Breakfast
A slight improvement, pastries and fresh fruit. Others have told me that there was no fruit last year.
VMVillage
Super big with an area for TAM, certification, blogger, vbrownbag, nvidia and more. I think this an upgrade from last year but it feels like it was stuck in th middlenofba giant warehouse. There is also “VMplace” which is a little lounge on the first floor sharing the same space as the breakfast area.
Keynote
It’s all about cross-cloud management!
VMware Cloud Foundation was announced as a private cloud (vSphere/VSAN/NSX + SDDCManager) and/or public cloud (currently Softlayer) play. What to be seen is how the private cloud portion is delivered, aka is this the EVO:SDDC from last year plus SDDCManager and then throwing in Softlayer? Or is it more about the SDDCManager?
VMware Cross-Cloud Services is where I see the most bang for the buck. I believe last year, NSX was discussed as the possible “glue” between VMs in Amazon and those in an on-premises datacenter. That was pretty world-changing, finally a way for VMware to insert itself in-between the customer and Amazon. A year later, VMware seems to have fleshed out that idea. The brief pre-recorded demo showed an interface that can discover Amazon instances (and soon Azure) as well as local vCenter inventory. The tools can analyze traffic flows and present a graphical representation. The user can use the tool to modify NSX distributed firewall rules and see the results in a refreshed graph.
Cloud management isn’t exactly sexy, but the need for multi-cloud management tools is definitely needed.
Lunch
Improvement from last year. There was soup, Salas, BBQ chicken and tritip, potatoes, bread etc. The VMvillage also had “to-go” meals with a different menu.
The one odd thing was that the lunch area was on the second floor in a small corner if the large room with VMvillage. This created some really long lines I think they should have setup downstairs as well and split people between the floors.
Sessions
STO7443R – How did VMware IT Achieve a Non-Disruptive Disaster Recovewry Test in 90 Minutes for 900 Terabytes of Storage and 2000 Production Virtual Machines
Great session from VMware’s internal teal describing how they setup SRM to DR 2000 VMs. Some nuggets I gleaned:
Recovery Plans were groups by order (infra, db, app/web) and amount of storage (number of luns). This provided an order for their playbook.
It seems like their general plan was to swing the VLANs over to the DR site so that they would not need to re-ip any of the VMs. For test, they used NSX VxLANS on the recovery site to recreate the physical networking. One issue was that there was no way for a user to do application testing since the VMs were on a private space. VMware solved this by adding Horizon View pools connected to the NSX networking and a View Security Server that had a leg in prod and dr networks.
TAM10672 – vCenter and Platform Service Controller High Availability – The future of vCenter Availability
NDA
TAM10660 – SDDC Manager – The Elastic, Self healing Automated Private Cloud
Session didn’t happen, the speaker was ill
INF8465 – Extreme Performance Series: Power Management’s Impact on Performance
I was really expecting to be told what would be the best power management setup to get MAXIMUM performance. What was presented was the power management settings to use to save power and some info on what each of the settings does. I did learn that you want the deepest C states enabled if you use Turbo Boost. Turbo Boost turns up the clock speed on certain cores if the other cores on that socket are not being utilized.
STO-7875 – A day in the Life of a VSAN I/O
Nice session from Duncan Epping and John Nicolson about how I/Os traverse a VSAN cluster (both hybrid and all-flash).
Dinner
Veranda at Four Seasons sponsored by VMware marketing folks who provided a round-table discussion for a few customers to discuss SDDC deployments.
Late Night
I stopped by the VMware Code Hackathon since it was in my hotel. Some good natured ribbing at each other during the presentations. I wish I was there earlier so that I could have contributed to one of the projects.