VMWorld 2009 has lived up to it’s predecessors. 

The food was seriously lacking at meals and at the party.  The logistics in the hallways, however, were far better than they were two years ago at Moscone. 

The Partner Technical Advisory Board (PTAB) was definitely one of the highlights of the conference for me.  The PTAB is made up of 20-25 individuals that represent companies that push about 40% of VMware’s revenue.  Needless to say, it’s an elite group of technical folks.  We spent one and a half days in a room with many different people from VMware, including Engineers, Product Managers, Partner Support Managers and R&D Managers, who conducted very interactive (sometimes heated) sessions with us to discuss current and future VMware features and policies.  Always an interesting time that makes me think hard and push everyone’s creativity.  More can be found on my Day 1 and Day 2 coverage posts.

The Paul Maritz keynote was luke warm and didn’t introduce anything major.  More info on my Day 3 coverage post.  Steve Herrod’s keynote was much better.  Though he didn’t make many announcements, there were just enough live demos to keep this geek interested.  More info on my Day 4 coverage post.

Sessions for me, as always, were hit and miss.  Some sessions I gain a lot from (LAB12, LAB07-even though it was too slow to enjoy, DV2181) and some simply don’t realize their promise (DV2672, DV3266, TA3576).  Note to presenters for next year: Describe your sessions very well in the abstract and make sure to note if your session will be technical, or just business/conceptual.  There’s nothing wrong with it being business or conceptual, I just want to know ahead of time.  Also make sure to show the product as much as possible, not just why or how you would use it.

The Solutions Expo didn’t seem as large and boisterous as previous years, but that wasn’t a surprise given the economic climate.  There seemed to be a big Twitter-based backlash against the “booth babe” (or “boob babe” as some Freudian slips put it) phenomenon.  I have to concur with this sentiment.  The conference is mostly men, but there are definitely women there, and most guys aren’t necessarily interested in women in skintight cat suits.  Maybe it’s just me, but I avoided certain booths (and aisles) because of such stunts.

I think the vExpert program, Twitter and the blogosphere did a lot to bring together the top community members.  It definitely helped me to meet a lot of new people.

All in all, a great conference.  Learned a lot, made a lot of great connections and met some great new (to me) companies.  I’m hoping to do it all again next year!

The last day of VMWorld started out a bit later due to a lack of a general session keynote.  This was a nice break after the VMWorld Party.  I started off with a quick bite to eat and then sat down to study for my VCP test until my vExpert booth duty.  After booth duty, I cruised the Solutions Expo some more having notable conversations with PanoLogic, Vizioncore, Transxition and Lakeside.  Then came lunch and my last session for the year (vCenter ConfigControl), which was informative, but didn’t show much of the product itself.  Finally, I headed over to take my VCP4 test (I passed!).  The test was challenging, but covered a good amount of the basics that haven’t changed dramatically since VI3, so some of the questions took no effort at all.

Watch for one more post where I’ll wrap up my final thoughts on the conference.

Steve Herrod started off the keynote today discussing VDI, including the announcement of an agreement to embed RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles into View.  Their goal is to provide end users the same rich experience no matter the situation (WAN, LAN or offline mobile).  Like any good Herrod keynote, live demos ensued, including PCOIP and the Wyse iPhone View Client.  The demo of the Mobile Virtualization Phone was pretty interesting, especially when he showed that the demo app was running in an android VM, completely seamless within the Windows CE environment.  The keynote then switched over to the datacenter, where he came out swinging by describing why VMotion is more mature and proven (and a time-tested marriage saver) compared to other “live migration” offerings.  Next, he discussed the fact that VMware is currently working towards I/O based DRS, which will include setting shares and IOPs limits per hard disk.  He then covered the big features of vSphere, but didn’t cover anything new until the end when he introduced and gave a quick demo of vCenter ConfigControl.  Next up was the cloud discussion, but nothing terribly groundbreaking, though he did mention long-distance VMotion as an upcoming feature.   Following up on the cloud discussion, Mr. Herrod described IaaS, PaaS and Saas (Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Service, respectively), and why SpringSource is so key to the cloud strategy.  In essence, it helps to continue to break apart the different layers of the datacenter into individual pieces that can be manipulated independently from one another.  The CEO of SpringSource then came out to demo their technology.  All in all, another great keynote.  Steve Herrod is not to be missed!

After the keynote I attended a session on vSphere deployments in the morning and an AppSpeed presentation in the afternoon.  Both were okay, but informational.  AppSpeed is definitely worth considering, but still has a lot of maturing to do.

Most of my day was spent in the Solutions Expo chatting with many different vendors.  The most impressive product I saw was the new HP MDS600, which is a SAS direct storage solution.  It holds 70 SAS drives in 5U.  Very impressive when you consider some of the futures of the SAS switches in the c-class blade system.  Go check it out; I believe they have one set up in the Melanox booth.  I also spent some time with VDI related vendors, including the aforementioned RTO Software, AppSense and LiquidWare Labs.  All have very interesting products that will need some lab time.

The highlight of the day was the vExpert lunch and meeting.  It was a great opportunity to meet and chat with many familiar names.  I can’t possibly list them here, but it was great meeting every one of you.  We even got to hear from Steve Herrod who told us he was going to be the executive sponsor of the program going forward.

And then the party…

As always, the party was a great time.  The food wasn’t great, but the drinks were free and the band was great, as was the company.  Unfortunately, by the time the concert was done, we emerged to find that the entire party was shut down, which was very disappointing!  We didn’t have near enough time to enjoy anything else that VMware had arranged for us.

Tod Nielsen, COO spoke first at the keynote this morning.  He started off joking about the slowness of the Labs yesterday.  He blamed it on an unset blinking clock (anyone know how to program a VCR?).  Went over like a lead balloon.  He finished by introducing a typical customer testimonial video.  Paul Maritz, CEO, came up next on stage and stated that engineers at VMware designed vSphere to “Continually defrag the datacenter.”  He had an engineer from IBM on stage to show the reduction in power utilization their servers have achieved.  This was pretty neat, as they showed a new view of the vSphere client that showed the used watts for the server overhead, plus the watts consumed per VM.  Sounds like an important metric for vCenter Chargeback.  He then starts to dig into the vCenter suite of products, including a demo of Chargeback and Lab Manager.  Moving into the cloud, Mr. Maritz announced a new offering: vCloud Express, which is a fast and effective way to purchase and deploy resources in the cloud.  He also announced the vCloud API, but didn’t spend much time on it.  HP came on stage to discuss View and the products they have coming, including a storage array (LeftHand, I believe) that pulls out in order access disks, which results in a much denser disk array, and an HP plugin for the vSphere client that will integrate the vSphere client  directly with HP tools, including the Onboard Administrator.  Next a live demo of a Tech Preview version of PCOIP was given by TELUS, which was very impressive, but could have been more thorough.  He finished up with discussing the SpringSource acquisition, but again didn’t provide a lot of details or vision.

After the keynote I hit a mediocre session that isn’t really worth discussing, then headed into a press/bloggers briefing with Paul Maritz regarding VMware’s vCloud initiative (more on that here).  Ended up eating lunch at the VMUG tables with a bunch of Omaha-area folks for some great conversation (over some mediocre food…do I see a theme?).  After lunch I hit the Expo floor for about an hour before vExpert booth duty.  Didn’t have any questions during my booth time, but plenty of new and old faces came by to chat.  After the Expo, I went to a VDI design session, which was good, if you like convoluted, overly complicated mathematical calculations for determining VDI performance (though Sean Clark and I did have some fun on Twitter).  After the session Sean Clark, Theron Conrey and I had a good discussion regarding VMware gatherings (i.e. VMUG and Community Extravaganza).  Finished up the day’s sessions with a SRM and View integration session (DV2181), which explained some very interesting stuff VMware and EMC have worked out to fail over an entire View infrastructure, including the vDesktops, with SRM and a series of scripts to tweak the ADAM database, Composer database and vmx files.  Definitely worth looking into.

Night life for tonight was a lot of fun as well.  Sat down for a drink with Tripwire before heading to Anchor and Hope for a customer appreciation dinner with Vital’s customers.  Thank you all who attended, it is great having you all as customers!  Ended up heading back to our room early in order to rest up for another long VMWorld (Alcatraz for the wife) day and make sure we can survive The Party.

VMware’s initial focus for releasing the vCloud Initiative is to assist customers to bridge the current datacenter to the future Cloud.  150,000 customers are already standardizing on VMware, which has definitely prepared them for the this evolution.  VMware’s main focuses with their initiative are: Enterprise Ready, Choice and Application Compatibility.  All this is rolled up into the vCloud Express offering, which enables customers easy web access (with a simple credit card transaction) to build an external cloud presence.

All the typical big players are involved, along with 1000+ service providers (including one I consider close to home, but more on that later) – just look for the VMware Ready logo. Providing a cloud platform is a natural evolution for companies like AT&T, who currently provide an entire range of hosting services to over half of the Fortune 50. 

Workload Federation is the ability to migrate server workloads around within a company’s federated cloud (internal + external), even across datacenters.  Savvis introduced a cloud offering that includes tiered SLAs.  Their web interface for signing up and setting up a virtual private data center includes a standard reference architecture with drag and drop components and selection of tiers (including storage tiering). 

Standards will be an important key to long term cloud success and VMware is leading the charge.

In my opinion, this is the kind of stuff VMware should be showing everyone, not just the press and bloggers.  Hopefully we’ll see more of this in the keynote tomorrow morning.  This actually helps solidify the cloud into an actual offering that users can see and believe in.

Day two of PTAB started off with yet another hot topic: security.  We got some good insight into vmSafe and products that are being developed.  Discussed pros and cons for both large and SMB customers with some really interesting insights.  Funny moment of the conversation: Scott Lowe channeling Edward Haletky.

The conversation heated up even more as we discussed the server virtualization competitive landscape.  I’m sure you can imagine how this conversation went (marketing vs. technology, does VMware = Novell, etc.).  Eric Gray presented a very humorous approach to the Microsoft SCVMM claim of a single pane of glass (see the blog version here: http://www.vcritical.com/2009/08/single-pane-of-glass-hyper-v-edition/).

Finished off PTAB with View reference architecture and data center services delivery discussions.

PTAB, once again, was a great experience.  I hope VMware will prioritize funding for it in the future.  I think it really benefits both groups.

The afternoon was dedicated to labs for PowerCLI and Lab Manager.   The first was great.  A perfect way to gain basic knowledge of how to use the framework, especially if you have any sort of scripting background.  The Lab Manager lab would’ve been good had the system not been unbearably slow.  It was hard to tell, but I think it may have been a storage problem.   Whatever it was, it caused me to leave early.

The evening began with the Welcome Reception, which was absolutely packed!  I don’t think I’ve ever seen it so full.  Spent most of the time chasing down people I hadn’t seen since Partner Exchange or VMWorld 2008.  All great people worth talking to.  I also spent some time introducing customers and co-workers to other people.  I ended up the Reception in the Communities area in time for the Tweetup.  Met many great people that now have faces (as opposed to avatars) associated with their names.  Things there wrapped up as John Troyer pulled me into a live interview in his fish bowl.  Watch it here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2084587.

The wife and I finished off the night at the HP Partner reception, which was held at a very nice wine bar called the Press Club.  HP and VMware gave a great speech/raffle, the highlight of which was a video of ordinary people on the street being asked to describe channel partner related terms (example: “What is a VAR?”  Ordinary person: “A cross between a van and a car”).  It was a well produced and humorous video.  I ran into a couple of fellow PTAB members, and even had the chance to chat with Carl Eschenbach (during which I really promoted the PTAB).

Two days of VMWorld down so far, and every minute was busy and worthwhile.

More to come tomorrow…`