VMworld Europe 2009 – EMC Post Show Report

UPDATED March 10th, 2009 – added some videos of the sessions, recordings of the demonstrations give, PDFs of all the presentations.

Hey everyone, on the plane on the way back to Toronto, and finally able to do a write-up of VMworld Europe 2009 (and still writing it up on Sunday :-).

NOTE – I will be updating this post with some additional content over next week as recordings of sessions are done, and will update the demos with "voice-overs” so people can see what the fuss was all about :-)

Was a huge event – around 4700 attendees – up significantly from last year’s inaugural VMworld Europe.   That and the fact that every customer I talked to loves VMware – well, I guess there is a reason VMware has been the top CIO spend priority for 12 quarters running.   

Here – they showed why they will continue to be the top CIO spend priority.   They are delivering on a strategic vision far more expansive that the origins of the company and virtualization (consolidation), and a far more expansive customer value proposition.   That vision - getting IT out of the plumbing business, letting them focus on the parts of IT that add value, and acting as not only a large scale aggregation mechanism (building the mainframe of the 21st century), but also a key policy, compliance, security insertion point.

The Virtual Datacenter OS is our path from present (some virtualization –> 100% virtualized) to future (Private Cloud on premise –> off-premise).  We’re all already on the journey, with every step being logical, supporting the existing business apps and enabling new ones, and every step providing CapEx and OpEx savings that justify each incremental step.

There are a ton of great places that have done write ups from a VMware-Centric world-view.  Rather than repeat what others are contributing, I’m going to give my perspective.

If you want it in a nutshell – you can watch me talking to the VMworld team here:

If you’re interested in details…. Read on!

For me, my personal highlights:

• The usual last minute pre-show emergencies!   These always happen, and part of the fun (once it’s past!) of an event is the crisis and the heroics of crisis resolution.   I’m sure there were millions of little ones, many which I didn’t see, but just a couple examples….  
  • in the Hands-on-Lab (HoL), the people use the infrastructure above and beyond anything in the real world in some dimensions.   What do I mean?   well, they don’t generate anything near a real-world load of a single use case, but the number of host and replication changes going on is insane.  Imagine not one Site Recovery Manager recovery plan being executed against a pair of arrays, but instead 5, or 10, or more being launched at the exact time.     Well, the week before the event, before all the gear got packed up, we were testing the SRM operations – and with one session it was taking 4-5 minutes, but with many sessions, it was taking 10-15 minutes.  May not sound like much, and perhaps in a real-world case, it’s not material, but in this case, it makes the HoL take a lot longer.   Over that weekend, I saw the CLARiiON and Solutions Enabler team took the time down to the original 4-5 minutes at the full workload with SRA work, tweaks, and new SE builds.   This will pay dividends for customers.   The gear wasn’t just supporting the SRM HoL, but the non-replicated LUNs and a lot of the rest of the show (including parts of the VMware booth).   Our product teams will be happy to know, the CLARiiONs/Celerras performed flawlessly all week long after hundreds of people going through the labs – no hiccups.   There’s a video of the HoL near the bottom of this post for those that want to see the gear.
  • in sessions, no matter what, no matter how much you prepare, you’re always modifying content up to the last second.   I’m talking with a customer when I realize that I have 5 minutes to go until a session – TP04.   I look at my phone (on mute) and see that the team is frantically tracking me down, so I start scooting up, and call them.   Only then do I find out that the presentation at the session is totally mangled :-)  Urk!   They’ve got the audience held up outside the session (and it was an overflowing session).  The poor room staff were aghast as I just updated the presentations and demos off my laptop (“argh, show protocol says each presentation needs formal review!”).   The breakout session went off without a hitch, and was one of the most popular breakouts – no sweat :-) The presentation we gave, and all the supporting content are below.
  • Demonstrations – literally, I was working on many of the demonstrations we gave – on the flight over the pond :-)    Demos are all below.
• Paul/Steve Herrod’s keynotes
  • Paul laid out his vision for our industry for the second time (the first one being VMworld 2008 in Vegas in September) in front of a large crowd – the Private Cloud.   When people ask what’s going on with EMC and VMware (and Cisco), its that we share that vision, it’s what our customers are telling us, and what we’re building ourselves to execute against.   What was interesting for me personally is that the audience and the analysts/press seemed to understand it much better now.   Paul’s been pretty consistent, I think it’s a case of the market and analysts digesting and understanding the importance and implications of the Virtual Datacenter OS, and the idea of the Private Cloud.

• Steve’s keynotes are always exciting, filled with demos, and funny (he’s also a really nice funny guy generally) – the demos of the PCoverIP stuff, the mobile platform virtualization, the vCloud use cases were awesome.    When Steve said “here are 3 things we’re working on heavily with our partners" before the demos – those are things we have our engineering teams working on frantically.
• Of course, I was happy to see that mind-blowing high end Oracle OLTP workload (and the infrastructure they ran it on)  You can see a picture of the config Steve mentioned here, and I’ve also posted a video of it in action.   

• While it was great for dramatic effect (“this VM lives here” red arrow), something to consider as you hear noise and FUD about “people aren’t doing Enterprise Flash in this economy because of cost” (I’m talking to you Seagate), or that efficiency is all about capacity efficiency (we agree, for capacity-gated production workloads and backup – and we can point to the highest industry efficiency there),  we just think efficiency applies to everything – cost, capacity, power, space, etc).
  •  THINK OF IT THIS WAY: We could have done the same workload on about 15 (!!) Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), at about a 300% total lower acquisition cost, and using 30x less space, and 98% less power.   Want to save money and have a performance-gated workload?   Want to just add a little EFD – on any one of EMC’s platforms?   We can do it on the CLARiiON, the Celerra, and the DMX, and you can start saving TODAY.   How’s dem apples?
  • So – the question is “why didn’t we use EFD it for that test?” – answer is in this post.   We started this in Q4, and we literally were shipping every CLARiiON EFD we could.
• We’ve been beavering away at a whole truckload of very high end testing to support the “100% Virtualized Datacenter” for a while, and there’s more to come as we get ready for EMC World in May.  Put it this way – that oracle config is a toy compared with stuff to come.  Remember, it’s not about being “big for big’s sake”.   These workloads are real customer challenges.   They want to do it virtualized.   Being able to do it is important, and being able to do it big while saving the money and being faster at the SAME TIME is very important.
• Meeting so many friends.  
  • “Meet the Experts” in the Community lounge.   There are so many people I work with in the blogosphere, and it’s really great to sit down and spend some time with them 1:1, break some bread, and get to know them personally.   A nice little video of the gang (my fellow vExperts) here…
  

   

  • Our competitors.   While looking at some of the stuff that goes on in the blogosphere, you’d think I’d want to stab them all on sight, but the truth of the matter is that there are people I respect deeply at competitors of every stripe.   These are the people that make me (and the EMC team) be the best we can be.   Was great to connect up with many of them – and for those of you that weren’t there – I hope to see you in VMworld in San Francisco!
  • The parties – in my “show world” – there were two big parties – the EMC customer appreciation event on Tuesday night, and then the VMworld party on Wednesday night (see below for pictures)
• Pulling off a ton of breakout sessions (9 if you include repeats!)
  • This year was off the hook in this regard.  Last year for comparison we had one session.   This year, as a platinum sponsor, one gets two partner breakouts – in our case TP03 and TP04.   Everything else you need to submit and they get accepted on their own merits against the mountain of submissions from every source.   The EMC team – from every part of the world, from every part of the business) made a TON of submissions – and many (many!) got rejected.  
  • EMC has 5 sessions that were “EMC led”
    • TP03 – Cisco/EMC/VMware – big room, filled – what are we doing (see below for video and the presentation used, and demos)
    • TP04 – Emerging Technologies and VMware – medium room, overflowing (see below for video and the presentation used, and demos)
    • TA11 – HA Storage Design – medium room overflowing – this session was rated #10 of 300+ and was asked to repeat (see below for the presentation used, and demos).
    • TA17 - End-to-End Disaster Recovery Approach with Automated SRM Failback (medium room, overflowing, see below for the presentation used, and demos).
    • AP04 – Optimizing SAP Production Systems on VMware (didn’t see this one personally, see below for the presentation used, and demos )
    • DC32 – Cisco/EMC vCloud – what are we doing here  (didn’t see this one personally, see below for the presentation used, and demos)
  • VMware had 2 sessions where they asked us to help based on the joint testing we’ve been doing (AP02 – Sharepoint best practices, and DV06 – VDI and SRM).   AP02 was the number 2 or number 3 most popular session (out of 300 sessions), and Venu and I were asked to repeat it 2 additional times!
  • The SQL Server one - AP05 (Scott Drummonds and Chetan Kumar) was also really solid on the same note as AP02

 

• A CRAZY product launch/PR schedule.  
  • This event is clearly VMware’s time to shine, not EMC’s, but of course, partners use this to launch new products and capabilities.   I can’t overstate how much engineering innovation at EMC is focused on the shared vision of “the Private Cloud”.   It was funny talking to the Press and Analysts, they ask a question: “what did you announce at this show?”…. I take a deep breath and then ask “are you ready?”  We issued launches (including immediate availability in almost every case) and PR EVERY DAY (some days 2).   Below I explain them in detail, and where you can download things (like the vCenter Plugins) – I provided the link…
  • To put it in perspective of how much VMware-focused goodness is coming out of EMC, and how fast, here’s a screenshot of something coming soon, but didn’t make the PR cut, not because it wan’t awesome, but because there was just TOO MUCH.   Do you like the idea of vCenter host-profiles for compliance checks and automated remediation?   What if you could do the same thing for VMs themselves?    Check it out (EMC vCenter plugin number what are we up to 5 now…. well, I’ve almost lost count :-)   

 

• Now, at every booth, everyone is saying they are the best choice for VMware, and that’s a GOOD THING.   Press/Analysts asked me about what I think about having EMC competitors like Symantec, IBM, Netapp, and other smaller (but nimble) players.   My answer:

“It makes me very happy.   VMware is transforming the IT landscape like nothing else, and the fact that we’re all here shows that we’re all competing to be the best solutions supporting that vision.   That competition means that we are all accelerating the customer value, that customers have broad choice, and it also means that it forces us all to innovate as much as we  can”. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.   My goal is to make sure that EMC is the best choice for customers, partners and VMware themselves – on our own merits.   That’s a challenge I relish, makes me jump out of bed every day, and start working with my 30K EMC peers to compete, to innovate and to win with the customers on our merits. 

• That said, often competitors say they are “more integrated with VMware than even EMC, and they own them – ha!”.   I understand that – if I were them, it would be fun to say due to the EMC/VMware business link (though incorrect - VMware operates truly independently).   You can say it in 5 seconds and get somone’s attention, particularly if they are already likely to be a fan of your kool-aid.  It’s pretty easy to make a statement like that, it’s harder to prove it.  It’s like the statement of “VMware their IT on competitor _____” (I get that regularly).  Well anyone who attended the VMware session on how their IT works knows now what VMware uses.   Believe it or not, we need to win on our own merits there too.   Using scientific terms, extraordinary hypotheses demand extraordinary evidence.   When you get a claim like that, at least ask them to show you:
  • more than 5 shipping vCenter plugins for things as broad as VDI, SRM, backup, compliance, storage management, array snapshots
  • vStorage proof-points – ACTUAL proof points (we demonstrated copy/write same/write zero earlier in 2008).   How many of them will be shipping a 3rd party vSphere integrated kernel-level piece of software at the vSphere GA date – like Cisco and EMC are?
  • Ask for a list of how many VMware Ready appliances are publicly available (we have 3 and many more coming)
  • Ask for a list of VMware Ready Management solutions they have (these are other management tools that integrate with the vCenter/ESX APIs) (we have 6 at my last count)
  • 3rd party validation of their claims of superiority – on whatever claim.

After such a huge effort, there’s usually only a day or two before you fall back into the daily rhythm of work, and before that happens, I want to make some thanks of my own.

The VMware team should be very, very proud of themselves.  From my perspective, while it’s a huge collective team effort, it’s still Richard Garsthagen’s baby – I can see his fingerprints all over it, and he did a masterful job of pulling it off.  Richard, my hat’s off to you!  Bogomil – Paul’s keynote was fantastic. 

I’m very, very proud of the EMC team that helped make this event happen for us.   The booth was fantastic, and was packed every day until closing.   Marcel Brunner who was covering the vStorage station where we were demoing a lot of stuff literally never stopped, along with Philippe Roland at the Backup/Recovery station and Scott Baker at the Site Recovery Manager station.  The gear there was awesome.

There are a couple EMCer’s I want to call out personally for heroics, and “over the top” work.  Sometimes the people at the like me get undue credit, when it’s the team that actually makes the stuff happen.   I’m only going to point out three, even though there more heroes than I can count.

• Alex Tanner (one of our field VMware Technical Specialists out of the UK) – for months of work getting ready with the VMware Frimley crew to stage everything, and then literally working the weekend to help the HoL be a success the moment the doors opened on Tuesday.   I popped in on the HoL lab and he was back stage, watching the SP utilization on the CLARiiONs to make sure everything was happy, and he was there to take care of any issue (which there was none).   Alex, you are a hero.  Here’s a video of Alex actually monitoring the HoL gear (during very active, multiple SRM lab station failback where 5-10 workstations are all failing over and back, the SP utilization was peaking around 60-70%)

• Nancy Wilga (on the EMC events team, the Sr. Mgr who is in charge)  – for coordinating and pulling off the event.   Anyone who has done this knows that it takes months of behind the scenes work, herding cats and coordinating internally and externally.   EMC’s execution was machine-like, and more than anything else, that was Nancy.   Here she is making sure every T is crossed, every i dotted (with Vito, our EMC VMware Technical Specialist from Italy).   To the my VMware Technical Specialists from Europe – thanks for being there – was great to be able to work with every customer in their native language.  Great to see our army of resources being brought to bear!

• Ryan Miller (one of the Celerra engineering team based out of RTP, NC) – for innovating away on his own, and giving us one of the coolest things at the show – the EMC Automated SRM failback vCenter plug-in (he also contributed to one of the other VC plugins).    I saw Ryan inventing this over the last few months, and turning it from an idea to a reality.   Scott Baker’s session where we were demonstrating this was literally over-flowing, and Scott did a great job of showing it to everyone.

There’s literally so much (with pictures/video).  For EMC folks, Customers, and Partners who couldn’t be there, I’m putting it all in one place below.

EMC – Announcements/Launches:

1) Next-generation Celerra platforms, with production dedupe

• Remember how I said that the CX4 was the beginning of our I/O strategy for VMware here?   The platforms are on a 2-3 year engineering cycle (i.e. there are people working on stuff  now that will see the light of day in 2-3 years).   About 2 years ago, we started to ask “what’s the characteristics you will need from storage platforms in 100% virtualized datacenters?” – well, there’s a whole bunch from the software stack (virtual/thin provisioning, integrated management, VMware-integrated QoS mechanism, deduplication), but there’s also some stuff needed at the hardware layer.   Customers were asking for very flexible I/O models – being able to flexibly change I/O (not just disk) non-disruptively – just like bladed network switches or how VMware makes CPU/Memory at the server layer a “plug and play” model.   They were also asking for the ability add new protocols between platform refresh cycles.   The CX4 was the first one to get a major hardware refresh, the Celerra just got refreshed, one more to go.  
• How does this affect the Celerra?  Well – you can start at the low end (NX4) for about $20K – but at the high end (the NS-960 or NS8-G), you can have up to 32 10GbE interfaces for NAS/iSCSI (and in the NS-960 case, up to another 32 interfaces on the back end for FC, and in the near future, FCoE).
• You can see the Celerras in action here.
• Want to calculate how much you’ll save using Celerra Dedupe?   There’s a simple calculator here (needs java).
• BTW – if you’ve bought a Celerra in the last couple of years, the new features will be available at no cost, requiring only a DART upgrade.   Within the next couple of weeks, I’ll update the Celerra VSA so anyone can play with it.

2) A whole bunch of VMware vCenter plugins.

This was hidden in the Celerra PR (just because it would have been simply too much PR to put out, and some of them are for now, Celerra only)

We have 3 new free vCenter Plugins:

1. FREE EMC Automated Site Recovery Manager Failback.
   • This is automates SRM failback (Celerra only for now – will rapidly cover all EMC SRAs soon) – really really cool. 
   • If you are an EMC employee, and EMC Partner, or VMware you can download this from Powerlink immediately here.   UPDATE: it’s been pointed out to me that this is an EMC-only link – working with the product teams to fix.   In the meantime, please ping your EMC friends.
2. FREE EMC VDI Deployment Tool. 
   • This automates using array features (provisioning, mass replicas) that are useful in Client Virtualization use cases and can be coupled with storage deduplication for user data and VMware View Composer (Celerra only for now, will rapidly cover all EMC platforms).    It replaces and is a super-set of the PowerVDI tool we have used in the past.
   • It was also shown in DV06 (Joint VMware/EMC session sharing learnings from large enterprise customers VMware View + SRM Proof of Concept) – thanks Tommy Walker!
   • If you are an EMC employee, and EMC Partner, or VMware you can download this from powerlink immediately here.    UPDATE: it’s been pointed out to me that this is an EMC-only link – working with the product teams to fix.   In the meantime, please ping your EMC friends.
3. FREE EMC Storage Viewer
   • This provides fantastic views of storage information far beyond what is availble in vCenter today (and even augments the updated storage views in vCenter in the vSphere timeframe). 
   • While Control Center has integrated with the vCenter APIs for the last year (and provides a massive super-set of views, provisioning, management, and reporting for the end-to-end physical-virtual world – and is getting much, much more), not every customer wants that sort of enterprise tool, and at EMC we recognize that VMware Administrators are not always Storage Administrators.   VMware admins want visibility in the management console they are used to – vCenter.  
   • Will be available for download from powerlink shortly.   If you have an urgent need for this, drop me a line.

3) IOmega ix2 and ix4 – a new storage category for VMware

• This is an interesting story.   VMware started getting a lot of requests for simple, turn-key shared storage for SMB and retail customers.   The existing floor for solutions in this space are in the “about $8-10K” band, an they needed something a lot lower.  So, we spent the effort (non-trival) to get these qual’ed.   Interest has been high, so we’re going to keep doing this.
• the iomega StorCenter ix2 (1/2TB, RAID 1 only), ix4-100 (2/4TB, JBOD/RAID10/RAID5, hotswappable – RSA encryption and EMC backup built in) are officially on the VMware HCL as supported platforms.  Rockets, they’re not – but the price is hard to beat (starting at $250).
• I’ve blogged on this before – currently they are NFS only, but there is an internal iSCSI build.   Don’t ASSUME this will come on these versions of the platforms – if you’re an EMCer or VMware employee – and understand that deploying this means you’re in “brick it and you’re hosed” territory – ping me, and I’ll work to get it to you.   iSCSI will be coming to this platform class, count on it.
• I just got my ix4, will post some performance stats as soon as I can.
• You can buy these here: http://www.iomega.com/ 

4) New Integrated “vPod” Solution and Backup Solutions for VMware

• Customers are asking us increasingly not just for the solutions we’ve been doing to date (Tier 1 application stacks like Exchange/SQL Server/Sharepoint/Oracle) on VMware, but also “vertically integrated” stacks.   Think of these as “Private Cloud” blueprints.   In our mind, these require:
  • Interoperability checks for the full stack
  • what we call a “Build document” – step by step instructions to get the whole stack (server, network, storage) up and running – we also provide tools that setup the whole config as a turnkey operation – and has cut 60% of the install time.   At the end, you can simply open VC, add the ESX hosts, and you’re off and to the races.
  • Performance testing to quantify the config to a given number of VMs and given IO envelope.
  • Our first public one we call “Integrated Infrastructure for VMware” (vPod v1.0) – and we had one in the booth (video below)  Cisco, EMC and VMware bring new technologies to market, we will continue to update the vPod (we’re working on v2 right now)

5) Independent Analyst (Forrester) Study Shows Storage Choices for VMware

You can download the full study here.   Of particular interest was that EMC not only made the strongest overall showing, but also the largest number of respondents across all protocol types (FC/iSCSI/NFS).   Surely NetApp had some rebranded N-series stuff in the “IBM category” (in the same way I’m sure that FC Dell/EqualLogic isn’t EqualLogic :-)   But, keep in mind, as of Feb 2009, NetApp got 6% of their business via IBM (slide 14).

BTW – I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – no customer should pick a solution purely based on marketshare – they should pick solutions based on merit against their need.   The marketshare stats do tell an important story though.   You cannot sustain (or grow) market share without doing stuff right for a broad set of customers.

Now, some will say “one survey, small sample group (124 customers), one 3rd party” – to which I say: I totally agree.

I’ve posted on this before (this was ANOTHER 3rd party – IDC, with another survey, at an early time, and a differ sample group) here.  Take a look at the EMC result.

Goldman Sachs has asked the same question consistently in their last two IT spending surveys (another 3rd party, another survey, at a different time, and a different sample group).

Each of these were different.   Each were at a different time, and different sample groups.   Some results varied.   EMC being number one, and by a LONG MARGIN has been consistent.   We put this one at the end of the week – after a ton of technical/product/solution innovation has punctuation to the week - “we’re number one, not by accident but based on technology/products/solutions, and we’re investing to stay there, and grow that position – it’s what our customers are asking for”.

 

VMware/EMC – Breakout Sessions

Note: I will post the other sessions as I get the ones that were used at the show.  TA11 was recorded by VMware themselves, so it may take a little more time to get posted.

TP03: Engineering Developments enabling the Virtual Datacenter - VMware, Cisco and EMC

Description:  This is a session Ed Bugnion (Cisco) and Scott Davis (VMware) and I started in VMworld 2008 in vegas, and it was so popular we agreed to continue to do it consistently – every event being able to show more and more of the things we’re working on.   We shared the common vision of the three companies, what we’re doing around vNetwork, vStorage and vCloud.   We demonstrated a lot.   the EMC Storage Viewer, Ultraflex IO modules, SRM failback, a prototype of a vSphere-integrated DLP offering and other things.    Session was well received – you’ve got to love when the crowd spontaneously claps :-)

Presentation Hardcopy: Here

Recorded Session:

Demos given :

vCenter Plugin: SRM Automated Failback (high rez download here)

vCenter Plugin: EMC Storage Viewer (high rez download here)

Proof-of-Concept: RSA DLP/VMware Integration (high rez download here)

Pictures:

 

 

TP04:  Applying Emerging Technologies to Enhance VMware environments

Description:  This is a session where we show all the latest shipping technologies that can be used to increase flexibility and efficiency for all sorts of VMware workloads.   We shared data on how EFDs can reduce cost in performance-gated workloads by 300%, LP SATA can reduce power in capacity-gated workloads by 90%.   We demoed the new Celerra Production Dedupe feature, demoed how EMC Avamar works including Avamar Virtual Edition (a Virtual Appliance).  

We also share  (although I ran out of time) what we were doing on vStorage APIs, including:

• Pluggable Storage Architecture/PowerPath for VMware (also demonstrated in TA11).   BTW – don’t let people confuse you – EMC is all about standards based multipathing.   First of all, you can absolutely use all the EMC storage targets with the vStorage NMP, with or without AULA in the midrange (the high-end doesn’t need AULA).  So why have PowerPath, and is it “non-standard”?   PowerPath uses the MPIO framework in the vStorage IO stack.  What it does is add more flexibility, faster path detection, more paths, "proactive flaky path death” and with EMC arrays, predictive multipathing based on the array’s input.   Think of this as being “everything that’s good with NMP and more”.   BTW – we are working to try to qual it with heterogenous configs, and aim to have the same matrix as PowerPath does for the physical world.   There’s a reason why it’s the most widely deployed multipathing software in the world.
• SCSI copy (vmotion offload)
• SCSI write same (accelerated VM clone/I/O Dedupe)
• SCSI write zero (acceleration for many use cases)
• TP integration

We shared efficiency findings from actual customers.

Presentation: Here

Recorded Session:

Demos given:

Avamar Virtual Edition (high rez download here)

Celerra Production Dedupe (high rez download here)

TA11:  Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for the Future of VMware

Description:  This was a session on Storage HA design (for FC/FCoE, iSCSI, and NFS), including what’s changing in vSphere (Pluggable Storage Architecture and Power Path for VMware) .   Tried hard to make it multivendor.   A MUST SEE if you have what VMware calls an “Active/Passive” array (example = EMC CLARiiON).   Showed demos of Fixed/MRU pathing behavior, PowerPath for VMware.   This session was voted #10 of the 300+ sessions at VMworld Europe.

Presentation:  Here

Demos (download high-rez here)

Pictures:

DV06: Desktop Disaster Recover with View and SRM

Description:  A session sharing experiences from a large customer PoC where the customer wanted VMware View and DR.

Presentation:  Here

Demonstration Given:

TA17: End-to-End Disaster Recovery Approach with Automated SRM Failback

Description: Focus on our new vCenter Plugin - EMC Site Recovery Manager Automated Failback

Presentation:  Here

Demos (download high-rez here)

AP04:  Virtualized SAP on EMC

Description: Experiences, best practices for virtualizating SAP, including writeable snapshot techniques to accelerate QA/test/dev cycles, impact of EFD technologies on overall peformance, DR solutions using Site Recovery Manager.

Presentation:  Here

DC32:  Technologies Enabling the Next Generation of Cloud Services (VMware/Intel/Cisco/EMC)

Description: The technical challenges to deliver the next generation of cloud services, and what VMware, Intel, Cisco and EMC are doing on that front.

Presentation:  Here

Hands on Labs

Here’s a video showing the Hands-on-Labs – I recorded this on thursday afternoon in the last few labs, it was much busier on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning, but so was I :-)  You can see that all the vendors are working together to help VMware (as per my earlier point).   EMC provided a total of 5 arrays for the HoL – a mix of CLARiiONs and Celerras.   They supported the SRM failback lab (along with the two NetApp FAS3070s)

Forgive the stuttery video – trying a new Kodak Zi6.   You can see that it does VGA ok, but the 720p, not so hot.  Apprently the 720p is ok, but only in brilliant outdoor light.

VMware/EMC – Fun Stuff

 

From the EMC Customer Appreciation Party:

All in all - a great show!

Comments

[Adam]

Do you know what the maximum LUN size will be with vSphere 4.0? It would be mainly for RDM purposes. Thank you for the excellent blog post.

[Rod Gilbert]

Chad - Excellent summary and a terrific event for EMC. It was a pleasure working with you and the rest of the EMC team. Looking forward to EMC World!

[Matthijs Haverink]

Great summary Chad!

[Maish]

I second that! Wonderful post, but it will take me a while to get through all the info and demos :)

[MartijnL]

Thanks for this summary. I have been to the EMC booth and everything looked great over there.

Regarding the EMC Storage Viewer for vCenter plugin: I have a customer using a CX300 who would love to start using this. Can you let me know when it will be available?

[Barry Weeks]

Hi Chad, great summary, looking forward to getting hold of the slides so I can pass on the excitment and enthuasiasm I gained over the week.
Good to meet you albeit briefly (1.5 million sharepoint, 2 million Exchange) and I will keep you informed on our progress.
Any idea when I might be able to get the vCenter Storage Viewer plugin? Our Ops guys are foaming at the mouth for a piece of that action.
Regards

Barry

[Michiel Brinkman]

Great summary indeed! As MartijnL you could say I have an urgent need for the vCenter plugin. We are currently migrating to a CX4 and a new Vmware Cluster and I would really like to introduce this plugin to provide the link our Vmware guys have been missing.

[Erich Popp]

Hi Chad, great info. But, i was not successful in downloading the vCenter plugins. I got an access violation (and other EMC partners in Germany too).

regards

Erich

[Justin]

Just wanted to point out something in your post regarding the Compliance plugin. This is coming from a company called Configuresoft with their product ECM.

[Chad Sakac]

EMC Partners - working furiously to get the links available to the partner view of powerlink, stay tuned, and apologies for the snafu.

In the meantime, reach out to your EMC friends (specifically my EMC VMware Specialist team all have them and have set them up - so if you have a Partner Technical Consultant or Partner Manager - just have them reach out to the VMware Specialists distribution list), and they can hook you up.

[Chad Sakac]

Justin - stay tuned...

[daniel]

Hi Chad,

I was not able to find a download for the Storage Viewer Plugin. Any news where to get it?

Regards,

daniel

[Mark Burgess]

Hi Chad,

We are an EMC and VMware partner and I see lots of potential for Avamar Virtual Edition for customers with around 0.5-5TB of data.

Talking to our local Avamar technical and sales representatives they are positioning AVE for remote office backups only.

The EMC messaging and your blog seem to position Avamar as a strong solution for VMware environments (datacenter or remote office).

I have a few questions that hopefully you can help me with:

1. AVE does not support tape-out therefore you would have to introduce a hardware appliance into the environment which defeats the purpose of the technology – are there plans to support this?
2. We would like to be able to replicate and/or backup the AVE at the VMDK level which would negate most of the need for tape-out and Avamar replication – is this supported?
3. The AVE does not include the Accelerator node for NDMP backups – are there plans to support this?
4. The AVE does not support RAIN – are there plans to support this?
5. With vSphere 4 and Avamar version 5 will we see 100% feature compatibility between the AVE and the physical versions?
6. Is there anything else you can tell us about the road-map for AVE?

I would have thought that as we move towards the 100% virtualised datacenter that AVE could become the backup solution of choice.

It does not make sense to virtualise all your applications but leave your backup solution physical.

Many thanks
Mark