DAY 0

There are a lot of new things that will be announced this week, that I can’t wait to talk about. We started VMworld week with a nice 6.0 earthquake in the area. I guess VMworld is rocking San Francisco.

Starting the day with the VMworld 5K charity event followed by VMunderground sessions and meeting fellow vExperts and fellow geeks.

More info to come. Got to run (literally).

…Run was a lot of fun, many people showed up for a good cause.

The sessions for VMunderground/vBrownBag were pretty good. There were a lot of good questions, some that may be answered this week after the big announcements are made. I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of fellow vExperts and geeks at the VMunderground party. Great event.

The main take away was the up and coming Hyper-converged strategy that is not only coming from different vendors but also VMware with their announcement of EVO:RAIL (more on EVO:RAIL here). For those not familiar with Hyper-Converged, it is (in simple terms) the combination of storage, networking and compute resources into one single box, but allowing for scalability by adding more nodes. More on Hyper-converged later.

Had a chance to stop and talk to several exhibitors, not only because they were giving some really nice vExpert swag, but I was interested in learning about their solutions. Coho has an interesting approach to storage and really liked the performance UI they put together, that has always been a tough one with storage. Simplivity also has a decent hyper-converged solution that also includes backup and de-duplication technology for both storage and backup. Ravello systems also has a nice solution for use cases such as test/dev. I will talk more about them post VMworld.