VMware

I saw an interesting tweet on my way to the conference, someone said "why is the VMworld conference not virtual ?"  At first thought that seems to make sense. With everyone focused on cost savings, why not hold the entire conference from the VMworld.com location ?

After spending the afternoon at the exhibitor booths this thought was still running through my head ... would I have been able to meet as many people and have as many meaningful discussions ?  I think not.

Then came time for the tweetup at the VMware communities lounge and put some faces to all the names I've seen online.  It was great to see people's faces light up as they made the connections with online names to real names.

The real reason I feel this conference would not be as effective virtually is when we started having the "real" conversations later into the night.  When you remove the "My Boss/HR/Press/Competitors" might be watching factor that you get with online conversations, you really get to hear what is on people's minds. They say what they really think about a particular technology and solution.  Those conversations are priceless and I thank many of the people I have met for being frank and honest. 

Social media and the internet may have made it easier to connect online, but there are still times when you have to "press the flesh".  Looking forward to having many more of these conversations with all of you this week !

But wait, maybe if the run across the Golden Gate bridge had been virtual, I might have been able to join and finish it without a sweat ! :-)

It's only a few weeks until VMworld.  All of us in the Dell TechCenter, Jeff, Kong, and myself are getting excited as this is one of the best conferences of the year. 

We have decked out the VMworld Dell Virtual Exhibitor booth in preparation for the trip.  Be sure to stop by for the latest information on our offerings and potential booth give-a-ways.

If you can't make the show, keep up with us on Twitter.

If you can make the show, we'd love to meet up with you.  We are evolving the Dell TechCenter and would love to hear from you what we can do to make it a valuable one-stop resource for virtualization, storage, power, systems management, and of course servers.

The plan is to pick your brains for an hour on Wednesday Sept 2nd from 4-5pm then get some refreshments and head on over to the VMworld party.  We've got limited room, so respond quick.  Send me an email (scott_hanson@dell.com) with your contact details and I'll get together a list and contact you with the exact details. 

Don't worry, if we get more responses than we have room ... you are still invited for refreshments afterwards.  Be sure to follow us on Twitter and I'll announce the location to meetup for the tweetup.

Looking forward to meeting up with you all !

Virtualization is key to any efficient datacenter deployed today.  The days of one-server one-application are gone.  We've virtualized workloads for years with the next wave being the *cloud*.

At the physical level, there have been several innovations that make cloud computing a reality.  First the ability to move workloads seamlessly across machines, with technology like VMware's VMotion.  Then there is the ability to move storage pools with Storage VMotion as an example from VMware.  These technologies allow the movement of applications and storage between machines, but what about the I/O ?

That's where Xsigo fits.  Using a single Host Channel Adapter (HCA) you can connect one cable to the host and define as many as 64 virtual HBAs and NICs.  Xsigo is virtual I/O. 

When I was first introduced to the Xsigo solution I thought, "Ohh great another proprietary fat pipe solution".  Once I was able to see the Xsigo Director in action with VMware, it made more sense.  "Ahhh, I just cable one time then I can create and move I/O around my virtualization cluster as I see fit". I also learned that it was not proprietary, but built on industry standards.

With Xsigo, as I move my workload around the virtualization cluster I can add more I/O resources dynamically, adding performance as my applications demand it.

See a demo of our Xsigo unit in the Dell TechCenter lab.

VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) is one of the new features in vSphere 4.0. FT provides continuous availability for applications by creating a secondary, live shadow instance of a virtual machine (VM) that is in virtual lockstep with the primary VM instance. It builds upon VMware High Availability (HA) so if you have HA in working order, you are only a few mouse clicks away from enabling FT. But be aware if you run into errors, some of the error messages can be cryptic and searching for answers can lead you to suggestions that may worsen your situation. When in doubt, roll back to HA and make sure that it works. This will eliminate the most troublesome issues which are usually related to networking.

Please visit the Dell TechCenter wiki page on VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance.  There is also a Dell TechCenter wiki page that shows step by step screen captures of FT and the failover test against an FT-protected VM.

The Dell TechCenter team is hosting a web chat today at 3PM CST on Microsoft Exchange 2007 on VMware vSphere 4.0. The TechCenter team will be joined by Todd Muirhead, VMware Staff Performance engineer, as he discusses the results of his soon to be published whitepaper. The infrastructure consisted of Dell blade servers attached to Dell | EqualLogic PS series storage arrays. Please join us as we open the discussion on the features of vSphere 4.0 and how they further benefit Microsoft Exchange 2007 deployments on Dell hardware.