VMTN Blogging Community and other notes from Day 1

There are a few things I’ve already been impressed with here at VMWorld 2007:

• The active VMTN blogging community. After the VMTN Forum Happy Hour last night, I decided to go through most of the blogs that I had came across from this list. I must say, there are some fantastic contributors to the community and I highly recommend the list that John Troyer put together. As I mentioned in one of the video segments today, the VMTN Forum is one of the most valuable resources available from VMware, and the good news is that’s it free!

• Embedded VMware VI3, a/k/a VMware VI3i. Unveiled today is the next step in virtualization, an embedded hypervisor. With VI3i, there is no longer a need for local disk for the operating system. I’m well aware than many companies are doing boot-from-san, but I’ve never been a huge fan of this solution. Let’s say I have a pair of storage arrays that are replicating from A to B. If I lose storage array A and want to fail over to B I am unable to initiate a rescan command to the VI3 host if it’s boot-from-SAN (because the OS is on the SAN and thus unavailable). However, boot-from-SAN isn’t all bad as it allows some very dynamic deployments and blade implementations. Now, with VI3i, it’s the best of both worlds. VMware was giving away USB thumb-drives with VI3i on the device. The idea is that I would boot the server from the USB drive and test out VI3i. I can’t wait to get back to try this out.

I’ll go more in-depth to some of the sessions with my post tomorrow including an over-view of vendor solutions at the, “Solution Exchange.”

- Jason Langone

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