VMworld 2009

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 ! :-)

Let’s start off by stating that Unified Fabric is not 10GbE alone.  Unified Fabric can be defined as a wire-once backbone that unifies computing and I/O resources.  And this includes the complete integration of 10GbE, iSCSI, and FCoE.  The main idea is that 10GbE can provide the infrastructure to run both iSCSI and FCoE.   

Both 10GbE and iSCSI are standards.  However, FCoE is still being finalized as a standard.  The missing piece for FCoE is DCB, DCE or CEE.  Regardless of the name, they all represent the same thing- flow control in the network.  So what options does one have while waiting for standardization?  The answer is quite simple- consolidate your Ethernet to 10GbE since it can support both iSCSI and FCoE.  And this will ease the transition towards unifying your data center fabric once the IEEE standards are defined.

On the storage side, on 8/25 Dell announced 10GbE support for the Dell/EMC CX4 series storage arrays (See Greg White’s blog posting) and has been demonstrating 10GbE on them at VMWorld 2009.  On the networking front, Dell has announced a new high-port count switch, a pass-thru blade I/O module and a mezzanine card that all support 10GbE.  All these enhancements will provide more bandwidth and more options for virtualized environments. Dell is also the only vendor providing support for advanced features enabled by VMware’s vStorage APIs for both the #1 iSCSI (Dell EqualLogic) and #1 Fibre Channel (CX4) SANs providing advanced vStorage APIs for Multipathing (MEM) support.  The MEM allows customers to intelligently use all paths between the SAN and vSphere 4.0 for improved scalability (think about 10GbE with the MEM!).  These are examples of what Dell is doing with 10GbE.  In addition, VMware vSphere features such as VMotion, storage VMotion, HA, FT, and DRS will benefit from the larger pipe.  The net effect makes the data center more efficient to deploy and manage.  Overall, 10GbE will be an important enabler of data center infrastructures and Dell is actively integrating it into our solutions, including the adoption of computing pods.  Computing pods are designed to offer IT organizations significantly enhanced data center capabilities, including efficient aggregation and networking, increased space savings, unified maintenance and training, and simplified infrastructure design and deployment. Redundant, high-bandwidth connectivity internal to blade enclosures within the pod helps speed communication and reduce congestion on the core data center network layer.  We see 10GbE as a key enabling technology to a more modular, standardized, building block approach to the data center.