VMworld 2009: Ask the Experts (TA2259)

This session was fun and was repeated twice (recordings of both are shown below).   I can’t believe how many of you stuck it out until the end…. I’m pretty sure that this session shut down the show – finishing around 6:15pm on Thursday :-)

On the panel were the inimitable Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Tom Howarth Rick Scherer (who also moderated) and myself.  

The questions were great, but considering all the stuff out there (vCenter, scheduler, 3rd party management tools, process, general best practices questions, etc), I was just taken aback by how many questions were storage related.   Someone suggested that it was because I was on the panel, but look at the luminaries there beside me on the panel.

Scott and I talked about it that night – and it really highlights the chasm between the VMware administrator and the storage administrator (this complaint came up in both sessions).  It’s why we have done the integration we have – but clearly have a long way to go still in both: 1) getting the word out about how things can be done today and what tools exist (and are free!!!!); and 2) ongoing work to make storage mgmt invisible.

Here’s the video from the first session (Vaughn was in the front row – see world, we can be civil!)

And here’s the second session… Now – this was literally SO long, with SO many questions (we shut down VMworld with this :-), I couldn’t get it up on blip without breaking it into two seperate files, no matter how I encoded the video :-)

Comments

[Duncan]

To be honest when doing health checks or design reviews 90% of the issues we talk about are either storage or bad configuration in general. it didn't surprise me at all. although the topic officially was "ask the experts- designing a virtual infrastructure" none of the topics where actually directly design related. :-)

Anyway I enjoyed myself! For me it was the first time up on stage with such a large crowd you guys being there certainly made it easier.

[David]

@duncan, Its never the Storage :) I enjoyed the session very much, in fact I would say I got the most out of that session than any other at vmworld. Great to hear from such a knowledgeable panel and questions! I look forward to the next one.

[aenagy]

At the end of the first session I asked you about materials geared towards SAN administrators as everything from VMware is geared towards the ESX administrator. Our CLARiiON administrator could not make heads or tails with ESX and we had an 'incident' in our early ESX 3.0 days. What was the name of the documentation/book you recommended?

[Chris]

@aenagy, as someone who administers both the storage and the ESX environment, the first place I would recommend for your CLARiion administrator is to take a look at the Solutions guide for VMWare ESX and CLARiion which is available on Powerlink.