So I must apologize first as I have not updated this blog as regularly as I would have liked. Not that it's an excuse but I've been finalizing a masters program and now that I'm done. I should have some more time to dedicate myself to training and updating this blog more regularly...
First let me start off with Dell World 2011. In October, we traveled to Austin, TX for the first ever Dell World 2011 conference. The conference was great and we had some great exchanges with some product specialists on some really neat innovations that are going to be coming from dell in the next couple of years. Our organization has an NDA on file so I cannot disclose details but let me just say that I'm impressed at what's coming. The conference in general was good but tailored more towards the executive staff or CIO level member of a given organization. There weren't any real lab environments to play with but the area where we could meet with vendors was neat. I would have to say the highlights were the Dell booth which showed the mobile (and environmentally green) deployable datacenter as well as the new Lync product shown by Microsoft. Intel had a great booth that showed some neat facial recognition software set and played it to something very similar from the Minority Report (facial recognition that tied to a metabase that would try to advertise masculine or feminine based products based on the gender of the individual recognized). Additionally, our team had a quick five minute exchange with Michael Dell. Though it was mainly regarding college sports, it was still nice to talk to the CEO of a multi-billion dollar organization...
Another reason that I have been unable to update this blog is that I've been selected on a special project at work that deals with the virtualization of enterprise resources. I can't get into details but one of those avenues has been regarding VDI. Therefore, I've been spending a lot of my time researching VDI solutions and what VMware offers from their VMware View product line. Depending on your organization, you can set varying pools of desktops with granular levels of entitlements. Furthermore, you can improve and optimize performance based on the protocol used, the type of session selected (i.e. persistent vs. non-persistent) and what storage and compute back end the entire infrastructure resides on. I won't get into too much detail in this post but look for future posts regarding more technical details on VDI in general.
Since we're on the subject of VDI, I've attended a VMware View course in early November and I had a great time and learned a lot of details about some of the best practices that are leveraged using the Teradici developed PCoIP protocol. Furthermore, I'm looking to upgrade my VCP to a VCP5 as well as get the desktop certification (VCP-DT). The only unfortunate thing is that the course was on View 4.5 and there wasn't anything available on 5.0 yet. I'm looking to take a training course on 5.0 after the courses are available after the new year. Regardless, the course offered some great information that allowed for us to design a decent VDI architecture using trending technologies and features offered by View 5.0.
Some information pertaining to some of the improvements can be found on this article...
http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2011/20110830-01.htm
This came out of VMworld (which I attended in August) but outlines the use of optimized storage on VMware View 5.0 and its capability of booting 500 desktops in less than five minutes. Which sounds very promising...
Lastly, I'm looking at retaking my VCAP. While I am on the fence about getting the VCAP4 or the VCAP5 (which means I'll have to update my VCP4 to a VCP5), I have a voucher from a course I took back in October regarding Advanced VMware vSphere training. Since I've already taken the VCAP4 once, I'm thinking that any VCAP is a prestigious certification. However, if it will allow me to take the VCAP5 (and I can upgrade my VCP in time), I may just do that to stay current with the latest version.
Well folks, that's about it. I'll leave you with an updated comparisons document from VMware. This compares VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus to Xen Server 5.6 SP2, Hyper-V 2008 R2 SP1, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2. The total document is 23 pages long and instead of uploading each page like I did with the vSphere 4 comparisons, I'll just provide the link... As with the vSphere 4 comparisons, the article is showing enhanced feature support for vSphere over the competition. Therefore, if you can shell out the money for vSphere licensing (which vSphere 5 has some vRAM entitlement restrictions - see my previous blogs), you'll be able to leverage some advanced features not currently offered by some of the competition.
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmware-vsphere-features-comparison-ch-en.pdf
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