The 2009 Intel Developer Forum (IDF2009) the week of September 21, 2009 in San Francisco, California will feature a wide array of experts and visionaries to discuss insights, innovations, and leading edge technologies and trends. This discussion focuses on highlights from the event, including keynotes, technical sessions, and technology showcases.

Technical Community - Background Reading

Chat Transcript

erson Scotth, were you the only guy from the Dell TechCenter at IDF2009?
Dell-ScottH Yes, which meant I had time for more tweets :-)
Dell-ScottH Tabasco, what would you like to discuss?
tabasco72 I am looking for deployment of operating systems through SCCM
Dell-ScottH Ah, we have some experts on that, but won't be on discussion today. Ramseyg is the man on that topic. He keeps up most of the pages on our site about that topic
tabasco72 I wish I could get some help with that subject, but I kept getting the run around with our Dell tech and never got any answers
vmdoug Hey, do I get points for being early?
Dell-ScottH Yes +10 for you :-)
tabasco72 Have a good one guys
Dell-ScottH Tabasco, have you seen this page: www.delltechcenter.com/page/sccm+-+system+center+configuration+manager?
tabasco72 Yes
Dell-ScottH Submit a question on the site, and I'll make sure Greg (Ramseyg) takes a look. He is part of the team that manages all 80,000 laptops in Dell
tabasco72 Sad thing is I have had no training on this software, and upper management just threw me to the wolves and said get it working. Gotta love that…
Dell-ScottH Oh yeah. MyITforum is a good site too. It's not as simple as a CD installa—Next, Next, Next—I tried that :-) ... uber failure
tabasco72 LOL, no its not. I’ll submit a question to Ramseyg; thanks for the direction
erson Tabasco72, look into Microsoft Developer Toolkit 2010 (MDT 2010) as well...that will help you a lot
tabasco72 LOL, well yeah, they don’t want that working on our network they have their own PXE boot service.
erson You build your images with preferably MDT 2010 and use SCCM to deploy for ZTI. Deploy with WDS for LTI
Dell-ScottH Thanks for the RT, Doug
Dell-d_glynn Tabasco72, consider it an opportunity to excel
Dell-ScottH Looks like Kong and Jeff don't want to join my chat :-( Have one fun week in SF and this is the payback I get
tabasco72 <--- Windows admin in a Unix world
nom_de_guerre Hi Scott, Sorry, I switched tabs and got booted. :)
vmdoug I think Jeff is still trying to figure out his whiteboard drawing
Dell-ScottH No problem!
tabasco72 Take care
Dell-ScottH Yup, you too
Dell-ScottH There's Kong
Dell-d_glynn Yeah, it is a tough learning curve
Dell-ScottH Yeah, we should probably devote a whole month series to SCCM too :-)
Dell-KongY Hi, the Ohio State graduate: @vmdoug
vmdoug I graduated from Western Illinois University, not OSU. I just live in Columbus ;-)
Dell-KongY Ah
Dell-KongY W. Illinois, what city is that in?
vmdoug Macomb, IL, surrounded by corn
Dell-ScottH Okay, from the light turnout I guess everyone got my #idf09 tweets every two minutes from last week :-)
Dell-KongY Too bad everyone isn't here
Dell-ScottH <---- Yelling at Jeff for not logging into chat!
vmdoug So Scott, is there anything you didn't tweet?
Dell-KongY Because Scott was going to unveil the 12G pics
Dell-ScottH Yes a few things
Dell-KongY And no, you won't get Rickrolled :)
Dell-ScottH Save them for the end
erson Who said 12G?
Dell-ScottH Make you’ll stick around
Dell-KongY Maybe you might
Dell-ScottH Ssshhh!
vmdoug Ssshhh
Dell-ScottH There we go! The two people physically with me in the room finally joined!
VeeamMark Did I miss anything exciting?
erson Exciting: http://blogs.intel.com/technology/nehalem-ex_steve_pawlowski_idf.pdf
VeeamMark And now Scott leaves…
Dell-JeffS Nice, we join and Scott leaves
VeeamMark Was it something I said?
nom_de_guerre LOL, they join and Scott leaves...
vmdoug Left-click, Scott!
Dell-ScottH Arrrggghhh!
nom_de_guerre :)
Dell-ScottH LOL
VeeamMark Might need to check the number of simultaneous connections allowed from this wireless access point
Dell-d_glynn Does Scott need training on right-clicking?
VeeamMark We launched a Denial of Scott attack on it
Dell-JeffS To catch up, click Action, Recent Room History
Dell-ScottH Never a dull moment...love you guys! Really, mean it. Jeez
Dell-KongY Scott has an excuse... he's running on allergy medicines right now
Dell-ScottH Did I enter the sarcasm room
Dell-ScottH Okay, my fellow dorks
Dell-KongY So you might hear talk of 13G :)
nom_de_guerre I will say that this UI does not allow for good multitasking
virtualTodd I'm in the right place, Dorkville!
Dell-ScottH Okay, looks like a bunch of the regulars. You all know the drill
VeeamMark Well, tell us about the Intel Developers Forum
Dell-ScottH So I'm offically kicking off this chat
erson We do
Dell-ScottH I summed up some of the things of note in this blog post: http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/dell_tech_center/archive/2009/09/24/idf-2009-highlights.aspx
Dell-ScottH Most of the content this year was around consumer devices. Seemed to be the biggest buzz. There were a few sessions on Nehalem-EX. Erson, you have that link again?
erson Hmmm, your images on those Nehalem-EX slides is in the pdf I posted above...
Dell-ScottH We did a soft announce of the Latitude Z. Unfortunately, the Intel VP on stage kinda glazed over it :-), but I was able to touch it, and it is one "envy"-ous machine—“envy” is the code name
erson Did you want me to post the link again: http://blogs.intel.com/technology/nehalem-ex_steve_pawlowski_idf.pdf
Dell-ScottH Yes, thanks
erson Now that everyone probably is here
Dell-ScottH I attended quite a few sessions. If you have the time, there are some good tweets: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&ands=&phrase=&ors=&nots=&tag=idf09⟨=en&from=dellservergeek&to=&ref=&near=&within=15&units=mi&since=&until=&rpp=25
Dell-ScottH Read them from last to first; ignore the Helicopter tweets :-)
Dell-ScottH They also unveiled the Atom Developer Program. It will be an application store for netbooks to begin with
erson Did they say anything about Westmere-EP (the 32 nm hexacore followup of the Xeon 5500-series)?
Dell-ScottH The cool thing is that the developers can also sell components and not just applications. They briefly mentioned Westmere-EP, and they had a 22 nm wafer on stage too. I think the application store is going to be a really big deal. Dell, Acer, and Asus have already joined. Current install base for netbooks is in the range of 40 million. Here's link: http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/
erson People on XtremeSystems are already running around with Gulftown (the LGA1366 desktop version), so I'm assuming that Dell is already playing with it
Dell-ScottH Oh yeah. They also showed a working Sandybridge system
VeeamMark Hopefully there will be an application for everything
erson Any word on if Nehalem-EX will be released during the upcoming Q4 or in Q1 2010?
Dell-ScottH One of the other interesting enterprise things discussed was SSD drives, and they showed a demo on stage of 1.076 m IOPS on 7 SSD prototype boards
erson If just Dell, HP and others would use anything other than Samsung SSDs
Dell-ScottH In the Ex session he was saying late December, but since he was a developer, I'm assuming that he meant that's when Intel would be done, and take a *little* longer to get the systems out the door
erson Wonder who makes the EqualLogic SSDs
Dell-ScottH Same Iometer workload would take roughly 5,000 disks. Then they showed the savings in power, heat, etc.
erson Too bad that SAS 6 Gb doesn't really cut it. Slap an SSD on the PCIe and you get to write speed with three e’s
Dell-ScottH The SSDs in our EqualLogic PS6000 are Samsung. All the IDF sessions are posted here: http://en.community.dell.com/controlpanel/blogs/posteditor.aspx/www.intel.com/go/idfsessions
erson I think EMC, NetApp, and others are often using SSDs by STEC
Dell-ScottH Some really good information if you can peel off the time
VeeamMark I love Samsung SSDs
Dell-ScottH Here's a link to the pics I took at the show: www.delltechcenter.com/photos/album/137890/idf%202009
erson Veeamark, why?
VeeamMark Because they are in the EqualLogic boxes
Dell-ScottH Oh great, here comes a circular reference. We also demo'd Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) over at the Citrix booth: http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/press-releases/2009-09-22-sr-iov.aspx?ref=rss
erson But the EqualLogic should probably be even faster with Intel SSDs
VeeamMark And anything EqualLogic is good
Dell-ScottH The Intel adapters showed great throughput (almost line speed) and CPU utility was less than 50 percent; with no SR-IOV the CPU utility on the host was a little over 90 percent. Here's Rich talking about the solution: www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7vch19mung
Dell-ScottH One of the coolest consumer things I saw was 3DTV. Yes, you have to wear the goofy glasses :-)
erson What is the difference between SR-IOV and VMDq?
jerrypele I lost the Youtube link due to a popup blocker
nom_de_guerre Scott, BCG!
Dell-ScottH There was a company called 3ality that was showing some of the content and their cameras; similar to what I remember in the early days of HDTV and people talking about content availability and wide adoption
jerrypele Can you resend the link?
erson They do sound pretty much the same, but SR-IOV is a PCI-SIG specification and VMDq is currently something that only Intel offers
Dell-ScottH www.3alitydigital.com/, and here's Rich's link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7vch19mung
Dell-ScottH Here's brief overview from Intel on VMDq and SR-IOV: http://software.intel.com/file/1920
jerrypele Thanks
erson Scotth, just read that pdf, and it's pretty good
Dell-KongY Yeah really good stuff there Scott
erson :)
JasonPowell Greetings. Think I'm late to the party
Dell-ScottH Read the transcript tomorrow :-)
JasonPowell I'm signing some Veeam paperwork :-)
Dell-ScottH Cool, now you can bug Vmdoug even more :-)
JasonPowell We probably won't buy servers again for three years. PowerEdge R710 servers are sweeto. The new latitude Z looks tasty!
wcnichols Anyone have a good article on how vCPUs work in VMware ESXi?
erson BTW, you guys should make a blog post about the excellent technical guidebooks that have been released for at least the PowerEdge R610 and PowerEdge R710
erson www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/server-poweredge-r610-tech-guidebook.pdf
erson www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/server-poweredge-r710-tech-guidebook.pdf
Dell-KongY Thanks for sharing, Erson. Large multi-socket systems increase the need for power and cooling plus maintenance, as Scott mentioned
Dell-ScottH ah, did not know about those...will do
erson They are great, and you should really make those for every server
Dell-ScottH Hey Todd, any great articles on vCPUs and ESXi?
erson They should really help for getting people to brush up on new servers
Dell-KongY @erson, agreed. There is a market for it. If that became the standard, Dell would re-enter the > 4S space
Dell-KongY @erson, great feedback. Will feed that back into Dell PG
needcaffeine For clusters, better to do multiple 2-socket servers or minimal quad-socket systems? Wouldn't quad sockets put more load on the MOBO?
erson Scotth, a bird sang it into my ear a couple of weeks ago
Dell-ScottH @needscaffine HPC clusters?
wcnichols Scott, I have a PowerEdge R610, and I am only going to be hosting 2 VMs on it. It is a dual quad, and I want to make sure I use all the resources that I have
Dell-ScottH So you are thinking of 4 vCPUs per VM?
needcaffeine No VM
erson My Dell rep has started asking me what new server stuff Dell is releasing :)
ceri Hey, Kong. sorry, bit distracted :)
Dell-ScottH Nice
wcnichols Yeah that’s what I was thinking, but wouldn't that consume all the cores for the guests
Dell-ScottH Define load on MOBO. What are the VMs going to be doing?
wcnichols Dual Debian Lenny with Apache and Mysql. I assigned it two vCPUs each, but I don't know if I am wasting the processor because of it
nom_de_guerre Grrr...I got kicked off again. :(
erson needcaffeine, Nehalem-EX has enough QPIs so that every socket can connect to all the other three sockets. So no risk of overloading a single bus like the case with the previous generations of Xeon MP
ceri When is Nehalem-EX available?
erson /me is guessing early Q1
needcaffeine Wouldn't it be better to have multiple Guests running on a cluster of 2-socket servers versus having 1/2 of them in quad sockets, thus increasing memory, I/O load on a quad?
virtualTodd wcnichols, the Nehalem processors are pretty good, so you may not need 4 vCPUs per VM; what is CPU percent utilization like?
ceri Erson, that would figure. Just after I deploy a bunch of new stuff :)
erson There has been hints about it on the Web and Pawlowski seems to have said pretty much the same at IDF
Dell-ScottH Todd, wasn't there a great paper from you guys on process scheduling? Can't find it right now
wcnichols Virtualtodd, it’s not that I am starving for resources, I just want to make sure all of the resources I have are available for the guests to use
erson Do realize though that the Nehalem-eX (most likely Xeon 7500 series) won't be cheap. Probably at least around four times the cost of a middle-end Xeon 5500 series
ceri It's cool, I can't wait around for new stuff anyway
erson Scotth, can you elaborate on the using-only-two-sockets-but-still-use-all-DIMM-slots technology? Is that a standard feature with the chipset, or is there any Dell voodoo involved?
Dell-ScottH @erson, don't think that was mentioned
Dell-KongY @wcnichols, you could always affinitize your resources, but that has to be weighed with the other features like VMotion and HA; if you have homogeneous servers, affinity is a possibility if you want to assign entire cores to a VM and its workload
virtualTodd The process scheduling paper was posted on our peformance blog a few weeks ago: http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2009/08/vmware-vsphere-4-the-cpu-scheduler-in-vmware-esx-4.html
Dell-ScottH The Resource Management guide is also worth a read: www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_resource_mgmt.pdf
wcnichols Gotcha, thanks
Dell-KongY @needcaffeine, it depends on your workload profile and peripheral needs
wcnichols BTW, is this ESXi free, so no fancy features?
needcaffeine Still not sure why you'd buy a quad-socket box. Wouldn't multiple 1U boxes be better (unless you need the DAS)?
erson You only get fancy features for free with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V ;)
virtualTodd It is fine to assign all the vCPUs, but it will be more difficult to assign them out later if you decide to spin up more VMs on that host
erson Like live migration (VMotion) and clustering (HA)
wcnichols Virtualtodd, I understand, they don't plan on it
Dell-KongY @virtualtodd, yet another consideration
virtualTodd There have also been some testing results that show performance is actually a little bit worse when you have more vCPUs than you need (fairly small percentage, usually, so probably no big worry)
Dell-ScottH @needcaffeine, I'm partial to building a farm from 2U boxes...you'll usually get better pricing because that's where all the vendors volume is at
Dell-ScottH And with the newest processors, there is so much more performance
wcnichols The switch to Windows Server R2 Hyper-V from ESXi would require a few more GB of memory just for the host right? If I boot from flash that is
erson Do you really need a 4U box these days for a 4-socket server? Are there two layers to hold all those 64 DIMM slots?
Dell-ScottH No, get a blade :-) With four sockets you need lots of I/O...would be a ton of complainers for 2U boxes with limited I/O
Dell-KongY @needcaffeine, quad-socket box for more PCIe add-in cards
Dell-ScottH Thanks to everyone for joining us again...as always the off-topic discussion is always better. :-) Feel free to stay on as long as you like
jerrypele Thanks
Dell-KongY IDwhat? :)
Dell-ScottH The transcript will be posted tomorrow
erson What about the new PowerEdge R210 and PowerEdge R510...should they have been released on Dell.com by now?
Dell-KongY Thanks, everyone
erson Single-socket Xeon servers for those who haven't read the press release
Dell-KongY Please join us next week as we will have Ron Oglesby, Dell Practice Executive for Virtualization joining us
Dell-KongY One of his articles: http://bit.ly/66pu8
Dell-KongY Ron is a renowned author, blogger, and virtualization expert
Dell-ScottH Gotta jump off and solve a network problem in the lab...thanks to everyone for joining!
jerrypele Thanks, Scott
erson Great as always, Scotth
Dell-KongY Thanks, Scott
virtualTodd Thanks
nom_de_guerre Thanks, Scott
sixth Looks like I am late for the chat
erson Yes. Transcript available tomorrow or on Thursday
sixth Darn! Awesome
erson Generally, we talked about stuff that happened at IDF 2009
sixth Anything good? I read some stuff
erson Wait and I'll give you some URLs
sixth Okay awesome!
erson Scotth made this blogpost about his experience of IDF2009: http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/dell_tech_center/archive/2009/09/24/idf-2009-highlights.aspx
erson So that sums up most of we talked about. We also talked about the upcoming Nehalem-EX processor from Intel. It will probably be released in Q1 2010. It will probably be called Xeon 7500 series and is an octacore CPU with hyperthreading for a total of 16 logical CPUs per socket
sixth Okay, awesome. Octacore...
sixth Any updates for the PowerEdge R710/PowerEdge R610?
erson PowerEdge R710/PowerEdge R610 is for Nehalem-EP, which was released as the Xeon 5500 series
erson This new CPU is for 4-socket systems
sixth Okay gotcha. So no changes there
erson But you can choose to populate only two sockets and still use 32 DIMM slots. The PowerEdge R710/ PowerEdge R610 will be upgraded ~Q2 2010 with hexacore CPUs. Have you seen the new technical guides for PowerEdge R610/PowerEdge R710?
sixth No, I haven’t. Do you happen to have a URL handy?
asdsa How can I register for the Unix to x86 Migration session?
erson www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/server-poweredge-r610-tech-guidebook.pdf
erson www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/server-poweredge-r710-tech-guidebook.pdf
erson They are most excellent
sixth Can’t wait for those hexcacore processors. Awesome...thanks much
erson They are called Westmere-EP so you should keep a lookout for that
sixth Westmere, that rings the bell; now I remember reading that
erson Not sure whether Westmere-EP will be a new revision of PowerEdge R710, or if you could drop one into the current PowerEdge R710; depends on the chipset. I'm hoping for 10 Gb LOMs as well
sixth Awesome
erson Westmere is the Intel "tock" for Nehalem, which means they are going from 45 nm that Nehalem used down to 32 nm
sixth There wasn’t any discussion (not at IDF), but in general about a new revision for the PowerVault MD3000i?
erson Nope, haven't heard anything about that. Have you?
sixth No nothing. JW, if there was any internal talk or any discussion anywhere
erson If you want something like the PowerVault MD3000i you should really look into EqualLogic PS4000E. It has way more potential than the PowerVault MD3000i. A bit more expensive, but well worth it
sixth Yeah, key word, a bit more “expensive” :-) Plus, I need 15,000 drives, so the EqualLogic PS4000 wouldn’t work
erson EqualLogic PS4000XV has 15,000 drives
sixth Yes, yes XV. My mistake
erson But yes, more expensive than the PowerVault MD3000i, but like I said it really makes up for it in performance and features
sixth The E wouldn’t work :-) Yeah, I know. I am trying to get one
erson No, E is always only SATA
sixth It’s in the budget for next year
sixth Was Kong in the chat today?
erson Talk to your Dell rep to get an NDA with Dell, and they can let you in on what’s on the horizon for the PowerVault MD3000i
erson Yes
sixth Yeah, I had an NDA for the release plans on the PowerEdge R710 :-)
sixth Well, I am checking out; thanks for the information, Erson. See you next Tuesday. I’ll try not to miss that one!
erson NP, see you next week