{"id":1193,"date":"2014-10-19T20:56:54","date_gmt":"2014-10-19T19:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tekhead.org\/blog\/?p=1193"},"modified":"2014-10-19T20:59:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-19T19:59:00","slug":"vmworld-europe-2014-day-three-roundup-and-closing-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/2014\/10\/vmworld-europe-2014-day-three-roundup-and-closing-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"VMworld Europe 2014 \u2013 Day Three Roundup and Closing Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well that’s it, its all over! Having never been to a VMworld prior to this week, I have to say the event does indeed live up to the hype!<\/p>\n

Day Three
\n<\/b>Day three started pretty subdued, not only from the point of view of the attendees, but a couple of the presenters as well; it definitely seems people had a good time at the VMworld party the night before!<\/p>\n

Mixing in a bit of session time with a visit to the solution exchange and a bit of Hands on Labbing\u00a0was the order of the day. I did have a quite amusing chat with one of the guys working on the Oracle stand. He said that the vast majority of people who had spoken to him had berated them about licensing and support in virtual environments, along with asking why they were advertising OVM at a VMware event. I think the poor guy was not far from the end of his tether!<\/p>\n

My last role was at Oracle, so I can fully feel the pain around the license questions as it was almost always the first thing people asked me about when I told them I worked there! It doesn\u2019t help the fact that the latest licensing hard vs soft partitioning guide<\/a> is still only from 2011!<\/p>\n

\"Oracle

Oracle Tastiness!<\/p><\/div>\n

One thing I will be very interested to see is what becomes the defacto stance on how many hosts you must license once share-nothing VMotion between clusters, vCenters and DCs comes along in vSphere 6. It begs the question whether any Oracle auditor might have the audacity to suggest that you need to license all hosts in all DCs?<\/p>\n

This of course assumes that the specific auditor will not accept mandatory cluster affinity as per Richard’s comments here: http:\/\/www.licenseconsulting.eu\/vmworld-tv-oracle-on-licensing-vmware-virtualized-environments-updated\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Hopefully in this scenario, common sense would prevail, but that\u2019s deep enough down that rabbit hole for now! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

The sessions I managed to attend on day 3 were as follows:<\/p>\n

STO2521 – VSAN Best Practices
\n<\/b>Rawlinson Rivera & Kiran Madnani provided a very useful overview of a number of example use cases and how to apply different VSAN configurations. As this was covering multiple use cases there was some repetition of content, but not so far as to be distracting. Key takeaway, when it comes to disk groups, more = better!<\/p>\n

\"VSAN

VSAN Use Cases<\/p><\/div>\n

STO2496 – Storage Best Practices for Next-Gen Storage Platforms<\/b>
\nBeing a bit of a storage geek, for me this was one of the best sessions of the entire week. Not only entertaining, but the quantity and quality of the information was intense to say the least! A couple of key areas which they covered were around benchmarking of storage (not just using the standard 4k 100% Read profiles which vendors use to produce stats for their marketing material).<\/p>\n

\"Absurd

Absurd Testing at the Chad & Vaughn Show<\/p><\/div>\n

TEX1985 – Lessons Learned from a Real Life VSAN POC at Trend Micro
\n<\/b>It’s always interesting to see how real customers found the use of a technology. Arsenio Mateos from Trend Micro was not particularly detailed in any specific issues they experienced, as he concentrated more on the decisions behind the solution, and the benefits it broupght them.\u00a0 Cormac on the other hand was very open and when into some detail as to some of the configuration issues and bugs which were common among other customer deployments. I was also the grateful recipient of a signed copy of the book Cormac co-wrote with Duncan Epping.<\/p>\n

EUC2027 – Characterise Performance in Horizon 6
\n<\/b>My final session rounded out the end of the day. I don\u2019t currently use or design VMware Horizon View in my current role, when most commonly customers have managed RDS or Citrix XenApp farms. I mainly went to the session to see the VMware approach to sizing the new session host desktops on Horizon 6. Unsurprisingly it turns out that they come out with very similar ratios and guidelines as Citrix do (shocking)!\u00a0 The really interesting takeaway for me from this session was the VMware View Planner tool, which looked like it could definitely have some value in load testing and gauging the requirements for customers with or without VMware View.<\/p>\n

By this time it was 4.30, and everything had closed. If I’m honest I was a bit gutted as I had believed the HoLs were going to be open until 6. I was most of the way through my NSX lab, so I guess I’ll just have to finish it up from home!<\/p>\n

After the event, my remaining colleagues and I wandered into town to check out the Sagrada Familia, and grab some light refreshments + tasty tapas.<\/p>\n

\"Sagrada

Sagrada Familia<\/p><\/div>\n

Wrapping Up
\n<\/b>Session Surveys – The one thing I didn\u2019t actually get done at the show (but I plan to fill in this weekend), was the session surveys. I understand these are as valuable to the speakers as to VMware, so I have no issues spending a bit of time giving feedback. If you haven’t already, then I suggest you do, especially if you want to see the same guys & gals back next year!<\/p>\n

If I were to be able to make any suggestions to VMware for next year they would be few and far between:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Keep the hang space and hands on labs and\/or solution exchange open until 6pm on day 3. It’s minimal extra effort but it will allow attendees to make the absolute most of the event and facilities, especially those who don\u2019t have an early flight back the same day.<\/li>\n
  • Make the information on getting to the event a bit easier to find on the VMworld.com site (rather than burying it in the FAQs)<\/li>\n
  • Free Segways or (or foot massages) for all attendees!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    I enjoyed a wander or two around the solution hall, but for me the best and most useful elements of the entire week were the breakout sessions (and being there live giving me the opportunity to ask questions at the end), and networking with others both in the event and at the vendor sponsored evenings.<\/p>\n

    As a side note, I will probably be creating PDFs of all of my notes and posting these on the blog imminently for anyone who may find them useful.<\/p>\n

    So finally a big thank you to everyone who made VMworld a success; the organisers, the vendors, the speakers, the HoL team and all of the people with whom I had the such interesting and entertaining discussions!<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t
    Key Stats<\/th><\/th>\n\t<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
    Number of days attended<\/td>4 (including partner day)<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Blog articles published<\/td>6<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Blogs word count
    \r\n<\/td>    		6,516<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Live breakout \/ HoL sessions attended<\/td>14<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Total session notes word count<\/td>10,412<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Average notes word count per session<\/td>743<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Hands on Labs Completed<\/td>2<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Number of steps walked<\/td>No idea as I don\u2019t have a Fitbit!<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Total hours slept in 4 nights<\/td>< 24<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Contacts made<\/td>Many<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n\t
    Knowledge gained<\/td>Incalculable<\/td>\n\t<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Well that’s it, its all over! Having never been to a VMworld prior to this week, I have to say the event does indeed live up to the [..]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1165,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_yoast_wpseo_focuskw":"","_yoast_wpseo_title":"","_yoast_wpseo_metadesc":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New Blog Post: #VMworld Europe 2014 \u2013 Day Three Roundup and Closing Thoughts #vExpert","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41],"tags":[353,205,547,321,356,357,374,96,228,372,367,371,376,354,373,189,375,540,120,229,369,254],"class_list":["post-1193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vmware","tag-barcelona","tag-blogging","tag-citrix","tag-emc","tag-fira-barcelona","tag-hol","tag-horizon-view","tag-licensing","tag-nsx","tag-oracle","tag-party","tag-pure-storage","tag-rds","tag-sddc","tag-stats","tag-storage","tag-trend-micro","tag-vmware","tag-vmworld","tag-vsan","tag-vvols","tag-xenapp"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/wp-uploads\/www.tekhead.org\/2014\/10\/VMworld2014.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2l3lU-jf","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekhead.it\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}