Yesterday was the Washington DC area VMware User Group meeting, which was held at the Red Porch restaurant inside Nationals Stadium. Being a baseball fan (though as a recent DC area transplant, not a huge Nationals fan yet), going to a Major League Baseball park is always exciting, with the VMUG being an added bonus (kidding!).
The first presentation was from Tintri, a storage vendor which presented itself as having “VMaware storage”. The presentation, while a little long-ish with the demo at the end, was very informative and thought-provoking. I kind of like the idea of nearly all writes going to SSD, then pushing cold data back to SATA as a means of tiering, rather than the traditional “hot-blocking” method of moving hot blocks to SSD or cache. It helped to internalize the idea by thinking of it as a push (push the cold blocks out of SSD) action rather than pull (pull hot blocks into SSD). Management of the appliance seemed easy, though the demo was a little short on that. I also liked the in-line deduplication and compression features.
The second presentation was from Michael Letschin, Virtualization Architect from Convergence Technology Consulting, comparing Citrix XenApp versus VMware Horizon Application Manager. I tend to like comparisons such as these, and I was not disappointed in this one. I have only passing familiarity with Horizon Application Manager via a VMworld 2011 session I attended, so the information presented was very well received by me. The comparison was a little bit off since XenApp can’t deliver SaaS apps like Horizon Application Manager can, but it was still very appropriate otherwise.
Lastly, the ever present Veeam presented on some of its new offerings. If you’re reading this now, you’re likely very well acquainted with Veeam and their products, so I won’t go in to that now. I would like to take this time to thank Veeam for its great efforts to support the VMware communities, specifically with their participation in VMUGs. Having been to several VMUG meetings in the past, they are almost always one of the sponsors, which is awesome for keeping the community going. Thanks, Veeam!
After all was said and done, we were taken on a tour of Nationals stadium, which for me, was great. I had a great time during the tour, and I’m absolutely glad I stuck around for it. I’ll throw the pictures I took on my iPhone on Flickr later and post a link if anybody’s interested.
0 Comments.