Virtual Geek

VMworld 2008 - EMC Wrap-up - Part II

Ok, here's the final wrap-up (a month late :-)  - I FINALLY got the video of our keynote - it's below in it's entirety.   For the ultimate "being there" experience (HA!), watch the video with the slides at the same time (the camera work was wierd, no slides behind us, they were off to the sides).   But, kinda neat regardless.   I liked the "how many folks here..." bits at the beginning, and you can see some of the physical demonstrations we did with the CX4 and the iomega StorCenter ix2 (our $329 NFS server/iSCSI target)

UPDATE (Feb 2, 2009) - The SS4200E is a fine choice, and so is the ix2.   If you can wait a little bit... I would hold on.   iSCSI work is in the lifeline codebase, but still pushing to make it available in all the platforms - which have varying CPUs, and varying iSCSI performance.   for now, consider the shipping SS4200E and ix2 as NAS-only until I give a firm update.   There are other reasons also to wait for about 1 month....

If you're wondering what that big tattoo on my hand is... no, I'm not that cool :-)   It's a big "I love VMware" temporary tattoo.

I also cleaned up the PDF (export of the straight PPT was a bit mangled due to powerpoint builds, and the one on the VMworld site is pretty weak quality), consider this the one to use if you want to look at it.   It's useful to look at this as you watch the video (see note above).

Read on for details....

VMworld 2008 - EMC Wrap-up - Part I

It's been a bit, I know (one thing I do suck at with this blogging thing is "time to market" :-)  Have been slammed - we had our EMC Technical Consultant/Solution Architect (and other various pre-sales technical roles) conference last week in Orlando, and I needed to show off some more distant future things....   Excuses, excuses.

I've gotten lots of requests for all the EMC sessions, including the keynote.   I've attached them in the body of this post (video of keynote will be posted shortly)

Quick observations:

• I think Paul Maritz did a great job on his keynote.   He summed up VMware's vision (VDC-OS for the internal cloud, vCloud for a federated external cloud, and vClient for the desktop dilemma).   Analysts hammered him the next day - but it was a weird bit of feedback: "right on message, what customers want, clear, and very differentiated.   BUT delivering on the vision will take a couple of years, and more SG & A expenses."   I don't know what to say to this.   VMware is way ahead of their competition - but you always need to innovate to stay ahead of the pack.   I think they were damned if they do, damned if they don't.   Had they just announced VMware.Next (whatever the next VI iteration will finally be called) - they would have been slammed for being tactical, that "hypervisors are a commodity" and lack of vision.    BTW - Joe Tucci got up in front of our thousands of pre-sales technical folks from around the world last week, and outlined EMC's vision of the future last week - and suffice it to say we see the world similarly, we're holding hands, and we're working together as partners to make it happen - and VMware continues to be firmly independent because we know that vision of the world requires them to be independent. 

I'm no analyst, but what stood out to me was simple - every customer I talked to at the show loved VMware, loved the technology, and were investing for the future.   That strikes me as a very, very good sign for VMware's long term prospects.  

• The hands-on-labs were good.    I did the Virtual Datacenter tech preview, the vClient tech preview along with others, but gave up my seat to customers.   Heck, I've got all the betas in the basement lab anyway :-)   It would have been good in the SRM hands-on to do a actual failover, and demonstrate how to do a failback.  This can be done (though not automated yet) in v1.0
• The whole  vClient tech preview convinced me of something... While NetApp, NEC, and EMC were each trying outdoing each other to demo VDI at scale (BTW - NEC won - with 12K clients :-), the VMware View Manager (formerly known as VDM 3.0) and VMware View Composer (formerly known as SVI) are simpler.   Also, as much as there is an economic challenge with storage (solved via deduplication or writeable snapshot technologies) with VDI, the technical challenge (particularly at scale) is so much more...   EMC did demonstrated (forgive the lack of a voice over, this video shows the scaling point, how the ESX clusters were configured, how many VC instances were needed, and the cluster utilization before workload applied) 10K clients, at a 100:1 storage savings (5 VMs per source LUN, 100 snapshots off every source), but the other reality (beyond "wow, look at this scale!") is that the process of update, management, pooling, even using Dan's award-winning PowerVDI script (and this doesn't take away from how cool that is) - it's just more complex, particularly in the ongoing "lifecycle" of the desktops.   I think the reality is that VMware themselves are in a better position to resolve this than us as the storage vendor.   The round 1 exercise was worthwhile - we learned a ton about scaling up the vClient use case (all aspects, ESX, vCenter, storage, network).   We're updating the solution lab as we speak to View Manager and View Composer, and neat unannounced technology from EMC for the user data for solution testing round 2.   We also want to bring Cisco as the 3rd leg from day one - there are loads of stuff in the vClient side that have to do with LAN and WAN optimization and compression.
• I won't speak for any other vendors, but I was pretty happy with the traffic at the booth - lots of customers, lots of good questions and dialog.   I think these events (while exhausting) are a great opportunity for direct customer/vendor communication - trust me when I say that we're listening!
• I was very happy with our joint VMware/Cisco/EMC keynote.   It was packed, standing room only - I think we would have been right around 1000 people.   I attended most of the platinum sponsor keynotes, and I think we had the largest attendence, with NetApp a close second.   The others (HP, Dell, IBM) were embarassingly empty.   I don't know what the deal is there.... I thought the IBM one was pretty good, for example.  In part II of this post, I'll post the video recording itself of the KN EMC session (VMware still hasn't gotten it to me) - but it exceeded my expectations, that's for sure.  I wasn't sure originally how well the 3-party model would work (1 hour is not a lot of time for a lot of content), but I think it worked well.   At the beginning, I started by asking how many people were EMC customers, then Cisco customers, then VMware customers.   It was awesome - nearly 100% to every questions - which affirmed why I decided to share our Platinum spot in the first place.   Our customers want to see what their trusted partners are doing TOGETHER to solve their challenges.   I'll say again what I said in the session: THANK YOU for being customers.   You make our world go around.
• I was very proud of the EMC team's execution to support the event.   For those that wonder, it takes a gargantuan amount of work to pull something like that off - and that's just the platinum sponsor side - 9 speaking sessions, a booth with 8 stations and a constant theatre schedule, customer 1:1 etc.   VMware themselves - well, hats off to the team (I can speak for EMC during EMCworld - and that's 10K people, not 14K).  A special thank you to Chris Carrier and Cathy Cushman on my team - wouldn't have happened without you.    

 

• To give you a couple of views into the behind the scenes madness:
• imagine shipping 13 CX3s, 4CX4s, 2 DMX 4-950s, and 3 NS40FCs to the event (some to Palo Alto for staging a couple months beforehand).  That's measured in TONS.   Of course - when things are frantic (and shipped in racks!) some arrived with significant damage from all the transit.   I got some panicked calls from the VMware folks for the gear supporting a couple HOLs and the VMware booth on Friday before the show.   A big thank you to the local Nevada EMC customer support team, who swapped out damaged parts in well under the 4hr MTTR.   I think it's fair to say that the VMware team was amazed when an hour after discovering damaged LCC cards, the replacement parts showed up on the scene.
• Without being too unkind about it - some of you may have noticed... well... inconsistent VMware naming in some of the sessions :-)   The new VMware branding and framework was being updated short days before the event.   Upside?   I think they really nailed it.   A good framework to have broader discussions with customers and between VMware and partners like EMC.   It ain't (just) about the Hypervisor.  But - the downside - core content was undergoing significant changes up to minutes before the sessions.
• We got the vStorage API-enabled builds of... VMware.Next (I can't wait until I can call it something - it's a PITA)..  (not the vStorage APIs for multipathing enabled build - we've had that for a while) on Wednesday before the show, and pulled off demonstrations (I think only EMC and Dell/EqualLogic were doing any vStorage API demos at VMworld - correct me if I'm wrong) days later.   Great EMC effort from our platform engineering teams and also Scott Dougherty (one of our field VMware technical specialists) - thank you all!

There are something's I think we could have done better, and as the team starts planning for VMworld Europe 2009 (Feb in Cannes - my goodness, that's right around the corner!), we're working on it.   What do you think we could have done better?   I really want to know!

All the late night evenings before VMworld paid off, and all the late night evenings celebrating with colleagues, customers, and competitors were loads of fun.  

Ok - for those of you looking for the EMC sessions read on - and if you have ANY questions on one of the sessions, don't hesitate to comment!

So, what does vStorage really mean?

(UPDATED 092308 - 19:53 EST to note that the VMware Backup Framework falls in scope)

Pretty big day here at VMworld, meeting lots of people I know only online - which is great.   My photo is in the about section of the blog, and if you'd like to meet me, I'd love to meet you!

So - the VDC-OS is the big news, let me fill you in on one part of it - vStorage.

vStorage has been something that VMware and EMC have been working together on for a long time, in fact, before it was called vStorage (which was recent) - it used to be called VMAS a name only engineers would like.  In fact, we've been working on this from almost right after the original acquisition before the program even existed formally.

vStorage is pretty broad: It's 2 very new VMware things, and 2 VMware features

• vStorage API for Multipathing
  • This was the first idea from eons ago.  Customers know the pain VMware multipathing can be - setting up static paths, manual "load balancing" by rotating primary paths, and no automated path discovery.... you know what I'm talking about.... But we needed to find a way that we could get PowerPath, which is the far and away the leader in this space, into the vmkernel, but still make it open for others to also innovate with VMware.  It so happens of course that EMC are the ones way out in front here.
  • So, while native multipathing (NMP) continues to get better (round robin will likely soon no longer be experimental), but this gives EMC customer another option - an option which is a quantum leap in multipathing/failover/scale and availability for block storage
  • It's also an avenue to deliver the other stuff PowerPath customers love in the physical world (path-based encryption, accelerated data migration)
  • It's also simple, and easy to use and install.   It just works, like the best technology does.
  • BTW - we're accepting beta sites now, and it's going to be HUGE for any VMware/EMC customers.

See this quantum leap in multipathing action here:

download a hi-rez version here.

• vStorage APIs
  • Acceleration via storage offloads using SCSI driver primitives (we're demoing this in our booth and in the VMware/EMC/Cisco Keynote) - think "I/O" dedupe (not to be confused with Storage Dedupe).  This can have a HUGE impact on storage network utilization - much more efficient, and very important for lower bandwidth storage networks like 1Gbps iSCSI.
  • Thin Provisioning Integration
  • While NetApp, EMC, and Dell/EqualLogic are all shipping Snapshot VC integration today (we're demoing Replication Manager in our booth and in the VMware/EMC/Cisco Keynote, and you can also see a demo of this here), vStorage will make this more transparent, but adds somthing REALLY cool - the ESX server tells the array what BLOCKS makeup a VM, so svmotion can be offloaded to the array as an alternative to the file-copy method now, snapshots can potentially be done on VMs even for block devices.  Again, this uses SCSI driver primitives

See this the "I/O dedupe" in action here:

download a hi-rez version here.

Also as part of this, some things that have existed before are getting clarified.

• SRM's SRAs are getting positioned more clearly now as vStorage APIs for Site Recovery Manager (since they are in effect, APIs for VMware/Storage integration)
• VCB is more correctly positioned not as an VMware product per se, but as a API framework for backup vendors - becoming the vStorage Backup Framework
• vStorage Virtual Appliances now formalizes a program around VMware Ready appliances that perform storage-related functions.
  • Celerra VSA freely available – iSCSI, NFS - public and free!
  • Avamar Virtual Edition – shipping for 1 year

Cool stuff we've been working on to help customers, I'm glad to share the news!

UPDATED - 9/13/2009 - Some interesting VDI performance findings and updated Use-Case Solution Guides

While much of the discussion and attention will be focused on the very high end VDI scaling cases next week, I thought it would be useful to show some stuff at the other extreme.   We also have been testing in the 125-250-500-1000 user ranges on our NS20, which is an mid-range unified system.   This is something someone could get started in the $30K range.    Note - I'm not talking about what we're doing at the other end of the extreme - the 10K+ use case (we'll talk about that next week).

There is a detailed document that covers these best practices, H5719: "EMC Infrastructure for Deploying VDI in the Enterprise".   The document is on powerlink, and will be up on EMC.com shortly.  The full validation test report showing all the performance envelopes will be up right after VMworld on powerlink.

UPDATE: Folks, the NetApp side has made some comments that in their view we're not being clear here: http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/    Vaughn is a good guy, so I'm going to take the personal slag (ouch - used car salesman) in stride.   We are replicating the LUN objects in this case, and they are the unit of replication.   If you will have more than roughly 200 VDI VMs per cluster, you need to have several VMs per LUN.   The PowerVDI tool automates this.   These ratios mean it's more accuate to say "you will invariably achieve 100:1 space savings, and may achieve more depending on the scaling goal". (the ratio of source VMs per source LUN needs to be higher at higher scales, and therefore 100:1 is the worst case model).   There is NOTHING intrinsically wrong with NetApp's approach, there is NOTHING intrinsically wrong with EMC's approach.   Each have advantages and disadvantages, and are a function of each vendor trying to solve the customer problem.  The ratio of LUNs to VMs is not 1:1.   We don't do this because we love block - while we can take 96 filesystem snapshots, only 16 of those are writeable, so this approach is better for EMC customers. Just setting the technical record straight.

If you want to see some interesting performance metrics - read on!

UPDATED - 9/13/2009 - What we're demoing at VMworld - details!

Some days, my head feels like it's going to spin right off :-)  Thank goodness I love my job!   I'm personally working on some of the last-minute demos - there's some really cool stuff that's under embargo until Wednesday - but suffice it it will be cool!  

My colleague Nick Triantos from NetApp did a good post on what Netapp will be doing, here: http://blogs.netapp.com/storage_nuts_n_bolts/2008/09/netapp-vmworld.html?cid=130026414#comment-130026414

I have to confess, it got my blood boiling a little bit - he accuses EMC of being "All Marketing" and that they will be the largest vendor there.    Please, look at my record, I've been kind, even handed, even complimentary to NetApp, but come on Nick, is that condescending tone necessary?     Tar ME with the marketing brush?!?

Did you know that while we're mud slinging (well, at least I'm getting mud slung at me) that the Large Hadron Collider fired up today?   Man, it's inspiring, and a reminder that this competitive stuff is SO petty.  I'm also pretty inspired by the SVVP "other shoe dropping" with formal ESX 3.5u2 qual getting done.

Ok, so we have a marketing gimmick (the car!!!), sure but heck, it's Vegas :-)   I like to think of us as "All technical, and some fun too"

You'd think that with all this back and forth - it's all we do (well for me - it's 8:51pm, and I've been working all day - so this is a diversion :-)

I will tell you this, it's going to be technical, we're demoing like mad, and there are some MIND BLOWING things there.

We're in booth 500, and I look forward to seeing you there.   What you can expect to see:

• Demonstrating Oracle 11g and SAP with instant/backup recovery and Site Recovery Manager all in action together  (BTW - thank you all who have been so interested in the Oracle piece that it got oversubscribed and we've been asked by VMware to schedule a second session on EA1961)
• Demonstrating Exchange 2007 Joint VMware/EMC reference architecture including VSS backup/restore, CCR and LCR use cases
• How all our management tools (Storage, Network, Application Dependency and VMware Best Practice compliance analysis) integrate with the VI 2.5 SDK and ESX CIM APIs - TODAY.   Our view is that customer need to start virtualizing tier 1 apps - and we want to help - with the joint best practices and with tools to ensure you get applicaiton-level SLAs.
• Replication Manager for VMware - instant VM or datastore backup/restore - integrated with the VI and ESX APIs for nice simple point in time consistency.   As a company that's not as good at marketing as others, we quietly actually shipped this BEFORE ANYONE ELSE.   It wasn't pre-launched, it shipped in June.   Here's  a quick look if you want to see what it does.   BTW - this is a single tool that does this for application integration Exchange 2003 and 2007/SQL Server/Oracle and now VMware, and across all EMC's platforms.   Here's a demo....

• VDI - great to hear that NetApp hit 5K clients. We just broke 10K :-)  UPDATE: I regret phrasing this sentence this way - it comes across as snide and as condescending.   I let frustration get the better of me.   NetApp has no intrinsic scaling limit that I know of, I only know what we can do.   BTW - that's what this standing lab in Santa Clara is there for - for EMC and VMware to jointly prove these out at scales (target of 40K clients).    BTW, we're also doing this at 500, and 1000 client cases.   It's not a chest-beating exercise - customers come in all shapes and sizes, and we're trying to help prove out how this works for them all, it was triggered by the World Bank which asked for us to show how this would work for 20K clients.      We have a similar (but different - each with advantages and disadvantages) approach as NetApp - mass scale with consumption of one, both how we do this today, and also how we do it with VMware tomorrow.    We will be sharing all our performance scaling data, and experiences.   THIS IS BLEEDING EDGE.   Anyone who tries to tell you that this is all figured out is not giving you the whole truth.  Anyone who just shows you the array side of the equation is flat-out dangerous.   When you push this far,  and all boot simultaneously, sometimes VC gets into a weird state on some of the VMs.  Its fun, and continues to be fun.   BTW - here's a cool screenshot (count up the VMs - there's actually 10,994)

UPDATE: Folks, the NetApp side has made some comments that in their view we're not being clear here: http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/    Vaughn is a good guy, so I'm going to take the personal slag (ouch - used car salesman) in stride.   We are replicating the LUN objects in this case, and they are the unit of replication.   If you will have more than roughly 200 VDI VMs per cluster, you need to have several VMs per LUN.   The PowerVDI tool automates this.   These ratios mean it's more accuate to say "you will invariably achieve 100:1 space savings, and may achieve more depending on the scaling goal". (the ratio of source VMs per source LUN needs to be higher at higher scales, and therefore 100:1 is the worst case model).   There is NOTHING intrinsically wrong with NetApp's approach, there is NOTHING intrinsically wrong with EMC's approach.   Each have advantages and disadvantages, and are a function of each vendor trying to solve the customer problem.  The ratio of LUNs to VMs is not 1:1.   We don't do this because we love block - while we can take 96 filesystem snapshots, only 16 of those are writeable, so this approach is better for EMC customers. Just setting the technical record straight.

 

 

• Here are some datapoints from the VDI testing to date:
  • there are limits to how fast ESX and VC can register vms (hostd dies) and how many you can spawn simultaneously - discover the what we've done jointly with VMware on this!
  • XP Booting causes 4000  IOs spread over 20 seconds.   That is 200 IOPS per Client Sustained during the boot….   Multiply that times 100 for a server…… 20,000 IOPS.    Or multiply it out to a moderate environment of 1000 desktops.     200,000 IOPS all directed at the Array.    How much hits the backend vs cache effect?   What is the client experience?  Come and find out!  (BTW this will be a big topic in session PO3824 - "Storage Solutions for Enterprise Consolidation with VMware")
  • BTW - Congratulations Dan for coming in 3rd in VMware's PowerShell contest for the PowerVDI tool we created for this.   The quote was great: "Here's what Lee Holmes, author of the Windows PowerShell Cookbook had to say about it: "Automates a very complex scale-out task, and combines a lot of technology (VMWare, Putty, AD, etc) into a single PowerShell task. Offers interactive use, unattended scripting. For high-scale clusters, this would be an enormous time-saver. This script really demonstrates the super-glue nature of PowerShell."   Dan, you'll laugh man, but a large NetApp customer asked me for the script... wait until we unveil what's coming next!   For those of you wanting this script, note that we've posted it openly for all.
• Deduplication, and simple file-level recovery for Windows/Linux VMs
• NFS and iSCSI deployment best practices
• Joint EMC/VMware Remote/Branch Office solution
• Several of our Partners (Agilsys, Fusionstorm, ICI and others) will be present in the booth to show their integrated solutions.
• We will be demonstrating several things I can't even allude to as they are under an embargo until the event.

We will have 70 people at the event, including myself, but also our engineering teams directly - including Bala Ganeshan and Sheetal Kochavara who are the engineering folks who maintain our DMX and CX best practices, along with our Field VMware Specialists (all VCPs from around the world.  

I don't know what any other vendors are sending equipment wise, but I've sent 13 CX3s, 4 CX4s, 3 NS20s and 2 DMX4-950s.   Those will be in lots of places where you can use them, including the hands-on labs, and in various booths.

I can wait to talk to YOU, and of course with our competitive brothers and sisters!

Oh, and our keynote  (where all are welcome!) is KN EMC on Wednesday at 11:00-12:00. It is a joint VMware/Cisco/EMC session discussing best practices for designing the next generation datacenter with Scott Davis from VMware and Ed Bugnion from Cisco.    It's three nerds on stage - a recipe for trouble!      I asked to do a show release to show what we're doing at the event, but our PR folks told me that unless a senior exec is doing the Keynote (like Dave Hitz is for NetApp - and they did a press release), we don't do those.  I'm just a technical guy, so I don't qualify :-)

Just to show the ridiculousness of it all, NetApp's press event got scheduled at the same time as our keynote.   We intentionally moved ours to avoid conflicting with theirs because we know some people will want to go to both.   I'm going to keep pushing the kind agenda, because I don't think pettiness helps any of us.

Nick says:

"For NetApp this will be the largest event of the year and like everybody else we've been preparing for it for some time now. This year, by far, we'll have the largest presence in the show and we'll be ready to showcase various technologies that solve some very real and hard to solve business problems."

UPDATE: Nick has made a fair clarification of his intent  of the statement, and I trust him in his clarification.

Nick - looking forward to meeting you there and getting to know you.   This is our biggest event of the year also, a bit bigger than EMC World which had 10K customers.   I don't know if we'll have the largest presence at the show, but I can tell you that you are not in a position to make that statement that you will be until after the show ends, right?   Statements that are not true?   I call that Marketing.

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OK, I can't help being a bit petty.

Remember the whole brouhaha about the IDC data back here?  

So, on Sept 8th, Goldman Sachs released their annual survey analyzing IT spending - the "Independent Insight"  here's how THEY describe it.

"This is the 42nd issue in our IT Spending Survey series. Our survey panel is made up of 100 managers with strategic decision-making authority at multinational Fortune 1000 companies."

Ok - so note (I don't want to misrepresent!) note that this is FT1000 (we're doing excellent in all segments - but I don't want to imply anything about other segments, take it what it is, no more, no less)

First, for my VMware brothers and sisters - congrats:

"VMware’s incumbent position at the top of the rankings demonstrates that server virtualization momentum remains alive and well."  (Microsoft - watch out for the wrath of Nick, showing Live Migration when Hyper-V R2 is scheduled for a 2011 release is called Marketing)

Nice to see EMC Software (which excludes VMware) also in the gainer column - our management tools are flying off the shelves, in some part due to their integration with the VI SDK and ESX CIM APIs.

I liked this, of course:

Does that look like it agrees with the IDC data from earlier to you?   Look also at who went up and who went down.

Oh, and then here's this hot off the presses too: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS21411908   The NAS numbers and growth numbers are stunning.

LET ME BE CLEAR: I THINK NO CUSTOMER SHOULD PICK A SOLUTION PURELY BECAUSE OTHERS DO.   Every customer should pick solutions that work for them.   What I am saying is you can't produce those results and outgrowing those that are smaller, and do it across categories if you're not doing something right for your customers.   To believe otherwise is to shrug off reality, and to become one of those "extremeophiles".

Look, I want us to focus on helping the customer.   Nick - I'm good with that if you are - sincerely......

I will be in some NetApp sessions (and in VMware labs, and in other sessions I'm interested in).   I will not heckle - though of course you guys are welcome to in my session (leave my colleagues alone).   I'm respectful and want to learn from you and with you.   But I won't take mudslinging at EMC lying down - in the same way that you guys shouldn't (and don't) when we do it.

Here's to seeing YOU at VMworld 2008

As we get in to the final stretch of preparation - I'm really hoping to see you there.

Here's a hint at the EMC contest (come by the EMC booth for more info - we're booth 502):

I really hope you'll come to all our sessions, we're trying our best make them pertinent, technical, filled with demonstrations, disclose current and future capabilities, and share customer deployment experiences. 

In the booth, we'll be distributing best practices and virtual appliances you can use, demonstrating solutions from VDI to SRM, Management integration, powershell scripting, VMware integrated VM-consistent array replication that simple and easy to use, and loads of other fun stuff, some of which I can't talk about until Wednesday.

My session is KN-EMC, on Wednesday at 11am.   It's a technical panel discussion on overall Next Generation Datacenter design and best practices, and I'm joined by Scott Davis from VMware (Chief Datacenter Architect, CTO Office), and Ed Bugnion from Cisco (VP/CTO, Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit)

If you haven't yet registered, it's getting close, but you can still squeak in - click on the graphic below.

FYI - I've posted my current calendar (I arrive on Saturday and leave Friday), hope to see you in some of the sessions!   if you want to see my schedule, read on!

VMworld 2008 - I'm getting excited....

BTW -the content catalog for VMworld is coming along, if you're interested in other EMC sessions/keynotes, just go here (you need a VMworld 2008 user account - if you don't have one, you can register here( http://www.vmworld.com/vmworld/registration.jspa?ref=EMC).   Once you're in, search for "EMC" in the company string - so far, there are 7 sessions (including the one where we talk with VMware and some other folks in a panel about how we use Lab Manager for process automation ourselves).   Sessions that will rock:

• the "Tier 1 Apps and SRM" one (session BC3096 - you need a login) session - there will be a live demo of SRM with Exchange 2007, Oracle, and potentially SAP if we can pull it off in time
• The Oracle one (session EA1961 - you need a login) is cool - we're showing how we can save more than 90% of the cost of a given customer's Oracle config by virtualizing, including the performance metrics we observed, and showing it live in action including an accelerated test/dev cycle.
• The management one (session AD3500 - you need to have a login) will be filed to the gills with neato demos, unveiling some of the integration work we've been doing with the VC and ESX APIs.
• The "VMware at Enterprise Scale" one (session PO3824 - you need to have a login)  is going to be cool.   To give you an idea, look at these pictures (equipment arriving, equipment racked) of what we're assembling for that session.  Use your imagination... We've got a TON of work between now an Sept (high, high risk), but are attacking it - it's a FUN project!!!!

 

 

While there are more than 3000 ESX servers all around EMC (and we use every VMware product under the sun for our own operations - we will be sharing info on that too in this VMworld session), and some of the Solutions labs have hundreds like I've shown here) - this is the the largest SINGULAR POC I know of.

Yes - that is 192 brand-new ESX 3.5u2 servers - each with 8 cores, 32GB of RAM rooling into the joint EMC/VMware/Cisco solution lab in Santa Clara.   There are another 100 or so servers still arriving to go into those spare racks, and there are seven cabinets worth of storage and next-gen switch gear... what oh what could we be working on? :-)

Psst... Wanna see something cool?

EMC World 2008 was a couple weeks ago - and was a huge hit.   There were just shy of 10K attendees, and it's growing every year.   EMC World one of the few of the industry giant conferences these days (VMworld, TechEd, Oracle OpenWorld, and Cisco Networkers being the others that immediately come to mind).   VMware had a great both (great work VMware Alliance teams!) with VDI demonstrations, VMware and EMC's management tools all integrated (this is SUPER cool), simple/inexpensive "all-in" Remote Office/Branch Office solutions, Tier one applications like Exchange 2007 and SAP,  VMware backup solutions and deduplication, and of course Site Recovery Manager.

So - I thought the event as a whole was good.   We try to make it technical only (it is run by the engineering teams), but the occasional marketing/sales pitch makes it in there, which is always frustrating for me.

BUT the highlight for me was Steve Herrod's (he's VMware's CTO) keynote.  You've GOT to see this....