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.

Stephen talked about the main focus of VMware.  That is, to enable customers to deliver IT as a service, at the same time remembering 3 key factors:  Efficency, Control, and Choice .  He went on to discuss vSphere.  He gave some awesome statistics on vSphere, particularly: over 3 million Engineering hours have gone into vSphere .  For the Efficiency section, he discussed the scalability and performance.  He talked about power savings and storage savings .  For Control , he talked about Config-Control and how to maintain consistency in host configuration.    He then discussed distributed switches and how they add control to the networking layer.  vApp and how it will let admins control their apps better as a single unit.  He then went on to demo a very polished Fault Tolerant configuration.  This was received very well and with a resounding applause from the crowd.  He talked about vShield Zones and how they protect applications from talking to the infrastructure that they shouldn’t for customers without advanced firewall experience.  Lastly, Choice .  The goal is to allow any server, any storage, any OS, and any app to run local in the private cloud or a cloud in a different location, public or private.  He showed a list of the supported OSes for vSphere compared to those of Hyper-V and it was not even close.  I guess it is an advantage to not have an OS business.

After the functionality section Stephen introduced Bogomil Balansky (below), VP of Product Marketing, VMware.

Bogomil introduced the Partners to the licensing and packaging of vSphere.  I apologize, due to legal restrictions I cannot list those here.  Hopefully we will find out more information from the announcement coming April 21st .

Stephen returned to the stage and discussed the API and plug in capability of vSphere which was a great segway to the next presenters: Adam Famularo (below on left) SVP and GM, Recovery Management and Data Modeling Business Unit, CA, and the second presenter was Roger Pilc (below, seated), Corporate SVP and GM, CA.

Adam showed a great video on the University of Texas, Brownsville, and how they used CA XOsoft to recover their MS Exchange environment on VMware at their disaster recovery site during Katrina.  He went on to discuss CA’s organization and how they are all aligned.  He discussed many of the channel programs that are available (this is a Partner conference after all).  He talked about upcoming Arcserve and XOsoft releases.  I apologize, I don’t know what is public or not from the information that was presented so I’m going to leave the details out on that one.  Roger took the lead at this point.  He discussed the cloud and how it is transforming business.  That management is one of the key pieces needed to take it to the next level.  He closed with an explanation of the VMware – CA relationship and how that joint effort can truly improve overall service quality from the cloud.

Now onto my labs today, I’ll check back in soon.

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.

Ed went first and talked about Cisco’s unified stragety and the issues that the Nexus 1000v will solve.  He described the VN-Link protocol and how the network switches become virtualization aware.  He then described the Unified Computing System from Cisco, although there was not really any new information that has not already been discussed .

Next up was Chad.  If you’ve never read Chad’s blog site , I highly recommend it.  It’s really some good reading.  Chad really pulled all the messaging together.  He described VMware as the software layer, Cisco as the computing and network integration, and EMC and the platform for storage.  He mentioned an interesting stat: 44% of all Site Recovery Manager implementations today run on EMC storage.  Chad described EMC’s V-Max announcement from yesterday.  One of the interesting points I saw was that the new V-Max platform from EMC will now run on Intel Xeons and not Power PC chips as Syms have always done in the past.  He closed with reiterating why customers would want to run Tier-1 apps and desktops on VMware.

Now onto my labs for the day, I’ll report back in soon….

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.