Carl begins by describing how the name of partner exchange was chosen and a recap of why we are here. Last week, Vmware had 3,300 of their worldwide sales force come to Las Vegas to train them on the company message. This week is the “second week” of vmware’s kickoff sales training as per Carl. He talks about some of the numbers: 63 countries represented, 3,300 attendees. Carl asks the top partner award winners to come on stage.  The partners represented are from a variety of awards, Best Infrastructure Partner, Best BC/DR Partner, Best Distributor, etc.
Carls then goes on to discuss some of the awards that vmware has won in 2010. CRN named Paul Maritz the most influential executive of 2010. Carl describes the successes that Paul has had and why he is so beneficial to the channel partners. Maureen Elizabeth and Colleen Courtney named to women of the channel. Doug Smith was also named to the CRN Channel Chiefs for 2010.  Moving past the channel personnel , Carl notes that Vmware spent 540 million on Research and Development in 2010.  It would seem he is trying to show that VMware is getting and using the resources they need to be successful.  Carl shows the gartner quadrant for x86 virtualization from last year and how well vmware is in the lead.  Lots of justification as if he’s trying to prove that vmware is the best, and they are doing all the right things to stay in the lead so the partners will continue to partner with them.

Now Carl goes on how vmware has listened to feedback. Goes into the renewals business and how it has changed and improved. Carl reviews how partners now get awarded profitability. He also reviews the vmware services business and vmware’s direction in delivering those services. He mentions that 7 percent of revenue comes from services business (suprising, I thought it was higher). Of that 7 percent, 45 percent comes from consulting and 55 percent comes from Technical Account Managers and Education Services.  Carl concludes with the new it stack that Paul showed yesterday.

Rick Jackson is next out, he is Chief Marketing Officer.

Rick describes Oracle and Microsoft as the extremes of the cloud. How they want to take everything of the customers and move it to their data centers and lock them in. Vmware wants to give multiple choices of providers and make it easy for customers to choose their providers and a method to export their vms to another platform if they choose. Ricks marketing idea is to use the idea of “your cloud” when talking to customers. He is showing the partners how “your cloud” will deliver business agility, especially when designing a custom cloud for a customer’s environment. “Your cloud delivered your way.” (I like this style of messaging it’s very easy to follow).  Rick describes the marketing campaigns that vmware is delivering (not a whole lot of non-partner info here so I won’t go into detail).  Rick gives the action plan to the partners.   Make sure they understand the message. Leverage the vmware programs and expand business beyond virtualization.  He announces Partner Exchange 2012 for feb 13 thru 16 in Las Vegas (I’ll be in Vegas for Valentine’s Day, my wife will be thrilled – might have to take her with me).

Dale is back out with a few jokes to lighten the mood.

The last presenter is Dan Pink, author on numerous books on transforming business.

Dan talks about motivation and science.  Dan is a motivational speaker and a management educator. I’m not going to recap his discussion as it does not really have specific cloud information. I will say that it was very good and educational but it’s not directly related to any virtualization news so you can go to his website if you want more info.

On to the sessions and more learning.

*All photos are copyright vmguy.com.  Any reproduction without express written consent of vmguy.com is prohibited.

The session kicked off with a introduction and recap of the VMware vision by Paul Maritz, Chief Executive Officer, VMware.

Paul described 2010 as a breakout year for VMware. VMware accomplished $2.9 billion in revenue, up 41 percent over 2009. He mentioned that international revenues were up 43 percent to $1.4 billion. He then thanks the audience, composed of partners and resellers, for that achievement. Paul also thanks the sponsors for the event including EMC, HP, NetApp, Cisco among others. After the thank yous are completed, Paul asks a rhetorical question of the crowd specifically if they know what customers want.  Paul says that customers want greater business agility while improving efficiency.  He says that in the next five years there will be a transformation in IT.  Specifically around Integration and Automation, New Application Platforms, and Device independence in what he referred to as a “post-Windows world” (love that term).  He reviews the chart of new server deployments by year and highlights 2009.  That was when VM deployments surpassed physical server deployments.  He thanks the partners again and exits the stage.

The next person to take the stage is comedian Dale Irvin.

I must say that I was a bit concerned by this.  It turned out that this was a blessing in disguise.  I’ll admit that not all of the jokes were funny, but the light humor in between the deluge of technology was a welcome breath of fresh air.  Dale’s comedy was a bit that “summarized” the previous speakers content.  His joke was that he summarized what he did not understand and completely mis-interpreted what he had heard.  It made for some funny humor nonetheless and eased our digesting of some very intense cloud technology.

Next up was Raghu Raghuram, Senior VP and General Manager, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms (fit that on a business card).

Raghu begins by asking the partners to gain the VMware competencies.  The competencies are specialties and training above and beyond standard virtualization.  Currently there are two competencies, Desktops (View and ThinApp) and BC/DR (Site Recovery Manager).  Raghu mentions that a new competency will be coming for running enterprise apps on ESX.  He then goes on to talk about running mission critical apps on VMware and a case study of Indiana University who converted their Oracle instances from the Mainframe to VMs running on Linux. He then changes gears and talks about one of the other competencies, SRM.  He states that SRM revenue was up 50% in 2010 (this one is a bit of a surprise to me).  He also states a stat that business continuity competency partners make 2x the revenue of other partners.  Not sure if that’s a whole or just VMware revenue (assuming VMware).

He then goes back to describing the cloud and how partners can help customers build a private cloud.  He says that stage two is for the services providers to open public cloud opportunities (this is a big sticking point for me and the subject of another article that I am hopefully finishing tomorrow – watch for it.)  Raghu talks about the cloud and how it will transform IT management.  He states that VMware is organizing the tools for management at the infrastructure level (what about managing the things not in the cloud?)  Lastly he switches to security and talks about how security has to transform for an IT environment (VMware has been saying this for two years.)  He then invites Dr. Steve Herrod, Chief Technology Officer, to come out and do a few demos for the audience (why is Steve the only one to ever do demos?)

Steve does a demo of vCenter Operations Standard which can monitor the infrastructure and predict issues and failures in the virtual enviornment.  He then shows a demo of vCloud Director for the crowd (some limitations on director annoy me: currently not available in an appliance, only supports Oracle back end, huh?)  The demo looks alot like Lab Manager and everyone can see the writing on the wall here.  He then discusses vCloud connector which will let you migrate vms from the private to the public clouds.  No actual demo on connector but screenshots instead.  Dale Irvin, the comedian, returns to bring the audience back to earth.

After a few jokes, Dale introduces Tod Nielsen, President, Application Platform.

Tod trys to get the partners interested by talking a few jokes about developers.  He discusses the problems developers have with building applications.  This is a very tough conversation for this room as most partners do not sell development software and are not equipped to do so (neither are VMware sales people from what I have seen IMHO.)  I take a look over to the executive forum section of the audience (where the partner execs sit) and half are checking blackberries.  He tries to mention the opportunity for development software but a good percentage of the room has been lost by this time.  Tod ends with instruction on how to jump on the bandwagon and get involved.  He tries to educate the partners on how to start a vFabric practice.  Just in time, Tod ends and Dale shows up for a few more jokes.

Last up is Chris Young, VP and General Manager, End User Computing.

Chris is going to talk about the end user environment and this is what people have been waiting for.  Chris introduces several new levels of certifications that will be available for desktops later this year.  He mentions some of the things that vmware is working on on the desktops (apologies, I cannot mention them as they are future features and under NDA.)  Steve Herrod joins Chris and does a demo of Project Horizon.  It does look really cool and will be fantastic if it catches on as planned.  It will hopefully be out this year and will be game-changing if it works as described.  Chris last recaps a call to action for the partners and to get the new certifications and the competencies.

That’s the synopsis for the general session on Wednesday.  Time to head to bed and rest for tomorrow’s session.  Stay tuned for that report as well.

*All photos are copyright vmguy.com and may not be reused without express written consent of vmguy.com.

The class was comprised of eight modules.  Day one ran through modules one thru four, day two had modules 5 and 6 and day three was comprised of modules seven and eight.  You can read this to see the syllabus for the class as well as the description for each of the modules.

There were a two things about this class that I found to be very different than any other VMware class I had attended.  First, there was no real administrative work.  We never used the vSphere client or looked at a host.  We barely used the classroom terminals at all.  Almost all of the work was whiteboarding and drawing architectures of networks and storage and physical infrastructure.  For the labs, the class was divided into two groups, one group was given an enterprise customer case study and the other received a SMB case study.  Both study’s had physical environments that wanted to virtualize.  The enterprise study was obviously significantly larger however the SMB had a very limited budget.  Both had items to challenge the designers.  As we reached the end of each module, we would incorporate what we learned into that phase of the design.  The labs were actually designed very well.  At the end of each lab session, each group had to pick someone to defend their design to the rest of the class (surely to prep us for what we might find at the VCDX defense session).

The second thing I noticed about the class that was very different from other classes was the references to blogger’s information.  The instructor referenced Duncan, Frank and Mike on more than one occasion (The VMguy was left out unfortunately – guess I’ll have to try harder).  Never had I seen such a display of non-vmware owned information in such a class.  Personally, I read all of their information pretty religiously yet I still found things I did not know or had not read.  This class was a very good summary of the pitfalls to avoid in design.  It was a collaboration of all of the gotchas that these designers (some who are now VCDXs) have seen.  Everything from the configuration maximums to what features are not supported with Fault Tolerance.  It was an outstanding display of all the things you have to remember when designing an entire virtualized datacenter.

My only complaint would be that the case study notes for the labs were incomplete.  We constantly found ourselves wanting to ask our imaginary customer for more information.  This can be expected somewhat as the class is a new offering from the education department.  I must say that our instructor was constantly requesting feedback for the course and promised to relay that information back to the class designers.

All in all, I would highly recommend this class to anyone who might need to design a virtualized datacenter.  It was an outstanding collaboration of experiences and best practices that would be required before creating a accurate, reliable, properly sized, well thought-out design.  Well done VMware Education Department, well done.

Stephen talked about the main focus of VMware.  That is, to enable customers to deliver IT as a service, at the same time remembering 3 key factors:  Efficency, Control, and Choice .  He went on to discuss vSphere.  He gave some awesome statistics on vSphere, particularly: over 3 million Engineering hours have gone into vSphere .  For the Efficiency section, he discussed the scalability and performance.  He talked about power savings and storage savings .  For Control , he talked about Config-Control and how to maintain consistency in host configuration.    He then discussed distributed switches and how they add control to the networking layer.  vApp and how it will let admins control their apps better as a single unit.  He then went on to demo a very polished Fault Tolerant configuration.  This was received very well and with a resounding applause from the crowd.  He talked about vShield Zones and how they protect applications from talking to the infrastructure that they shouldn’t for customers without advanced firewall experience.  Lastly, Choice .  The goal is to allow any server, any storage, any OS, and any app to run local in the private cloud or a cloud in a different location, public or private.  He showed a list of the supported OSes for vSphere compared to those of Hyper-V and it was not even close.  I guess it is an advantage to not have an OS business.

After the functionality section Stephen introduced Bogomil Balansky (below), VP of Product Marketing, VMware.

Bogomil introduced the Partners to the licensing and packaging of vSphere.  I apologize, due to legal restrictions I cannot list those here.  Hopefully we will find out more information from the announcement coming April 21st .

Stephen returned to the stage and discussed the API and plug in capability of vSphere which was a great segway to the next presenters: Adam Famularo (below on left) SVP and GM, Recovery Management and Data Modeling Business Unit, CA, and the second presenter was Roger Pilc (below, seated), Corporate SVP and GM, CA.

Adam showed a great video on the University of Texas, Brownsville, and how they used CA XOsoft to recover their MS Exchange environment on VMware at their disaster recovery site during Katrina.  He went on to discuss CA’s organization and how they are all aligned.  He discussed many of the channel programs that are available (this is a Partner conference after all).  He talked about upcoming Arcserve and XOsoft releases.  I apologize, I don’t know what is public or not from the information that was presented so I’m going to leave the details out on that one.  Roger took the lead at this point.  He discussed the cloud and how it is transforming business.  That management is one of the key pieces needed to take it to the next level.  He closed with an explanation of the VMware – CA relationship and how that joint effort can truly improve overall service quality from the cloud.

Now onto my labs today, I’ll check back in soon.

Brandon walked thru the new portal and how are partners can use it to find the information that they need.

Afterward, Carl introduced Chad Sakac (in center below), VP, VMware Technical Alliance, EMC.  Carl also introduced Ed Bugnion (on right below), VP and CTO, Server Access Virtualization, Cisco.

Ed went first and talked about Cisco’s unified stragety and the issues that the Nexus 1000v will solve.  He described the VN-Link protocol and how the network switches become virtualization aware.  He then described the Unified Computing System from Cisco, although there was not really any new information that has not already been discussed .

Next up was Chad.  If you’ve never read Chad’s blog site , I highly recommend it.  It’s really some good reading.  Chad really pulled all the messaging together.  He described VMware as the software layer, Cisco as the computing and network integration, and EMC and the platform for storage.  He mentioned an interesting stat: 44% of all Site Recovery Manager implementations today run on EMC storage.  Chad described EMC’s V-Max announcement from yesterday.  One of the interesting points I saw was that the new V-Max platform from EMC will now run on Intel Xeons and not Power PC chips as Syms have always done in the past.  He closed with reiterating why customers would want to run Tier-1 apps and desktops on VMware.

Now onto my labs for the day, I’ll report back in soon….

For those Partner SE’s selling VMware it gives you some very good sessions on setting up and installing each product, who the intended user is of each product and their use cases, as well as administration on each product.  I highly recommend this training for our Partners.  Just don”t do like I did and take all 16 tests in a 36 hour period.  I now need a stiff drink and some aspirin.