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VMworld US 2012: The Day 4 Buzz

August 30th, 2012

VMworld Day 4 started a little later than the previous days to give all attendees a little more time in bed to recover from the VMworld party last night after belting out Bon Jovi hits!

The day started with the Genius Machines general session featuring three researchers who are working at the frontier of machine technology Kevin Slavin, Co-Founder, Area/Code; Dr. Dennis Hong, Director, RoMeLa who showed some awesome robots and Chris Urmson who showed the Google Self-Driving Car Project. These were fun presentations showing how far technology has come. It was a welcome break from all things cloud and virtual and seeing some cool other technology stuff.

The Solutions Exchange wasn’t open today which I think was a bad decision. The last day of the conference is normally the day when attendees have completed their preferred sessions and have free time to wander around the Exchange and see what the vendors are up to. Hopefully this will be rethought for next time.

VMworldTV has been doing some more work.

Women in Virtual Infrastructure was a great initiative to highlight the superb work by many women in our admittedly overly male dominated industry.

Behind the Scenes at VMware R&D

Having fun on the VMworld Exhibition Floor

VMworld 2012 Book Signing

I only had one session booked today as I wanted to have free time to catch up with people and had to head to the airport.

INF-VSP1168 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure by Aidan Dalgleish, Rawlinson Rivera, Duncan Epping and Chris Colotti all from VMware.
This was a panel discussion moderated by Chris which went through some of the design discussions for architecting a cloud infrastructure and that doesn’t just mean vCloud Director but architecting for any cloud. What was interesting is they concentrated on some of the design decisions that are not necessarily the deepest technical decisions but but things like speaking to customers or your internal IT users to properly find out their requirement and mapping out the constraints such as hardware already purchased. They suggested always relooking at your previous best practices assumptions as with each new release of vSphere things change such as recommended sizes of LUNs, VMs per core or how you lay out resource pools.

They went through conceptualising your design by actually drawing the building blocks of your cloud infrastructure which makes it easier to explain the benefits of your approach to bosses and also the techies. This could include the hardware and software building blocks but also for example the provisioning process.

It’s also important to look at the environment today and not just architect a new design in isolation but use the current infrastructure and processes as a base.

They went through some of the compute considerations as how many VMs you could run per host so you can understand how many eggs in a basket which impacts availability and maintenance time to vMotion machines around on massive hosts. Networks are generally not a bottleneck especially with 10GbE. For storage which is the component which most often has performance issues, lots of attention needs to be given to working out IOPS.

It’s all over

I’ve met an amazing bunch of people. Being able to attend in San Francisco has been incredible and having the chance to put names to faces and twitter names and meet new people has been great. Far too many people to mention. Thanks to those who spotted me and came over to say hi. The community is alive!

Well, that’s pretty much the end of VMworld for me in San Francisco. Far too much to see in far too little time, I’m looking forward to catching up on some sleep if the twins let me and then catching up on all the things I didn’t manage to see in person.

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