Welcome to the VMworld Partner Exchange Keynote. Today I will be reporting live from the keynote as long as WIFI connection permits. This page should update automatically on most browsers, should you have problems, let me know through twitter: @GabVirtualWorld. The keynote speech will start at 10:30am. 

See full post at: Live blogging from the VMworld Europe 2011 Partner Exchange Keynote

After skipping VMword Las Vegas, I’m very much looking forward to VMworld Copenhagen. Today I created my schedule and boy it was hard to choose between the many good sessions. A good start to build your schedule is this list provided by Duncan Epping which holds a number of deep technical sessions. But you’ll soon discover that there are many conflicts, so you’ll have to make some hard decisions.

I copied Duncan’s list and added the time slots to make it easier to select a session and I also added the “Attend” column to show you what my choices are. As I said, some tough choices because I would have loved to see Frank, Eric and Luc and “He Who Shall Be Named PowerCLI Man” on stage, but I hope reading their blogs and of course read the “VMware vSphere 5 Clustering technical deepdive” book will make up a little for not seeing the sessions.

Except for the sessions recommended by Duncan, I also added:

See full post at: Building a VMworld schedule… it’s hard

The partner day at VMworld is not the most exciting day for the techies amongst us, it is mostly about sales and the big announcements are usually made in the Tuesday keynote. So it started with registration and getting the bag and meeting a lot of people from the communities, fellow bloggers and of course quite a number of tweeps. Nice meeting you all!

First session of today was of course the keynotes. My report from the keynotes can be found at “VMworld Partner day – Super Session -live report“ .

After the keynotes and lunch, I visited some labs and listened to some sales session. I was pleasently surprised by a demo of Application Discovery Manager (ADM). With ADM you will be able to discover the applications in virtual environment as well as your physical environment. I’m definitely going to checkout the product info on the VMware website.

I also heared talk that tomorrow (Tuesday) VMware will make a new announcement regarding their the acquisition of Integrien. Since the acquisition itself has already been announced at VMworld SF 2010, I’m wondering what they will talk about tomorrow. I doubt it will be the release of a product based on Integrien.

There will also be the presentation of vCloud Request Manager. vCloud Request Manager provides enterprises with enhanced governance and control of vCloud Director based Private Clouds. See more at Eric Sloofs blog: http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1599-vCloud-Request-Manager.html

Today I also worked through three lab sessions. Two of them deserve a special mention: “vCloud Director” (LAB013) which was a very good lab to get more acquainted with vCD. The second one is ThinApp v4.6, because I have always been playing with ThinApp, but never got to the more in-deep parts like linking apps or virtualizing Internet Explorer 6. It took me about 3min to virtualize the complete IE6 package. I posted a video here http://moby.to/c6955a.

See full post at: Notes from the Partner Exchange day

Welcome to this live report of the VMworld Partner Day in Copenhagen. Very excited to be here and also a bit sceptic on how much real news will be presented this VMworld after hearing all the news from VMworld San Francisco.

First on stage: senior VP EMEA Maurizio Carli

Total more than 6000 visitors this week at VMworld.
1500 partners attending today
First half of 2010 VMware has grown 41%
partners deliver 95% of this growth

We finally have Paul Maritz applauding for us partners thanks Paul !!

Now on stage Paul Maritz President & CEO VMware.
Paul feels a big change coming in IT, we just can’t go one with business as usual in these days. We’re entering the cloud aera.

We’re working hard to release a major release every year and producing very stable code. vSphere 4.1 was the first release that came out right on schedule. We are already code complete with the next version which will soon be in beta and working on the next release after that.

Next on stage Carl Eschenbach. Executive VP, Global Field Operations
The theme of this year is virtual roads, actual clouds. This year is the first year people are actively looking at cloud computing. Virtualization paves the way to cloud computing. That is what we have done for customers, we have virtualized their data centers and paved the way for cloud computing.

Industry changes are talking place every 10-15 years. These changes transform your business and VMware will give you the tools to leverage these changes.

Carl is now talking about the number of new products released this year, view 4.5, sphere 4.1, vCloud Director, ThinApp, etc.

Statistics business revenues: Q1 $634M 35% Yr/Yr growth
Q2 $674M 48% Yr/Yr growth

128% growth in number of VCP’s.

Number of sales slides on how much partners can benefit from accreditation, how to sell vSphere.
VMware stands alone in the Gartner magic quadrant: “VMware is the clear market leader”. Microsoft and Citrix are the two closest competitors but on a respectable distance.

Next on stage Andy Hunt, VP of emea partner organization, VMware.
Andy shows we’ve reached the tipping point, there are now more virtual machines than physical servers.

Customers are moving from fase1 to fase2′ where virtualization is moving from cost efficiency to quality of services. Getting better performance and reliability through virtualization compared to physical apps. Now we’re taking the next step to fase3. Moving to IT as a service. Optimizing business consumption of IT. Virtualization works for existing apps, new enterprise apps and SaaS apps.

The new stack for IT as a service:
Cloud infrastructure management ( vSphere, vCenter, vCloud Director, vShield)
Cloud application platform (spring, vFabric, Hyperic)
End-user computing (View, Thinapp, Zimbra)

We now have Carl back on stage.

(wifi dying, wordpress app doesn’t like that and lost quite some text)

2010 VMware view 4.5
Industry first
- integrated online and offline solution
industry best,
expanded user and use cage coverage.
- Win7 migration, byopc concept, health care “follow me desktop”

Journey to end-user computing
- modernize the desktop

End-user computing – end state
Project horizon will manage your user infrastructure. More will be announced this conference.

Tridata to secure your enterprise access to the cloud (user oriented), directory federation. License tracking, access management.

This is the optimal time to migrate to win7 and pull all assets of your desktops into your datacenter, into the virtual desktop.

Desktop partner competency spotlight.
Tony Burrisson from ACR. UK Manchester area. 15 employees, VMware YoY growth £5M 2010.
Their seeing more and more growth for VDI desktop market. Desktop sale is a different strategy. Make sure your pilot is absolutely error free and deliver it as a whole to the decision makers of the customers. We helped migrate a customer move from xp to Win7 in two days, with 500 users.

See full post at: VMworld Partner day – Super Session -live report

Twitter is a great source of information confirmed and unconfirmed. I just learned from a tweet by vegard_s that VMware has plans to hold VMworld US and VMworld Europe as a back-to-back event. In other words, VMworld Europe will be held in Q4 2010 which will be very close to VMworld US.

Behind the account of vegard_s is the name of Vegard Sagbakken who works at VMware as Technical Account Manager in the Nordic region. As far as the rumor mill tells me, this is a deciscion on CEO / CTO level and it looks like this rumor will be confirmed soon as being correct. Now, what has gotten into VMware to do this? I can’t think of big pro’s of holding the two events close to eachother, in fact, everything that comes to mind is against holding those two events so close together. Lets look at some arguments against.

The techies

• As a consultant, especially in these times, it is hard to get training and even harder to get your boss pay for a trip to an event like VMworld or Microsoft TechEd. With both events held in the same quarter I can be sure that I can only go to one. Even Microsoft recognized this by holding TechED US and Europe at different times.
• When the events were held further apart, I could often make a case in which the Europe event was especially good for networking and early previews. This helped me advise my customers to go a certain direction without having the final products. The US event would show me the final product and supply much more detailed info. But now it will be hard to tell the difference between the two events and even harder for me to tell my boss the difference and that I want to visit the US event rather then the Europe event. Long story short, no more US visits.
• The great thing about VMworld (US and Europe) has always been meeting those people you always have contact with over twitter, e-mail, MSN, etc, etc and now get to meet them in person. Which (luckily) is always of much more value then only digital contact. By seperating these two events, this sort of contact between “those” from the US and “them” from Europe will slowly degrade. A pitty. Remember that VMware always has been seen as some sort of religion (http://www.virtualgipsy.com) and those followers want to meet to strengthen their believe.

The Press

• How can the press choose between both events? Will VMware make Europe an exact copy of US? Then all the news will be released in the US and the European press will have nothing new to report or has to sent their reports to the US. In either way, the event in Europe will degrade.
• Maybe some news will be released in the US and some more in Europe. So as a press agancy, I will have to sent my reporters to two events for just a few scoops and for 80% (???) of double content. Is this still worth the investment for the press agancy?

The Vendors

I’m conviced that large vendors like Dell, HP, IBM, NetApp, etc, etc will have the money and the people to be at two places in almost the same time. But they do have larger booths which they now at least have to have an extra copy of to be able to attend US and Europe. Maybe they already have and it is not a real problem for these large vendors. But I’m certain that the smaller vendors like Veeam, VizionCore, vKernel, DataCore, etc will have quite a challange attending both events.

• Doug Hazelman from Veeam ( http://www.veeam.com) about his opinion on this rumor: “Well Gabe, if this rumor is true, I think it will present a challenge for smaller ecosystem vendors who will need to cover two conferences in different parts of the world.”
• Mr. Steve Beaver from vWire ( http://www.vwire.com ) said: “I look forward having the opportunity to goto both and this might really put a damper on those plans since it is too much travel in such a short period of time for me. I would guess it would be very rough on any company having to put out all the money at one time to be a part of both conferences at basically the same time.”

What is the reason behind this?

See full post at: Rumor !!! VMworld US 2010 and VMworld Europe 2010 in same month

Like any large vendor that hosts a big event like VMworld, competition is also invited to the floor. Last year I saw a good Microsoft session at VMworld and although they told us how much better Hyper-V was then VMware ESX, nobody would find it strange that Microsoft was present.

This year I also expect Microsoft, Citrix, Novell, etc to be at VMworld and that they will have plenty of room to talk about their products and how much better they are. But when opening my VMworld bag and finding the VMworld Program Guide, I was a bit surprised to see that it was wrapped in a nice yellow paper from Citrix. Is this VMware displaying a god amount of self confidence?

VMworld Program Guide

Del.icio.us : Citrix, VMware, VMworld

See full post at: VMworld Program Guide brought to you by CITRIX ?

Daily, I have contact with a lot of people from all over the world. Contact through virtual media like MSN, GTalk, Twitter, online forum, e-mail, etc. And for me, meeting quite a number of them at VMworld in Cannes, is kind of exciting. I’m really looking forward to meeting all these people in real life. Most of them for the first time.

Now, it seems there are people that do studies on this. They observe and participate in these “communities” to learn how this affects the lifes of people, to discover patterns equal to normal day life and learn to explain certain behavior.

I’m lucky enough to know one of these observers (or better: anthropologists) and have her join me to Cannes this year. So, if you’re interested in how virtual and physical world meet and interact, see the website of my girlfriend Brenda at: http://www.VirtualGipsy.com. She’ll be blogging all week about her findings. Add here site to your RSS feed and bookmarks !

Del.icio.us : VMworld VMware Virtual World ViirtualGipsy Gipsy view twitter MSN GTalk

See full post at: A whole different view on the virtual world by VirtualGipsy

There is a lot of talk going on these last few weeks about VMworld. Gabe, your P.I. on virtualization, made the following video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeOIABjvLug

See you all at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes !!!

See full post at: GabesVirtualWorld going to Cannes!

From VMware:

The first VMworld Europe conference ever gave more than 4,600 attendees a glimpse into the future of virtualization, 95 partners unveiled the newest technologies, products and best practices for deploying virtualization solutions at the solutions exchange. More than 100 journalists attended the conference.

We would like to thank you for your participation. Keynotes, videos, sessions and labs are now available on http://www.vmworld.com

See full post at: VMworld Europe Sessions & Labs online

DV07 – Optimizing storage for virtual desktops

(Tony Armstrong – VMware, Mike Slisinger & M. Vaughan Stewart (NetApp)

To be honest, this was one of the session I didn’t like. I would have expected this session to be about how to work with storage in a VDI environment, but it turned out to be a commercial talk for NetApp and what they can do.

NetApp presented the following products:

• Raid-DP. Its a fault tolerant disk setup like Raid10, but using only the amount of disks of a Raid config.

• Data De-Duplication. This looks like ESX’s transparent page sharing for memory but now on disk. When identical blocks of data would have been written to disk, NetApp writes the identical blocks only once. This of course can save some diskspace, maybe even a higher percentage then transparent page sharing does because there is a lot more identical data on disk.

• FlexClone for fast storage provisioning. A very nice technique which can deliver a 1000 VMs in a minute.

All the options presented by NetApp seem very usable in a VDI environment. Definitely something to look at when deploying VDI in a very large scale environment. Also check out the other storage vendors, because I was told by a colleague that he had seen similar options with other vendors.

See full post at: DV07 – Optimizing storage for virtual desktops