ALT 2004 – Building the VMworld Lab Cloud Infrastructure

Dan Anderson, a Principal Architect for VMware, spoke about the infrastructure behind VMworld 2010.  This was a very entertaining session and Dan was fun to listen to.  There are 3 datacenter locations used to power VMworld, one is here at Moscone, another at Terremark in Miami, FL and the third is at Verizon in Ashburn, VA.  All sites connect over the public internet through IPsec VPN connections.  Having some of the equipment onsite made this a ‘hybrid cloud’ deployment.  Since VMware says the cloud is the future of computing they decided to practice what they preach and deploy it in a cloud.  All lab stations are PCoIP zero clients and the room is divided into 8 sections.  Of those 8 sections 3 connect locally, 2.5 go to Verizon and the other 2.5 go to Terremark.  One of the problems during setup was moving data around, and Dan mentioned as an industry we need to figure out an effective way for moving data between clouds.

Networking:

10 Gbe core

2 x DS3 links at Moscone

Redundant 100 Mb connection at Terremark and Verizon

All connections go over public internet through IPsec VPN

Storage:

329TB Raw

244TB Usable

Compute:

352 ESX hosts

736 CPU sockets

3072 CPU Cores

7.5 THz Clock cycles

Memory:

14.6 TB

Clients:

480 PCoIP enabled zero clients

The two other locations were picked on the east coast because they will also be used for VMworld Europe which is coming up soon, Moscone equipment will be moved and the others will remain in place.

Lab Stats:

30 labs

44 hours of lab time over 4 days

480 seats

22070 lab hours

Also mentioned was that 4000 virtual machines are built and destroyed every hour!