The not-exactly-live-blogging-VMworld 2012 blog post

[Eric_Hennessey1]

I had the pleasure of attending VMworld 2012 this week and had every intention of blogging daily from the venue. Suffice it to say that between working in the booth a few hours each day and meetings on the side with Symantec customers and partners, that just didn't happen. On the other hand, I did manage to spot Brent Spiner (Data from the Star Trek: The Next Generation series) at the event.

As I said, I spent several hours each day in the Symantec booth talking with customers (current and future!) about our new release of Veritas Cluster Server due out this Fall. This release is pretty exciting in that it has enhancements allowing users to install VCS on Windows and Linux VMware guests, providing application failover between virtual machines. This gives customers another level of protection beyond what our ApplicationHA product delivers so our customers can now select the appropriate level of availability based on service level agreements.

From the IT director at a professional sports media group to the server virtualization engineer at a leading Polish bank, there was a very high level of interest in this capability expressed by just about everyone I spoke with.

On the partner side, it was great chatting with some of my counterparts at VMware and getting their take on the state of virtualization and where things are going. I guess I'm going to have to wrap my brain around this new "software-defined data center" concept since it seems "cloud" is just SO early 2012 now.

I also had an interesting talk with the Unified Computing System (UCS) guys at Cisco. We tossed around ideas of what Veritas Cluster Server can do in either a VMware or bare-metal environment running on UCS. Combine VCS's triggers and open agent framework with the UCS PowerCLI and you've got some pretty interesting automation capabilities. We hope to get some lab time together in the near future to write up some details.

My feet are sore and my throat is raw, but it was a pretty awesome few days at VMworld 2012.