VMworld 2006 Day 3 and Wrap-Up
Published on 9 Nov 2006 · Filed in Liveblog · 344 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)Given that my employer is a big partner of both VMware and Network Appliance, I was particularly looking forward to the session on using NetApp SnapMirror to provide business continuity/disaster recovery for virtual machines hosted on ESX Server. Unfortunately, the session turned out—in my opinion, at least—to be more marketing fluff than solid technical information. I did pick up a couple of useful ideas and a few technical tips, but it wasn’t as technical as I had hoped it would be.
It actually turns out that many of the sessions to which I had looked forward turned out not to provide as much “technical meat” as I had hoped they would. That’s not to say that they weren’t helpful, since I was still able to glean some useful ideas and helpful tips here and there. For example, while the command-line session I attended on Day 1 didn’t unveil any major information I didn’t already know, I was able to pick up a couple of useful tricks (like Tab-Tab to show all possible commands that match what you’ve typed—of course, this is a shell feature not a VMware feature). Likewise, in the NetApp session I mentioned earlier, their discussion of the use of tiered storage (classified as gold, silver, and bronze) and the construction of service levels and service management around those classifications was a pretty good idea. Even so, I had really hoped that the sessions would be much more technical in nature than they were.
Next year (assuming I get the opportunity to attend), I’ll probably focus almost exclusively on the “internals in-depth” sessions. The networking internals session I attended was very informative and very technical and helped deepen my understanding of how VMware’s networking infrastructure actually works. For me, at least, having a deeper understanding of how it works means that it is easier for me to find new ways of utilizing the functionality or integrating the functionality into a customer’s existing infrastructure.
Oh, and the VCP exam? I passed. Woo hoo! (And I got a nifty lime green T-shirt to boot!)