Day 4 is typically known as the Hangover, most people are partied out and miss or skip sessions. For that reason there are a lot of repeats on Thursday. The Solutions Expo is closed so everyone working the booth has the option of flying home.
Before we get started I want to mention a few people that I forgot that I met
Peter Learmoth from Netapp
-actually dropped some quick VCAP-DCD tips right before the test
Breakfast – breakfast burrito
Today was SRM day, with three sessions on SRM
BCO1152 vCenter Site Recovery Manager: Architecting a DR Solution
-Pretty good session from Rackspace on architecting a solution with some good best practices. They handed out a cheat sheet which then became somewhat outdated in the next session.
Lunch – choice of beef, veggie, or Peruvian sandwhich
BCO2629 – Site Recovery manager and vSphere Replication: What’s new Technical Deep Dive
My second session with Ken, I am always interested in what’s new with SRM. I was on the Beta (as mentioned before), but things change from Beta to GA. Most improvements are aeouns scale (max 5000 protected vms with 2000 concurrent recoveries). Oh yeh, and there’s this thing called the web client. Now Update Manager is the FINAL thick client hold out.
My WhatsApp blew up 5 minutes before this session ended, they were finally giving away the extra backpacks. By the time I got down to the first floor there was a huge line.
BCO1893 Site Recovery Manager and vCloud Automation Center: Self-service DR Protection for the Software-Defined Data Center
Session with Ben Meadowcraft, the PM that I work with quite often for SRM as well as Lee Dilworth the principal SE for EMEA. We use BMC’s CLM solution (don’t ask me why), so I hope to see if the VCAC integration can be ported to CLM. I also sat down right in front to heckle..along with Ken Wernerburg and Jeff Hunter and GS Khalsa (who’s who of Availability). Ben showed some cool SRM ntegration with the VCAC blueprints..I’m really jelly for that. I want the new API right now!!! You can let the user choose certain items (storage or priority) or hard code that in the priority. VCAC will then place the VM on the correct storage and protection group. Lee then described how to get vCAC to fully recognize the vm again for management (two parts: Changing discovery plus a Special executable to update the expected folder paths). The executable is limited availability, talk to your VMware account rep to get in on it (cloud clean or something like that). I am contemplating doing a guerrilla attack and switch out the other cloud stuff to vCAC.
Overall it was a really session packed day, all SRM!
I’m really glad that I was able to meet a lot of people this year, WAY more than last year. I also interacted with a few readers and some other folks who were not able to attend but were watching Vbrownbags or were reading my recaps. I don’t think I met my goal of really diving into the Solutions Expo this year, every time I stepped in I felt like I only had a little time before next session. I also was less interested in getting swag, just impatient I guess or bored of it. I did attend a lot of TAM sessions but sacrificed a few regular sessions to do so. We just got a TAM this year with our ELA so it was a great benefit. Great experience blogging and tweeting this year as well (though difficult from an iPhone at times). If it wasn’t for failing the DCD I would have had a super awesome VMworld, but now I know, and knowing is half the battle!!!
Anyways, I hope to meet more people at VMworld 2014 Aug 29 – Sep 3 in San Francisco! Not too hyped about the food, but the people and content will be crazy good.