I have seen what appears to be the VMware person who schedules sessions a few times now. This leads me to believe VMware is aware of the overflow of interested people. I have tried to sell my spot in line for $20-$100 with no luck. People seem to think they have paid their due to sit down in a session, I agree.

VMware we love you. We just really want to hear what you have to say!

Bookmark to

VMworld 2010 so far has been informative. It’s obvious in my first few sessions that VMware is serious about cloud computing. Most of my sessions have either shown or eluded to upcoming cloud oriented products and tools from VMware. They appear to even be providing the software we will need to really run our own private clouds. This appears to heavily depend on orchestrator. Keep an eye our for vCloud Director and the vCloud api.

I would be happier if they would allow us to schedule sessions as the lines are quite long to get into sessions. Only one session so far today has been full before I got there.

Breakfast was light, I was hungry. Lunch was a little on the light side, and no water? Coffee was good but seems to have disappeared now. Recycling is big this year and that is welcomed.

The conference bag is a nice backpack. My pocket guide took me to the wrong room; I will have to check my conference bag for the bigger book because I didn’t see it last night. I’m a winner for CSC’s little flyer game. We’ll see what I really have won later. I think they have won some contact info .

Bookmark to

Last night I spent two hours talking to a couple of developers from the Site Recovery Manager group. They turned out to be excellent people who listened to my experiences with SRM. I felt empowered as a small voice for the SRM user base. They were already well aware of some of the issues I addressed, others seemed to spark their interest.

IP customization obviously needs work. An enterprise class user interface is needed and it should not look like a spreadsheet. We talked about policy and rule based ip customization. This would work well in my environment since I change the 2nd and 3rd octet. For example in site A you may have the ip address 10.20.30.40. In site B this machine would have its ip changed to 10.40.130.40. The 10.40.30.0/24 network is already in use as a server vlan (vlan 30) there. Policy or rule based, in the inventory mappings possibly, would let me say that I want the destination ip to always have 100 added to the 3rd octet and use 40 for the 2nd octet if the 2nd octet is 20. Then I would never have to do anything else for ip’s. Of course exceptions and additional expressions would be awesome.

Failback is another key point. Currently SRM is a one way product. You set it all up, test your plan to prove success, and you wait for an event that justifies hitting that red run button. Now you are up and running in a new and strange place, but with no easy way back. You have to create your ip customizations and build your protection group and recovery plans. The ability to do all of this ahead of time needs to be there. Your protection group should have a failover and a failback plan section of the recovery plan. Your configurations should be stored in both sites. It would be nice to be able to test the failback as well, however this could get complicated I would think.

Deep recovery plan testing is something you can do now, but it requires considerable development on the customer end. Of course I am talking about proving your recovery plan beyond simply having the virtual machine power up. A virtual machine is useless! It’s what we have running in them that matters most. Exchange, Citrix, DNS, Active Directory, Oracle, or SQL insert any number of applications and services you may use, these are what you are really after. You can write your own scripts to check that these function. Then have exit codes from the scripts that let SRM say if a VM had an error and thus the DR plan. It would be excellent if VMWare provided these scripts for the default installations of major applications like Exchange or SQL. In addition a place for the VMWare user community to post their own scripts. I would really like to see more than just checking for a process to be running, but will take anything. This would also lead us into scheduling DR tests in the middle of the night or weekend. We can sleep while the systems make sure the DR plan is good once a week. Notify of results with an email you check on Monday. I think this is the future of DR tests. If VMWare doesn’t do it someone else will.

Test bubbles are also something I would like to see improved. Currently the test bubble is there just to allow testing to work on a single ESX host. You can create an isolated vlan (OSI layer 2) to allow VM’s to communicate across ESX hosts. However there is no built in solution to allow for routing. We have tackled this at my shop with a linux machine running in the recovery site as a VM. It has 4 virtual nics and I have created 3 isolated vlans for testing my servers. The fourth virtual nic is available if needed to allow internet connectivity to the machines for testing. This allows me to have a 3 subnet test bubble with routing inside of it. VMWare could package up a quick appliance with a web interface that you could configure all of the subnets and it would create virtual nics for you. There are obvious issues that could come up if you allow your test machines to communicate with production or the internet. An example would be an email server brought up in test allowed to connect to internet and delivering email even the it’s production twin already did.

I would like to give a big THANK YOU to the developers standing at the SRM station in the VMWare booth. It was a pleasure speaking to you. I really do appreciate your work on SRM. The product is wonderful and appears to have an excellent future.

Bookmark to

Well folks it is time for the 2nd annual CiRBA grid match at VMWorld!

This year they have taken notice to our methods of winning and have added a twitter draw to their ways to win.

Here is a list of what you can win.
1. Twitter Draw $250 Best Buy gift card. September 4th, 2009.
2. Daily Draw $500 Best Buy gift card. September 1-3, 2009.
3. Grand Prize $1000 Best Buy gift card. September 3, 2009.

So everyone take a picture so we can match up these grids.

Here is mine.

Bookmark to

VMWorld organizers,

I hope you take the suggestions of the attendees. More labs were needed. The vsphere performance lab was slap full each time I tried to get in. Many of us were turned away. Then we attempted to get into other labs and they were each full or past the start time and the conference workers would not let additional people in. The only other activity available at the time was the self paced labs. The line for the self paced labs had about 400 people in it.

More content is required to keep us busy on Monday’s. I eventually did make it into two labs but wish to attend more. We will just skip talking about the no lunch on Monday issue.

/rant

Bookmark to

Well I am here in San Francisco for VMWorld 2009. If I find any good content I’ll be sure to post it here. If anyone would like to meet up for conversation, white boarding, or to share war stories you can email me tsevmworld2009 at thesystemsengineer dot com.

Bookmark to