Seminar: Storage for Virtual Environments, Cleveland OH

The next date in my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar series is rapidly approaching, and I hope to see my Ohio readers there! I’ve made major changes to the seminar content recently, updating it with vSphere 5 news and rearranging the whole thing. I still feel like there’s not enough time to get to everything, but it’s a start!

As always, I’ll be presenting three one-hour sessions:

1. The first hour focuses on virtualization and hypervisors in general, including a discussion of storage features in VMware and Microsoft’s products
2. The second hour dives into these hypervisor features, including storage presentation, thin provisioning, and VAAI
3. The final hour is all about storage outside the hypervisor, including protocols (iSCSI, NFS, and FC/FCoE), convergence on Ethernet, SSD, and specialized storage for virtualization

I’ll be tweeting live from the seminar using the #VirtualStorage hashtag, including “virtual footnotes” providing additional details on what I’m covering.

If you’re in the area, you can probably still get into the event. Head over to the TechTarget site to register, or just show up at the Ritz-Carlton. But beware: TechTarget only allows end-users to attend and have been known to turn away vendors and consultants at the door! Happily, the Avengers movie shoot shouldn’t interfere with getting to the Terminal Tower.

Notes From Toronto and Denver

The last two weeks have been seriously busy. In addition to Tech Field Day in Austin, I presented this same content in Denver, CO and Toronto, ON. These sessions generated some great questions and comments!

• Lots of discussion in Denver about partition alignment. I’ll be adding content to the seminar about this, but am not sure if it’ll make Cleveland. In the mean time, read this whitepaper and this blog post.
• I got great feedback from the Denver audience (Rated 4.92 out of 5.0? Seriously? Thanks!) but some wanted better slide colors (including me!), more time (me too!), and more focus on alignment and dedupe. Thanks for the feedback!
• Toronto discussion dove a bit into the VMware VSA in more detail, and we also talked a bit about best practices for justifying consolidation generally. How do you justify putting all your eggs in one basket?