employees without the need to carry a laptop.
for our size, and market we are very far along in our virtualization strategy, and we did it all in house
My team is not silo'd. We play with the entire stack! I get to write some automation for dealing with storage en masse. Will be staring a blog to share scripts and info soon!
Exploring the standardization of very small linux distro's for use as a development environment and application hosting.
Using Atlantis ILIO in a VMware View / Citrix XenDesktop w/PVS solution to rid our enterprise of the higher storage costs. Utilizing a combination of Fusion I/O cards w/Atlantis to drive our IOPS needs further beyond what we can afford on the array side. We are thinking of even creating our own FCoE array with Cisco UCS rackmount servers w/RAM drives as FCoE targets to provide fast cheap storage. Throw in some Fusion I/O cards for some additional redundancy and space and we have one hell of a cheap solution that's redundant and can drive a ton of IOPS. From our new point of view, support is getting to the point where it's killing our TCO and ROI numbers. Cheap, fast, maybe not fully supported hardware is great in a non-persistent world that we are shooting towards. Add some level of redundancy and protection and that's all the security and assurance we need to move forward.
really going to private cloud with self-service portal for our customers to bring them the real freedom they deserve.
Working with SAP B1 together with vCD and UIM on vBlock to test out feasible solutions for service providers Working with Sybase Unwired Platform to test out SAP Mobility on top of VPLEX Metro infrastructure
We have a self service training lab, without lab manager. Using VMs to jump into a private 192.168 network, which are monitored using Manage Engine Free.
Using View to front end a vCD environment to provide self-contained end-user isolation and access without needing multiple public IPs and/or VPNs
VMware View 5 is very cool. We started testing it a couple of months ago and have been very impressed.
2012 will be a fun year, Exchange 2010, Sharepoint 2010 and Lync will all be moved\upgraded to VM.
Trying to figure out WTF the Compellent SAN replicationis doing and why the change rate is so high. Ohh wait you said cool things... nothing cool about using Compellent.
Backup software and storage replacement. So learning about how different vendors accomplish the same underlining goal.
Scripting a self-service provisioning system for users who require short-life VMs, which system generates order packages according to options determined by user/function/team attributes and needs only a Y/N decision by my team.
Lots of automation with PowerCLI (With help from Project Onyx) We've built a Service Provider Cloud Love working with CapacityIQ!
We are utilizing all the enhanced features of VMware and EMC as we can. Storage IO Control, VSI, Powerpath, soon to be using SDRS (THAT'S F'n AWESOME BTW). I can't wait to use SDRS. Soon we will be upgrading our Celerra to a VNX and I will be using Storage Pools and FAST (Another Amazingly cool feature).
Currently in planning stages of moving everything to EMC storage so looking forward to trying lots of coolness out that you have been showcasing.
KIT is a big EMC beta tester. That is where our cool stuff happens. Sadly we do not always have the budget, to put that stuff into production.
We are working on small "packages" of a couple of servers + storage that could be deployed to remote sites with minimal onsite tech involvement. HP's P4000 VSA is great for this, but it's too expensive.
trying to study for my VCP410 (failed first attempt with a 250/500), and discovering all the undocumented stuff the previous sysadmins did. pushing for more VDI in the enterprise.
Nothing crazy, though we are actively researching how feasible it would be to add OSX Server hosts to our cluster.
Building out a more opinionated infrastructure as a service, ala EC2. One that forces applications to design for failure, rather than propping up shitty application design with complex, expensive, highly available infrastructure.
Building an internal cloud for a Fortune 100 company that tried external cloud and liked it except for the security issues.
Finally have a test environment setup to test all of VMware's newest products. Gets us out of doing the same thing every day.
Trying to pull together the various requests we're asked for that start with "I need a virtual machine". We learn that 15 of those requests were really "I want to host wordpress but don't know how I can ask for that so I need a virtual machine", among others like that. Also to ensure fellow co-workers don't say things like "Oh it's different, it's virtual as opposed to physical". Even if it's an etch a sketch and provides the service they are asking for it doesn't matter.
Sync replication on two EMC CX4 on two sites (3km away) over dedicated fiber connection. SRM between the two sites.
Poor man's Storage vMotion across vCenters and across the WAN simultaneously - used in migration and consolidation scenarios. We've had to do this twice already - last time was in late 2010 so the technology might make this easier but I doubt it. This is sorely missing for any shop that is consolidating or acquiring other virtual datacenters (using VMware in both places) and needs to bring everything under a single instance of vCenter. We've done this manually using NFS and rsync and it was a largish pain but we're required to have minimum downtime. The minimum downtime made this effort worth it. In the datacenter that will be consolidated 1. Move the VMs from SAN to NFS (NFS backed by the same SAN typically) 2. Snapshot the VMs 3. Replicate VM files using rsync over SSH to an NFS server in the destination datacenter. We do the rsync during WAN or Internet idle times or we throttle the rsync bandwidth to keep from causing congestion. 4. Replicate as often as needed to keep the two datacenters in close sync 5. On the migration day shutdown all the source VMs (outage starts) - DNS TTL was lowered in advance to make the DNS cutover go faster. 6. Run a final rsync 7. Edit the destination vmx files (fixing the VM networking which is a problem if distributed virtual switches are involved) 8. Register the destination VMs 9. Boot the destination VMs - fix IP addresses and update DNS as needed (outage ends after QA validation on the destination) 10. Live Storage vMotion the VMs from the destination NFS back to SAN disk 11. Cleanup Using this technique we were able to migrate several terabytes of VMs from a remote datacenter over a 6Mb/s Internet circuit. Total outage time was very low - in can be in the minutes per VM if they are done one-by-one. VMware needs to address a few points. It should be possible to export and import VM performance and task/event history between vCloud or vCenter instances. This information is currently treated as disposable. Secondly the situation with having to fix virtual distributed switch network in the vmx file is pretty messy. I haven't tested vCloud connector and I would imagine it probably makes this way less painless. From what I've seen vCloud connector could be used to do the same job but it lacks the ability to prestage the data from source to destination which means a long outage - in some cases so long that it becomes easier to FedEx than to ship over the WAN or Internet. I also know some people have done SRM data center migrations and we would take a strong look at this option in the past but costs and low downtime are key. We couldn't use this option due to dissimilar SANs in this case. I know the new SRM might help using the SRM host based replication.
Working on my VCP 5 and looking to change jobs from my current pre-sales job at a big software company that specialises in IT Management.
Written a custom tool that behaves like SRM but works for physical and virtual servers and any hypervisor is supported.
Tested long distance vmotion with IBM SVC and created a `swing lun`` to allow it even though there is no active/active luns on array
We use a combination of a Promise FC Array and are currently about to implement a custom FC Array based on Open-E with a combination of HD's and SSD's.
Migrating Novell Groupwise from Netware 6.5 cluster to non-clustered, Novell Open Enterprise Servers running on vSphere cluster: removing Novell clustering reduces complexity. Moving Library catalogue systems from physical Solaris to RHEL vSphere VMs. Planning move of Oracle Financials from physical Solaris to RHEL vSphere VMs. Planning how to better use externally hosted vSphere clusters in conjunction with internally hosted cluster.
Structuring multiple datacenters (private or DCaaS) to act in a highly available compute on demand resource for the organization.
Backing up our entire virtual environment (1500 VMs) including Exchange (20k users) nightly utilizing VEEAM. We keep 30 days on disk for instant VM restores and file retrieval.
Implementing vCD and testing multiple storage platforms for features and performance. Also POCing vSphere 5.
Developing and creating an Auto-Tiered model for VMWare and non virtualized environment to boost performance and drive cost out
Virtualizing VMware ESX and using virtual storage appliances to setup isolated demo and test environments
Challenging the need for Oracle RAC given vSphere's increased capacity (32 vCPU), doing things Oracle says aren't possible
Replicating data via WAN using "home brewed"solution meaning openvpn+mbuffer+lzo for encryption,buffering and compression within pretty crap links :) Developing some custom/poor's man solution for DR/Failover across datacenters/storage...Quite painful to get, but small budget = thinking outside the box :)
Building out a shared iSCSI/Fibre channel storage almost from the ground up using existing hardware, in a new data center.
Hybrid cloud, also mixing the vendors. Data migrations and system swaps with minimal impact to production (native and virtual. Powermig is g8 :)
We are trying to build a public *aaS Cloud. Which looks great on paper, but no vendors really offer any almost-ready solutions for frontend. Development from scratch is going slow.
I just moved an entire lab vmware environment between buildings online with no downtime with HP P4000 and vmotion. Really cool stuff! Playing with VCOps. Would love to see the super secret emc plugins for that!
PowerCLI scripting and automation - providing more info on storage automatically and on schedule to help with storage planning (especially capacity)
I am currently building a new esxi 5 environment, i am hosting internally, my bothers business, as well as using veeam for two external clients for back/recovery purposes
Being asked to work for a great company, and getting the chance to evolve myself within the VMware/Storage (EMC) site of things ;-)
SRM/View are great tools we frequently use. Absolutely loving the changes in SRM 5.0. VMFS 5 has also been a very welcome change, especially from the storage perspective.
We are implementing a stretched cluster based on data core and vSphere5. VPLEX was to expensive for us :(
Lots of PowerCLI using PowerGUI and the plug ins. We run our 911 system on VMware and are currently 75%-80% virtualized and plan on being over 90% by this time next year.
Evaluating many SSD/Flash solutions: Flashcache, Tintri, Virident, Pure Storage, Dell MD1200 SSD array
* Implementing disaster recovery solutions. * Investigating VMware Enterprise level Backup solutions. * Linux administration
We're looking at Isilon as a potential storage location for VMWare hosts via NFS export. We're also looking into providing tiered services via storage tiers and host limits.
As a system engineer I maintain a large virtual environment with several Linux & Windows servers on which a lot is automated by several 3rd party software.
Trying to convince 1st level support/desktop support to start paying attention to how they deploy VMs instead of expecting the storage team to make it all magically work out.
Looking to get into storage DRS, but heard with NFS it should not be done automatically when using dedupe.
Cool to you, nothing. We're too small. I'm just trying to get all my Hosts licensed the same way! :)
Tons of testing in lab environments and storage IO testing with nexenta / nexentastor/ openIndiana
Working on a compliance cloud so that healthcare and financial institutions can utilize the public cloud.
move the VMslive from local storage to NAS to another server with local storage and back after the maintenance
VDI for doctors, providing acces within and outside hospital premises, across range of devices including Ipads (upgrading to 5 soon for addtional performance)
Integrating OS and applications into vSphere. Analysing performance and making provision\decommission decisions. I.E Auto deploy new VM's during high load, increase VM resources via hotadd. Utilising App Monitoring Automated P2V process incorporating all recommended performance tweaks and OS reconfigurations
Creating VMware solutions in multiple selfowned datacenters. Within that scope I'm creating services wich are easily failed over between the DC's on VMware, networking and storage-level.
We have virtualized our manufacturing process on Panologic zero clients, using dual touch screens.
Still getting into the virtualization world for my home business, and learning more and more each day
Working on a design to run high performance multimon trading desktops on VMWare view utilizing SSD and hopefully VMWare hypervisor based replication.
Eliminating a dramatic amount of storage administration by being on the IBM XIV. No tiering, RAID, etc. makes it a very easy process. (no, I don't work for IBM)
Made a San with local storage using drives in esx server using openmediavault vault was using NSS but it took to many resources.
Tiered vCompute and vStorage; working on assigning "showback" cost values to VMs based on allocation/usage. Working on self-service portals for server admins and application owners.
recently we are exposing our vmware lab environment to have outside people (from other offices) to use our lab systems, which is a great cost saver.
NetApp SnapMirror with SRM5, vcenter 5. Will be implementing SDRS when the hosts are upgrade from esxi 4.1 to 5.0
Provisioning servers in minutes, not weeks. Point in time recovery of production VMs, using Recover Point. Migrating systems between datacenters without significant downtime using storage vmotion
Creating customized developments to help vendors automate their environments using .NET and Perl SDKs and VI Java API
Deduplication is an awesome feature on most modern filers. We are basically running dedupe across the board.
VMWare training and showing storage stuff (but I only have Equallogic / iomega / netapp I can show....
Just moving from Exchange 2000 / 2003 spread out over seven sites to centralised Exchange 2010 with offsite DAG for resilience via Exchange 2007 consolidated to one VM at HQ's cluster.
We're a service provider - and we use Datacore SanSymphony but just implemented a EMC SMS Utility contract on VNX and VMAX. SanSymphony is a great product and has a lot more features than VNX (not VMAX Q1 next year). We need to provide storage as a service and it blows on anything other than VMAX... and the $/GB is mind-blowingly expensive when you get down to brass tacks.
Public / Private Cloud migration planning with federal security requirements. Designing and delivering an "On Demand" cloud.
using other VSAs like Lefthand VSA, Stormagic, Nexenta. Automated/Orchestrated Storage provisioning & Configuration
Building a poor's man vBlock - UCS, Nexus 5548UP, EMC VNX, vSphere 5.0 in two DCs with SRM and Replication on top of it. Cool :)
We've tried running our stuff on Corporate IT infrastructure, and it's a colossal PITA. Outages, delays, restrictions, etc. Independence is cool.
Testing InfiniBand cards with Mellanox and IO virtualization with Xsigo. Playing with vCD 1.5, Cisco Nexus 1000v and VXLAN.
trying to come up with High Availability for VMware View, trying to come up with application HA (like Exchange DAGs) usage together with SRM
Openfiler is a life saver iSCSI lab envrioment. Currently have 2 setup at work for a 3.5 and 4.1 hosts. At home I'm able to do something cheaper using a NAS presenting a iSCSI LUN to my vShpere 5 test lab hosts for VCP cert.
Moving to a virtual first strategy for desktops and servers. If it can't be reasonably virtualized then it is physically provisioned.
Currently trying to get in on the beta of the quadro virtual graphics platform so I can help to revolutionize the way civil engineering firms do desktops!
Leveraging the following Hardware/Software to enable a bad ass, robust, Highly Available infrastructure. vSphere 4.1 vSphere 5 EMC VNX 5300 x 2 Replication Manager 5.4 for VMware Snapshots via Proxy VMware Site Recovery Manager EMC NetWorker 7.6.2 with VADP support EMC Avamar
At work I will be working on a project to virtualize a whole data centre and move it to cloud infrastructure hosted by my company.
Trying to virutalize all we can. Datacenter about 75% done, move to remote offices (180 of them).
Infiniband connected compute clusters, petabyte scale storage, cloud bursting, looking at new ccNUMA machines, kicking around submerged liquid cooling for high clock speeds. Solid state storage meta data offloads for large file systems. Just go back from the Supercomputing conference in Seattle. Hope you didn't mean other cool VMware things, having used it on and off since the original Linux workstation version was in beta I just don't get that much time, we'll see about 2012.
Virtualizing some small aspects of out networking environment, including Cisco Unity and load-balancers.
Assisting organizations such as hospitals and nonprofits choose and decide on their datacenter and virtualization strategy.
replaced my parents MS SBS server with an esxi host running the same SBS instance. And a firewall. And an XP host for me to jumpbox. With room for more. In one Dell 310.
Playing with VASA and VM Storage Profile with HP Insight Control Storage Module for vCenter. Creating LUNs and auto provision this to the selected cluster on the fly.
Implementing UCS Blade (B230M2) with 20 cores. But licensing costs from VMWare forced us to use competing products.
Being a consultant - I get lots of requests - so it depends. Recently tied VMware Data Protection into a CA backup client.
Getting legacy O/Ss working without vmware tools - getting UPS software monitoring external power sources
Virtual delivery on virtual servers with XenApp and XenDesktop with application virtualisation with App-V with Virtualised profiles with AppSense through the virtualisation hypervisor VMware
just playing around a small home lab to then possibly use at work (if I can convince manager/customer)
Piloting a PoC for vmware storage over wide-area infiniband spanned across half of the US (40Gbps local & 10Gbps WAN). Possible use for VDI or DR...or whatever else we dream up!
Nothing much, we are a small and simple shop just getting started in the virtualization world. Test pilot of 50 VDI clients next year, woo!
We are going to start looking into stretched clusters due to the high bandwtih and low latency private fibre network that we own and see whether it feasible
Using NFS datastores for a "poor man" SRM. Manual process but no additional cost and NFS much much quicker to accomplish with than FC
This is a POC Lab used to develop solutions for F5 and VMware products. Newest two solutions are a certified Metro distance vMotion solution, and a single namespace solution for multiple View Pods
Was thinking about building a cruiser to ride to the local coffee shop...oh, you mean with VM/Storage. We are furthering our service tiers utilizing other hypervisors and 3rd party mgmt tools. Overall goal of this is reduction of cost as a result of newer licensing 'allocation' models.
Looking into backups and deduping VM backups. Avamar is too pricey to add into a heavy TSM environment with many high profile DB2 databases. Data Domain could be our answer.
We offer vCloud services so multitenancy is important, but also SIOC/NIOC and whatever help us to silence the noisy neighbours VMs. These two features of ESXi/vSphere are fundamental for us. We also love vCloud Fast provisioning and use it extensively, great savings on storage space even if IOPS are sometimes a little worse than full clones, but we deal with this using all the tiering/caching/dedup and whatever our storage offer us.
Appsense Application Manager on View desktops HP P4000 VSA's on local SSD (our SSD tier) Veeam 6 :) Testing Hyper-V V3
We are using vCloud director internal and for our public cloud and building out the public cloud side with a VNX 5100 and cisco server with vmware
I do some work with a local community college to provide VMware training (ICM) courses. SIOC and StorageDRS have made provisioning for performance much easier for the student lab environments. Storage DRS is the number one new vSphere 5 feature.
Trying to convince multiple customers to buy and deploy vplex for geographically disbursed clusters.
Working on POCs and design documentation for build of vmware environments (vSphere, View, vCD, etc...)
Deploying 3rd Party tools like DT Availability for P2V, Testing same tool for DR, deploying Capacity IQ.
Consolidating thousands of State of Colorado to servers Vblock infrastructure. Spinning up provisioning with UIM/Vblock.
Storage as a service with chargeback for internal users Parallel nfs Object storage for large scale web infrastructure
Developing my own auto-deployment utility because management won't buy utilities that are already out there.
Planning a 2003 to 2008 infrastructure upgrade and other services that I can now deploy because of virtualization. (server room space constraints meant this could not be done before).
Virtualization of dev/test environments with a private cloud offering (ESXi and some Hyper-V), plus more scalable production environments using public cloud offerings (EC2, Rackspace). Has significantly reduced overall cost and deployment time for our purposes.
Implementing tiered storage with SATA, SAS and FC. New hosts, complete Wintel virtualisation within the next 9 months. Then we start on the SUN/Oracle boxes............
Unfortunately I'm not smart enough to do cool things, I just play with what other people figure out.
Fluid Computing Reducing or eliminating all function specific hardware, routers, load balancers, hypervisor managed function redundancy. Generic hardware compute resources only. Enterprise Monitoring Architecture (EMA) Standardized Monitoring Architecture to support Hybrid RAID Cloud Architecture
1. Building a VM cluster in a box for my own lab. 2. Virtualizing as many of the department servers as we can into the enterprise systems to achieve cost/refresh reductions and wrest control from dept managers/elected officials so that the security and stability are increased for all.
SAN snapshots are nice and the Dell EqualLogic tools for automating these snapshots are very nice and included at no additional cost.
Global review of our storage strategy and looking at some cool DR technologies for Branch office to Datacenter replication etc. Looking at leveraging VPLEX for '100%' availability intra-datacenter
VDI vm's with XenDesktop Stateless, Virtual (vmware) terminal servers with Citrix provisioning server and App-V
View 5 externally as a alternative to XenApp. SRM with RecoverPoint. Replication Manager snapshots to run Dev Oracle, saving 25Tb of SAN space.
Automated builds of appliances with as-the-build-occurs updates of the ISO within vmware to enable appliance testing.
Virtual firewall, IPS hosting. Virtualizing type 2 hypervisors within a VM (ie: Parralels Containers in a VM)
Iscsi booting ESX. Using UCS blades to prepare the upgrade to vSphere 5, with storage clones, without trashing the 4.1 installation.
I am one of the lead VMware engineers for a 65k person healthcare organization and I can honestly say we wouldn't be where we are today without EMC + VMware. We are replicating a tier 1 AEHR System with VMware + EMC + RecoverPoint + SAN TAP + SRM combined with cluster-enabler for RP (for our mega database clusters) to protect one our most sensitive medical applications. Test fail-overs have shown that we can "pop over" to our DR site in texas in a matter of minutes (RP ROCKS for this). We are expanding on that now as we implement the next rev, Meditech 6.0, on vSphere 5 right now on Cisco UCS + EMC VNX 7500 and EMC VMAX + Stratus FT Servers with environment wide replication down to our DR datacenter (making our new environment the first fully available / most powerful Meditech implementation yet). This is an massive upgrade to our current Meditech Magic environment. We were the first company to virtualize Meditech Magic (VI 3.5 / DMX / HP Blades). This environment is so complex that our internal VMware lead who designed it presented it as a defense for VCDX3 (and passed) and is now works for VMware PSO.
Working on a smaller virtualized pod concept. Because we want multiple, fully independent pods and our environment is not especially large to begin with, we come in under the size of things like vBlock.
Cisco UCS / VMAX / VPLEX giving workload mobility between two L2 connected data centres. Going the final step to virtualise our complete Windows stack within the next 3-6 months - first step - virtualising 12+TB of Exchange mailbox servers.
I use ESXi basically for: *Routing internal network (running ipcop actually) and routing between four virtualized networks (dmz servers, internal servers, internal network and internet) *Virtualized Storage *Test machines for develop (i work on SIEM market and in house / at job i often need dedicated environments)
Migrating from vSphere 4.1 to vSphere 5, Enabling site-to-site replication and SRM. Migrating 1500~2000 desktop clients to VDI clients. Replacing obsolete hardware with a FBI based on Cisco UCS or HP Converged or IBM based on NetApp storage. Implementing 3-tier backup strategy with Snapmanager and offsite backup/export to tape....stuff like that
Starting to look at gemfire. SRM to provide Business Continuity beyond replication of storage volumes.
Currently, we have only a single VM being image-level backed up (all other backups are agent-based). We are looking to expand that.
vaai assists for single pass vm backups with backup exec, restore db's or file from that single pass
We utilize EMC's Recover Point to replicate LUNS for MS Windows Clusters between our primary and secondary (and DR) sites. We have presented the cluster disks as raw devices to 2 VM guests (on separate LUNs) in both the primary and secondary site. We have the ability to automatically fail back and forth between datacenters in completely redundant vm clusters.
We're looking at setting up a View environment that would be redundant between two sites, but there are challenges with this and it doesn't look like there's an automatic supported way to do this, but we have a couple of different options.
NFS over 20Gb/s Infiniband (IBoIP)? Check. iSCSI over Infiniband (IBoIP)? Check. Natve Infiniband storage (SRP)? Check? Converged iSCSI over 1Gb, 10Gbe ethernet, 20Gb Infiniband, 8Gb FC and and NAS over Infiniband box? Check. Man I wish had some SSD about now.
Praying that our out of warranty storage in the lab that's really not a lab but more like semi-production/staging doesn't die since we're not replacing the storage because we can't/wont spend money because it's only a lab.
Absolutely nothing cool with storage--storage is almost always our bottleneck as it is poorly implemented.
Creating Monster VM's ! We have now 1 we are looking at with Oracle. 16 cores, 100gb ram, 500gb storage. Ram may go up possibly. Using an ipad to vmotion vms from host to host. Why can't I do that with Storage?
Design internal clouds for other companies Develop iSCSI storage solution Building internal vSphere infrastructure And so on
Brought new EMC VMAX, will maximize the solutions for multiple systems/usage. Upgrade everything to vSphere 5.0, SRM 5.0, vCloud 1.5 and use all EMC integrated tools. Using FCoE and 10GBe NFS/iSCSI as well.
Virtualizing and replatforming mainframe workloads. Integrating VMware and legacy custom Lotus Notes tools into a new MS System Center environment.
It's not cool to enterprise, but as a small School at a University finally getting shared storage and being able to do HA is amazing.
unfortunately, we only use about 70% of vmware features. no DRS, SRM (too expensive) - we're running vSphere 4 using ESX 2.5 features ... go figure.
Integration of vSphere with RecoverPoint, Replication Manager and SRM. It's cool! Avamar integration with vSphere. Is't cool too!
Using NetApp's SnapMirror and Data Fabric Manager as our entire backup and replication solution (I inherited it). It sucks!
Our SAN is dying ...need a new one to do cool things ...like dedupe and remote replication without breaking the bank
(1) Purchasing SAN upgrade to Nimble CS-220 (2) vSphere5 and View5 upgrades (3) Evaluating vCops vs. ReflexSystems
Trying to get all the IT teams involved in virtualisation. It has so much potential which can only be achieved if the teams work on this together.
As a PAAS hosting provider and a consultant it's quite fun to use all sorts of new technology for our customers.
Thinking about setting up a training / play area at work so other colleagues can use to further their knowledge of VMware and other products
Rapid guest cloning (scripted export, relocate, import) with VMware Workstation. Rapid guest importing (export, relocate, import) on ESXi 4.
Virtualizing just everything and trying to automate our deployments (jboss, tomcat, ...) so that our whole environment including VMs can be set up automaticly
We really really really want external access to the my documents folder of all our students/teachers. So replication of file to an external DC and then let them access those files.
Cloud based dental office. VDI and x86 servers. Using PCoIP zero clients as workstations. Virtualized trading platofrm. 100% virtual infrastructure (besides storage and switches)
Migrating all our physical servers to two new DC's, SRM use between the DC's and replication to a third DC of some critical VM's
mixing application and guest OS level HA and replication with VMware and storage replication to achieve better overall HA and DR
Virtualizing major network nodes within the company on predominantly x86 platform. Migrating above solution to private cloud and looking for commercial viability
1. using avvi as much as possible 2. getting network performance improvements with port channels, not everyone seems to do this, don't know why 3.going to the beach this weekend
I'm building out my home lab to include (2) 2-host clusters to dev/test VMware vCloud Director..this is prob. the coolest thing I've got going at the present. :)
I have tinkered some with virtual routers like Vyatta for lab environments. I hope to see more virtual networking devices (without requiring dvSwitches to be available SMB)
Trying using storage virtualization with Datacore and Lefthands. I'm also project to test in deep vmware vsa solution
Automated deployment solutions which provision and configure network, storage, virtualization, etc. in military environments.
system and application monitoring of the vm's using nagios, works lika a charm, very scalable and flexible and this tool has a great ROI
Two-tier replication of the virtual environment, one mirror copy for HA and one backup copy for DR.
Starting to virtualize our network appliances. Already finished spam filter. Now moving to WAN virtualization and soon looking at firewall.
Converting Lotus Domino applications to Sharepoint with majority of Sharepoint infrastructure hosted on VMWare
Working on doing a large VDI deployment ( 3k seats ) leveraging 10g ethernet/NFS/dedupe and FAST cache with the VNX array line over the next few monts. Using Citrix XenDesktop as a broker.
Powershell automation. I am not really using it to do anything cool but the possibility to do cool things is there.
cool to me is learning to exploit the storage I have to make my life easier. Figuring out VMware storage virtualization in VMware 5.
PowerShell like crazy. Also using EMC VSI plugins, which make life much better when it works (so that we can self-provision storage)
Using VMware and EMC smaller products (VMware Essentials, VNXe) in small quarries and plants to build almost bullet proof highly available solutions
Virtualizing mission critical fincial front to back system (java and oracle) production against vendors initial recommendation. We'll be fine :-)
We've started to test placing SSDs or PCIe SSDs in our ESXi servers, used as a write-through cache, this seems interesting.

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