Today started with the usual carb loaded breakfast at the conference, so I tried to stick with fruit. There were many great sessions today and little time to attend them all.

After breakfast I took the NetApp/VVOL/VASA Hands on Lab. Really cool to get to play with this before it is available, it helps to understand better how everything works. Because the lab only shows the VMware side, which is pretty straight forward, I had to go and talk to the NetApp engineers so I could put the two together. Turns out, the NetApp side it’s even easier. In order to create VVOLs, we need containers on the SAN. In the NetApp case, it is nothing more than creating Volumes. The cool part is that there is no need for Qtrees or permissions to connect the NetApp Volumes to the vSphere hosts, the VASA provider (requirement for VVOLs) takes care of everything. How cool is that?!?!

Afterwards, I stopped at the Riverbed HQ building for a one-to-one meeting to discuss Steel Fusion. You should check it out, this is some really cool stuff. Rushed back to make it to the VSAN Architecture Deep Dive. This was a really good session, it covered some of the things I have already talked about VSAN in my previous blogs such as 10GB networking for the storage, disk groups, etc. This was session STO1279.

Went back to Moscone to have the yummy (not really) boxed lunch and then went to the solutions exchange to learn more about other products. Talked to nice VMware people at the AirWatch booth since this is something that I need to look into it more for my day job. Also sat down at the Atlantis demo, really neat stuff. Also stopped and talked to EVO:RAIL folks. This is some ground breaking technology, it not only uses VSAN as the underlying architecture but it also includes Log Insight out of the box. Provisioning is almost automatic, meaning that there is little manual configuration from the user side.

Lastly, went to see the EMC session INF3037SPO with Tyler Britten and Rich Scherer. The session talked about how to build and deploy a well run Hybrid Cloud. Great session, lots of info and great tips. Check it out when the recordings are available.

The VMware party is tonight, so I’m heading there to see Pat do the Ice Bucket challenge.