During the last weeks we’ve been busy implementing a large VMware View deployment for one customer and planning an even larger VMware View deployment for another customer. At the first site we ran into some video performance issues which we definitely want to avoid during the second project.

In our quest to solve and avoid the video performance issues we ran into a number of ways to improve the video performance in VMware View that I would like to share.

First of all, we used the information below from the VMware Architecture Planning Guide:

480p-formatted video You can play video at 480p or lower at native resolutions when the View desktop has a single virtual CPU. If the operating system is Windows 7 and you want to play the video in high-definition Flash or in full screen mode, the desktop requires a dual virtual CPU.

720p-formatted video You can play video at 720p at native resolutions if the View desktop has a dual virtual CPU. Performance might be affected if you play videos at 720p in high definition or in full screen mode.

1080p-formatted video If the View desktop has a dual virtual CPU, you can play 1080p formatted video, although the media player might need to be adjusted to a smaller window size.

3D If you plan to use 3D applications such as Windows Aero themes or Google Earth, the Windows 7 View desktop must have virtual hardware version 8 and turn on the pool setting called Windows 7 3D Rendering. Up to 2 monitors are supported, and the maximum screen resolution is 1920 x 1200. This non-hardware accelerated graphics feature enables you to run DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.1 applications without requiring a physical graphics processing unit.

These are the settings we used to size the first solution, so we use a Windows 7 desktop image with dual vCPU, 2GB memory, a VMXNET3 adapter and hardware version 8.

This is good for playing 720p in native video resolution but when scaling to full screen this setup does not run smoothly.

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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.

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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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 those of you who have been following the launch of VMware’s new flagship vSphere 4 and are anxious to upgrade their virtual infrastructure, I ran into a great post on Mike DiPetrillo’s website.

Mike has posted four great video’s with the following scenario’s:

• Video 1 -VMware VirtualCenter Management Components
• Video 2 – VMware ESX Host Migration Methods
• Video 3 – Virtual Machine Upgrades (VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware)
• Video 4 – Implementing VMware vSphere Licensing

Interested? You can check out the videos here.

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.

Some of our colleagues ask us what we do in Cannes all day long. It’s easy to explain what the sessions are, presentations sometimes supported by a product demo. But with the Solution Exchange and Hands-on-Labs some still have huge question marks on their faces. Maybe they don’t understand the term or the setup so we created a video compilation to give you an idea. Maybe now you will understand why we, at some days, didn’t follow any sessions because we were ‘stuck’ at level -1 of the Palais des Festivals.

Yesterday there was a session called VMware ‘unplugged’, here you could ask all kinds of questions to a panel of VMware CxOs. The panel constisted of Steve Herrod, Paul Maritz, Mauricio Carli and Tod Nielsen. Anne Jan posted an article on this yesterday and now we have a video with the highlights of this ‘unplugged’ session.

In addition to our post this morning hereby the highlight of this session in a video.

Last, but certainly not least, we attended the Partner Award Ceremony at the end of our day. This is the place where VMware awards its Partners for a year of hard work. We knew that Centric was nominated so we were a bit nervous but at the we did not receive an award

We already wrote about it but here are the highlights of the 2009 Partner Day @ Cannes on video.

October 13th I met Eric Sloof, the man behind NTPRO.NL, at the VMware Partner Forum 2008 in Brasschaat. He was busy filming various presentations. Today I visited Erik’s site and discovered his video collection. If you are interested in the ‘live’ presentations of VMWorld 2008 or some nice product demo’s, check out Erik’s videos on Vimeo.

Here are three of my favorites:

• Brian Madden VDI versus Terminal Services Video
• VMworld 2008 | VMware Site Recovery Manager Video
• Designing the Next Generation Data Center – Cisco and VMware