VMworld Day 1

I’m looking forward to this week and here are a few highlights of what I’ll be looking into.

On the tactical

1. Settling on a primary load balancing partner for VMware View. (Eying Kemp, anyone have any thoughts?). I’ve got a number of smaller deployments (few hundred users) that need non-disruptive maintenance operations, and patching on the infrastructure and are looking to take their smaller pilots or deployments forward.

2. Learn more about VDP-A designs, and best practices. I’ve seen some issues in the lab with snapshots not getting removed from the appliance and need to understand the scaling and design considerations better.

3. Check out some of the HOL updates. Find out if a VVOL lab in the office is worth the investment.

On the more general strategic goals.

Check out cutting edge vendors, and technologies from VMware.

CloudVolumes – More than just application layering. Server application delivery, Profile abstraction thats fast and portable, and a serious uplift to persona and ThinApp. Really interested in use cases having it used as a delivery method for Thinapp.

DataGravity – In the era of software defined storage this is a company making a case that an array can provide a lot of value still. Very interesting technology but the questions remain. Does it work? Does it Scale? Will they add more file systems, and how soon will EMC/HP buy them to bolt this logic into their Tier 1 arrays. Martin Glassborow has made a lot of statements that new vendors don’t do enough to differentiate, or that we’ve reached peak features (Snaps, replication, cache/tier flash, data reduction etc) but its interesting to see someone potentially breaking outside of this mold of just doing the same thing a little better or cheaper.

VSAN – Who is Marvin? What happened to Virsto? I’ve got questions and I hope someone has answers!