Time flies when you’re having fun right?

Back in 2006 when I joined LightEdge, I wasn’t sure what the future was going to hold for me. The company had employed my wife for a year already and they seemed to be moving in the right direction. Just over 7 years later, things are going strong and if anything, its hard to keep up with the customer demand. A great problem to have. (FYI…LightEdge is hiring)

I’m very fortunate to have a nice lab at work where I have a UCS chassis, fabrics, a few blades and a VNX to play with. Recently I’ve been working on getting our Razor implementation hammered out so messing around with all the good automation bits.

Now, because its a lab, it doesn’t tend to fall into the same patching cycles as our production servers do. My Razor server in particular is an example of this only getting updated when I have the chance to turn a wrench.

That VMworld went by way too darn quick. So fast that I didn’t get to put up a day 3 and day 4 follow up. There is a lot of cool stuff going on with VMware that many of us will be talking about for years to come. Mainly, NSX, vSAN and vCHS.

But what are we here for, we’re here to see how dead wrong I was with my annual predictions. Here we go.

Day 2 flew by for me and I have to say, I’m still reeling a bit.

The day was kicked off with the general session keynote which is usually when we see Herrod take the stage, but since his departure, we got another C level (COO Carl Eschenbach). This one was probably my favorite of all of them that I’ve seen as we didn’t have to suffer through a VMware View / Horizon demo. I’m not a fan of desktop support so this has never appealed to me.

The big day for VMware admins around the world is here with the first day of VMworld 2013. Kicking off the conference (besides the pre-parties) is the keynote given by the CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger.

The big announcements from the keynote are:

• VMware vSphere 5.5 As rumored, we didn’t see vSphere 6, but there were several enhancements here that caught my eye. A new VM version which now supports better vGPU and more device support (more disks per VM). vApp HA which checks for the presence of “heartbeats” from VMware Tools™ as well as I/O activity from the virtual machine. If neither of these is detected in the specified amount of time, vSphere HA resets the virtual machine. You will notice that many of the performance features have increased 2x except the vmdk which overshot and now supports 62TB-512b vmdks attached to a VM. I know several of my customers that will like that new feature. You can read more about what’s new in vSphere 5.5 here.