The Dutch VMUG Event 2010 – Recap.

Just a quick blog about the sessions I attended at the sixth Dutch VMUG Event, which have been hold at NBC Nieuwegein. This event was the biggest so far, 750 attendees!  I blogged earlier about the sessions that I will attend so here is a quick recap.

1. First session: VMware vCloud Director presented by Willem van Engeland (VMware) and Duncan Epping (VMware). Willem and Duncan showed us what the vCloud Directory is and what you can do with it. Good explanation of the product and a live demo. Nice!
2. Second session: vSphere Advanced Troubleshooting presented by Eric Sloof (NTpro.nl). This was a huge session about troubleshooting your hosts and VM’s. A lot of info in a short time. Eric started with troubleshooting the CPU issues (%RDY time and the %MLMTD value). He also gave some tips about the co-scheduling (%CSTP) values in VM’s with more than one vCPU. Next, the memory troubleshooting. Eric gave an overview about the page sharing, ballooning, memory limits/reservations and compression. Relation to each memory technique on the host and there were some tips to avoid the memory performance issues. After that, he moved to storage troubleshooting. The topics discussed were vscsiStats, SCSI reservations conflict counter (CONS/s in esxtop), disk alignment, kernel latency and the VMFS datastore block size. Next, the networking troubleshooting. Eric talked about the dropped packets (%DRPR), how they occur and what you can do to avoid it. In addition, some tips about Load Based Teaming on a distributed Switch, PortFast/STP settings on your physical switches and the use of the VMXNET3 driver in your VM’s. Final topic of this awesome presentation was the troubleshooting tools like Veeam Monitor, VMTurbo Watchdog, the VESI, Graph-VM and RVTools.
3. The third session: Q&A about DRS and HA presented by Duncan Epping (VMware) and Frank Denneman (VMware). Questions from the audience, answers from the masters. Nothing more, nothing less 🙂 Great interactive session.
4. Fourth session: Fluid Data Storage presented by Mark Dik (Compellent). Mark gave a brief overview of the Compellent Company before he moved to more technical stuff. Compellent got a pretty smart data tiering concept. Data not used for a while, moves after a defined period of time from tier 1 to tier 2 to tier 3. The software fully integrates in VMware. There is a vCenter Server plug-in, which enables you to create, modify and delete the datastores from your vSphere Client. The VAAI support will be added in early 2011. Mark showed us some video’s how their product works. Nice, informative session.
5. The fifth session: VDI & Storage – Deep Impact by Herco van Brug (VMUG/PQR). Herco showed us a quick overview of the VDI concept as well as pros and cons of server hosted VDI. Proper design and sizing of the VDI infrastructure and hardware is crucial when you build your VDI environment. Herco showed some examples of sizing the CPU, memory, network and of course the storage. He stated that the “write” IOPS is the most important factor for sizing your VDI infrastructure. He also gave some tips on how to generate less IOPS from the VM’s. Good session, good tips.

So, to recap, the sixth edition of the Dutch VMUG was a big success. Great speakers, a lot of information and a good atmosphere made this event one of the best I ever attended. My compliments to the organization and I am already looking forward to the next Dutch VMUG meeting. One more thing, the presentations from the event can be downloaded from the Dutch VMUG website.

Cheers!

– Marek.Z