I thought I would get more into posting my thoughts on each session. To be completely honest I was in some really good and really bad sessions. My goal was to find sessions that would potential benefit my day to day work. Not just a session where they talk about features we may or may not see in the next year. More of that knowledge came from doing the labs. Next year I will make more time to check all the labs out. I do not really learn well listening to someone speak anyways. I am more of a hands on learner.
I was go over how I would address the sessions I didn’t like. I think the best way to comment is to just say there were some sessions that were not helpful, at all. Others were really good. Therefore I wanted to list out five good lessons I learned in the VMworld 2010 Breakout sessions.
1. A common theme to me was the distributed virtual Switch (dvSwitch) is required to do anything advanced. This convinced me to push more into using the dvSwitch on deployments when possible. I figure more and more network features will be depending on the dvSwitch. Included features now available are: Network IO Control, Private VLANS (needed for cross Host network fences, and will be important for Cloud networking in vSphere an vCloud Director)
2. Innovation is coming to the Network. Converged networks from Xsigo and Cisco are just the beginning to virtualizing the network and I/O.
3. Doing VDI and having happy users is going to be harder than Server Virtualization.
4. VMware is working hard to get View deployments right. The View Benchmarking tool is going to help validate the deployments in order to provide scale. Hoping for good things here.
5. There are so many moving parts in a virtual datacenter solution. Architecture when it comes to VMware is basically knowing to account for everything involved. Seeing how the lab datacenter was put together was encouraging. Knowing even the rock star Architects at VMware have the same challenges as the everyday folk. They did a great job, because in my opinion the labs rocked.
I learned a great deal during VMworld. It was once again a great experience. At the same time I hope the words “deep dive” are not misused like they were this year. VMware did a great job this year and hopefully will do better next year. See you all at PEX 2011 in Orlando?
I agree with your comment on “Deep Dive” being tossed around. I went to one in particular that was pretty bad. Best session I saw, besides Dan Anderson’s was the Kit Colbert one on Memory. That really was a deep dive!