Category Archives: Special Events
Ahead at EMC World
I just wanted to give you all a quick preview of what Ahead is doing at EMC World this year, and provide some opportunities to meet some of us in person.
Booth
Ahead is again sponsoring a booth in the solutions pavilion. It will be staffed by some of our executives, as well as members of our engineering staff.
Magazine
Ahead has published a magazine that will distributed as part of the conference materials. It has some of our recent solution briefs, as well as some commentary by engineering on the state of the industry.
Partner/TC Conference
A number of our engineers will be attending the partner conference this year, as well as sessions in the EMC TC conference. We also have several NDA sessions set up with product management as ...
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H108: Lab Launch – Experience a True Hybrid Cloud
This Wednesday will be a big day at Ahead as we launch our second-generation lab. Those who have been reading our blog probably know we have been architecting and building this for the last two quarters.
I’m often asked why we spent the time and money on such a state-of-the-art facility when so many of our partners and clients have their own labs. Well, Ahead's goal is to help our clients plan, design, and deliver complex solutions within the data center. We can only do this by getting hands-on with the technology to educate our clients and ourselves. In addition, the lab lets us demonstrate the integration between different layers of the data center stack. Too often the aforementioned labs look at one piece of ...
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VMworld 2011: Day 4 (Thursday)
VMworld 2011 - Thursday
This is going to be my second to last update on VMworld 2011 – I’ll write up one more summary with a glossary to help easily find things next.
Today I attend the keynote followed by three sessions. Today’s sessions included NetApp’s solution to metro distance HA/DA (disaster avoidance), HP CloudSystem Architecture, and a vCenter Ops deep dive. So – to jump right in:
BCO2863 – Using Distance to your advantage to create a Unified Data Protection Strategy
Maybe because it was the last day of the conference, maybe because it was the first time slot, maybe it was the topic – not sure, but there really weren’t a lot of people in this session. Felt a little sorry for the presenters at the light ...
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My brush with the brightest minds of VMware at a private CTO event
I was one of a lucky group of 100 people that received a private invite to attend a reception with VMware CTO and many other great and high ranking VMware executives. You probably are asking how did I get such an exclusive invite. Well as a recipient of the VMware vExpert award for 2011 my name was placed in a random drawing of the 332 vExperts and I was one of the lucky one hundred people.
So the event was held at the Wynn hotel next door to the VMworld conference. There was a huge list of people that are well known in the VMware and Virtualization industry. This was all made possible by Stephen Herrod the CTO of VMware. He put on the event and ...
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VMworld 2011 – Wednesday
VMworld 2011 – Day 3
I ended up missing a couple of (what I thought would be less critical) sessions today so I could catch up on work, calls and blogs… I sure am glad that I did not miss VSP2884 - What's New in Performance for VMware vSphere 5.0.
Unlike some of the other technology sessions that I have attended – this one did not go very deep, but instead it provided a broad swath of information around every facet of vSphere – specifically why vSphere 5 is better. I could have gone to 10 different deep dive sessions to cover each of these. For both mine and hopefully your purposes – this synopsis was most excellent.
Also covered in this post – CMI3257 – vCenter Chargeback ...
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VMworld 2011: Tuesday Part III
Two great sessions - 1 hopefullygreat blog post:
VSP2122 – Everything you could possibly want to know about vMotion (my name not their’s)
I went to this session to learn more about vMotion. I really did learn more than I probably ever wanted to learn. I have very detailed notes written up that will eventually be supplanted when they release the slides to attendees – for now, I am not going to share the DETAILED technical notes of vMotion in 4.1 and 5.0 – but I will offer a synopsis. If you want the raw notes, let me know!
Both vSphere 4.1 and 5.0 effectively do the same thing when a VM is vMotioned from one host to another. It’s pretty straightforward – assuming network and shared storage ...
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VMWorld 2011 – Day 2 – Part 2 (running behind)
VMworld 2011 – Tuesday – Part II
Originally, my schedule for today had the Steve Herrod keynote session and six other partner super-session and technical deep dives. Again, best laid plans and “out of Las Vegas” interruptions kept me from getting as much as I wanted to get out of the day – but I did attend 4 sessions, 3 of which I am going to cover here:
SUP1006 – EMC Supersession
I attended this based on the almost daily blog postings from EMC’s Chad Sakac around the face-melting awesome sauce that would be on display. Even though I consider myself pretty deep with EMC technologies, I was looking forward to learning something new about EMC’s approach to working with and integrating to VMware.
To put together a quick ...
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VMworld 2011 – Tuesday Keynote
Well, it's been a lot harder today to take notes, clean them up, and get them ready to post. I've been in back to back sessions -and there is a lot to cover!
This post was focus exclusively on Steve Herrod's keynote from Tuesday morning. Hope you find it useful. I should get one more post up later about EMC's Super Session, some deep dive on vMotion in vSphere 5, and where things are going with Stretched / Distance vSphere clusters. Hold tight!
Today’s VMworld activities started with Steve Herrod (VMware CTO) doing a deep dive on the latest and newest round of VMware tools and capabilities around end user virtualization and the general vSphere 5 infrastructure stack. While Paul’s session last night was aimed at laying ...
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VMworld 2011 – Growing Pains – or “The New IT”
Today at VMworld, Paul Maritz (CEO of VMware) took the stage in front of ~19,000 IT professionals to deliver the keynote of VMworld 2011. The topic of Paul’s session was “The New IT”.
Overall, the message that Paul delivered was clear and concise – and it articulated VMware’s goals for the future of the company, and their vision of the future for IT in general. The overall message – loud and clear – is that Cloud is here. Cloud is now. It’s time for Cloud.
The underlying theme to that message was laid out in the statement that cloud is enabled through three distinct focus areas, all of which should be lead by VMware:
The vSphere 5 Infrastructure is the cloud platform – it’s ready, its scalable, and ...
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VMworld Updates – Monday Morning
First Session: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications
In summary, the #1 Message from VMware was expected:
vSphere now supports “Monster VMs”
if vSphere can now support – 32 vCPU, 1TB RAM, 36GB/s Network IO and up to 1M IO/s per VM – then show VMware a workload that CAN’T run on vSphere5.
Only hole in the marketing is still with Fault Tolerance being limited to a single vCPU
Other messaging were standard fare –
HA and DRS and vMotion – better than physical – higher availability with faster recovery
Hypervisor overhead is very very small compared to increases in x86 compute power – especially when compared to legacy application hardware platforms
DR with SRM is better than ever (failback) – much easier to DR virtualized apps than non virtualized apps
Market Adoption for VMware for ...
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