EMC World Day 2 & 3 Wrap-Up

One post, two parts. Not because they’re short, but because the days were so intense I only had a chance to jot down notes & start to expand on them now.

TL;DR – For those at the show, you’ll understand. For those that couldn’t make it… you’ll want to stay tuned to EMC & VMware… Big things coming.

Day 2 – Who Peed in Your Resource Pool

Day 2 was interesting on a number of accounts:

Keynote:

• It costs VMWare .06 per vm per hour to provision a VM.
• The hypervisor is no longer the secret sauce. That is now in management and orchestration
• Real time statistical analysis of your environment will help you identify the kid that peed in the resource pool.
• There are lots of new animals in the IT zoo (read: end user Devices)

VMWare End User Computing 2015

This one identified the state of things today, and how they’ll play out into the future. Unfortunately, I’ve still not made sense of my notes. I figure that’s because he iPad autocorrected them for me. Blah.

vLab – VSI

Boom! This lab was slick in that it walked you through installing, configuring & working with the EMC VSI plugin for vCenter. The plugin itself operated slowly, but this was more due to the nested VM nature of the lab.

Chad Sakac!

Chad did a “Social City” session after which I cornered him to ask about a BrownBag. I’ll have to work out some scheduling… but, expect some “face melting awesomesauce” coming to a BrownBag near you.

Day 3 – Hookah Smoking Caterpillars

A bit tired after yesterday, but some additional things talked about/covered that I came for.

PowerPath/VE Ask the Experts

This was a panel session, with a large number of folks from the PowerPath team. The questions were all over the place, so I’ll try to highlight a few that were interesting:

• Q: “I have customers who try to migrate either the quorum or MSCS volumes without taking the other node down, this makes pain. Is there a way to have the PowerPath migration tools notify the user of this pitfalls?” A: Crowd: “Wait what?” A: Panel: “Suggestion Taken”
• Q: “I have an issue when deploying PowerPath/VE to ESXi hosts that causes a PSOD. There is an open issue, but can you provide some perspective?” A: Engineering is working on it. The issue is a hard one to pin down as there don’t seem to be many consistencies with it, but they’re digging in.
• Q: “Does PowerPath/VE Support RDMs on Virtual Machines?” A: Yes… No… well, we’ll need to follow-up on that, here’s a card.

Virtual Storage Overview & Direction

I’m just going to leave these here and let you make of them what you will. I think you’ll find them curious indeed.

Disclaimer: EMC stated at the beginning of the session that well, these are “vision” slides. The future is uncertain, so take them with a grain of salt.

Nerd Herd

This was a “Social City” event put on / arranged by NerdBlurt (Luigi Danakos / @NerdBlurt). The panelists:

The conversation went round and round on the various bits of the show that each liked, thoughts on the vision, etc. I believe there will be a recording of the session here.

Summary:

On the whole, I didn’t get to a number of the sessions I was after, but still feel I got a huge amount of info from the ones I did make, as well as from the conversations with other expert folks at the show. The conversation with the PowerPath/VE engineers on deployment, FlexLM, and VUM told me quite a bit about what I rolled in there for. Additionally I got to corner any number of vSpecalists & other experts both VMware & EMC alike to get some direct questions addressed.

Further the show floor had any number of interesting things outside the typical key players. There was a small time SSD player with whom I had a great conversation (he wasn’t giving away an iPad2, so I got to talk to him for a bit). The storage/virt space is going to be interesting for a while to come & it’s good to see the small guys innovating also.

Pool Pee picture by this guy here.