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Monday night of vmworld2007 the NEVMUG (new england vmware users group) invited 25 or so people out to the ballpark for night of baseball featuring the nation’s favorite steroid scandaled ball player (recent american cyclists don’t count, they don’t use real steroids

A great time was had by all in a super nice ballpark right on the bay.  Good views of the bay bridge and Mr. Bonds.  I should have snapped some shots of the NEVMUG crew but I got nothing…

Here is everything else….

Lots is going on this week at VMworld 2007. I watched a video at the AMD booth of a server being upgraded from dual proc dual core to dual proc quad cores featuring their new “Barcelona” F series cpu. The only change required is a bios upgrade which they actually replaced with a new physical bios chip. They stated in the video that no additional power, cooling or hardware is required for the upgrade. The upgrade made a significant change in system performance. FMI for quad core opterons…

I’m seeing a lot more companies adapting a de-duplication technology to their product. Netapp and Data Domain are a couple of vendors that I spoke to about this. Data Domain was interesting to me because they supply you with an entry level HW appliance with redundant disk storage at RAID 6. The cost is about $17k for their entry level appliance. The appliance comes with 2.5 raw tb of space which is the equivalent to 25tb of actual vm files because of the capabilities of de-duplication. Pretty incredible.

Ubuntu is visiting VMworld again. They’ve released a version of ubuntu that’s slimmed down for usage with virtual appliances and virtual machines. The product is called Jeos (pronounced juice).

Tonight is the VMworld 2007 Party…

So VMware is introducing V3i. This is going to be ESX embedded to a flash drive device. I read that it’s going to be only 32mb which just seems ridiculously small. There should be HUGE benefits from running an embedded hypervisor.  Their hypervisor went from 2GB -> 32mb.

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid94_gci1271277,00.html

http://crn.com/software/201804948?cid=ChannelWebBreakingNews

Tomorrow is the keynote. I wonder if we’ll here anyting about the new quad core amd processors that are supposed to be released. I enjoyed the keynotes from last year so hopefully it’ll be intersting.

Tonight I went to the SF Giants game courtesy of the New England VMUG. What a nice ballpark. It was not very full by any means but I think that was because of an opening Monday night 49rs football game. The ballpark was about 1.5 miles from the hotel so the walk was not too bad. Arizona won with a 9th inning 2 run shot…there was a few home runs in this game which was cool. You could pretty much pick wherever you wanted to sit which is crazy ’cause you could never do that at Fenway.

I landed in San Francisco yesterday at around 1:3o pm. Another excellent experience with United; 6 hours and on time from Boston. I rented a car and found my way to the hotel pretty easily. Most of the roads feel pretty difficult to maneuver. The Marriot I’m staying at is around the corner from the Moscone center which is great.

Today I was able to register for the event which included a free laptop bag and t-shirt. I started my day with an 8am lab dealing with DR and multiple sites. The lab felt slightly unorganized but it was the first one of the day and also first of the conference. There were multiple typos in the lab manual. If someone had never used Virtual Center before I can see it useful. I followed this lab with one on Security and Hardening ESX. I actually took this lab last year as well and I’ve found that this lab might not have changed at all and if it did is was probably slightly. I’m not sure if that was good or bad. I thought the lab would have been slightly more updated.

I’ve found a neat KVM utility for vmware vm’s.  This utility is interesting to me because it utilizes virtual center permissions but you don’t have to deploy the whole boat for the user requiring simple console access.  You can take a peak at it here:

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/categories/7-Virtual-Machine-MKS-Client