VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

This week VMworld 2010 is held but unfortunately VMGuru.nl is not there to bring you the latest news from San Fransisco.

But of course we scan the Internet, follow twitter and have close contact with VMware personnel on-site.

First of all, if you can not attend VMworld like us but want to stay up-to-date check out:

VMworld 2010 buzz and the VMworldTV Channel.

VMware vCloud Director

The biggest news from VMworld today is the introduction of the VMware vCloud Director, formerly known as project Redwood. With the VMware vCloud Director enterprises can build secure, multitenant private clouds by grouping infrastructure resources into virtual datacenters and publishing them to users through Web-based portals and other software interfaces as fully automated, catalog-based services. This solution provides a clear path to cloud computing by giving customers the power to leverage existing investments and the flexibility to extend capacity among clouds.

For more information go here.

Or watch the video on VMware KB TV.

VMware View 4.5

The other big announcement was the VMware View 4.5 release in the beginning of September.

For more information see yesterdays blog post.

iPad VMware View client.

Besides the VMware View client for the Mac, which is part of the VMware View 4.5 package, a very nice addition to VMware View will be the upcoming VMware View client for the iPad. VMware is going Apple! Great news in my opinion because now I have an extra excuse to get myself an iPad .

For more information and a short demo visit VMworld TV.

Bye bye ESX.

Another public secret is the end of life for VMware ESX. With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware announced that this will be the last version which will have an ESX version. At VMworld this seems to be one of the primary messages besides all the new products, features and announcements. New releases of VMware ESX will only come as ESXi.

Visit VMworld TV for an interview with Sean and Charu fro.m the ESXi team about what this will mean for customers. Is ESXi up to the challenge? I don’t think so! Almost all my implementations in the last two years have been based on VMware ESXi and I have never encountered any problem regarding back-up-, UPS- or monitoring agent which couldn’t be solved. So I’m happy, one less choice to make.

VMware acquires Integrien and TriCipher.

Another announcement done at VMworld 2010 is the acquisition of Integrien and riCipher to expand VMware’s stack of cloud enabling software. Integrien is a company which specializes in performance analytics and TriCipher is a federated-access-management software provider.

Integrien’s real-time performance analytics software, called Alive, can be combined with VMware’s vCenter virtualisation products, allowing organisations to derive performance summaries of their infrastructure and virtualised applications.

TriCipher’s software will provide VMware infrastructure with a single set of authentication and security controls that can be used to bridge public and private clouds.

Today VMware organized the vForum 2010 in Nijkerk, the Netherlands, and during this day Dutch VMUG-er Viktor van den Berg interviewed Richard Garsthagen. Richard is one of the organizers of VMworld and during this interview he revealed some news about VMworld 2010.

First of all VMworld 2010 USA will be held from August 30th until September 2nd  in the Moscone Center in San Fransisco. The European version in the Bella Center in Copenhagen will take place from October 12th until October 14th.

Talking with colleagues and community members the issue which is immediately brought up is ‘Can we expect any news in Europe or is all news presented one month earlier?‘ Richards response is that VMworld is not primarily meant for product news but it’s a three day training event.

The biggest news Richard bring is that VMware is going to promote the experts. How? During VMworld 2010 you can get educated in four different ways. First of all you can attend breakout sessions or attend the self passed labs. A new item is that a you can attend smaller, more private group sessions. But when this is not private enough you can register for a 10 minute one-on-one private session with one of the VMware experts! Very cool!

A second great new feature …..

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hey folks!

First of all, a happy newyear to you all!

With 2009 behind us, we look forward to a new and intense 2010. Personally, I think 2010 will be a very interesting year. With the world economy leaving the ruins of the crisis and alot of new trends and technology introductions ahead, we are in for quite a treat. Also, we are eagerly looking forward to VMworld in Copenhagen, later this year. We hope to see a lot of you in Denmark!

However, a quick look back is in order too. (more…)

Today was a special day, VMGuru.nl celebrated it’s 1 year anniversary and to celebrate VMware organized a party, how thoughtful

Seriously, today we attended the VMware Partner Forum at Bussum in the Netherlands. So at 5:45 my alarm rang because we had to be in Bussum at 8:30. We arrived tight on time and after a cup of coffee we attended the keynote ‘Energize Business Through IT!’ Here VMware told us how important their partners were and what business to focus on during these difficult times and Jeremy van Doorn presented the news from VMworld 2009.

After a refreshment break it was time for our first breakout session. Anne Jan and I went to ‘5 great reasons to upgrade customers from VI3 to vSphere 4‘. The title says it all, convince customers to upgrade based on better scalability, flexibility, manageability and integration.  This session was completely my style, to the point, not too technical and without basing of the competition (as many of the other vendors do, much to my disgust). Citrix XENServer and Microsoft Hyper-V were mentioned and compared but the conclusion was all up to the listeners.

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I just finished a great webinar by Randy Groves, Chief Technology Officer at Teradici Corporation.

The challenge for this and upcoming years is to give the most demanding users a true user experience while working on a true zero client through any network. The Teradici corporation is far ahead of the rest with their PCoIP protocol. No surprise VMware embraced the technology and the Teradici corporation by working together to answer the challenge.

The entire focus of the Teradici company is PCoIP, the DNA of the team working on the PCoIP protocol is from big and important companies like Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia and others.

Why should you want to use your graphics remotely you ask?
Several branch of industries choose for running graphics in the datacenter because of several reasons. For instance the healthcare industry and because of security, Media & Entertainment and CAD/CAM because of the enormous power they can use in a datacenter and efficient way of using resources and you can connect to it from anywhere. So designers aren’t convicted to 1 pDesktop, if that 1 breaks down it will be a big loss, instead they can use almost any device to do their work from anywhere connecting to their vDesktop or even vDesktops. Also branches like the Trading Floor, Air Traffic control and others who want space savings are using graphics remotely.

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During VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, VMware announced the vExpert program. Erik and Anne Jan both were awarded with a vExpert award for their effort and enthusiasm around virtualization and their community work.  Today, ta the end of the day a special delivery arrived at the office from overseas we had to sign for, bringing proof that we have 2 vExperts in our midst. Congrats guys, you earned it and you now have a nice paper to proof it. Keep up the good work and maybe you can prolong the vExpert status in 2010.

Yesterday, the three of us attended one of the quarterly CDG⁽¹⁾ Technical update sessions which was held at ‘de Glazen Ruimte‘ in Maarssen.

The three subject were:

1. RES Software and VMware View by Bart van Winden (RES) en Ton Hermes (VMware);
2. Citrix reduces traffic jams on the roads to and from our Dynamic Delivery Center by Marc Wagevoort (CDG);
3. VMworld San Francisco 2009 update by Rob van der Wel.

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Just before VMworld 2009 Wyse released a great application for the iPhone called Wyse Pocket Cloud. It’s a great new application which enables you to connect to servers of desktops using RDP or VMware View.

So, what do you need and how can you get it? You need an iPhone 3G with a WiFi or 3G connection and today you can still download the application in the Apple Store for €15,99. This is a limited time promotional sale (30% off) for the week of VMworld.

Richard Garsthagen recorded a nice demo on VMworld which you can watch below.

Yesterday we showed you how VMware designed and build an awesome infrastructure just for one week of VMworld 2009.

Awesome figures!
776 ESX servers,  37TB RAM, 6.208 cores, 348TB storage and 37.248 virtual machines. But what is this infrastructure used for?

Well VMware primarily uses it for the 10 different self paced labs they provide to VMworld participants. VMware build a vCloud which consists of the best of three solutions, vSphere, Lab Manager and a self service portal in which users can select the lab they want to follow and within minutes they get there own lab environment.

Depending one the wanted lab virtual machines can be provisioned within minutes, from 3 minutes for a simple two server lab environment to 7 minutes for a large nine server lab environment.

The system does not just provision basic virtual machines like Windows, but it provisions entire virtual ESX environments, with nested ESX server, storage, SRM and vCenter server.

If you want to know more just watch the interview Richard Garsthagen did below.

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Just as Microsoft is proud to present users with live migration in Hyper-V 2.0, VMware announces that it supports long distance VMotion up to 200 Kilometers. As a VMware Premier Partner we already heard this was coming but we never realized it would be available this soon.

Long distance VMotion is the first step in enabling cloud services, it provides customers with the possibility to move virtual machines from a private to a public cloud or vice versa or enable clients to ‘follow the sun/moon’ simply by VMotioning the virtual machines to a remote datacenter. It can also be used as a pre-SRM kind of tool by VMotioning a complete datacenter when you see there’s trouble coming (tornados/floods/etc).

Of course this great feature does not come without some limitations. You need a WAN connection with minimal 622Mb/s and a maximum latency of  5 ms.

Edit: Joep Piscaer from VirtualLifestyle.nl attended breakout session TA3105, Long distance VMotion, and wrote a great report and recorded a video which you can see/read here.

VMware announced their effort to produce a software implementation of PCoIP together with Terradici at VMworld 2009 in Cannes.

Since then I have been anxiously waiting for a demo or beta. During today’s keynote at VMworld 2009 VMware gave a demo of their long awaited PCoIP demo.

Joep Piscaer from VirtualLifestyle.nl made a video of this demo. Audio is bad and the image is a bit shakey but it gives a good impression of the PCoIP performance an d possibilities.

You can watch the video here.

I’m impressed by the performance and I can’t wait to get my hands on the beta. I’m curious what Brian Madden’s opinion is on this premiere as he was skeptical on VMware’s effort to produce a software implementation of PCoIP.

It is becoming a sequel, the datacenter VMware has build for this weeks VMworld 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

In addition to our two previous articles (art1, art2), today we found two very nice videos loaded with tons of techno porno!

The first video shows the VMware team building the complete datacenter on-site at the Moscone Center. During the video footage the awesome numbers representing this huge infrastructure run by.

In short? 28 racks containing 776 ESX servers which provide the infrastructure with 37TB of memory, 6.208 CPU cores and 348TB storage which uses 528KW electricity and is servicing 37.248 virtual machines. You will probably never find such an infrastructure anywhere in the world, at least I know I won’t.

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You wanted to attend VMworld 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco but you couldn’t?

I know what it feels like

But now John Troyer (VMware) has a live video feed from the Solution Exchange. It feels like you’re there while sitting on the couch at home. John interviews various interesting guest on various subjects.

If you want to view John Troyers Live feed and/or chat with him check out more.

Edit: Keep in mind the time zone difference betweeen LA and your current location (LA 9:00-17:00 = NL 18:00-02:00)

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Today in his keynote speech Paul Maritz announced vCloud Express. vCloud Express is an Infrastructure as a Service offering which is delivered by the leading VMware service provider partners like Logica, BlueLock, MelbourneIT and Terremark. It provides reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized services. It allows software developers and other users to easily access computing resources in a pay-as-you-go model. vCloud Express provides users compatibility with their own internal datacenters.

Customers can sign up easily with a credit card and immediately begin provisioning computing capacity at one of the VMware service providers like Terremark. Integrated firewalls, load balancing and network management features allow users to easily customize their cloud environment to their specific needs. Users will also be able to access their cloud computing environments via the VMware vCloud API.

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At VMworld 2009, which started yesterday, VMware launched two new products.

VMware GO and VMware vCenter Product Family.

VMware launched VMware GO which is targets small to medium sized businesses. VMware GO is a free beta service that makes it simple for clients to get started with virtualizing their applications. VMware Go is a web-based service which will let companies run multiple operating systems and applications on a single server. By doing so VMware helps SMBs to spend less money on hardware, energy and server administration. VMware Go beta will start next Monday and will be generally available in Q4 of 2009.

The second product, VMware vCenter Product Family, is actually a suite of existing VMware virtualization solutions . The suite is built on top of VMware vSphere 4 to help enterprises create and maintain dynamic and flexible IT infrastructures.

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As they do every year, VMware has asked their customers to put their creativity to the test. The assigment was to create a video that shows why business-critical applications run best on VMware vSphere 4. Last week VMware announced the five winners and from August 31st until September 3rd you can vote for your favorite.  Visit www.vmware.com/go/videocontest and vote for your favorite. Which of these videos do you think deserves to win the VMworld Favorite award?

• Grand Prize: Email’s Down
• Runner-Up: VMware vSphere Aces the Competition
• Runner-Up: Featuring the letters V and M!
• Runner-Up: Dude, Where’s My Server?!?
• Runner-Up: Virtualize Your Legacy Infrastructure on the Cloud

As a big ‘24′ fan my absolute favorite is Email’s Down.

For all off you who liked the techno-porn I described in my earlier post on all hardware which is flown in for VMworld 2009, which starts next week, here’s some video footage.

Many people have already traveled to America to attend VMworld 2009 which starts Monday September 31th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

We’ve already seen the ‘Ultimate Gabe & Babe US Road Movie‘ and a Gabrie’s New Orleans site-seeing clip.

But today, Virtual Geek, Chad Sakac posted some pictures frm inside the Moscone Center where the VMworld crew is busy setting up all hardware for next weeks VMworld 2009.

There will be 3 datacenters which will support all the hands-on labs, e-mail stations, booths, etc. The largest datacenter consists of 16 racks, each containing 4 Cisco UCS blade chasis, with 8 blades each. This totals 512 blades(!) so computing power won’t be a problem.

Do you want a peek? Check more.

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Eric Sloof just reported on NTPro.nl that next year VMworld Europe 2010 will be held at the Bella Centre in Copenhagen.

This was revealed onthe last page of the VMworld 2009 conference guide.
So Copenhagen here we come!

hello 2010

VMworld Europe 2010
October 11 – 14
Bella Centre, Copenhagen

We’re now 1 week from the start of VMworld 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Fransisco. Unfortunately the VMGuru.nl-crew won’t attend but many of our fellow blogger will. According to our info, Gabrie van Zanten from Gabe’s Virtualworld and Eric Sloof from NTPro.nl will attend as will many others.

We will be monitoring all the VMworld 2009 news next week and will try to keep you informed as much as possible.

Yesterday Tripwire Announced their new VI monitoring and automation tool, vWire, which gives you full control over virtual infrastructure. With vWire you monitor the health of your virtual infrastructure, correlate this information to provide context and insight into potential issues, and act to prevent and resolve problems which reduces downtime and operating costs while inspiring confidence in virtualization across your organization.

Tripwire is giving away fully functional evaluation copies of vWire at www.vwire.com You can download it, take it for a test drive and take the mystery and complexity from virtual environments while further automating your environment.

Update April 22th 2009: Today the rumor mentioned below was confirmed during the vSphere 4 launch.

Rumor in the VMware community has it that the next version of VMware ESX, vSphere, has very limited support for the VMware management and automation suite. vSphere will of course be available with vCenter for basic management and automation tasks but the rest of VMware’s great product suite is not supported in the initial release of vSphere.

So there won’t be support for:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vCenter Lab Manager
• VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
• VMware vCenter Stage Manager
• VMware View

In my opinion this is a mistake. I understand the pressure is on and VMware should  release a new version fast to challenge the competition. But releasing a product which does not support the majority of your former product suite is not a clever move.

From what I understand this is also a discussion within VMware so let’s hope VMware gets wiser and postpones the release or add support for the VMware Management & Automation suite soon.

I know it has been a while so maybe it’s old news to some of you but we have to support our VMGuru-founder, Scott Herold. Scott released chapter 4 of his VMware Infrastructure 3, Advanced technical Design Guide and it can be downloaded (for free) here. A great initiative and a must for every VMware Architect.

Saturday I slept through most of the day and Sunday I put all of our video material on my computer. I created a video which will show you all our highligts of VMworld Europe 2009 in 10 minutes. Enjoy and thanks again for the support.

Last night we finished publishing the last two videos and now it’s Friday Febr 27 8:15, we are eating breakfast and getting ready to leave Cannes. Our flight leaves at 12:05 and we hope to touch down at Schiphol Airport at 14:20. We had a great time, it was hard and very exhausting but it it was worth every minute of sleep we missed to keep you informed and keep VMGuru.nl up-to-date. We very much hope you enjoyed it. We hope the post were good, the videos were entertaining and your experience was as if you were in Cannes yourself. The website statistics looked very promising, 250.00 hits in the last week, and we hope we can keep you interested in the future.

As I already said, we hope you have enjoyed it, we certainly did. If you have any questions, comments or compliments , please feel free to drop us an e-mail.
We collected all VMworld Europe 2009 videos on a new ‘Videos page’, so check it out.

From the VMGuru.nl-crew @ Cannes, thank you for you support!