Gartner on the place of Private Clouds

Check out Gartners view on private clouds in this video from Tom Bittman.

Tom thinks that services will ultimately move to service providers but that they are not ready yet. Hence to do something now, organisations are looking at virtualisation to create Private Clouds (Internal Private one would assume). Its predicted a lot of the money spent over the next few years will be put into these areas and not into utalisation of Service Provider clouds.

However, in Gartners view, Private Cloud computing is not the destination but a stop gap, near term step, until the services are more mature which may be six months for some services or ten years for others. Tom also talks about how creating Private Cloud can be a stepping stone to ease the migration to Service Providers in the future, "I don't want to build a dead end, I want to build a stepping stone".

Its only 90 seconds long, take a look.



Whilst I like the premise behind the message, I can't say I agree with all of it; although I am sure its hard to sum things up in 90 seconds. I think that Private Clouds will remain and it won't be an evacuation off to the Service Provider space. There will still be a place for Private Cloud. I can think of many reasons to maintain your smaller Private Cloud. If you have some good ideas of why you would maintain some Private Cloud post in the comments.

Rodos

Interview - Chris Akerberg from Vizioncore

The President and Chief Operating Officer of Vizioncore, Chris Akerberg is currently in Sydney Australia so I look the opportunity to ask him some questions about the company and their products.

Chris has been with the company for a number of years, before the acquisition by Quest. Since becoming President and CCO he has been focusing on building out the company in order to sustain a much larger customer base, moving beyond the 20,000 customers they now have to the future 100,000 range.

The questions and a summary of the answers:

• What does it mean for Vizioncore to be owned by Quest?

It allows the backing of a large company which brings deeper pockets for investment. There is also the wider breadth of the Quest sales force. Lastly there is the sharing or blending of IP where Quest can bring their application and database management expertise.

• What is the reason behind having free and paid tools within the companies portfolio?

We are in a marathon of virtualisation adoption and we want to give back to the community free tools that will assist in that virtualisation adoption. These tools include a P2V product, V EcoShell and an Optimizer product for storage. The paid tools will evolve with the customer as their need for virtualisation increases.

• How do Vizioncore tools work within an organisation as they move along the maturity model to reach 80% virtual or above?

We have an analyze to automate story which matches the virtualisation adoption life cycle. Analyze your existing environment (vFogLight), take action on the results by converting the workloads (vConverter), then protect the workloads (vRangerPro and vReplicator), now monitor those workloads (vFogLight), then optimize the environment (vOptimizerPro and vFogLight) and lastly extend your ROI by doing automation (vControl). So analyze to convert to protect to monitor to optimize to automate. We can help customers out anywhere along the curve.

• What can you share about product updates next year? What's coming?

Not a wider portfolio, we have already moved from being a backup product to having a comprehensive portfolio. What you will see from Vizioncore is going deeper within those products. So vRangerPro being able to have visibility and control of the applications as well. vFogLight being able to look at applications. Bringing application awareness to the product line. Lastly having all our products being Cloud ready as we are supportive of customers moving into the managed services or Software as a Service industry.

• VMware are increasingly releasing products which overlap with functionality of 3rd party providers like yourself? What's your position on this?

We get this question quite a bit and are creating literature for our channel partners and customers about the differences between what VMware are offering and what Vizioncore do. What we do is communicate with VMware and understand where their roadmap is going and as they turn we will turn with them. Yet if they are going to put a significant investment in an area of platform, Vizioncore can choose to not spend money there and maybe go off in a different direction. Likewise where VMware might not be investing, Vizioncore can capitalize and add more value. Also we want people to think of investing in Vizioncore is investing in virtualisation management. We are going to to not only do this analyze to automate story for VMware but also for HyperV and Citrix. As customers decide what to use within their strategy they can still look to Vizioncore for supporting products.

Of course what you really should do is watch the short video below and listen to Chris in his own words. He is much more articulate than my summary.

Rodos

Drobo configuration

Have you ever wondered how long it would take for a 12 year old child to configure a Drobo storage device? Well you are about to find out. In this short time lapse film you can see it for yourself!

[Watch the video to see the answer]

I was lucky enough to win this Drobo from Data Robotics at the Gestalt IT Field Day last week. It arrived today via Fedex. If Drobo is meant to be simple for home users than there is not really any point in me testing it out, I know a thing or two about computers. However my youngest son Tim does not.That's not quite true, he is bit of a geek and a whiz at using applications but he is only just starting to learn about computer technology itself like storage. What a great test of the simplicity of the device. Seriously, the hardest thing was removing all of the packaging.

Tim also managed to figure out how to create the partition and format it. The Mac was kind enough to pop up the right utility when the Drobo was plugged in. After the partition was formatted it auto mounted. His test was to then copy a video file into the Drobo and play it from there. This is all included in the time.

If you are wondering what a Drobo is check out their web site. Essentially is a desktop storage device that contains data protection.

Drobo utilizes the revolutionary BeyondRAID storage technology that protects data against a hard disk crash, yet is simple enough for anyone to use. As long as you have more than a single disk in Drobo, all data on Drobo is safe no matter which hard disk fails. There’s no need to worry about anything else.

Its technology lets you add disk drives, it will take up to four. If you run out of space you simply pop out the smallest drive (its okay your data is protected) and insert a larger one, you will then get more space and the data protection re-configures itself underneath. For large drives the re-configuration process can take quite some time.

If you enjoyed this, please post a comment, I am sure Tim would appreciate it.

Rodos

[Note : I attended the Gestalt IT Field Days as a guest of Gestalt IT. Travel and accommodation was provided as part of the event. See the Field Day FAQ and my comments for details.]

Ocarina Networks

The analyst industry is telling us that unstructured data growth is going to outpace that of transactional based data. "While transactional data is still projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.8%, it’s far outpaced by a 61.7% CAGR predicted for unstructured data in traditional data centers." You don't have to look far past your own explosion of data consumption to realise this is becoming a large problem for IT departments. Combined with this growth is our desire to keep more aged data online, in order to provide much faster retrieval.

What is one to do? Well a company called Ocarina Networks says they "make free space on storage you already have" through some very clever content aware compression and de-duplication. The key element here is that it works on your online storage so the savings to save are multiplied as there are flow on effect to the transmission of your data over networks and to the amount of data that you need to backup. So even though companies like Netapp (which Ocarina say they are 57x better than) and DataDomain do de-dupe its only at the underlying storage without these possible secondary benefits.

A quick look at just three of the people involved in Ocarina gives you a good impression that they have the pedigree to achieve great things here. Their CEO, Murli Thirumale and CTO, Goutham Rao, hail from the same roles in the Citrix Advanced Solutions Group, where they led the SSL-VPN division (acquired via Net6). In those roles they took their technology to the number #1 unit in market share in eighteen months. The Chief Scientist, Dr Matt Mahoney is a thought leader in next generation data compression. Also as a company they have been very busy in creating some interesting patents.

Last week at the Gestalt IT Field Day I got some deep dive into the Ocarina technology. Here is a video I took of Goutham and Murli.

However the insights from these guys on the science of de-dupe and compression was very informative, so lets look at what they had to say in more detail.

There are two approaches to compressing data, either a dictionary or a statistical approach. A dictionary encoder approach, such as the LZ algorithm, "operate[s] by searching for matches between the text to be compressed and a set of strings contained in a data structure (called the 'dictionary') maintained by the encoder. When the encoder finds such a match, it substitutes a reference to the string's position in the data structure."

The statistical approach is much more interesting. If you can predict what is coming next in a data series, you don't need to record it, you only need to record the things you did not expect (this is what takes up the space). As long as you use the same algorithm to extract the exception data you get exactly the same data (or file) whilst only saving a very small part of it. You can also have a feedback loop from from the errors back into the input to improve the prediction. For example if you look at a photo of the room you are sitting in now, there are probably lots of boarders or edge framed objects or walls etc. If you turned all of these edges into axis's and you were to follow an axis of colour moving down the edge of the wall you can expect that the next element moving down will be more of that same edge, you only need to record something when its not. Complex but you can do some clever things with the right algorithms [more on that shortly].

Compression is something you can only do on a single file. As mentioned the key to compression is predicting what the next value is going to be in an incoming stream of data. The more data you have available in the incoming data steam the better you may be able to predict the next value. Also note that a lot of file types being generated today are already compress internally, such as JPEG images either by themselves or embedded inside other documents.

De-dupe is all about finding the similar chunks of data by comparing hash values or a fingerprint. The smaller the chunks you are comparing the better because it increases the likelihood of a match between the two. Dividing the data into fixed chunks will get you so far but unless you have really small chunk you can miss a match that might occur across the boundary of two chunks. Netapp de-dupe does it this way. To get maximum effect you need what is called a sliding chunk window, looking for a matching bit of data anywhere, yet this is expensive computationally as you have to calculate a lot more hash values. There is a risk that two different chunks may produce the same hash or fingerprint, a false positive. Typical hashing algorithms are MD5, which is very weak or SHA256 which is strong, but Rabin [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabin_fingerprint] is most liked [its fast to implement in software and works well on sliding windows]. How does all this comparing of chunks of data save you data? When you find a duplicate chunk you don't need to save a second copy, you can just save a small reference to the original piece of data you already have. Some technologies, such as Microsoft Storage Server 2008 do single instance storage (de-dupe) by only comparing whole files, which is bit of a joke really, it not going to get you much saving, because these days we create so many copies of the same files which are only slightly different (we add a few words to a document but save it as a new file name) or there is a lot of repetitive elements across files (images and templates). Yet this technique is really easy to do. Lastly, not all data can be de-duped, some just has very little if any repetition.

Now it also matters what you are de-duping, is it a data moving over a network, a backup or your storage. Each of these has a different "window" of time that they are looking at. On a network transfer you don't have much of a window and the data in that short window may not be very repetitive, whereas a backup has a very long window with repeated cycles of data coming in that is probably very repetitive. These different characteristics of the data stream require different algorithms to achieve greatest efficiencies.

Compression does not preclude de-dupe but they do pull against one another. For example as mentioned earlier a lot of data is already compressed and compressed data removes just about any chance of finding duplicate chunks of data. If you are a photo storing site you probably want to turn de-dupe of and not waste all the effort. Likewise in a corporate environment you may have millions of occurrences of your company logo image but they are all compressed and embedded inside Word and Powerpoint files that are then also compressed. All that repetitive data has been obfuscated! Remember, all that growth in storage is in this unstructured data area.

Yet you want both de-dupe and compression, because there is always data you need save so compress it.

So given this primer what do Ocarina do? Well Ocarina find the optimal chunk size for everything, compression and de-dupe, by performing object chunking. If you take all of the data and break it into objects, so a zip file is broken down into its multiple files, a Word document may be broken down into images and text. Then the actions occur at the object level. Hence a jpeg would not be broken down into smaller chunks, as the best windows size to compress or de-dupe a jpeg is the whole image.

Going beyond the object based chunking Ocarina then use a neural network to determine what the best compression algorithm is for this particular type of chunk, in fact they have over 120 different algorithms. There are even different algorithms for variations of the same object, such as for a small versus a large jpeg. Their algorithms range from plain text to gene sequences. For images they have some very smart algorithms that perform spatial optimization or what can your eye see, based on chrominance and luminance. If you take a typical scenario it helps to understand the power of this. If you have the same photo at different sizes, or if you slightly adjust a photo (such as removing the red eye) the data on the disk is all very different and there is probably no repetition across them. However because Ocarina can "look" at the image it is able to determine that they are all in fact the same photo.

How does all of this work? Well an appliance accesses your storage and process the data. It breaks files down into their objects, weaves it magic and puts the smaller shrunk version back. This all occurs in RAM. To be safe, before it replaces the file it compares the original file with an expansion of the shrunk file to ensure they match exactly so there are no errors. Of course the files on the storage are now different, so you need to use the ECOreader (a file system filter driver) which expands the files in real time as they are read so you get them back in their original format. Of course sometimes you may want to read the shrunk file and not expand it, for example if you want to transmit it over a network (replication) or for backup. The software can be integrated into storage to make it all transparent to the user. Performance when reading and expanding is on par for de-dupe, for compression its dependent on the method but usually the same rate to uncompress as it was to compress it. Essentially you are performing an economic tradeoff of consuming compute cycles for disk capacity gains.

Having reviewed all of this organisations which are having to store, transmit and backup large amounts of unstructured data could benefit a lot from the Ocarina technologies. Especially those that the Ocarina algorithms work well. From speaking to them they are working hard on new and improved algorithms but just as importantly on how to make the technology solution work well.

You can find more details about the products on the web site http://www.ocarinanetworks.com/

Rodos

[Note : I attended the Field Days as a guest of Gestalt IT. Travel and accommodation was provided as part of the event. See the Field Day FAQ and my comments for details.]

Cisco UCS deploy and ESXi 4 install guides

Cisco have posted two documents into their support forum around deploying the Unified Computing System (UCS)

Deploying UCS Blade Server with UCS Manager for Virtualization

VMWare ESXi 4.0 Installation on UCS Blade Server with UCS Manager KVM

The documents include many screen shots and may serve as a good primer for those wanting to investigate UCS.

I do think that the Fabric Interconnect setup section in the first document should have the CLI method included as well. Likewise as most implementations will require the setting up of a pair of F-I's this part should be there too, after all its not difficult.

The VMware ESXi install instructions talk about changing the boot order in the blades BIOS, however this should really be done from within UCSM. It also covers local installation and not boot from SAN which should be the typical deployment.

Rodos

Happy Days - Fusion and Shrink Disk

Happy days? Why you ask. Well ditching your Windows laptop and moving to a Macbook Pro with Fusion is happy days!

My kids have had a MacBook for a year and I knew I need to get my own permanent machine when the kids started complaining because I was using it so much. I once took it away to a conference along with my work laptop so I could use the applications I needed.

Yet I could not pull this off without Fusion. The day I got my new piece of Apple bliss I loaded VMware Fusion (upgrading to 3 from my older 2 on the kids machine). It was easy to run through the http://www.vmware.com/go/pc2mac/ conversion process for my PC by just plugging an Ethernet cable between the two machines. It does not need to be a cross over cable as the Mac Ethernet port is smart enough to figure it out. Goes nice and fast through the 1Gb ports.

Once migrated the windows activate process caused no problems. Lots of applications that were no longer needed were removed. I also moved most of the working files into the Mac directory tree by using the neat shared folders feature of Fusion.

Now here is my first tip, my VM disk was taking 65Gb of space, yet once I had completed all the cleanup and removals there was only 18Gb of data in the machine, thats a lot of space to reclaim. Well in VMware Tools there is a nice little feature called Shink, its lets you reclaim all the free space within the VM. Here is the dialog.

It only took a short time to "prepare" the process, Fusion then suspended the machine and did its works. Result 64Gb down to 18Gb.

As I continue to push Fusion hard in the world of Bring Your Own Desktop (BYOD) I will let you know the tips and tricks to ditch that PC you hate and get the best of both world, a MacBook and a sweet Fusion based corporate SOE virtual machine.

Rodos

Gestalt IT Field Days 2009

You will have seen from my recent posts (1, 2, 3) that I have been attending the Gestalt IT Tech Field Days in Silicon Valley, home of all computer nerds.

Unlike your normal conferences and vendor events the Gestalt IT Tech Field days take a different approach to engaging with the vendor community. As I quoted previously :

This unique event brings together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders who have immense influence on the ways that products and companies are perceived and understood by the general public. The world of media has changed, with social media and blogging gaining special importance.

Our Field Day is an opportunity for tech companies and independent writers to get to know each other. Ultimately, we hope to provide a forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback.

However now that I am actually here in person I have been able to witness just how well it has worked. One of the vendors doubled their daily website traffic. The amazing thing was that this was the day before we came, and it was no small company. That just shows you how much engaging right can create value all round. On the flip side, at the same company, we got to challenge their CEO, head of marketing and Chief Architect around product and engagement complaints from the community, some of which were coming in over Twitter whilst we were talking!

I took the chance to get Stephen Foskett, the organizer of the event, the man behind it all (with the great help of many others) to briefly share his thoughts. I don't think he has slept much in the last week so he did well to be coherent late on the last night when I put him on the spot without notice.

Look to see my posts over the next while with some more technical details, the good, bad and the ugly about what we experience over the two days.

Rodos

[Note : I am attending the Field Days as a guest of Gestalt IT. Travel and accommodation is provided as part of the event. See the Field Day FAQ and my comments for details. Also note that Stephen Foskett is affiliated with one of the participant vendors, Nirvanix]

Gestalt IT Field Days 2009 Day 2

Today was the second day of the Gestalt IT Field Days.

Starting at 7:30am it was a short walk across the street from the Hotel to the offices of Ocarina Networks. Ocarina do content aware storage optimization and they did a great job of taking us through their technologies along with some deep dives by their CTO on how compression and de-dupe work for different data types.

Next was Nirvanix who are a Cloud storage platform. You can use them as tier "n" for a backup destination or as a Storage Delivery Network (they have 5 locations across the globe).

W. Curtis Preston then launched Truth In IT, a new online community for users of technologies to freely exchange information whilst receiving formal product research materials and testing results. Curtis also provided the great lunch. Thanks!

From here it was back onto the bus and over to Data Robotics the company behind the amazing Drobo storage devices. Drobo have a great technology called BeyondRAID which lets you protect data across multiple drives where the drives can be different sizes, there is also zero admin. I was in a group of four people who won a Drobo device to take home so expect to hear more from me about this amazing little unit. Of course I had to head to Frys afterwards to pick up a few large drives to whack into it, unlike a lot of Geeks in attendance I don't have a stack of SATA disks laying around the house.

Here is the video summary from the day with each of the vendors explaining their technologies.

Of course over the next few days I will review my notes and write up some technical items on some of the technologies with my thoughts. There were some great things discussed today so there is much to write.

Rodos

[Note : I am attending the Field Days as a guest of Gestalt IT. Travel and accommodation is provided as part of the event. See the Field Day FAQ and my comments for details.]

Gestalt IT Field Days 2009 Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of the Gestalt IT Field Days.

It was a great event which ran smoothly. We started the day at the VMware ECB for breakfast then a tour of the VMware demo lab racks. From the main building we walked over to one of the R&D buildings for some vendor presentations.

First off was MDS Micro, followed by Xsigo and then the VMware team responsible for building their demo labs, including for VMworld. Some good time was spent running through a lab exercise on the Xsigo equipment creating virtual vHBA and vNICs to present dynamically to an ESX host. Bandwidth control was also applied to the some storage traffic to show QoS.

After more nice VMware food it was back onto the bus to the 3Par offices. Here we had a number of speakers from 3Par followed my a number from Symantec. Certainly the primary speaker from 3Par received my vote as best presentation for the day (if I try and spell his name I will get it terribly wrong, will try and update the post tomorrow). The vote is due to the fact that he was passionate, knowledgeable and was the first person all day to pick up a whiteboard pen and start drawing!

Here is a video of the days events where each of the vendors gives a little summary of their message.

Over the next few days I will review my notes and write up some technical items on some of the technologies with my thoughts.

Rodos

[Note : I am attending the Field Days as a guest of Gestalt IT. Travel and accommodation is provided as part of the event. See the Field Day FAQ and my comments for details.]

Gestalt IT Field Days - Cash for comment?

This coming week is the Gestalt IT Field Days. Whats that you ask, well this the official blerb

This unique event brings together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders who have immense influence on the ways that products and companies are perceived and understood by the general public. The world of media has changed, with social media and blogging gaining special importance.

Our Field Day is an opportunity for tech companies and independent writers to get to know each other. Ultimately, we hope to provide a forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback.

Sounds reasonable. However for anyone from Australia it raises a suspicion of "cash for comment". Cash for comment was a scandal that occurred in Australian Radio where the two top "shock jocks" were giving positive comments regarding various big name companies during their broadcasts without making it clear that they were actually being paid to do so. Therefore when I received the invite to attend I was a little cautious. After all one thing I love about my blog is it gives me a place to ramble on about things I am interested it, whatever they may be. I don't have any sponsors although I do use Google Adwords which produces enough revenue for a cup of coffee once or twice a month. You can see that disclosure is something the blogging community is having too deal with given the updated guidelines released by the Federal Trade Commission in the US regarding bloggers and disclosure.

It did not take long for me to realise that the Field Days are a great idea, that they can be above board and that concerns around integrity can be handled appropriately, after all most of the issues are not new. As we continue to move into the new social media era these concerns will need to be worked out, just has they have been in the commercial media space. I think its good to be part of that evolution.

Also, who would pass up an opportunity for a few days geeking it up with some really great and smart people arguing over the ins and outs of products and the industry. Sounds like a lot of fun.

In summary I think this question from the the Gestalt IT FAQ states it well

Isn’t this just a paid vendor love fest?
If you know the folks we are bringing in to attend, you should know better than to throw rocks. These folks believe in tech and won’t hesitate to tell the truth, even if it hurts. They aren’t paid to attend (though their expenses are covered), and most are taking vacation days off from work. If you’re worried about payola, there are much better places to look.

Lets see how it goes. My Cisco Flip may get bit of a workout!

Rod

P.S. If you want in on the action you can participate in the "Do you know ..." contest which seeks to see how well people know the Field Day vendors. You may win an iPod Nano with Video.

Welcome to vBlock Type 2

Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will have noticed some big announcements come out from Cisco, EMC and VMware around their new alliance, the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition.

Interesting to see the new name. If you take the first letters it spells out VCE which could stand for VMware, Cisco and EMC. Of course that is not the kind of message that VMware want to be sending so its a good idea not to have it named after the companies.

It was nice to be named and shamed by Chad Sakac as one of the first vBlock adopters on the planet. This is closely linked to being the FCS (first customer ship) for UCS world wide.

I generally don't like posting anything related to my employer (the legal team scare me) but as I am just repeating what has already been publicly stated I am probably safe.

I note what Chad stated.

I’m also glad finally to be able to start talking openly – you should have seen the edits that occured to the VMworld 2009 VMware/Cisco/EMC supersession (SS5240 – which you can watch here) to tiptoe around this (if you do watch it now knowing what we’ve been working on – it’s interesting).

I remember seeing some of these edits and can attest to just how much care was given to this. Here is the slide from that VMworld session that also refers to our VCE customer reference story.

Also nice to be playing with the top end of the vBlock scale, with the Type 2. The Type 2 is described as the "target is very large enterprise and service providers- with a very large degree of horizontal scaling – for customers with 3000+ VMs). You can see a 3D model of the Type 2 Vblock here." This is what the model looks like but its not that realistic. Its a little undersized, add a few racks of some high end switching gear to this. Plus this is only your starting point before you begin to scale out.

As a consumer of this technology whilst at the same time being a seller of this and other vendor products I think Scott's comments are very valid. These commercial elements are very complicated and positions need to be carefully worked through.

My only comment would be this is early days people. I am sure the coalition will do all they can to accelerate development and deployment. However as someone who is knee deep in this stuff, let me just say that the technologies we are dealing with here are non-trivial, especially at scale (sort of the whole purpose behind the vBlock idea in the first place, to remove as much of this as possible). It would be wrong for you to have the expectation to whip out your credit card and get a new data center or Cloud offering up and running any time soon. The rocket has lunched but its a little way off a moon landing yet.

Exciting times and great to be a part of it.

Rodos

Disclaimer : Remember all opinions and statements are my own and relate it no way to my employer who will deny anything.

VMware vForum Australia 2009

On 27th and 28th of October 2009 VMware held its user conference vForum in Sydney Australia. With over 2100 attendees combined with 40 partners and vendors who were exhibiting it was one of the biggest IT events in Australia for the year.

A number of key representatives from VMware were in attendance including Carl Eschenbach, Executive VP of Worldwide Field Ops, Steve Herrod, Chief Technology Officer and Scott Drummonds, Technical Marketing Engineer in the area of performance.

Here is my video summary or montage of the event.



What were the highlights of the event?

• The PCoIP demonstration performed by David Wakeman in Steve Herrods keynote was by far the best. The demo compared a RDP session to a PCoIP session at both 1ms and 180ms latency, the differences between the two were amazing. You can read a news report that contains a video of it.
• An awards night was held with customers and partners receiving recognition across a number of categories. You can read the list of recipients and see some photos at the CRN article.
  
• It was mentioned that Australia is the most virtualised country in the world (per capita pop) more so than many other OECD country.

As I was on booth duty and presented a session I was not able to attend many sessions. I did some live tweeting from the sessions I did attend, here is a cut down list of my Tweets from the two days.

Welcome to Day 1 of #VMware #vForum in Sydney, Australia
VMware #vforum http://mypict.me/1cCfQ
Carl Eschenback presenting his keynote at #vForum
#vForum keynote is full, people registered and turned up.
Carl 3 steps to virt journy. IT Production, Business Production to Virt IT (virt first). Start with savings and move to bus agility #vForum
Carl on stage at #vForum http://mypict.me/1cDVx
Cloud bingo. Carl just said Cloud, he he #vForum
"Cloud is real and not just hype" Carl E, #vForum keynote
Don't fragment Ur DC with silos of diff hypervisors. Simplyfy. #vForum keynote
Carl tells how MelbIT upgraded to vSphere over lunch on the day of the launch. #vForum keynote
Is cloud evolutionary or revolutionary? Delivering ITaaS within your DC. Carl keynote #vForum
#vForum take the benefits of the cloud and use them in Ur DC. Build Ur private cloud. Then federate with providers. Carl.
Carl lists three local partners building the federated Cloud; Optus, MelbIT & Telstra. #vForum
Carl talking about CapacityIQ. Wonder if he knows it does not work with v4. #vForum keynote
Carl says the Cloud providers may integrate with VMware GO for cloud workload ingestion. #vForum keynote
Carl E, "2010 will be the tipping point for VDI". #vForum
perational cost savings. Carl keynote
#vForum Capital cost of VDI is getting lower but focus on the o
"Provision users not devices. Let the personality move in time and space." #vForum
Why Vmware will will in VDI? Platform, management and best user experience. Carl E #vForum
Carl now talking about SpringSource! Fantastic. IMHO spring is key for VMware long term future. PaaS #vForum keynote
Congratulations to my competitor Dimension Data for their win as regional partner of the year at #vForum. Well done.
Heading home from big day @ #vForum. Over 1100 people rego'd for my session tomrw! Where did they all get the imprsn it would be that good?
Welcome to day two of VMware #vForum ANZ. #vForumAust
Will be doing tweets from Steve @herrod 's keynote this morning at VMware #vForum
Lots of people entering the keynote at #vForum http://mypict.me/1dxJ2
#fail #vForumAust hash tag promoted at start of keynote. Do I keep boycotting and only use #vForum? I think so.
Herrod @ #vForum: CTO of the year now on stage
Herrod @ #vForum: doing desktop first with View. Mentions Win7
Herrod @ #vForum: Provision a person not a device. The term desktop does not make sense anymore.
Herrod @ #vForum: XP and W7 are tier one workloads that vSphere was desined for.
Herrod @ #vForum: intel 5500 does desktop workolads grt as does flash storage.
Herrod @ #vForum: Demo uf desktop use experience coming.
Herrod @ #vForum: Best experience to the type of device Ur on, even if offline. WAN, LAN, local. PCoIP and CVP
Herrod @ #vForum: PCoIP, pure software, bandwidth aware, lossless if required, screen aware. Build to scale through diff use cases.
Herrod @ #vForum: David Wakeman doing the View demo. Go buddy! Good luck.
Herrod @ #vForum: 1ms latency was good. Now doing 180ms. Amazing difference. PCoIP works great at high latency.
Herrod @ #vForum: why did they not do a demo of PCoIP like Wakemans at VMworld? Great
Herrod @ #vForum: Talking about BYOD with Fusion 3 and Workstation 7 or future bare metal hypervisor. Good for securty as well as img std.
Herrod @ #vForum: Pocket cloud from Wyse.
Herrod @ #vForum: Now moving to vSphere. 3m enginering hours.
Herrod @ #vForum: VMotion joke about saving mariages got a laugh just like it did at VMworld!
Herrod @ #vForum: Great flexability through storage and network vMotion. Plus partners working hard on VMotion between DCs
Herrod @ #vForum: "The myth that U can't ran DBs and high end workloads has now been dispelled."
Herrod @ #vForum: DRS being extended to include I/O
Herrod @ #vForum: DPM is server degrag!
Herrod @ #vForum: We forget in IT that nothing matters at the end appart from applications.
Herrod @ #vForum: Lab Manager, the signature avoidance tool.
Herrod @ #vForum: Sharing the size of the VMworld lab setup. What no photos or video?
Herrod @ #vForum: Cloud bingo. Now doing cloud information.
Herrod @ #vForum: Discussing challenges with Federation. Supporting the use case for internal cloud. Also federating Ur own multiple DCs.
Herrod @ #vForum: Follow the moon computing. Chase the cheapest elec around the world.
Herrod @ #vForum: vCloud being discussed. I love the API.
Herrod @ #vForum: Spring logo, I wonder if Spring will be discussed?
Herrod @ #vForum: Yes Spring is being discussed in relation to vApps. Trad vs future app architecture. Removing the tenticles.
Herrod @ #vForum: "Spring is an application framework" leading to PaaS discussion to support it.
Herrod @ #vForum: Love hearing @herrod talk on Spring. 1 of the times we see his true intellect and comp sci bckgrnd rathr than mrkting fig
#vForum MelbIT: Hosting is not Cloud, we know, we are the largest hosting provider in the country. (Here here!)
#vForum MelbIT: Glenn is having a customer talk about their experience.
#vForum MelbIT: vCloud Express. Customers like the quick or lack of sales cycle.
#vForum MelbIT: The developer on stage is manually scaling their enviro. IMHO in future with Spring &/or vCloud API they can automate this.
#vForum MelbIT: Glenn talking about upredictable billing. Mainly around intrnet bandwidth. (but this is not a nsrly prob with private cloud)
#vForum MelbIT: Going to offer cap plans or insurance plans to balance peak and non peak months.
#vForum MelbIT: Seeing lots of security incidents around these public Cloud internet facing VMs.
#vForum MelbIT: Melb Cup site used hybrid Cloud of AWS with MelbIT
#vForum MelbIT: Thinks people will use multiple Cloud providers of different features and specialities. (Agreed)
#vForum MelbIT: The chllnge. Get Ur app provdrs 2 build for horz scale that the cloud delivrs well. (Place for Spring and PaaS driving IaaS)
#vForum : @hartmant from VMware talking about vCloud
#vForum VMware talking about vClould API use cases, also the GUI and vCenter Plugin. Contrast to Express
#vForum VMware saying U may want to upgrade to vSphere top be ready to Federate with vCloud
#vForum VCloud GUI will be baed on Java rather than .net according to VMware
#vForum Everyone enjoying the networking detail slide of vCloud. Everyone leaning forward and squinting.

Here is some linkage to other photos, videos and comments.

• Andre's Photos
• Short video of the main stage.

Thanks VMware for a great event, we all look forward to next year.

Rodos

P.S. Next year it would be great to have a blogging area at the keynotes like they do at VMworld, some wireless networking and power. Its hard to live blog or tweet from a BlackBerry or a laptop on your knees.