by
adam baum
Here's the last of my Day One:
I only attended one afternoon session. It was "AMD- One year later". I was impressed by what they did, and did not, say. First of all, the group at AMD doing VM is not as big as I thought. I've attended one of Intel's Premier IT shows and they talk about how they have 50K servers and are growing. Here's AMD talking 500 servers. Turns out these guys are in global ops. They manage systems such as email, ERP, and such. They don't touch any of the engineering systems.
It was comforting to know that these guys have the same problems that I do such as FUD, NIMBY, etc. Even though they had a C level champion (Hector Ruiz), they still had difficulties in getting customer buy-in. One area that was surprising is that there is not a whole lot of communication with the chip engineering group. I expected that the two groups would work closely together so that future chip designs would incorporate characteristics that would improve performance based on real world usage. BTW, this was Ron Oglesby's baby. He and his group did the initial architecting and rollout. Ron is here touting his new book and company.
Just to throw some numbers into the mix. The initial rollout was 117 physical servers consolidated onto 7 hosts. AMD has sinced increased the guest count to 266 guests across 11 hosts.
By skipping most of the afternoon sessions, I was able to peruse the Solutions Exchange (trade show floor). I am glad to see that there are number of companies tackling the performance mgmt and reporting aspects of virtualized data center mgmt. I particularly liked what I saw at BalancePoint. Their product does all the typical monitoring that you would expect, but it also watches disk I/O. If two guests are hammering the same LUN, it will provide a recommendation on moving one of the guests to a lower utilized LUN. I really like this because disk I/O monitoring and tuning has been a nightmare for me.
All the standard players were here. IBM, HP, EMC, Equalogic, VizionCore,PhD, etc. Other than some mgmt tools, I really didn't see anything that made say "Wow!". I'm guessing it's because I've spent the last three months researching VM related products. I was hoping to stumble onto some unknown gem. Who Knows, maybe I will. There is still two days left.
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