Alex of vi411.org thought Tuesday keynote, while not "exciting" in a Hollywood or roller coaster sort of way, got him excited about virtual appliances:
Why buy a separate OS and application? The OS will need to be tweaked
to work optimally for your hardware, and the app for the OS. Instead,
give me a Virtual appliance where the application and OS are optimized
specifically for each other. No competing processes, just performance.
Honestly, isn’t that the point of an OS? To provide applications
optimized access to hardware resources? Why do I always need to deal
with all of the “optimizations” that Windows (or Linux) plugs in if I
don’t need them?
Dave Marshall also liked the appliance panel:
The session on Virtual Appliances seemed to work for me. Virtual
Appliances are getting a lot of buzz. Yesterday I heard about VDI and
Lab Manager, today, there was a lot of talk about appliances. And
Microsoft’s announcement about their own appliance like offering only
seemed to help push the buzz out even more.
tu at 16412.org didn’t expect the "Ask the VMTN Experts" session to be a Q&A, and so was a bit disappointed. This format went over well last year and so we repeated it. Drop me a line and let me know what what you expected and we’ll see what we can do for VMworld 2007.
The one I was most excited for was the “Meet the VMTN
guys” session, which had potential for greatness but alas I didn’t
realize it was a total Q&A session. Had I know I probably would’ve
brought some questions. Anyone else not know before coming into that
session that it was a Q&A format? Bummer.
Scott Lowe reported on his Day One — some confusion in the VMware Consolidated Backup Lab ("However, VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup) is a very cool technology, so that makes up for whatever glitches we ran into during the lab.") However, he liked the command-line tricks session:
I wrapped up the day with a session around VMware command-line tricks.
This presentation was lively, entertaining, and quite informative (like
a presentation should be). I gleaned a couple of useful tips but
unfortunately did not find an answer to a problem I’ve been running
into with vmware-cmd (where it reports an error trying to disconnect a
device from the VM). I’ll have to keep working on that one.
Kevin at medicgeek had a full day of sessions, including some cool power-management scripts from Dell:
TAC4055 Save Energy! Using VI3 and Dell’s Systems Management Tools to Save Money
The
biggest take-away from this was that Dell had devised a set of scripts
they plan to release by the end of this month, to allow you to automate
various hardware-related events within a virtual infrastructure, from
automatically VMotion-ing all VMs from an ESX server in the event of a
hardware failure, to detecting peaks and valleys in load and actually
powering off excess physical machines when they’re not needed! Pretty
cool concept.
Edward Aractingi also had a full day, including a good drill-down on storage from one of VMware’s long-time experts:
VMware ESX Server 3 Tips and Tricks: Storage Internals by Mostafa Khalil of VMware
Advanced, deep and detailed discussion of SAN and Iscsi implementation,
tips and troubleshooting, great presenter, to go person for this kind
of stuff, most hard questions were asked and answered, covering
different storage venders and technologies.
