Here we go:

The keynote kicks off with a video with admins and some of the issues they have and how they are solving them.

First speaker is Dr. Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware.  Steve talks about the world we come from, the world of managing desktops and servers.  He says that we want to start managing services and not servers.  We want to manage devices, not users.  Steve shows another video about how people are using mobile devices for their day-today work.  Steve is segueing into how we keep up to managing these devices and the user’s information and data.  Steve says we need to simplify, manage and connect the users.  He says VMware has been using View to provide the desktop as a service and using ThinApp to create an App Catalog Service.  Lastly, VMware has been creating a new data service which manages the user’s information.

Steve now starts to show a demo of View 5 and how it provisions desktops.  This is a demonstration of the “desktop as a service” above.  The next thing is to provide the apps as a catalog.  Steve then does a demo of Horizon.  The cool part here is he’s showing how Horizon will be able to scan for apps and import them into the catalog.  (This is huge as I believe the main challenge to ThinApp adoption is the admin work required to package the apps. – This drastically reduces that time.)  He shows how Horizon will be able to deploy apps automatically when the user uses it the first time or can be chosen by the user from a catalog.

Steve goes on to talk about the user data to manage.  He talks about “Project Octopus” and compares it to Dropbox.  He shows how the data will be managed: A user can use a spreadsheet on their desktop and then it sill automatically be available on their phone.  All of the demos are from the Administrator perspective and how the admins will control these products.

Steve moves on to demo the same products from the user perspective.  Steve introduces Vittorio to demo View5 and Horizon and he pretends to have it first day on the job.  He shows how he logs into his desktop for the first time and chooses his office applications from a dashboard.  He also shows how he can choose mobile apps from the same dashboard.  As he chooses one for his mobile, he gets a text message from the server with a link to install the app. (Pretty cool stuff).  Steve is back and summarizes the demo.  He talks about how they are working on implanting this on Android mobile devices.  He says that they have started strategic partnerships with Samsung to roll it out on their devices.  (No mention of Apple whatsoever.)

Vittorio is back again to demo how he gets his data on the road.  He does a demo where he has Excel on his iPad to edit a spreadsheet on the road. Steve is back recapping the demo.  Steve explains AppBlast (just demoed for the first time publicly) which gives users the ability to run Windows Apps on the iPad with nothing but HTML5.  (Very, very cool stuff – get ready Citrix, you’ll need something comparable).

Steve is now switching from desktops.  He shows the new vSphere Client for iPad and how a vMotion is done by “dragging” the VM from one host to another on the iPad.  Steve goes on to the new features in vSphere 5.  Steve gives an overview of VMware Go.  It’s a hosted service that helps SMBs deploy VMware in their environment.  He also talks about the new vSphere Storage Appliance and welcomes Bruce to the stage to show both.  Bruce shows a demo of VMware Go and the vSphere Storage Appliance.  Steve now talking about Auto Deploy and how it can spin up hosts running ESXi very quickly.  He talks about the large VMs of vSphere 5 (32-vCPUs, 1TB RAM, etc)

He talks a little more about Intelligent Virtual Infrastructure and when we deploy VMs, we should be able to “set it and forget it.”  When we deploy VMs we should be able to set policies for VMs so that they cannot “misbehave” in the future.  He’s now reviewing the new storage IO controls, pools and storage DRS in vSphere 5.  He moves into networking.  He’s describing the problem we have with networking today.  This issue is that identifier = location.  He describes their solution: VXLAN.  VXLAN is a way to move VMs across datacenters and maintain connectivity while moving VMs.  VMware has summited this as a standard with the help of Cisco.  Steve says this is the last barrier for full Cloud mobility.  After we solve this, customers will be able to unleash the full power of the global cloud.

Steve goes on to DR and Site Recovery Manager 5.  He talks about the new vSphere Replication built in to replicate the VMs to the DR side without the need for storage based replication (love this stuff.)  He mentions that when they integrate VXLAN, you will not need to reconfigure the IP addresses in the VMs.

Now on to security.  Steve describes vShield Endpoint, Edge and App and how the new features in 5.0 protect the VMs at many layers. He then goes on to management and how the focus of VMware is to automate as much as possible.  He gives the audience a “sneak peek” at where the automation tools are going.  He shows the new vSphere Web Client and shows a new column in the client labeled “Services.”  This enables the admin to see what is running on them without an agent.  The client is also showing the integration between VMs.  The use case is that if I protect a app server by SRM, the client can warn me that the app server depends on the sql server and it is not protected (absolutely brilliant.)  Steve goes on to show an upcoming version of vSphere Operations.  It has a new display of “Business Metrics” these are rollups for Management to be able to see how the infrastructure is performing.

Steve starts to sum up the keynote and how it’s about services and people.  How we have to adapt and use these technologies in the future.

My notes:  A few nice peeks at advances: AppBlast, VXLAN, vSphere and Operations futures sprinkled in with all of the new stuff in vSphere 5.  One thing I absolutely noticed: minimal vFabric mentions.  Reason being that this is not a developer conference and I’ve seen vFabric clear a room of non-developers.  Well done VMware.

We begin at 3:40pm pacific time. First up is Rick Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer from Vmware. Rick announces attendance at 19,000. Rick talks about the labs at vmworld. He talks about how in 2009 the labs were in a private cloud, in 2010 it was a hybrid cloud, and in 2011 it is a pure public cloud (mostly running at Terramark in Miami, FL). This year they expect to deploy 200,000 VMs in the labs over the course of this week. Rick reviews a few upcoming schedule highlights for the week. He also mentions VMworld 2012 will be in San Francisco August 27-30, 2012. He also mentions that they are reaching the limits of Vegas (uh, I thought CES was much larger).

Next up is Paul Martiz, CEO, VMware. Paul says that for the first time more than half of the entire install base of server applications is now running on virtualized infrasucture and no longer a majority on physical infrastructures. Here are some cool stats: a VM Is born every 6 seconds (more than human births in the U.S.), and there are more than 20 million VMs in the world. He also said there are more than 5.5 vmotions per second, which is more vms in flight, than humans in flight. There are 800,000 Vmware admins and 68,000 VCPs. Paul goes on to review the history of IT computing until now. He leads the audience the “Cloud Era”. This is a time where PCs are the minority. He talks about eventually replacing the mainframe and mini computers. He says that we are going from a world of apps that were made for a paper world. They were not designed to be real time. These will need to be replaced by apps that now need to scale and perform in real time.
Paul reviews the previous VMworld announcements of sphere, 4.0, 4.1, and now 5.0. Paul said that vSphere 5 is the first release that he has ever delivered that was on time and had all of the features that it was supposed to. Paul says that all of the Cloud Inastructure Suite will be released together, vCloud Director, vShield, Operations Manager, SRM and vSphere. These core platform products will be released together in the future.
Paul talks about the migration of old apps onto the new platforms in the Cloud Era. For these developers, VMware has developed vFabric. Paul makes the announcement of Data Director. This will allow developers to scale out databases for the new modern applications. Last topic on vFabric he explains Cloud Foundry and what it does and how it works. Not much new here, just education for the newbies.
Paul goes on to talk about desktops and announces View 5.0. It has bandwidth improvements, client ubiquity, and VOIP/unified communications. He segues into Project Horizon and delivering applications to different devices. Paul talks about the virtualization of phones and having your personal phone and corporate phone combined. (just don’t see this happening with apple and google now buying Motorola).
Paul summarizes the 3 strategies: the platform, the next generation of applications and lastly the next generation of users and their devices.
Paul invites Carl Eschenbach, co-president, customer operations, Vmware to the stage. Carl goes on to introduce a few customers and how they work with VMware. This seems like a commercial for VMware so I’ll stop blogging for now and continue with the good stuff tomorrow (where we get to dig into the technology)

As always, here’s the what’s new section from the release notes:

With this release, the VMware virtual datacenter operating system continues to transform x86 IT infrastructure into the most efficient, shared, on-demand utility, with built-in availability, scalability, and security services for all applications and simple, proactive automated management. The new and enhanced features in vSphere 5.0 are listed below.

Platform Enhancements
Storage
Networking
VMware vCenter Server
Availability
Partner Ecosystem
Platform Enhancements

Convergence. vSphere 5.0 is the first vSphere release built exclusively on the vSphere ESXi 5.0 hypervisor architecture as the host platform. The ESX hypervisor is no longer included in vSphere. The vSphere 5.0 management platform, vCenter Server 5.0, supports ESXi 5.0 hosts as well as ESX/ESXi 4.x and ESX/ESXi 3.5 hosts.

VMware vSphere Auto Deploy. VMware vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing ESXi installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines. New hosts are provisioned based on rules that the administrator defines. Rebuilding a server to a clean slate requires only a reboot. To move between ESXi versions, you create a new rule using the Auto Deploy PowerCLI and perform a test and repair compliance operation.

Unified CLI Framework. The expanded ESXCLI framework offers an extensible command set, including new commands to facilitate on-host troubleshooting and maintenance. The framework allows consistency of authentication, roles, and auditing, using the same methods as other management frameworks such as vCenter Server and PowerCLI. You can use the ESXCLI framework both remotely as part of vSphere CLI and locally on the ESXi Shell (formerly Tech Support Mode).

New virtual machine capabilities. ESXi 5.0 introduces a new generation of virtual hardware with virtual machine hardware version 8, which includes the following new features:
32-way virtual SMP. ESXi 5.0 supports virtual machines with up to 32 virtual CPUs, which lets you run larger CPU-intensive workloads on the VMware ESXi platform.

1TB of virtual machine RAM. You can assign up to 1TB of RAM to ESXi 5.0 virtual machines.

Software support for 3D graphics to run Windows Aero. ESXi 5.0 supports nonhardware accelerated 3D graphics to run Windows Aero and Basic 3D applications in virtual machines.

USB 3.0 device support. ESXi 5.0 features support for USB 3.0 devices in virtual machines with Linux guest operating systems. USB 3.0 devices attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to a virtual machine and accessed in it. USB 3.0 devices connected to the ESXi host are not supported.

UEFI virtual BIOS. Virtual machines running on ESXi 5.0 can boot from and use the Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI).

Graphical User Interface to configure multicore virtual CPUs. You can now configure the number of virtual CPU cores per socket in the Virtual Machine Properties view in the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere client. Previously this feature was only configurable through advanced settings.

Client-connected USB devices. USB devices attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to a virtual machine and accessed within it.

Smart card reader support for virtual machines. Smart card readers attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to one or more virtual machines and accessed in them. The virtual machine remote console, available in the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Client, supports connecting smart card readers to multiple virtual machines, which can then be used for smart card authentication.

Expanded support for VMware Tools versions. VMware Tools from vSphere 4.x is supported in virtual machines running on vSphere 5.0 hosts. Additionally, the version of VMware Tools supplied with vSphere 5.0 is also compatible with ESX/ESXi 4.x.

Apple Mac OS X Server guest operating system support. VMware vSphere 5.0 adds support for the Apple Mac OS X Server 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) as a guest operating system. Support is restricted to Apple Xserve model Xserve3,1 systems.

Host UEFI boot support. vSphere 5.0 supports booting ESXi hosts from the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). With UEFI you can boot systems from hard drives, CD/DVD drives, or USB media. Booting over the network requires the legacy BIOS firmware and is not available with UEFI.

Support for up to 512 virtual machines per host. vSphere 5.0 supports up to 512 virtual machines totaling a maximum of 2048 virtual CPUs per host.

Support for larger systems. vSphere 5.0 supports systems with up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2TB of RAM.

Improved SNMP support. With vSphere 5.0, you can convert CIM indications to SNMP traps. Check with your hardware vendor to see whether their CIM provider supports this functionality. In addition, vSphere 5.0 now supports the Host Resources MIB (RFC 2790) and allows for finer control over the types of traps sent by the SNMP agent.

Memory fault isolation. On supported platforms, ESXi 5.0 detects and quarantines physical memory regions that exhibit frequent correctable errors. This preemptive action reduces the risk of uncorrectable errors that result in VM or host downtime. Should an uncorrectable memory error occur, ESXi 5.0 quarantines the failed memory region and restarts the affected virtual machines. ESXi halts with a purple diagnostic screen only if the memory error affects the hypervisor itself. These enhancements deliver improved VM and host availability.

Image Builder. A new set of PowerCLI cmdlets lets administrators create custom ESXi images that include third-party components required for specialized hardware, such as drivers and CIM providers. You can use Image Builder to create images suitable for different types of deployment, such as ISO-based installation, PXE-based installation, and Auto Deploy.

Host Profiles Enhancements. Using an Answer File, you can configure host-specific settings to use with the common settings in the Host Profile, which removes the need to add host-specific parameters. This feature enables the use of Host Profiles to fully configure a host during an automated deployment. In addition, Host Profiles includes support for an expanded set of configurations, including iSCSI, FCoE, Native Multipathing, Device Claiming and PSP Device Settings, and Kernel Module Settings.

Metro vMotion. Ability to use vMotion to move a running virtual machine when the source and destination ESX hosts are more than 5ms round trip time latency apart. The maximum supported round trip time latency between the two hosts is now 10ms.

Enablement of Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). ESXi 5.0 can be configured to boot with Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). This boot option can protect ESXi in some cases where system binaries are corrupt or were tampered with.

Improvement in scalability. ESXi 5.0 supports up to 160 logical processors.

Storage

Storage DRS. This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage. You can group and manage similar datastores as a single load-balanced storage resource called a datastore cluster. Storage DRS makes disk (VMDK) placement and migration recommendations to avoid I/O and space utilization bottlenecks on the datastores in the cluster.

Profile-driven storage. This solution allows you to have greater control and insight into characteristics of your storage resources. It also enables virtual machine storage provisioning to become independent of specific storage available in the environment. You can define virtual machine placement rules in terms of storage characteristics and monitor a virtual machine’s storage placement based on these administrator-defined rules. The solution delivers these benefits by taking advantage of the following items:

Integrating with Storage APIs – Storage Awareness to deliver storage characterization supplied by storage vendors.

Enabling the vSphere administrator to tag storage based on customer-specific descriptions.

Using storage characterizations to create virtual machine placement rules in the form of storage profiles.

Providing easy means to check a virtual machine’s compliance against these rules.

As a result, managing storage usage and choice in vSphere deployments is more efficient and user-friendly.

vStorage APIs – Storage Awareness. A new set of APIs that allows vCenter Server to detect capabilities of a storage device, making it easier to select the appropriate storage disk for virtual machine placement. Storage capabilities, such as RAID level, thin or thick provisioning, replication state, and so on, can now be made visible with vCenter Server.

VMFS5. VMFS5 is a new version of vSphere Virtual Machine File System that offers improved scalability and performance, and provides internationalization support. With VMFS5, you can create a 64TB datastore on a single extent. RDMs in physical compatibility mode with the size larger than 2TB can now be presented to a virtual machine. In addition, on SAN storage hardware that supports vStorage APIs – Array Integration (also known as VAAI), ESXi 5.0 uses the atomic test and set (ATS) locking mechanism for VMFS5 datastores. Using this mechanism can improve performance, although the degree of improvement depends on the underlying storage hardware.

iSCSI UI support. Configure dependent hardware iSCSI and software iSCSI adapters along with the network configurations and port binding in a single dialog box using the vSphere Client. Full SDK access is also available for these configurations.

Storage I/O Control NFS support. vSphere 5.0 extends Storage I/O Control to provide cluster-wide I/O shares and limits for NFS datastores.

Storage APIs – Array Integration: Thin Provisioning. Reclaim blocks of a thin-provisioned LUN when a virtual disk is deleted or migrated. You can also preallocate space on thin-provisioned LUNs and receive advanced warnings and error messages when a datastore on a thin-provisioned LUN starts to fill up. The behavior of a full thin-provisioned disk is also improved. Only virtual machines that are trying to allocate new blocks on a full thin-provisioned datastore are paused. Virtual machines that do not require additional blocks on the thin-provisioned disk continue to run.

Swap to Host Cache. The VMkernel scheduler is modified to allow ESXi swap to extend to local or network SSD devices, which enables memory overcommitment and minimizes performance impact. The VMkernel automatically recognizes and tags SSD devices that are local to ESXi or are on the network.

2TB+ LUN support. vSphere 5.0 provides support for 2TB+ VMFS datastores. Very large VMFS5 datastores with the size of up to 64TB can be created on a singe storage device without additional extents.

Storage vMotion snapshot support. Allows you to use Storage vMotion for a virtual machine in snapshot mode with associated snapshots. You can better manage storage capacity and performance by using flexibility of migrating a virtual machine along with its snapshots to a different datastore. A new Storage vMotion mechanism uses a mirror driver, which synchronizes the source disk to the destination disk, making the migration quicker.

Software FCoE. vSphere 5.0 introduces support for a software Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) driver. To enable this driver on an ESXi host, you must have a NIC that can support some FCoE offload capabilities.

Snapshot commitments. If a snapshot commit operation fails, this feature enables the vSphere Client to warn users that a consolidate operation is still required on the virtual machine.

Networking

Enhanced Network I/O Control. vSphere 5.0 builds on network I/O control to allow user-defined network resource pools, enabling multitenancy deployment, and to bridge virtual and physical infrastructure QoS with per resource pool 802.1 tagging.

vSphere Distributed Switch Improvements. vSphere 5.0 provides a deeper view into virtual machine traffic through Netflow and enhances monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities through SPAN and LLDP.

ESXi Firewall. The ESXi 5.0 management interface is protected by a service-oriented and stateless firewall, which you can configure using the vSphere Client or at the command line with esxcli interfaces. A new firewall engine eliminates the use of iptables and rule sets define port rules for each service. For remote hosts, you can specify the IP addresses or range of IP addresses that are allowed to access each service.

VMware vCenter Server

vSphere Web Client. A new browser-based user interface that is supported across Linux and Windows platforms. In the 5.0 release, the vSphere Web Client is a replacement for the Web Access product. The client is suitable for all console and virtual machine use cases, allowing administrators to manage their environments.

vCenter Server Appliance. A vCenter Server implementation running on a preconfigured virtual appliance. This appliance significantly reduces the time required to deploy vCenter Server and associated services and provides a low-cost alternative to the traditional Windows-based vCenter Server.

Inventory Extensibility. VMware customers and partners can extend vCenter Server in multiple ways, including the inventory, graphical user interface, and agents. vCenter Server includes a manager to monitor the extensions. By deploying extensions created by VMware partners, you can use vCenter Server as a unified console to manage your virtualized datacenter.

Enhanced logging support. All log messages are now generated by syslog, and messages can now be logged on either local or one or more remote log servers. A given server can log messages from more than one host. Log messages can be remotely logged using either the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or TCP connections. The vSphere syslog listener is available as an optional plug-in to vCenter on Windows. In the vCenter Virtual Appliance (VCVA), logging is accomplished using the native syslog-ng facility. With vSphere 5.0, log messages from different sources can be configured to go into different logs for more convenience. Configuration of message logging can also be accomplished using ESXCLI in addition to the vSphere Client.

Availability

vSphere HA. vSphere High Availability is now a cloud-optimized availability platform. Enhancements such as the elimination of the primary and secondary roles and removal of the dependence on DNS make configuration easier. New features, such as the ability to use shared storage as a backup communication channel ensure higher reliability of host failure detection.

vSphere Data Recovery 2.0. VMware increases the speed and reliability of backups expands with the release of Data Recovery 2.0. This release improves integration with vCenter and provides new manageability features including:

Automated generation and emailing of backup job reports.

Improved backup, integrity check, and reclaim operation performance.

Increased resiliency against transient network failures provides improved CIFS support.

Increased flexibility to schedule, pause, and cancel integrity check operations.

Partner Ecosystem

Expanded List of Supported Processors. The list of supported processors has been expanded for ESXi 5.0. To determine which processors are compatible with this release, use the Hardware Compatibility Guide. Among the supported processors are the the Intel Xeon E7-2800, E7-4800, and E7-8800 processor series, code-named Westmere-EX, and the Intel Xeon E3-1200 and i3-2100 processor series, code-named Sandy Bridge.

Support for Multi-queue Storage Adapters. The vSphere storage stack is enhanced to discover multi-queue capabilities of adapters and distribute the incoming I/O on these queues based on CPU affinity. This results in reduced CPU cost per I/O.

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.

VMware vCloud Director provides the interface, automation, and management required by enterprises and service providers to build private and public clouds. vCloud Director:

• Supports multi tenancy/organizational isolation
• Allows for the creation of central application catalogs and personalization of templates
• Enables creation and deployment of vApps from catalogs/templates
• Controls user resource usage through roles/rights, quotas and leases
• Enables programmatic control through the RESTful vCloud API
• Provides an additional level of abstraction from underlying hardware

Definitely worth evaluating in your environment.  A 60-day eval is available here.

• Over 12,500 attendees (still awaiting the final tally)
• Over 300 attendees at VMware’s first Technology Exchange – Developer Day
• Over 200 sponsors and exhibitor companies
• 300 break out sessions across 6 tracks
• 12 Instructor led labs and 9 Self Paced lab courses
• 920 new VMUG members recruited on site
• VMworld 2009 generated a strong volume of coverage with a total of 315 articles. 90 original US articles, 11 ANZ articles, 51 APAC articles, and 163 EMEA articles.
• Strong social media activity with:
  • 4,305 tweets on the event, 1205 contributors and 2,350 followers
  • New VMworld YouTube views: 5,714
• VMware produced 14 VMworld videos on site and released these on VMware TV with 13,509 total views
• 4,459 Self Paced labs taken with 41,043 VMs deployed. This has broken all previous self paced lab records.
• 6,149 Instructor led labs taken across 12 labs on offer during VMworld 2009.

And just for fun (yes these are real and not made up):

• Quantity of sodas purchased     54,742
• Quantity of bananas      14,813
• Quantity of apples         14,813
• Gallons of coffee          1,895
• Quantity of cookies       5,647
• Quantity of brownies     9,188
• # of beers consumed at the welcome reception monday night: 10,200

We’ll have to work on that beer number next year!!!

The set list looked like this:

Double Vision

Head Games

Cold as Ice

Dirty White Boy

Feels like the first time

Urgent

Jukebox Hero (with Whole lotta love in the middle)

for the encore:

I want to know what love is

Hot Blooded

Here’s what it looked like during Cold as Ice:

and during Double Vision:

The concert was held in the general session area where the keynotes were held.  This is an absolute huge room that had 30 foot screens setup (6 of them) for everyone to see.  To give you an idea how big this was, here’s two shots, both left and right.  In the first pic you can see lead singer, Kelly Hansen, in the lower right.

A very fun time had by all.  Well done boys.

*pictures are copyright vmguy.com.  Any reproduction without express written consent is prohibited.

Steve begins on the topic of desktops.  He says the industry wants to go from device-centric to people-centric(I totally agree – it’s a better model).  He talks about the goals the VMware has in it’s desktop strategy and he labels the user experience as the most important.  He describes why vSphere is the right platform for desktop virtualization.  Steve talks about how VMware decomposes the desktop to share images and simplify patching.  Steve announces a OEM agreement with RTO Virtual Profiles (just heard about this, check the link, cool stuff).  Steve goes on to describe PCoIP.  He describes hosted virtualization and how users can check-out a desktop.  He describes a use-case of how users can bring their own device to work and check out a VM.  This seems like a great use case for hosted virtualization where the user is running a base OS on their device and they check out their desktop to run as a VM on top of their own personal OS on the hardware.   He then talks about the scenario of bare metal virtualization for corporate owned IT. This is where you would load a hypervisor onto bare metal laptop hardware and then check-out a desktop VM to it.  He then introduces Mike to show CVP.

Mike shows Windows 7 running on CVP.  He shows the Aero interface and some videos running in CVP.  He then shows the Wyse cloud app and demos accessing the same desktop from his iPhone.  Really cool stuff, I love the iPhone app. Now back to Steve.  Steve talks about mobile access to vCenter and describles how the engineers are working on have mobile access to manage view desktops as well as vCenter mobile management. Steve describes the mobile virtualization platform (MVP) which is a mobile virtualization platform that runs on mobile phones.  For this section he introduces Peter Chiura, from Visa.

Peter demonstrates what Visa is doing.  He shows an Visa application on a phone which can show live transactions from the owner’s Visa card in near real time.  It can then show special offers from vendors you have made purchases thru.  He then backs out and shows the audience that the application is really running on Android in a VM on a windows mobile phone.  Pretty cool demo really. Back to Steve.  Steve talks about the platform.  He describes vSphere as “the software mainframe”.  He describes vMotion and it’s maturity.  He gives the history of VMworld 2003 with 1600 attendees and how they did a early preview of vMotion on stage for the first time at that conference (I was there when I was a customer!).  He describes vmotion migrations and how many have occured, how many dollars it’s saved and how many marriages have been saved due to the reduced time spent working by the administrators (get’s a really good laugh from the crowd).

He talks about the breath of vmotion and how it’s grown to storage vmotion.  He talks about using vmotion to balance workloads with DRS.  He talks about how you’ll soon be able to extend DRS to network and storage, for instance, moving a virtual machine to another host when the network adapter has been saturated.  He goes on to talk about Distributed Power Management and how it powers off servers when they are not in use and how this can be very useful for desktop scenarios.  Talks about AppSpeed and describes how it works and how it can provide the answer on who’s to be called when a multi-tier app is not running optimally.  He then shows vApp and the descriptors that they can have.  He leads into the new VMsafe APIs.  He describes how the vApp descriptors can now have security descriptors.  He then introduces Rob to show a preview of Config Control.

Rob shows how we can see exactly what’s changed in a virtualized enviornment.  He shows a demo with a port group being changed and how it was tracked and what else was impacted by that change.  Actually it was a very technical but cool demo on how to see what changes can impact your environment.

Back to Steve and onto choice.  Lab Manager and providing users a self service portal. Gives some stats on the datacenter for VMworld:  If it were physical, they would need: 37,248 machines, 25 Megawatts, and  3 football fields worth of physical servies.  Running everything virtual and they cut it down to 1 end zone, 776 physical servers, 540 Kilowatts. He leads onto the Cloud.  He gives an overview of the cloud and how vSphere is the foundation for the cloud.  He talks about the connecting of the internal and external cloud.  He talks how SRM is handling connectivity between two internal clouds.  He then talks about how long distance vMotion can be handled.  He descirbes the challenges: memory and disk sync and network identity.  It’s very challenging to keep 2 VMs in sync with their memory changes and disk changes.  Steve explains how Long Distance vMotion can be used to follow the sun/moon, or for DR. He talks about how different vendors are doing this different ways.  He describes Cisco and F5 and their different strategies for doing it. He goes on to the vCloud API and how a console can show your VMs in your datacenter and your VM’s that are running in a hosting provider.  He describes PaaS and how VMware wants to provide the platform and now can provide the framework to run applications. Introduces Adrian Colyer, CTO, SpringSource.

Adrian shows an application written in SprinSource Cloud Foundry. He describes how the application itself and method of delivering it via scale are seperated.  The app can be coded and then delivered and scaled very easily.  I notice a few people exiting as we reach towards the end.  Probably not the most interesting section for non-programmers but I was getting what he was trying to say.

Steve returns to summarize everything that was discussed:  How we are in a pendulm shift in the industry and VMware is posied to assist customers with all of their needs.

*Photos are copyright vmguy.com.  Any reproduction without express written consent is prohibited.

Tod thanked the sponsors for their support and gave us the number: 12,488 attendees at  VMworld 2009.  Quite an amazing achievement given this economy.  Tod also described the goal of VMware: To Energize and Save, wither that would be Financial Savings, Human Savings, or Earth’s Savings.  He then showed a video of customer testimonials from Siemens and Kroger.  Next up Tod introduced Paul Maritz, Chief Executive Officer from VMware.

Paul gave a definition of the cloud to the audience.  He went on to talk about how VMware will bridge the gap between the datacenter and the cloud of the future.  He described the VMware journey, where VMware has come from and where he believes VMware is headed.  He reiterated a comment that I’ve heard him say once before: that vSphere had more than 1,500 engineers working on it which was more than any Windows operating system durning his tenure at Microsoft.  This is another reason that vSphere is reconized as a true platform.  He went on to give a review of the vSphere features and how vSphere integrates into the ecosystem of available software.  He talked about customer upgrade plans and how customers polled are planning on upgrading to vSphere in the next few months.  He then introduced Tom Brey, Sr. Technical Staff Engineer, IBM.

Tom showed a great demo of power consumption of a IBM 3850 inside the vSphere client.  In the standard performance tab, he had real time counters of power consumption in watts on a per VM basis.  Very cool to see how much power your VM’s are using.  One thing I did note from his preso, he was running it on ESX 4.1 build 000000 (where can I get a copy of that?)

Paul returns after the demo to give us a explanation of all of the things coming to enhance vCenter and the management of the infrastructure.  With that lead in, Paul introduces us to an engineer named Bruce who goes thru a demonstration of Lab Manager 4 and chargeback.

Bruce shows us a demo of checking out a configuration in Lab Manager and then Paul leads that into a new portal called vCloud Express.  This portal lets customers check out VM’s or groups of them to use for development or for production.  It’s an interface that fulfills the much needed aspect for the cloud: a self-service portal.

Paul next leads into Desktops as a service and what is happening on that front.  For this Paul introduces Steve Dupree, Director of Platform Virtualization, Hewlett Packard.

Steve talks about the direction that HP is headed with virtualization.  Steve does a great demo of Hp Insight integration into the vSphere client.  An extra tab is show for the physical hosts where admins can find all of the Insight information about the health of the physical hardware.

Next up, Paul introduces Chris Renter, Telus Communications.

Chris demo’s a bit on the upcoming functionality and experience customers can expect from VMware View with PCoIP integration.  The PCoIP protocol will be a new enhancement for View coming later this year according to Paul.

The last (whew!) of the guests is Rod Johnson, CEO, SpringSource.

Rod gives us a description of how SpringSource will complement VMware to deliver PaaS (Platform as a Service).  He demo’s how easily code can be migrated to the cloud using the SpringSource framework.  It’s pretty impressive to see how this migration can happen from a developer’s perspective.

At this point Paul finally closes the opening keynote.  On to the press event and more pictures to follow.

*all photos are copyright vmguy.com.  Any reuse of these photographs without express written consent is prohibited.