If you’re at VMworld 2010, and you haven’t been to session ALT2004 - Building the VMworld Lab Cloud Infrastructure, I recommend you put that one on your schedule.  Dan Anderson (VMware Principal Architect) is a great presenter, and hearing him describe in detail how he architected and built this year’s lab environment is mind-boggling.

This guy is basically doing something that might take us a year or two, in only a few months.  There’s no load testing, and no way to know if it’s all going to work well until we all get in the labs and hammer on the environment.  Talk about flying by the seat of one’s pants!

Here’s a quick summary of what’s in the lab environment:

• 329 TB of storage from EMC and NetApp
• 352 Servers (HP Blades and Cisco UCS)
• 736 CPU sockets with 3,072 cores
• 7.5 THz of total CPU
• 14.6 TB RAM
• 480 thin clients
• 4,000+ VM’s deployed every hour
• 12 Lab Manager Instances
• 4 vCenters per site

This is all spread across 3 sites:

• Verizon – Ashburn, VA
• Terremark – Miami, FL
• Moscone – San Francisco

Each site can run the entire lab environment if necessary, so Hurricane Earl won’t be spoiling our fun!

Taking note of the lessons learned during Dan’s experience will help all of us, even if we’re not building at that speed or scale.  I encourage you to go to his session.  Here are the remaining opportunities to see this one:

Tuesday 11:00 AM		Moscone West Room 2014
Wednesday 03:00 PM		Moscone West Room 2014
Thursday 12:00 PM		Moscone West Room 2014

Now back to your regularly scheduled long line.