The third day of VMworld 2011 started out with a general session and keynote by Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware.

Three VMware customers were on stage telling about their cloud experience, among these; Ducati. Ducati could tell us that they have virtualized about 97% of their infrastructure and that they’d probably get to 100% in within the next 2 years.

The keynote by Paul Maritz started with some statistics. According to Gartner, 75% of all virtual machines are hosted on the vSphere platform. That is both impressive and understandable. I’m wondering what the last 25% is thinking of.
VMware is focusing a lot of their resources on the end-user. They are improving and optimizing their View platform in addition to making it possible to run business applications on any device. They are working on a product that utilizes HTML5 to deliver these applications basically to any device that has a browser that supports HTML5. I’m already utilizing virtualization at work, at home and on my laptop. I’m looking forward to utilize the technology on my Android devices as well.

LAB: Advanced Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning for Your Virtual Environment

We can never be to good on troubleshooting and performance tuning in a virtual environment so I took this lab to maybe get some input. The lab brought me through a couple of pretty good real world cases where the server administrator reported that the server wasn’t performing to good. In the lab the issues was identified and solved by using the vSphere Management Assistant. I learn a couple of new ways to approach an issue and enables me to more effectively solve it. A very good lab for the advanced system administrator.

LAB: Control SaaS and Web Applications with Secure Access to Your Cloud Applications
VMware Horizon is a very interesting way of delivering applications to users. Even though the lab was fairly easy, it gave me a good introduction to the product and how it works. Horizon is delivered as a Virtual Appliance and I must say; the virtual appliance way of delivering products is the only future proof way of doing it. Horizon is basically a link between the user and ThinApps available. A quick and easy lab.

VMware View Enterprise Architecture Design and Implementation Best Practices
In this breakout session John Dodge (does it get more american that that?) presented his way of architect a VMware View solution for an enterprise. We’re talking 10.000 virtual desktops here. This is a bit bigger than what I’m used to working with, but still; The approach is pretty much the same. He talked about Design Decision Entanglement. Translated, this is a design process where the important decisions are made first because they have a significant impact on the next.

The presentation also included a few best practices. I’ve collected these on this wiki page and updates will put there.

Here are the numbers when I left the scene:

• Attendants: 7200
• Labs completed: 5414
• Historic VM’s: 60211

This concluded my attendance at VMworld 2011 in Copenhagen. It has been a great conference that again reminded me why I enjoy working with VMware products and the future with VMware does not seem to become any less exciting.

Next: VMworld 2012 Barcelona

Thanks for a great show.

Todays keynote by Raghu Raghuram focused on the software driven datacenter and sharing VMware’s ideas and thoughts about the subject. Some interesting numbers about what to expect from a standard server in the next few years; 16 cores per CPU, 300GB Memory and up to 320VMs per host. 320VMs is possible today, but do we want to?

The focus on virtualization of the network is increasing with VXLAN and in near future we might be able to migrate machines to other subnets on other VLANs without having to change anything in the OS.

PCoIP Performance and Best Practices
The first best practices session of the day was regarding PCoIP. The recently released View 5 include a few new features that will be appreciated. Support of 3D with DirectX9 and OpenGL 2.1 will improve the user experience. VMware also announced that they are working with Nvidia to be able to provide GPU rendered graphics in VMs by utilizing the passthrough feature.

VMware has, in co-operation with Teradici, improved the PCoIP protocol significantly. By optimizing the codecs, moving from SSE3  to SSE4 instruction set on the CPU side and a couple of new features they have managed to reduce the BW usage with about 60%. Even with improving the user experience, they managed to reduce the CPU usage with 5-10%.

I must credit Warren Ponder and Banit Agrawal (both VMware) for an excellent session. I attended a session with these guys last year as well and they present to-the-point information. Thanks guys.

Tips, tricks and best practices for VMware View Success: Learning from Customer Support
The Customer Support sessions are based on support cases and experiences from VMware customers. This session provided information about the most common cases regarding VMware View and pitfalls we’d like to avoid;

• vCenter: Do not manage virtual desktops from vCenter. vCenter is not View Aware so changes made in vCenter is not replicated to View.
• Network: Make sure the vSwitches has enough network ports
• Storage: Do not rename datastores

LAB: Enhancing Your Virtual End-user Desktop Environment
There are many hands-on labs available at VMworld. I have recently been working with a VMware View design so I thought this might bring a few new tips. This lab brought be through a complete installation of VMware view with security servers. This lab is great if you want to get a quick introduction to installing and configuring VMware view. A overall good lab.

VMware day 2 has come to an end. I’m not sure if I’m getting slow/old or VMware is releasing, announcing, launching a lot of new features/products, but my head is fried now.

Off to the VMworld Party!

VMworld 2011 is currently being held at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. VMware is hosting this event that has become the largest IT conference in Europe with over 7000 attendees this year. That’s a new record with over 1000 more than last year. Can this be beaten at VMworld 2012 in Barcelona?

View Troubleshooting – looking under the hood
This advanced technical breakout session gave me a better insight in how the connection process in a VMware view environment is made. Combining this knowledge with detailed information about what to look for in the event database and logs will help me in troubleshooting different issues later. I will probably download this presentation for reference.

The End-User Computing Revolution starts now with VMware View
This Super Session was all about end-user computing. How we have developed from a “Windows Workstation” point of view to a multi device, multi OS point of view. It is very common that people using IT today are currently holding 2-3 devices that they can and want to use. The presentation provided some introduction level information about capabilities in VMware View 5. It was a good session.

Best Practices for Virtual Networking
I really enjoy best practices sessions. They often provide detailed information about how things should be implemented and this one did. Stuff presented here can be implemented right away. Even though I’ve been to similar sessions before it is always good to get a reminder in addition to some new information about vSphere 5.

Best Practices for Deploying vSphere 5.0 using 10Gb Ethernet
We are currently looking at implementing 10Gb Ethernet in our environment so I thought this was a good session to get the latest and greatest. This technical breakout session had a great answer/question ratio. By this I mean that it gave me many answers, but I still left the room with several questions in my notebook.

Engineering the future (Keynote)
This keynote by VMware CTO Steve Herrod reminded me again why I enjoy working with VMware and VMware products. There are quite a few brilliant minds working to provide the best IT experience possible. The keynote provided information about vSphere 5 and View 5 in addition to several other products that are already available and launching of new products. I will certainly put some of the new products in the vSphere portfolio in the test bench.

After day 1 at VMworld 2011 I still have the impression that this is the best way and place for keeping up with the technology.