This will be a brief article highlighting some of the numbers that are of interest from VMworld US 2013 and some of the major announcements. I will dig deeper into some of the features that are important for customers virtualizing business critical apps in additional articles and only cover some of the important aspects here briefly. VMworld US 2013 was all about defying convention and for those that attended the event VMware certainly put on a great show.
In no particular order here we go.
First up, Number 10. 10 was a significant number this year. It was the 10th annual VMworld US and that made it an extra special event. It’s hard to imagine that it all started way back in 2004. Also this year as the event was bigger than ever a total of 10 buildings were used including the Moscone Center to host the event. The event was large enough that additional hotels and buildings surrounding Moscone Center were included as part of the main event venues. Check out the VMworld Campus Map if you want to take a look.
10 is also important as every year VMworld announces the top 10 breakout sessions and this year one of my sessions got into the top 10. Thanks to my co-speakers Andrew Mitchell, Frank Denneman, Mark Achtemichuk, and Mostafa Khalil on the VAPP4679 – Software Defined Datacenter Design Panel for Monster VM’s. The audience agreed we took the Technology to the Limits for High Performance, High Utilization Workloads. As the recording has been made public you can all watch it and hear the questions from the audience and our responses. You can see all of the Top 10 Sessions of VMworld here. A very special thank you to all people who registered and attended this session and filled in the survey. We had some excellent questions and feedback during this event and I look forward to repeating the success at VMworld Europe in Barcelona with a whole lot of new questions. The feedback from the session is very valuable and it’ll help us improve for next time, so thanks for taking the time to fill it out.
33 was the number of people that had attended all 10 VMworld USA events since 2004. A small selection of this group talked about the most memorable moments for them during the opening keynote on day one.
1,149 is the number of people who registered to attend sessions that I was involved in presenting. 878 is the number of people who actually attended these sessions in person. I’m very grateful for all of the attendees to my sessions. It was fantastic to have such an engaging audience and we had some excellent questions. 227 is the number of people who filled in the surveys after these sessions and gave us such good ratings.
1600 is the number of people who attended the first VMworld way back in 2004. 23000 is the marketing number (thanks Carl) of people who attended VMworld USA 2013. The actual number was closer to 22500. That is a lot of people to squeeze into the keynote area, the breakout sessions and the solutions exchange. The organizers did a superb job though and everything ran smoothly. VMworld is by far the biggest IT Infrastructure conference in the world and it was easy to see with all the different sponsors and exhibitors in the Solutions Exchange (which was packed all the time!), and the number of sessions and events. It’s almost double the size of HP Discover.
40 Million is the number of VMware VM’s in the world roughly as at VMworld 2013. 67% of all x86 workloads are virtualized. VMware has 500K customers.
Booth 2035 was where all the New Innovations Exhibitors were located. There were some pretty incredible new innovations on display including a fling from VMware called Predictive DRS. I sought out my friends from VSS Labs in the solutions exchange and they had some great demo’s of their Cloud Migration Portal (Exclusively licensed by VMware) and also vCert Manager (Now Available and Fully GA!). I wrote about these in a previous article VSS Labs To Showcase Latest VMware Automation Solutions At VMworld USA 2013. Now I can share with you the actual demo’s that they were showing in the Solutions Exchange so you can see for yourself how cool this stuff is.
vCert Manager 1.0 Demo
5.5 is the version of vSphere that was launched during VMworld US. There are some major enhancements in this version for all customers that are already or are interested in virtualizing business critical apps. There have been some major enhancements for low latency applications in addition to full support for Windows 2012 Clustering. There were some great scalability improvements in vSphere 5.5 for us as well. Some of the interesting numbers here include the following:
3 is the minimum number of ESXi 5.5 hosts providing storage in a VSAN cluster. Once VSAN is GA I could see a lot of interest in running this in ROBO environments and also for management clusters for other environments.
4 is the amount in TB of RAM that a single ESXi 5.5 hosts support, it’s the number of new AHCI SATA controllers per VM in the new Virtual Hardware v10, and it’s the number of storage products that VMware announced during VMworld keynote (VSAN, vVols, vSphere Flash Read Cache, Virsto).
10 is the new version of Virtual Hardware in vSphere 5.5. vHW 10 has support for the new AHCI SATA controller, better support for GPU’s, and good enhancements for performance of Windows virtual machines.
16 is the number of NUMA nodes supported per ESXi host, it also happens to be the bandwidth in Gb/s that is supported end to end for Fibre Channel SAN connections.
30 is the number of devices per AHCI SATA controller in the new vHW v10.
32 is the number of LACP LAG’s (Link Aggregation Groups) supported per vDS in vSphere 5.5
40 is the number of Gb/s supported for physical NIC’s in vSphere 5.5. You can now have 40Gb/s NIC’s in your hosts. I’m sure it won’t be too long before we see 100Gb/s NIC Support too.
62 is the number of TB supported for a single VMDK on a VM (Which I have covered in detail in my article vSphere 5.5 Jumbo VMDK Deep Dive).
100 is the number of ESXi 5.5 hosts supported by the vCenter Virtual Appliance 5.5 with the embedded database.
120 is the total number of AHCI SATA connected devices per VM with vHW v10 in vSphere 5.5.
128 is the maximum amount of Open and Active VMDK’s in TB that’ll be supported on a single host with the new adjusted VMFS Heap. The way VMFS Heap is handled has been changed to ensure it’s used much more efficiently and actually requires less memory. So the old heap size settings from previous versions of ESXi are not longer relevant.
320 is the number of logical CPU’s supported per ESXi 5.5 host.
3000 is the number of virtual machines supported by the vCenter Virtual Appliance 5.5 with the embedded database.
4096 is the number of virtual CPU’s supported per ESXi 5.5 host.
Here are some numbers specifically for Business Critical Apps some of which came out of VMworld 2013 and specifically from Raghu Raguram’s Financial Anlyst Briefing which you can find on the VMworld Investor Relations Page.
40 is the amount of TB of one Oracle Database that a customer I was speaking to at VMworld had virtualized successfully.
48 is the number of vCPU’s for a SQL Server database data warehouse of one of the attendees at our VAPP4679 – Software Defined Datacenter Design Panel for Monster VM’s: Taking the Technology to the Limits for High Performance, High Utilization Workloads session. This was just one example of the Monster VM’s that VMware’s customers confidently run on vSphere 5.x.
49 is the average percent virtualized for Oracle Database workloads across VMware’s customer base as at June 2013. This compares with 35% in 2012.
50% was the average CPU utilization of the SQL Server database mentioned above.
59 is the average percent virtualized for SQL Server workloads across VMware’s customer base as at June 2013.
256 is the amount of RAM in GB for an Exchange Mailbox VM that hosts 15,000 mailboxes for a customer in Australia. They have 3 such mailbox VM’s hosting a total of 40,000 mailboxes. Each has 20 vCPU’s and many TB of storage.
457.55 is the result of the Worlds First TPC-VMS Benchmark, showing an overhead vs native of just 1%!
512 was the amount of RAM in GB configured for the SQL Server database mentioned above.
40,000 was the number of average IOPS for the SQL Server database mentioned above. Interestingly this DB was backed by iSCSI datastores on a Dell Equilogics array.
Here is the graph from page 15 of Raghu’s presentation. You can see for yourself the increase in virtualization of these business critical workloads across VMware’s customer base over the year. It’s especially interesting to see the rise of Oracle DB and Oracle Middleware. SAP is also a highly virtualized workload. This demonstrates the confidence that VMware customers have and speaks of the results they receive when virtualizing their business critical applications.
While I was at VMworld I was also involved in the VCDX defence panels as a panelist. So here are some VCDX numbers for you.
1 is the current number of VCDX holders in New Zealand (just me right now). It’s also the number of people who hold more than one VCDX Certification. Tomas Fojta is both VCDX-DCV and VCDX-Cloud and he is also the first recipient of the John Von Neumann VCDX Achievement Award, which was given out for the first time at the VCDX/vExpert Reception by Pat Galsinger during VMworld in San Francisco. Well done Tomas! Thanks for the reminder Mark! 1 is also the number of moderators on the VCDX Panel and ensures everybody has a consistent experience and the panels keep to the time and rules set out by the program.
2 is the maximum number of VCDX observers for each VCDX panel defence. This is also the number of newly minted VCDX’s from Ahead IT in Chicago.
3 is the number of VCDX panelists on each VCDX panel that interact with the candidate. It also happens to be the number of VCDX each currently employed by Ahead IT in Chicago (after the San Francisco results came out) and Nutanix in San Jose, and also VCE, Cisco and EMC. These companies are second equal employing the most number of VCDX outside of VMware according to Will Huber’s VCDX by the Numbers.
66 is my VCDX certification number.
110 is the number of VCDX holders in the world before VMworld VCDX certification results were announced.
119 is the new number of VCDX holders in the world. Big congratulations to all those candidates that passed the defence panels. For those of you that weren’t successful this time, don’t give up. Learn from your performance, take a good look at the feedback you received and hopefully you will be successful next time.
Final Word
Although this was only my second VMworld USA it was incredible. It was so much bigger, better, and brighter than last year. The event food was certainly miles better than last year. Presenting to and meeting all of the attendees was a great highlight for me. The VMworld Party at AT&T Park was just out of this world. My wife commented to me that she wished she’d studied IT instead of business and gotten over her fear of public speaking just so she could attend VMworld and go to the party. I Skyped my family just while Train was finishing their set and the fireworks were going so they could feel part of the action. I’m very much looking forward to doing it all again in a few weeks at VMworld Europe in Barcelona. If you are attending VMworld in Barcelona don’t be afraid to seek me out and say hi, especially if you want to ask anything about business critical applications on VMware vSphere. As always your feedback and comments on this article are appreciated.
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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2013 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
I like such reports. Thanks for sharing.
BTW on what kind of HW (brand/model) is running this 48 vCPU’s SQL Server database?
If I recall correctly the server was a Dell R910 with 4 x 6 core sockets with HT enabled. The consolidation ratio was 1:1. The reason they virtualized was to get non-disruptive upgrades and maintenance. But with this sort of a system you really need 20Gb/s or 40Gb/s for vMotion, so if you want to attempt this you should configure Multi-NIC vMotion, as we suggested to this customer.
Isn't it a ratio of 1:2 (1 core and two threads)?
I had the opportunity to architect a design around Dell R910. We went for Xsigo solution mainly to avoid extra mezzanine 10GbE cards, cables and pSwitches and also for IB low latency…
Do you present your monster VM session again in Barcelona?
I will indeed be presenting the Monster VM session again in Barcelona. We'll probably have two scheduled time slots for it as it was so popular in San Francisco. So look out for the schedule builder to go live in the next week or so.
One of the more fun blog posts I have read in awhile. VMworld was indeed awesome this year. Thanks, Michael.
Fencepost error: this being the 10th VMworld meant the first was in 2004, which it was. Not 2003.
Good spotting. I was wondering who was going to be observant enough to spot the obvious error. I have now corrected it.
Great post, Micheal! Simply loved reading it! Good job. – Amit, Singapore
Great read Mike whilst waiting for my flight. Congratulations on making the top 10.
Nice article, enjoyed the fun facts! I will make it a point to attend your session next year.
Kirk Bellmore
1 is the number of people that hold more than one VCDX Certification. Tomas Fojta is both VCDX-DCV and VCDX-Cloud and he is also the first recipient of the John Von Neumann VCDX Achievement Award – which was given out for the first time at the VCDX/vExpert Reception by Pat Gelsinger.