My experience at VMworld 2016 US
You will find this article updated, please come back and refresh!
Community. That's why I'm here. I've spent a lot of time this past year refining the process of installing and running tiny clusters of Xeon D, and I'm pleased that I finished preparing my Supermicro & Intel NUC demonstration on Sunday, just before my direct flight to Vegas. I even got those sound and watt measurements done, which people have been asking about. I'll be adding those to the detailed comparison table. DONE! Suffice it to say that the mini-tower form factor is still champ when it comes to versatility and quietness.
Not only did all the gear arrived safely, but it continues to work well in my staging area, aka, hotel room. This is good!
So far, you'll see much about what I've been up to here at VMworld 2016 US from Twitter. My focus has been on meeting with folks in the vendor area, and some technical presentations, including Micron, NVIDIA, QNAP, Sandisk, Samsung, Supermicro, and Synology. I've also been to some VCSA related sessions.
I've also been doing some hunkering down to get some last-minute foam posterboards printed up using the updated information, so visitors to my demonstration at VMworld tomorrow will, including the latest noise and watt burn measurements. People will be able to see the many Xeon D variants, at a glance. I also have an engineering sample surprise, for visitors with inquiring minds.
New Bundle Announcement
I have been working on finalizing the new Wiredzone Supermicro SuperServer bundled offering, to be announced at 9am Pacific on Wednesday, August 30th via twitter and a brief post here at TinkerTry. Yep, that's one hour into my 8am to 1pm live demonstration, at the Social & Communities area of the VMvillage. I'll be the guy standing in the green shirt. Ok, more specifically, I'll be the vExpert with a blogger pass and a TinkerTry.com logo'd shirt, standing next to a tiny home datacenter that looks a lot like this:
Aug 31 2016 Update
Another great day at VMworld, with an exciting start to the day, when I announced this big news for TinkerTry readers:
It was very inspiring to have roughly 200 folks visit my demonstration over a 6 hour period, and a whole lot of fun for me to show all the components of this little datacenter.
Had some rough spots, with difficulties lugging the gear up and down many elevators on the 1 mile wheelie-bag-hostile route to the VMvillage. This set me back a bit when it came up to finishing up setting up my little network configuration, so the first hour or so of visitors didn't get to see a live demo. Didn't seem to bother them much, as there was instead plenty of focus on the physical aspects of the design of each of the servers. Many people did return later to see everything fully operation, including the new HTML5 based ESXi Host Client and vSphere Client UIs.
The question about price came up often, which I highlighted on the posterboard I made of the Intel Core i7 Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK spec comparison with all current Xeon D-1500 Supermicro SuperServers suited for home labs.
VMware employee gallery
Overall, I discussed Xeon D with about 8 folks from VMware, 3 from EMC, and 2 from Dell. Each conversation was pretty in depth, and a lot of fun, with a lot of interest in vSAN and NSX for traveling demonstration labs. Yes, the SYS-E200-8D with room for one M.2 NVMe and one 2.5" SSD would be a natural choice, but the hold-up right now is the lack of M.2 NVMe drives that are on the vSAN HCL that are 2280 in length. Micron is planning to adddress this, seen in my VMworld 2016 video interview.
Iwan Hoogendoorn has what must be one of the most impressive LinkedIn profiles out there, including 6 CCIEs!
The day ended with a fun evening at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, where I quite enjoyed gawking at the cars, and hearing Capital Cities perform Safe and Sound live. Great way to end the day!
Sep 01 2016 Update
Once again, I made a magic moment happen at a VMworld lunch table. Like last year, I scoped out which table looked more sociable than others, with folks actually talking to one-another, and plates full of food, having just sat down.
What do you know, a VMware employee who works with Supermicro. Yes, we had LOTS to talk about ;-)
Sep 02 2016 Update
Early today, just hours before my early AM flight, I USB transferred my iPhone's MOV files to my PC, then uploaded them to YouTube from my Luxor Hotel room as-is, unedited, in the interest of getting these published promptly. Enjoy!
Sep 04 2016 Update
If you hadn't read about this already, see:
- Mandalay Bay installs America's biggest solar roof - 26,000-panels big.
Jul 08 2016 by Andrew Tarantola @Terrortola for engadget:The Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, NV is now home to the largest roof-top solar array in America. The array consists of 26,000 individual panels and produces enough power to meet roughly 25 percent of the convention center's energy requirements.
My flight path, LAS to BDL.
Above image from https://goo.gl/maps/USMMFGY8EQC2
Sep 05 2016 Update
Getting ready to return to work, there's that feeling of regret for all the people I spotted on line or in person at VMworld, but never got to catch up with in person, such as Roger Lund @rogerlund, who has a great post on his site that I just happened to run into via the Googles very recently:
- Setup an L2TP/IPSEC VPN On Your Ubitquiti EdgeRouter
Mar 27 2016 by Michael Davis at vBrainstorm
Sep 10 2016 Update
Came across this great article that features his terrific little video:
See also at TinkerTry
See also
