Day 2 Keynotes at Partner Exchange

The VMguy — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:15:36 +0000

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.

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….

Site Recovery Manager by example

The VMguy — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:08:56 +0000

One of my favorite things in talking to people is when they tell me how well the software I teach them about works. Even better is when someone will take the time to blog about their experiences. I have had a few customers become early adopters of Site Recovery Manager. One of the most memorable was a customer (let’s call him Virtual_JTW) whom I worked with in September. On a Friday afternoon we ran thru configuring and setting up SRM in his environment. We worked thru the configuration and integration with his Celerra storage. In the end, we passed with flying colors and his Disaster Recovery test was 100% successful. It was fun and exciting for me to watch Virtual_JTW’s reaction to the success of the test. He felt so impressed by the results and his subsequent demonstration for his Disaster Recovery team, he felt the need to blog on the whole experience. You can read his account of what happened as well as the test results here .

The VMguy » EMC

Day 2 Keynotes at Partner Exchange

Site Recovery Manager by example