VMWorld 2007
Well, it's been a while since I've posted here - I bet most of you thought I wasn't coming back! Truth is I've been busy with non-virtualization related stuff quite a bit, and when I do get to play with my VMware fixing stuff at work takes priority. Having an ESX license at home and some hardware that'll run it would help - I'm working on that.
So anyways - I'm typing this while sitting on the floor in a corner of the Moscone convention center (hope thats right, going from memory), near the end of the first full day of VMWorld - I have about another 1/2 an hour till they open the welcome reception. Thoughts so far... the content of the show has been great, but the organization around it has room for improvement - the lineups are INSANE. The big points I've heard about so far are the releases of ESX 3i and their disaster-recovery product that I've gone and forgotten the proper name of - but whatever, the releases are well covered elsewhere so I'm not going into any more detail.
One point I did pick up that wasn't in any of the big announcements is that ESX 3i apparently will NOT have the full functionality of current ESX 3 - specifically relating to the addon components that aren't in ESX3 standard. He specifically mentioned DRS and HA - though I have a feeling DRS will work. I've heard from a person who was in the beta and he was vmotion'ing from ESX3.0.1 to 3i, and DRS is not much more than VirtualCenter doing a vmotion for you (nothing special required on the host), so I think DRS + 3i will be ok. HA on the other hand functions without VirtualCenter - even if the VC server is dead HA will work. HA actually uses some Legato clustering technology installed in the service console to work - so it wouldn't surprise me if they had to take that out to get 3i into that 32MB footprint. When I'm back in the office (and have free time) I'll look into testing some of this with the 3i copies they handed out to everyone who attended - we all got bootable USB thumb-drives with 3i pre-installed.
Other than that - not much of interest to report that won't be better-covered elsewhere. I'm here to learn as much as I can, and will use that to help develop the VIClient DLL, answer your questions, etc. - not to pretend to be a journalist. And for anyone else who was able to make it here - feel free to mail my blackberry at robbaum at nait dot ca and we can try and meet up and have a chat.
