VMworld 2009 the full EMC picture

Ok – so here’s the big picture. It’s going to be awesome – and I can’t wait!

First a little preamble… I’ve been freaky-busy this last week, so apologize for the lack of posts.

I’m on vacation for the next two weeks – will be nice to have some nice decompress time with my wife and kids… So, will be a bit of a quiet period – in effect – the quiet before the storm :-)

When I get back, I’ve queued up posts on:

HOWTO specify PSA claim policy in a particular (and non-default way)
the vSphere 4 SAN config guide implies you can’t configure multiple vmknics with iSCSI and CLARiiON. This is not correct – you can saturate all the front end CLARiiON ports all from a single VM, but there are some important dos/don’ts – will do a post on that.
My experiences on the Data Domain acquisition. Here’s the key elements – have been spending this week with Data Domain folks – and to a ONE they have been happy, open, and excited to partner up and engage. I have always thought their technology was great, but the people seem awesome.
an awesome
We’ve published a TON more reference architecture docs…

If you missed it and are interested – I was lucky enough to be on this past week’s VMTN community podcast. If you want to listen in on the dialog – you can get it here: http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=19367. Thanks for offering up the spot John, will happily do it whenever you would find it useful.

Are you registered for VMworld yet? If not – what’s wrong with you!!!

Psst… If you register at this link, and use this code (EMCEB2009), it gets you the pass with a $250 discount.

There’s of course stuff that will be announced that I can’t discuss – but I’ll be as transparent as I can, and just say that I’m really, really pumped!

OK – so here’s what’s brewing at VMworld on the EMC front:

1) Giveaways – who’s kidding who – this is a big part of these events – what’s the good schwag? So – what are we giving away?

We will be giving away one Segway each day to people who register at the booth. Yes these things make you look dorky, but they are a LOT of fun :-) We’re also giving away 3 4TB IOmega devices every day. These are devices that don’t yet exist on the market, and trust me, these are VERY cool, make the previous generation (which were cool in their own right) look pedestrian in comparison. Looking forward to posting the details!

2) Hands-On-Labs

The equipment we’re providing is going to be a big part of this (but if we have a good amount - the Cisco piece here is well… immense). We have two V-Max arrays, CLARiiONs and Celerras galore. I’ve shipped them out with hundreds of spindles, and a whole whackload of solid-state disk (Enterprises Flash Disk). Curious about solid state disk? Come and see it live. Skeptical? Ok, but we’ve literally sold out again last quarter – that means our customers like them, and are using them to do more with less.

3) Sessions

Wow – it’s going to be awesome! There are a TON of sessions which are by EMC, by VMware/EMC (and sometimes VMware/Cisco/EMC) and by VMware with EMC support. It looks like it will be settling at 18 sessions. Here’s the calendar, and what I think is the highlight of each session. Hope you find them interesting – I want to see YOU there!!!

I’m really, really pumped about the EMC keynote (Steve Herrod and I are doing this one together) and the VCE sessions (Ed Bugnion from Cisco, Scott Davis from VMware and myself). We’re developing a bit of reputation for “unveiling” cool stuff, and laying out things that are launched 6 months later (vSphere, V-Max and UCS last time). I love it – I get to pretend for one day that I’m Steve Jobs :-)

MAKE SURE you submit your questions for the joint “Ask the Experts” panel on Thursday at 1pm – TA2259 – details are here.

The joint session on long-distance vmotion use cases and technologies will also rock. The session about VMware View and SRM will provide a powershell script that allows you to use View Composer and SRM together!

Download a high-rez PDF that has the full schedule here.

4) Parties – it wouldn’t be a conference without some good benders :-)

The Sunday night party. I have my whole global team coming in on Sunday (man – it adds up to just shy of a hundred people) for our 2010 planning and sharing our experiences, so we’re going to have a little fun – but the bigger party will be the one the VMware event team is pulling together to kick things off.
Monday night is the “customer facing nerds” party :-) The folks that lead the EMC elite delta commando squad of VMware Specialists (EMC field technical folks 100% focused on VMware) have coordinated a party with their VMware SE and the Cisco Datacenter SE folks. This one will be AWESOME. If you’re a VMware SE or Cisco Datacenter SE – just reach out to Dino Cicarelli (VMware), Dom Delfino (Cisco) who have been working with Wade O’Harrow on my team for the logisitics. It’s going to be at the location pictured below… I look forward to seeing you their, and enjoy the fun on me!

Tuesday night is the EMC Customer Appreciation party. It’s at Roe (picture below), a very nice place less than 1 block from Moscone. If you’re an EMC customer you should have already gotten an invitation. If you didn’t, please reach out to your rep and ask them to “reach out to Chad’s team”, and heck, just come by – we want to thank you!

The rave itself… This is the big one, don’t have the logistics all yet, but we’re in as a sponsor – so as I get them, will update the post.

5) The EMC booth

There’s been a LOT of work in this – and this year it’s big. I mean BIG. So – we are a platinum sponsor, but Configuresoft (now part of EMC IONIX) and a partner section have all been put together. You can’t miss it – it’s right beside the VMware booth. The partner booth is really cool – we have 8 VMware/EMC partners showcasing their solutions in addition to everything in the EMC booth proper.

In the booth itself, we’ve got stations for management, storage (every scale), vStorage API integration (so you can see all sorts of current and future stuff), backup solutions, details on the pluggable storage architecture, data dedupe technologies, vCenter plugins, etc….

There’s still risk, but we’re also planning on having a whole whackload of 10GbE stuff live in the booth on Qlogic, Nexus 5Ks, and EMC storage platforms. If you’re curious about 10GbE and storage with VMware (for NFS, iSCSI, FCoE use cases) – and see what we’re getting in live tests - come on by the EMC booth.

We’ll also be giving away:

free 45 day PowerPath/VE licenses (give it a whirl!)
Virtual Appliances of several EMC products
All sorts of schwag

The best part of the booth are the people. We’ve got great folks in the booth including the product teams and the engineering folks. The folks who have authored our best practices papers, and worked on our joint reference architectures will be there. There will also be some of our field VMware Specialists – great folks to bounce ALL sorts of questions…

Also, Data Domain is going to be there of course – will be fun (gang – you are welcome to join the VMware/Cisco/EMC SE mixer!!!)

6) In the store….

You can by the Mastering vSphere 4 book by Scott Lowe (with chapter 6 on storage by me) at the store, and also EMC IOmega platforms that are on the VMware HCL – including these cool new things to come…) GREAT DEALS!

I really am looking forward to it – and looking forward to seeing you there!

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

I cant wait, should be a lot of fun and hopefully get to meet you Chad, I havent gotten any info on parties yet from my VMware rep, I will hit him up though.

Posted by: david robertson | August 02, 2009 at 07:07 PM