Well, the adventure begins... I am at PDX (Airport in Portland, Oregon) and waiting to board my plane. So far, nothing virtual about this experience. Except maybe that I had to go through the 'puffer'. Kind of thrilling actually.

;o)

When I arrive, I will get settled in and then head down to my first session; "The ABC's of Virtualization: A shortcut Guide to Virtual Technology"

It sounds like a fairly high level class, but I am hopeful for a few surprises. Especially given that this is an all day session.

More later...

Class yesterday was pretty good. Nice coverage and seemingly appropriate depth of content. I was pleasantly surprised at the level of expertise involved and at the perspectives being represented from IT professionals in the room. I do take issue with a couple points, but am still resolving in my head if those points are in fact valid.

One item in particular was to "avoid" consolidating homogenous applications (Mail for example). He made several supporting points; one key one was to ensure peak times are addressed. He indicated that most test servers/configurations are often not truly representative of live servers. I agree that one needs to evaluate the entire realistic solution, and I think most IT folks should know how to model their real world situation. Where do the time and resources to do it come from??? Good question. But rather than saying 'not' to implement homogeneous servers, I think the warnings and reminders should be given, then let y'all do what is right for you/your organization.

Perhaps why I took issue with that point is because I talk to a lot of customers who want to evaluate homogeneous configurations with our vConsolidate benchmark (not 'yet' supported). That tells me there is a need for such a configuration and that smart people are already working on it. Telling them they shouldn't do it seems less than satisfactory.

Enough of the review… Now, I am in another class (Windows Server 2008:Administer, Virtualize, Transform the Datacenter) where the same instructor is giving us an overview of the new OS. Kind of cool because he has Hyper-V running on Server 2008 and is showing the different functions/features and how to implement it. Nice level of detail.

More later...

So, I snuck out of the 'Windows Server 2008' session this morning (just for an hour...) to check out a Web 2.0 based session. It was more or less about showing people what MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Second Life are all about and just how well each site does with regard to security.

Interesting topic given the presenter was able to point out several security 'issues' with each. But, the net message is, make sure you know what you are putting out there. Especially important for employees and professionals who use these social outlets (inlets?) and potentially could fall victim to social engineering efforts to steal intellectual property. One person in the room actually indicated that some companies employ people specifically to troll (hang out with) people known to be from their competitors to see if any information slips.

Valid concern. But again, it comes down to ensuring you know what you are putting out there. ;o)

Now back to the Windows 2008 Server session. BTW... here is a link to several of this presenter's presentations; free for download. http://www.reso-net.com/presentation.asp?m=7

More later...

Here I sit, all broken hearted, tried to enter the Expo (booths) and was thwarted. I apparently don't have the right badge. Oh well, I guess I can wait another half hour until it officially opens. When I get in, I will take a few pictures for y'all to see what I saw.

After a little booth time, I have 10 different classes/sessions/demonstrations that I have to squeeze into 4 session blocks. That is 2.5 classes per block!!! There will be some prioritization before the day is through.

More later…

Yesterday was a stretch... I simply couldn't get to all the classes I had in mind. Cutting out on a good session just didn't seem appropriate. The ones I did attend, were very enlightening.

Not necessarily because of the vendor hosting the session, or the product being discussed. Mostly because the interaction with IT folks in the audience, and the 'real world' issues being addressed. Here are a couple of those discussed items:

- Application Virtualization and Streaming is available from several vendors. It was made to sound simple and available for all to implement today. If you are not doing this, it is worth looking into further.

- What effects will virtualization have on the installed infrastructure? Sure it will save server real-estate, but don't forget to update your networking to support a higher utilization from a smaller number of servers. Oh, and don't forget about your cooling and power needs... by virtualizing, you just focused your power and cooling needs to a smaller area of your server datacenter. Key point; Re-evaluate the supporting infrastructure.

- When considering starting a virtualization migration, look for some tools to help you. I got a few demo's of amazing software (Cirba http://www.cirba.com/ & PlateSpin/Novell http://www.platespin.com/) that evaluate your server infrastructure, determines what you can virtualize, and actually helps to kick off the migration. I was very impressed. Key theme though… don't just evaluate your infrastructure once and migrate. Model several scenarios and re-model for efficient use of your hardware/software in your datacenter.

I'm polishing off my last class right now (6th of the day) and will have more updates tomorrow.

More later...

Yesterday was a bit of a marathon, 6 classes in 4 session times. Two of them in particular stood out among the rest;

- One for all, and all for Xen

This panel discussion included representatives from Oracle, Red Hat, Novell (SuSE), and Citrix. All were preaching the goodness of Xen as an open source project, but were also quick to point out the differences between how each had implemented it differently. Cross platform compatibility with a pointer to http://libvirt.org/ as an open source effort to ensure that compatibility is covered at the API level, warnings of "don't forget about KVM" (not Keyboard, Video, Mouse, but rather http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine), and finally several claims that Xen implementations perform better than other hypervisor solutions… I would like to see the data on that before I believed it. Anyone have it?

- How to Virtualize your Enterprise - Sponsored by Oracle

The presenter from Oracle was pretty good about what considerations you should take when planning a migration or new installation of a virtualized environment. His basis of information was that he is Oracle's VP or Linux Engineering and has responsibility of implementing virtualization on their multiple thousands of servers (60K I believe was his number). Specifically interesting to me was his discussion about benchmarking your hypervisor and VM's carefully before any implementation. One example was a physical to virtual comparison. Test on a server with a typical OS on it, then load a hypervisor and create a VM, then run the same test. Ensuring the configuration is effectively the same, you should see the impact of that hypervisor/VM. Compare that to other hypervisor/VM combinations. A couple specific benchmarks mentioned and used by him are LMBench (http://lmbench.sourceforge.net/) and SwingBench (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine). For more about Oracle's virtualization efforts… http://www.oracle.com/virtualization/index.html

Today, sessions during lunch time… sometimes, you must do what you have to do to get the job done. Especially considering that the boss sends you to Vegas for the event. ;o)

These two sessions are at the same time (again... INTEROP, Could you please spread these out!!!).

- Reduce Costs and Simplify IT Management with Virtualization - Sponsored by VMWare

-- Decided to skip this one in lieu of the other… I pretty much got the story about how to reduce costs from other sessions.

- Enterprise Virtualization Interoperability: Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Novell SLES Tackle Mixed Environments - Sponsored by Microsoft

-- This is the one I am in now. The speaker is talking about the collaboration between the two companies and specifically about how their two offerings are interactive and supportive. A demo of Hyper-V with a SuSE 10 VM was demo'ed as well. A few questions about Hyper-V's features were asked, and generally a nice bit of messaging from Microsoft about playing well in the sandbox with others.

-- The Novell representative from yesterday's 'One for all, all for Xen' panel was pretty happy about this collaboration too. I actually talked to one of the Novell guys in their booth about our vConsolidate benchmark, and plan to get in touch with him later to see what we can see.

Gotta run and get some food now.

More later...

I made it back and am catching up on e-mails now…

Overall, I have a pretty good impression of the event and its attention to Virtualization as a real benefit to IT. It actually covered more of the good things and the pitfalls surrounding the topic. I would call it real training on an introduction to virtualization. Although, given that this was an industry event with expo, the training was generalized and had a flavor of 'buy my product' injected wherever possible.

I would expect someone coming from this event to have a good idea on where to go from here. Good job Interop!

Looking forward, I will work on the boss to see if I can attend VMWorld. http://www.vmworld.com/vmworld/home.jspa

Or, perhaps I can convince one of my co-workers who is already going to offer a similar (or better) account from their perspective. Regardless, we'll give you more insights wherever and whenever possible.