Storage for Virtual Environments Seminar, Seattle, WA

The next date in my Storage for Virtual Environments seminar series is rapidly approaching, and I hope to see my Pacific Northwest readers there! I’ve made even more changes to the seminar content, adding more about vSphere 5 and including new VAAI and partition alignment info. There’s never enough time for everything I want to cover, of course.

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 Westin Seattle. But beware: TechTarget only allows end-users to attend and have been known to turn away vendors and consultants at the door!

Notes From Cleveland

One of the most interesting topics of conversation in Cleveland was the “layer cake” of storage virtualization present in VMware environments. In other words, since the hypervisor is a storage array and the storage array is (of course) a storage array, where do you manage storage? It seems to break down to a simple choice:

1. Users of homogenous “all virtualized” infrastructure likely want to remove the storage array from the equation altogether. They would be better served buying automated but simple storage and managing everything in the hypervisor or above.
2. More diverse environments, especially those that are not fully virtualized, are likely to be more interested in moving intelligence into the storage array. They like automation and integration functions like VAAI but are less enthusiastic about thin provisioning and storage DRS in the hypervisor.

Thanks again for the feedback, and I look forward to meeting you all at future seminars!