Last year Andrew talked our employer into sending us to VMworld. We followed up that amazing week with several whitepapers, and a year of being ahead of the curve. Apparently we did something right because VMworld 2009 here we come! Last year my goal for the show was to gather a better understanding for how other VI Administrators worked. To assess where we were in both process, and execution. This year I have a stack of stuff I want to get into.
Processes:
I want to find what others use for VM Request/Provisioning? Lab manager Is great but that only covers my developers. What about joe admin or a new customer? Is there anything that competes with lifecycle manager(Quest had to buy something :D). Additionally, we’ve seem to reach a critical mass, and charge back (at least the math behind it) will be of interest to me in particular. While I don’t think we’ll ever charge per division, I would like to be able to show the cost in datacenter capacity every VM is consuming.
Technology:
I chose to skip the first round of VDI… It’s been a year time to look at VMware View. What’s the report card is VDI ready for primetime, or is Citrix still my best bang for the buck, are there any new players I never heard of? Sticking with VDI, anything new in thin clients that I care about (doubtful), but then again you never know. I also need to take a fresh look at I/O virtualization. I spoke with the NextIO guys last year, and left excited, but I never got to that part of our datacenter… Maybe this year. All of that isn’t even addressing any storage, network, but I have a separate list for Cisco, and NetApp!
Dev Day:
I’m really looking forward to Monday. You can keep your NDA, and partner track. I want to spend a day with the other SDK/Automation geeks. Perhaps I can find some fellow PowerShell enthusiast in the crowd.
People:
Finally, I’m hoping to meet you People! Last year I was fairly new to VMware, and was rather uneasy about the whole thing. A year later I’m much more familiar with the Virtualization Community, and I hope to get to meet you in person. Especially, the PowerCLI enthusiast our there… not to be too cocky, but I called it, and while I’m no LucD… I know a thing or two about PowerShell, and would love to talk!
See ya at the show,
~Glenn
Monday |
|
10:45 AM-11:30 AM |
DE-04 |
Developing vApps and Virtual Appliances using VMware Studio 2.0 |
1:30 PM-2:15 PM |
VS-02 |
Hardware Health Monitoring |
2:30 PM-3:30 PM |
VS-03 |
Integration Best Practices for vSphere Web Services SDK |
3:45 PM-4:45 PM |
VS-04 |
vSphere API for Performance Monitoring |
Tuesday |
|
10:00 AM-12:00 PM |
LAB03 |
VMware View Advanced Config & Troubleshooting |
1:30 PM-2:30 PM |
TA3438 |
Top 10 Performance Features of VMware vSphere 4 |
3:00 PM-4:00 PM |
TA2713 |
Safe At Any Speed with VMware DRS & DPM |
4:30 PM-5:30 PM |
TA2623 |
Enhanced Storage VMotion in vSphere 4 |
5:30 PM-7:00 PM |
VM2241 |
Managing vSphere with VMware PowerCLI |
Wednesday |
|
3:00 PM-5:00 PM |
LAB11 |
VMware vCenter Chargeback |
Thursday |
|
11:30 AM-12:30 PM |
TA4341 |
Virtual Network Performance |
3:00 PM-4:00 PM |
TA2650 |
Take PowerCLI to the Next Level |
4:00 PM-5:30 PM |
TA2963 |
ESXtop for Advanced Users |