However VMworld hits the bottom rung of the ladder.  The VMworld content team simply provides this feedback.

Here is a list of the most common reasons why sessions were declined:

• There were too many submissions with similar topics.
• The submission was too basic, not enough information was provided in the abstract.
• The session was too single vendor product focused and likely to have a commercial nature.

Having the most common reasons why sessions weren’t picked isn’t exactly helpful.  Given that my abstracts have been accepted at conferences like TechEd and the SQL PASS Summit I can assume that the submission wasn’t too basic.  While my sessions are SQL Server specific, virtualizing SQL Server is a major push for VMware so I’m assuming that I don’t fall into the last bucket.  That leaves that there were just too many submissions, which I can’t believe as currently there are only three sessions on the schedule that talks about SQL Server (as of my writing this).  The first is about virtualizing SQL Server, and the second is how General Mills succeed in virtualizing SQL Server using VMware, and the third appears to be a repeat of a SQL Virtualization session from last year.

The first session is called “Virtualizing SQL High Availability” but the abstract doesn’t talk about SQL Server High Availability, it only talks about SQL Server Performance Tuning within a virtual machine which let’s be honest from a SQL Server perspective is identical to tuning SQL Server on a physical machine.  Make sure the disks are fast enough, that you have enough memory and CPU then do the normal SQL performance tuning.  Looking at the external speakers companies website he appears to be knowledgeable on databases in general, but he doesn’t list anything more current than SQL Server 7 in his publications list for SQL Server, and most of his publications are for Oracle.

The second session called “Virtualizing SQL 2012 at General Mills” looks basically like a fluff piece being led by a Technical Account Manager from VMware (Sales) and a VMware Architect. In other words, they’ll have no one around who can actually answer any SQL Server questions, or talk about SQL Server in depth.

The third session is called “Virtualizing SQL Best Practices” which I’m pretty sure I saw at VMworld last year, and if it is the same session as last year I really hope that it is better than the session last year.  When I saw the session by this same presenter last year the session was full of incorrect and very outdated information, much of which was based on SQL Server 2000 but was being presented for SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2.  If this is an updated version of last years session, I REALLY hope for the attendees sake that the session is updated and the incorrect information is updated.

Now am I writing this because I think I should have been handed a speaking slot at VMworld?  No.  I’m writing this because I think that VMworld needs to do a better service to their potential speakers so that the speakers can improve their abstracts based on VMworld’s requirements (as every conference has different criteria that they use when evaluating session abstracts).  I also feel that VMworld needs to do a better job providing SQL Server specific content to their attendees.  VMworld has 9 Oracle sessions listed (granted I think that only 7 of them are actually Oracle specific).

Hopefully this blog post won’t fall on deaf ears at VMworld and they will do something about their lack of SQL Server content as out of the three sessions listed, I personally don’t have much hope for any of them being very useful to the general VMworld attendee.

Before writing this blog post I emailed VMware asking for more information about why my sessions weren’t selected.  I got a pretty generic response back which doesn’t specify anything about why my specific sessions weren’t selected.

• Take the time to specify some of the details in your session description.  The title, abstract, outline, and session takeaways are key factors in determining whether your session is selected and can affect session attendance.

• Be sure your perspective or story is unique.

• Attendees are there to learn, so educate rather than pitch your product.  Your proposal submission should clearly reflect your intention.

• Make sure your topic is relevant to the audience you’re targeting. Review the content topics before submitting a session.

• Session selections are based on the content described in the submission, and the speaker(s). Speakers should have extensive experience presenting at conferences of a similar nature. If a speaker has presented at VMworld in the past, we will look at speaker scores and take them into consideration during selection.

Again not exactly the more useful information for me as an abstract writer to improve.

Denny

The first thing I was was a project called Project Octopus.  This allows your users to access the same files via Windows, Mac or Linux PCs, phones, tablets, etc.  It also allows users to edit any files which they have access to on any device.  This is done via HTML 5 so as long as the device supports HTML 5 (which most everything new does) you can access full Windows applications on the machine.  In the demo the user was sent an Excel file via IM which they then opened on an iPad and they were able to edit it in a fully functional copy of Excel 2010.  There was a small application installed on the iPad which then connected to the server via the web browser, uploaded the file to the server (or opened the file from the server, not really sure here, but either way) then the user was able to edit the Excel sheet and save it back to the server.

The next product which we were shown was called VMware Go.  Go is a software as a service offering where the user signs into the site and then they are able to via the webpage scan an IP subnet looking for servers which are capable of running vSphere 5.0 on them.  The user can then select which Windows servers they would like to deploy vSphere 5.0 to.  vSphere 5.0 is then deployed to the servers.  I’m not sure what happens to the Windows OS and services which are already installed on the servers, so this could be very dangerous if pushed to the wrong server by accident.

A new product which I’m really excited about is aimed directly at the small / medium business (SMB) market and will allow you to take two servers with only local storage and configure them in a highly available vSphere 5.0 cluster.  This new product is called Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA).  The way this is done is that the VSA which is a virtual appliance which is installed on all the hosts (it supports two and three node clusters only).  When installed and configured it will take the local storage and present it to the cluster as shared storage.  Redundancy for this solution is done by using software based replication and setting up each VM to be replicated to another host in the cluster.  This way the cluster can always survive a single node failure without loosing the ability to run any guest on the cluster.

There are some big changes coming to vSphere Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 which is no longer called VMware vSphere SRM.  One of the biggest is the ability to automatically fail back after a site has failed and restored automatically.  In prior versions of SRM failover was a one way operation, in order to fail back to the first site you would have to totally reconfigure SRM and then trigger failover.  With the new 5.0 version of SRM you simply configure the failback as part of the policies then when the second site comes back online SRM will failback as configured.

Another cool thing you can do with SRM 5.0 now is the ability to DR your site to a cloud provider instead of to your own backup data center.  This allows you to run your primary site on your hardware, but rent your DR systems from a cloud service provider that is certified as a SRM site.  Currently there are only a couple of options, but as time goes on there will be more options available.

I went to a couple of sessions today, the most informative of which was about the new features of vSphere 5.0.  VMware is upgrading the VMFS version from 3 to 5, but this time it is a non-distruptive upgrade unlike the upgrade from VMFS 2 to 3.  The new version of ESXi is much thinner than the prior 4.1 version leaving more resources available for the guest machines.

vSphere will only officially supports 32 hosts in a cluster, however there was been clusters tested with over 100 nodes, but still only 32 are supported.  Something which will make a lot of Linux shops happy is vCenter no longer requires Windows as the OS for the vCenter server.  It can now be installed on a Linux OS (they didn’t specify which Linux flavor).  There is an embedded database which supports up to 5 hosts and 50 VMs.  For installs which are larger than this you’ll need to install an instance of Oracle.  Currently only Oracle is supported and eventually other databases will be supported.  Another limitation of running vCenter on Linux is that you can’t run the vCenter in linked mode.  Linked mode is where you have a vCenter server one at each site and they are linked so that you have redundancy at the vCenter level.

There is a new web based client which will be included with vSphere 5.0.  This won’t be a fully featured featured UI, but it will support most of the features.  The nice thing about this new web client is that it will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux.  Eventually the web client will become the default client for vSphere and vCenter but this isn’t the case yet.

The last change I want to talk about today is the fact that vMotion now supports slower links.  In vSphere 4.1 and below using vMotion required using a network which had a 5ms or lower network latency.  In vSphere 5.0 this limit is increased to 10ms latency which allows you to vMotion over city wide networks.

See you tomorrow for VMware Day 3.

Denny