VMworld 2014 Europe – Wrap-up Tuesday

My day at VMworld Day 2 started at 6:30 because we (Austrian “Gang”) wanted to participate in the vBreakfast. We found the Cafe near the Fira on time. Unfortunately we were the only one there. A fourth guy, Fabian Lenz (@lenzker), a VCI from Germany joined us for breakfast but that’s it. Jane and Pietro tweeted me that they can’t make it. I took this first approach as a beta test and hoped that there will be more people on Wednesday and Thursday. To be honest I hadn’t checked this because i didn’t attend the other vBreakfasts because of all the parties that was going on in the evening. Overall there is a lot of room for improvement for the next years vBreakfast at VMworld Europe.
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The good thing about being up this early was that we were not late for the General Session. I don’t want to summaries the General Session and all the announcements because it was already done by some fellow bloggers like Magnus Andersson, Alex Galbraith and Michael Poore. This Info could be found here:
Magnus Andersson – VMware Barcelona 2014 – Day 1 Summary
Alex Galbraith – VMworld Europe 2014 – Keynote Day One
Michael Poore – VMworld 2014 – Day 1
Keynote VMworld Europe 2014 Day 1

After the General Session we headed to the blogger desk to spread some of our buttons there. Andreas had really cool buttons for this VMworld. My personal goal was to spread approx. 50% of them. At the blogger desk we found also some other cool blogger swag lying around. A Hyper-VCDX and blogger sticker by Joup Piscaer (@jpiscaer), a beer coaster and cool sticker by VMguru.com (@vmguru).
After lunch (was really good compared to the US conference) I went to the Solutions Exchange which was my primary place to be this VMworld, because I wanted to talk to several Vendors about their solutions. Because I joined VMware doesn’t mean that I lost completely my independence. I’m still interested in other technology that can benefit my customers in some areas. My first visit was the VMware expert bar to meet finally Frank Buechsel (@fbuechsel) in person. He is an cool and awesome guy and a challenge when it came to certifications. There is always some competition between him, Ross Wynne (@rosswynne) and myself when it comes to VMware certification. 🙂
My first stop on my Vendor tour was Veeam for a quick chat with Claus Pfleger (Systems Engineer Austria) and Phillip Altmann (Territory Manager East Austria) about the new “free” product (Veeam Endpoint Backup) what was announced earlier that week.
Diablo Technologies who contacted me previous to VMworld for a chat/demo was my next stop because I had no time for this demo so I told them I will stop by their booth at the conference. Their product, Memory Channel Storage (MCS), is very impressive because data capacity is now accessible via the shortest and fastest possible path to the CPU, the memory channel. This is enable by a driver you need to install on the ESXi host. There is no prerequisites for the server (special Server, BIOS etc.) to use this DIMMs, as long as the specification for memory in the server is DDR3. The only thing to keep in mind about this technology is, that you will lose memory capacity when using MCS. For more information about Diablo Technologies visit their website.
Another storage vendor I took a look at was SolidFire. Solidfire is a scale-out All-Flash array. It uses a node-based scale-out architecture, that means if you run out of capacity or performance you can add nodes to get more of both. When adding a new node(s) Solidfire rebalance non-disruptive the capacity and performance in minutes. A cool thing is also that you can also remove nodes from the system and create new clusters within another location. The minimum for a cluster is 3 nodes but Solidfire recommends 4-5 nodes. Another key feature of Solidfire is the Guaranteed Performance QoS, that means you can create a Volume with a min, max and burst limit for IOPS and you can change this on the fly. Solidfire uses Shared Nothing High Availability which mean a cluster-wide RAID-less data-protection called SolidFire Helix spreads at least two redundant copies of data across all drives within the system. There are also more features like In-line Efficiency or Automated Management. If you wanted to know more about SolidFire please visit their website.
On my way to the PernixData booth I ran into Erik Bussink (@erikbussink). We talked about our homelabs and how they evolved over the years. We also talked about the new job and how each other came to his position. It was a great chat and Erik is really an awesome guy to talk with. Erik reminded me also that I would get a PernixPro jacket but my size was unfortunately out of stock. PernixData told me that they will ship it to me after the conference (thanks God! :)).
The first day was really crazy because I couldn’t walk 5 meters without running in some familiar fellow blogger or twitter follower like Pietro Piutti (@stingray92) or José Luis Gómez (@pipoe2h)
I joined Andreas again after some time and he told me he got a really cool T-Shirt from Atlassian (@atlassian). -> The ANGRY NERDS Shirt. That was by far the best T-Shirt at VMworld Europe 2014. For people like me who didn’t know who Atlasssian is and what they do here is a brief overview.
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We came across PernixData booth where I meet their CTO, Satyam Vaghani (@SatyamVaghani). He congratulated me about my shift to VMware. I had a great chat with him about PernixPro program and the new FVP 2.0. He is really a great guy and I hope I can retain my PernixPro status. although I change to VMware.
In the evening I was attending the vExpert/VCDX/NSX party where I finally meet Corey Romero (@vCommunityGuy) and for all of us who don’t know him, he is the vExpert Program Manager. It was really a pleasure talking to him about the program.

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