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.