The VMguy

This week I had the luxury of attending the three-day vSphere: Design Workshop in Orlando, FL.  The class is now a requirement for VMware Enterprise Partners which was the reason for my attendance.  The class had about 15 attendees comprised of partners, customers and VMware employees.  There are no formal prerequisites for the course although I would highly recommend a VCP4 as some of the topics and recommendations get very technical and that level of experience would be very helpful.  This class is intended for those that will be designing virtual datacenters.  It is directly related to the newly-announced VCAP4-DCD certification and I would also recommend it for any one considering the VCDX certification.

The class was comprised of eight modules.  Day one ran through modules one thru four, day two had modules 5 and 6 and day three was comprised of modules seven and eight.  You can read this to see the syllabus for the class as well as the description for each of the modules.

There were a two things about this class that I found to be very different than any other VMware class I had attended.  First, there was no real administrative work.  We never used the vSphere client or looked at a host.  We barely used the classroom terminals at all.  Almost all of the work was whiteboarding and drawing architectures of networks and storage and physical infrastructure.  For the labs, the class was divided into two groups, one group was given an enterprise customer case study and the other received a SMB case study.  Both study’s had physical environments that wanted to virtualize.  The enterprise study was obviously significantly larger however the SMB had a very limited budget.  Both had items to challenge the designers.  As we reached the end of each module, we would incorporate what we learned into that phase of the design.  The labs were actually designed very well.  At the end of each lab session, each group had to pick someone to defend their design to the rest of the class (surely to prep us for what we might find at the VCDX defense session).

The second thing I noticed about the class that was very different from other classes was the references to blogger’s information.  The instructor referenced Duncan, Frank and Mike on more than one occasion (The VMguy was left out unfortunately – guess I’ll have to try harder).  Never had I seen such a display of non-vmware owned information in such a class.  Personally, I read all of their information pretty religiously yet I still found things I did not know or had not read.  This class was a very good summary of the pitfalls to avoid in design.  It was a collaboration of all of the gotchas that these designers (some who are now VCDXs) have seen.  Everything from the configuration maximums to what features are not supported with Fault Tolerance.  It was an outstanding display of all the things you have to remember when designing an entire virtualized datacenter.

My only complaint would be that the case study notes for the labs were incomplete.  We constantly found ourselves wanting to ask our imaginary customer for more information.  This can be expected somewhat as the class is a new offering from the education department.  I must say that our instructor was constantly requesting feedback for the course and promised to relay that information back to the class designers.

All in all, I would highly recommend this class to anyone who might need to design a virtualized datacenter.  It was an outstanding collaboration of experiences and best practices that would be required before creating a accurate, reliable, properly sized, well thought-out design.  Well done VMware Education Department, well done.

We’ll I woke up at 5:30am this morning and could not sleep so I grabbed breakfast early and got a front row seat for today’s keynotes.  The keynotes today started with Dr. Stephen Herrod (pictured below), SVP of R&D and CTO, VMware.
Read the rest of this entry »

This morning’s keynotes started off with Carl Eschenbach (on right below), EVP of Worldwide Field Operations, VMware.  If you ever have the opportunity to see Carl speak, go.  He’s a great presenter and very easy to follow.  Carl opened up by discussion the VMware opportunity to our partners.   He also made the new announcements about the upcoming updates to Partner Central, VMware’s partner portal.  He discussed the upcoming changes to the partner programs and our focus on specialized partners.  That is, Partners who have a specialty in one or more of four main areas, Virtualization Core, Virtualization Management, Business Continuity, or Desktop Virtualization.  He introduced Brandon Sweeney (on left), VP of Channel Sales – Americas.

Brandon walked thru the new portal and how are partners can use it to find the information that they need.

Afterward, Carl introduced Chad Sakac (in center below), VP, VMware Technical Alliance, EMC.  Carl also introduced Ed Bugnion (on right below), VP and CTO, Server Access Virtualization, Cisco. Read the rest of this entry »

So the first day of keynotes at Partner Exchange is finishing up now.  Rick Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer at VMware, Tod Nielson Chief Operating Officer at VMware and Boyd Davis, General Manager Server Platforms Group Marketing at Intel all spoke.  Some very good information to kick off the event.  Rick really got everything going, Tod delivered the vSphere story and the overall direction of VMware and Boyd really talked details on the new Xeon 5500′s and all of the virtualization advantages in them.  Here’s a quick pic of Tod (on left) and Boyd on stage(sorry, I’ll try to sit closer tomorrow):

For my customers that read my blog, please consider this article optional. For my Partners that read it, listen up.  I just completed the VTSP Certification. The VTSP is VMware Technical Sales Professional .  It’s a certification for VMware Partner SE’s to confirm that they understand the technical aspects of VMware software and how it applies to customer needs.  There are a set of Core exams on Virtual Infrastructure and then you can choose electives in one of 3 catagories (Advanced Virtual Infrastructure, Enterprise Desktops, or Management and Automation).  For VMware SE’s we have to take all of them.  It’s a total of 16 possible exams ranging from 15-30 questions each.

For those Partner SE’s selling VMware it gives you some very good sessions on setting up and installing each product, who the intended user is of each product and their use cases, as well as administration on each product.  I highly recommend this training for our Partners.  Just don”t do like I did and take all 16 tests in a 36 hour period.  I now need a stiff drink and some aspirin.