Saturday, September 5, 2009

VMworld 2009 Boot Camp Surprise:

VMware is an awesome company. As I reported earlier, the boot camp had some major technical issues. I received this email today from VMware:

"Thank you for attending the invitation only vSphere Bootcamp on Sunday, August 30th. We realize your experience was not optimal due to system issues. As a valued VMware customer, we would like to offer you a complimentary pass to VMworld 2010, August 30 – September 2 . You’ll automatically receive an email early next year with details on how to register but please keep this email as your reference."

Now that is a company standing behind their VMorld experience! AWESOME!

Hats off to you VMware for making VMworld THE VIRTUALIZATION event to attend!

Thursday, September 3, 2009

VMworld 2009: Wednesday: General Session: 

Steve takes the stage, VMware view people centric, not device centric. Large movement to this..and focus area. Efficiency and centralized management, and user experience are key.

vSphere right place to run this:
commonality, security (VMsafe), Availability, Efficiency
centralized image and policy managment
decomposition to shar image, simplify patching

storage concerns, iscsi and thin provisioning help. 


Announcing RTO virtual profiles


User experience, three main areas: wan, lan, local. Rich portable desktop. Leverage the media hardware. Same image, same policies. 
PCOIP shipping later in the year. option to use hardware acceleration...software only solution shipping as well. 
IT give the IT approved DVD for laptop, with policy, bare metal virtulization corportate-owned IT. 
demo that was very impressive..and iphone to access your desktop

Mobile phone virtualization: mobile becoming a personal computer.  Gives device freedom, work approved vphone. application freedom, one device to run all different 
nice demo

Cloud discussion: building a colleciton of resources to combine and build the software mainframe. Giant computer, 6 year anniversary of vmotion. a lot of maturity, breadth, automated usage.
Dec 2003, 359 million vmotions customers have used...admin saving  459 million,, marriage saved 74
network vmotion- may 2009, long distance vmotion. Break ties to anything physical.


DRS gave 40% better performance to sql workload as more workloads caused imbalance.
DRS to include IO.
Saving power. Constant server degrag in the datacenter. Explains DPM. Early reports 20% power savings. 


Control..making admin jobs easier.
Appspeed: how is my application performing...auto discover topology, physical tiers as well. Finger of blame. 
vapp..it service policy descriptor, single unit, giving it SLA definitions. 
vmsafe discussion, vapp can assisgn a security level.
configcontrol demo, database of all changes across multiple vcenters.


VMware lab manager self service portals...VMware will be creating more of these. Let the customer help themselves...more announcements coming.


cool info about vmworld setup  power savings...provide numbers


cloud discussion. clouds can be SRM. 
Long distance vmotion, two vendors mentioned that have solutions now (cisco and f5).
shows announced vendor working in the cloud and standards has been submitted.


vapp: applications is what it is all about. 
vsphere gives the infrastructure, application can be combined with the infrastructure. 
policy, scale on demand, visibility.
consumer wants an application that works.


springsource discussion...and a demo showing how the app is not tied to the hardware or OS...very interesting...uses a springsource foundry.


Tuesday, September 1, 2009

VMworld 2009: Tuesday: General Session:


Todd Neilson takes the stage, 96% fortune 1000 use VMware. who are not using it? thank vendors, 12,488 attendees this year, goal energize the business via IT , spend more on innovation and less on maintenance,
video..customer testimonials,

Paul Maritz, CEO takes the stage, hunger to get to a world stable, on demand, standards, scalable, easier to expand; we have pillars of complexity but secure and understood. vitualization is the answer because of encapsulation, whether via VMware of others.

server consolidate= capital savings, then clouds (internal or external), big advantages environment becomes easier to manage, automate operations, business agility

vSphere a major release, 1,500 engineers, larger effort than any effort for windows when Paul was at Microsoft.  "Continuously defraging the datacenter"! Storage one of the biggest costs in a datacenter. Thin provisioning will help with this. ALL servers should be virtualized. The most demanding applications. 350,000 iops a sec, entire processing of Visa. Networking important to work closer with as we move everything around in the datacenter.

Enhance availability, FT, storage vmotion, security industry-they need to become virtualized as well.

Can only do this by working with others in the industry. Certified for vSphere 1000 servers, storage devices, 300 network devices, and high level integrated parts in vSphere.

vsphere downloads, 357,151

virtualization journey goals
1. management tools, it can work with other products in the environment, into and out of vc,
      ibm demo, power info sent between ibm and vc and vc and IBM tools
      3650 M2, showing esx 4.1, IBM and vc lowered the power when not needed, then demo showing vc         providing info to ibm tool,
new management products:
capacity configuration, operations scheduling, SRM
plus: act more like clound operator internally,
service profile,service catelog, chargeback, app provisioning, app scheduling.
lab manager demo using linked clones, from single snapshot
charegeback demo, assigned costs to metrics, disk, cpu, etc.

IT in a BOX, vsphere essentials, $166 per proc.
Free ESXi


2. vCloud experience: work with service provider community. key step, new top level concept, virtual datacenters management, work with service provider community---slide a virtual datacenter into a cloud, management looks the same. working with third parties, introduced VMWARE VIRTUALIZED logo to identify them, 100 service providers last year now 1000 have signed up.
vcloud express announced new program,, time and price oriented. fast and cost effective.
vcloud express demo, terremark, impressive easy ordering process for a new server from the cloud.
announce vcloud API, submitting to make open standard

3. desktops, goal to manage users, not devices, million desktops so far, security concerned companies adopted so far (health care listed),
HP comes to stage, Steve dupree, blades, iscsi internal to blade, using lefthand for the storage, hp announcing,be in the fall, kick the tires..see it in the booth,,,HP keynote. hp annoucement supersession 135 insight plugin for vc that allows blade management and info inside of vc..nice!
PCoIP demo with telus.

4. what applications are doing, spring source aquisition, merging in as a division into vmware.
answer, virtualization+lightweight framworks=radical simplifcation
apps, spring/grails frameworks
50% of new java work with done with this product
can put on top of  oracle, IBM, Jboss,
VMworld 2009: Monday: LAB Day: 

I attended LAB02: SRM Advanced operations and this lab went very well. We had some lecture, a three section lab and some troubleshooting to do as part of the lab experience (on purpose).

Lunch was supposed to be provided for lab attendees but they quckly went through 700 lunch boxes and there were a lot of people that missed out on getting a lunch. Rather dissaointing.

Next I headed over to the self-paced labs where you get more hands-on experience and using the product. The menu of available labs was very impressive. Unfortunately, technical issues continued to plague VMworld this year. The self-paced labs were to originally start at 7:30am but were delayed several times and eventually didn't get started until 2pm in the afternoon, with a limited selection of labs. The concept was rather impressive they were doing, as you selected your lab it generated your lab environment for you on the fly via some hooks into Lab Manager.

Next up was the vendor reception that opened at 5:30pm - 8:00pm and this really went great . There were tons of vendors and a mob of VMworld attendees to look at their products. Of course there was also the usual beverage and food.

Overall..day 2 was fun and full of good learning.

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