VMworld Was Very Thought Provoking

I got back from VMworld last Friday. I had intended to blog throughout the sessions as I have in the past with Brainshare, but unfortunately the internet connectivity in the presentation rooms at the Moscone Center was not good enough to maintain a decent connection. I suppose I could have done offline blog posts and then uploaded them during breaks, but it was too much fiddling and I didn’t bother.

However, there was lots of great information at the conference. I learned some immediately applicable information about securing ESX servers and services that run on VMware servers. I also learned some practical stuff about network attached storage in a virtualized environment, including NFS and iSCSI.

There was also a lot of stuff that got my brain stewing about future approaches both in our datacenter back-end stuff and in the regular office server rooms and even out on the floor. In particular, I think future shared storage that we buy will probably be moving away from fibre-channel and towards iSCSI, which is faster (when done right,) more flexible, and way cheaper. Also, I think that a lot more of our desktop workloads are virtualizable than we thought, and also we could probably achieve significantly higher hardware consolidation than we have been expecting.

The next year or two will probably see much more of our infrastructure becoming virtualized, that much is certain.