VMworld

The process behind judging the Best of VMworld awards

I wanted to comment on some recent controversy concerning the Best of VMworld award winners by explaining in detail the process and how the judges decide winners for each category. I’ve been a judge for two years now so I know how challenging it can sometimes be to pick the winners.

Let me begin by explaining what we are not doing when judging products. We are not installing each product and testing them out to determine a winner, that’s not what the awards are about. So we are not installing product A in a lab and seeing how it performs against product B to try and determine which product is better. In fact in many cases product A may do something completely different from product B and a direct comparison is not possible. In the hardware category for example the winner was the Cisco UCS and one of the finalists was the Xsigo I/O Director, two very different products that aren’t directly comparable to each other. Continued »

VMworld, so much to do, so little time

Either someone needs to invent a time machine or VMware needs to make VMworld a two week show. There is just way too much to do at VMworld and not near enough time to do it.

Sleep is always the last thing on my priority list at VMworld; I was lucky to get about five hours each night. There were just so many people I wanted to talk to and spend more time with and so little time to do it in. Trying to fit everything into your schedule is a near impossible challenge and is comparable to the ESX CPU scheduler trying to handle a host full of busy vSMP virtual machines. This is the biggest complaint I hear from attendees each year, too much to do and not enough time to do it in. But now that the dust has settled, it’s time to digest everything from the show and check out the sessions once they are posted on the VMworld.com website. The sessions are supposed to be posted September 14 for attendees only, however there are 17 online-only sessions that are already posted and are viewable by anyone. Continued »

Judging the Best of VMworld awards

For the last few years at VMworld TechTarget has sponsored the Best of VMworld awards, which showcases the best products in many different categories. Last year was my first time being a judge and I had the privilege once again this year. Judges include TechTarget writers and editors and well known industry people/bloggers such as Scott Lowe, David Davis, Edward Haletky, Rick Vanover and Tom Howarth. It’s not an easy job as you need to carefully evaluate each product that is nominated on several different criteria to determine the winner for each category. This includes doing some prejudging work before the show starts and then visiting vendors at the show to learn more about their products. Continued »

Countdown to VMworld

VMworld is just a few days away and the excitement is definitely in the air as everyone prepares for the show. Trying to cram all the various events, sessions, labs and everything else into one’s schedule is like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle that has way too many extra pieces. I finally managed to prioritize and fit everything together as best as I could so I could make the most of my experience at VMworld. Here’s a summary of some of the things that will be happening each day, along with what I’ll be doing at VMworld.

Sunday - I arrive on Sunday and after doing some sightseeing with some friends and virtualization peers will be heading to the big party at the Thirsty Bear. You can also check in on Sunday to avoid the lines and get your conference badge and VMworld gear.

Monday - Monday is traditionally Partner day where VMware Partners receive various briefings from VMware. New this year is a Developer Day track with many sessions geared towards developers that focus on using the various VMware SDK’s and application programming interfaces (APIs). Registration is required for Developer Day though and the cost is $249. Additionally there are many hands-on labs that you can schedule and attend on Monday, but they do fill up quickly. Lastly the Welcome Reception is held Monday evening in the Solutions Exchange where you can enjoy drinks and hors d’oevres and check out the all the vendor booths.

Be sure and stop by the Community Lounge where many of the bloggers will be hanging out at, there is also an informal vExpert booth that will be staffed by various vExperts (including myself) where you can come by and ask questions. We’ll have access to a virtual lab there as well so we can do product demonstrations and also use it to help answer questions. Additionally be sure and stop by the TechTarget booth (#1232) as well where you might be able to catch various folks from SearchVMware.com and SearchServerVirtualization.com.

After the Welcome Reception ends head on over to the B Restaurant & Bar which is right by the Moscone Center for a Tweetup hosted by John Troyer from VMware. For those of you who don’t use Twitter, a Tweetup is a social gathering of Twitter users to meet face-to-face and talk in sentences longer than 140 characters. Finally to end the night a few of us plan on heading over to a local cigar bar to enjoy some drinks and fine cigars. If you are interesting in joining us there just let me know via Twitter or email.

Tuesday - Tuesday is when things really kick off with Paul Maritz’s keynote session at 8:00 AM. Afterwards there are a whole days full of sessions and labs that you can attend (if you’ve scheduled them ahead of time). Tuesday is also the day that a group of us judges visits vendors to decide the winners for the Best of VMworld awards. I am judging the security category again this year and also helping out David Davis and Scott Lowe with judging the hardware for virtualization category. After we meet with all the nominees we sit together in a room and discuss our findings and decide on winners for each category. Tuesday evening is when most vendors have their receptions and parties. If you haven’t gotten an invite to one check with your vendors, there is a good chance one of them is having a party.

Wednesday - This is the keynote that most of the techies look forward to as Stephen Herrod takes the stage at 8:00 AM and delivers his presentation which is usually more technical then the previous day’s keynote.

The Best of VMworld awards winners will be announced at the Solutions Exchange theater at 12:30 PM. I’ll be doing a signing for my book at the VMworld book store at 1:00pm so if you have one bring it with you and if not (and you want to) you can buy one there.

If you’re a vExpert there is a special lunch area for you at noon as well as a private session at 5:30 PM where you’ll get a chance to meet Stephen Herrod.

Finally at 7:00 PM the official VMworld party begins, unlike last year where buses were required to get to the party, this year its right next to the conference at the Yerba Buena Gardens. Music will be provided by DJ Ravi Drums, Elastic Skye (VMware house band) and Foreigner. Entertainment includes rock climbing, mechanical bull riding, laser tag, video games and bowling. This is always a fun time and you also get to see the effects of alcoholic beverages on VMware geeks which is always entertaining in itself.

Thursday - Things tend to wind down on Thursday and is your best chance to get to sessions and labs as many of them are not full. The Solutions Exchange closes early (2:00pm) as many vendors are packing up to head back home.

I hope to see many of you who I regularly communicate with on Twitter at VMworld. I resisted using Twitter at VMworld last year but now that I’m using it I can honestly say it’s a great mechanism for communicating with fellow virtualization professionals and conference attendees. If you’re a Twitter user make sure and use the #vmworld hashtag in your twits. Additionally you can follow @vmworld for the latest conference information. I’ll be doing daily blog posts here as well and will share my experiences at VMworld with you.

When will VMware P2V VMworld?

VMware seems to be intent on virtualizing anything it can these days, so when is VMware going to get around to virtualizing VMworld? It would be great if VMware could take its annual physical conference and transform it into a virtual conference to reach a much larger audience. After all there are many people that can not attend each year for various reasons and having a virtual conference will allow them to experience the benefits of the conference without the extra travel expense that is required to attend.

Here are a few ideas I had if VMware ever chooses to implement this.

• Virtual sessions - Recording and live-streaming all the sessions as they happen would allow virtual attendees to see the session as it happens and get all the benefits from it. Additionally they could ask questions via an interactive online interface which allows people to ask questions which could be relayed to the speaker. This would have an additional benefit of allowing physical attendees to view sessions that are full from their own laptops or offsite at another location.
• Virtual labs - Virtual labs would pretty much be the same as physical labs with the only difference being the PC that’s used and having a virtual instructor instead of a physical one. This is commonly done today by many training companies and is a very effective means for providing hands-on labs. Virtual attendees could sign up for the virtual labs which could accommodate more people as there are not any seat limitations.
• Virtual Solutions Exchange - VMware currently has their Virtual Pavilion which attempts to mimic the physical Solution Exchange in a virtual way by providing some information about vendors. It would be nice to see this taken a step further though and enhanced so attendees could see product demo videos, interact with the products and ask questions directly to the vendors at the booth.
• Virtual networking - VMware also a virtual lounge as part of its Virtual Pavilion with a chat room, but it’s not very user friendly. Enhancing this with multiple chat rooms where virtual attendees could interact with each other — VMware developers/engineers, vendors and others – would allow for some great networking and information sharing to occur.

Virtual parties might be a bit difficult as attendees would have to supply their own food and drink, but live streaming from the official VMworld party would be a nice touch.

It wouldn’t be all that difficult to implement these ideas as the technology already exists to make all this happen. VMware seems to be slowly heading in that direction, as evidenced by their Virtual Pavilion, but it would be nice to see this fully implemented

Having a simultaneous physical and virtual VMworld conference would allow VMware to greatly expand the number of attendees without having to worry about increasing the size of the facilities at the show. While it’s hard to beat physically attending VMworld, having a virtual alternative would really be a great benefit to everyone who cannot physically attend.

Editor’s Note: If you’d like to see what attending a virtual conference is like, you can check out TechTarget’s most recent virtual conference, Advanced Enterprise Virtualization, with Eric Henderson, Greg Shields, Shannon Snowden and Rick Vanover. Click on the free registration button to view the archived content.

Scheduling VMworld sessions

VMware’s VMworld session schedule builder went live last week so you can now start picking your sessions and planning your schedule for VMworld. This can be quite a challenge as the schedule builder will not allow schedule conflicts so consequently putting together your agenda each day is like putting together a puzzle with way too many pieces.

Three days is not a lot of time; out of the 200+ sessions you will be lucky to squeeze in five each day. Therefore you must carefully choose your sessions so you attend the ones that will be most beneficial to you.

When putting together my schedule I often had to make agonizing choices as I had a great many of conflicts and had to choose only one from the multiple sessions that I wanted to see at a particular time slot. Very few of the sessions repeat which makes this even more challenging and means I will have to wait until the sessions are recorded and published online to see the ones I missed at the event. Continued »

Sample letter for justifying VMworld to your manager

VMworld is less than a month away, and if you’re serious about VMware virtualization you can’t afford to miss it. You might be having trouble convincing your boss to approve your attendance at the show, so here is a sample letter that you can use to justify the expense of attending the conference.

Dear [insert boss's name here],

I would like to attend the upcoming VMworld conference in San Francisco from August 31 to September 3. I know that as economic times are tough we need to be careful with spending, but I believe that this would be money well spent.

The cost of VMworld, including registration and travel expenses, is roughly the same as a one-week IT training class. But unlike a class where you are limited to covering only the material on the agenda, VMworld has a selection of sessions, labs, vendors, product experts and other VMware customers who attend. Here are some of the things I would experience at VMworld:

• Sessions - There are hundreds of mini one-hour training courses available at VMworld so I could learn about a wide variety of topics.  There are dozens of sessions on business continuity and disaster recovery, cloud computing, desktop virtualization, application virtualization, operations and management, and much more. These sessions all contain great technical information, real-world solutions and strategies and customer success stories. There are more sessions than can be seen over the course of the conference, so attendees can view them online after the show is over.
• Labs - There are dozens of self-paced and instructor-led labs on specific topics that will enable me to gain valuable experience in a controlled environment and get answers to any questions that may arise.
• Vendors - Since all the third-party virtualization vendors will be under one roof I can  spend time reviewing all of the products we might be interested in and ask questions on the spot without having to schedule an office visit with the vendor. Being able to browse through the product offerings that are available will also allow me to identify those that could be beneficial to our environment.
• Product Engineers - Many VMware engineers attend the conference, so VMworld is a great opportunity to get close to the people that have designed and developed the software and discuss any particular issues, questions or problems that we may have in our environment.
• Customers - There will be thousands of VMware customers and users at the conference which will benefit me by enabling me to network and learn from other users’ experiences. I may find others that are experiencing some of the same challenges that we are and be able to learn how they dealt with them and overcame them.

VMworld may only last a few days but I can access all of the content long after it is over. With the  knowledge I’ll gain at VMworld I will be able to better support our virtual environment and grow my own knowledge and experience. I thank you in advance for taking the time to read my request and for considering the many benefits that attending VMworld this year will bring to our organization.

Respectfully,

[insert your name here]

VMworld sessions soon available for free

VMware plans to start releasing VMworld 2008 and VMworld Europe 2009 sessions to the general public soon — for free. Currently only attendees, vExperts and anyone who purchased a paid subscription can access them. For now VMware plans to only release approximately 10 sessions for free, they may later decide to release more every month until VMworld 2009, at which point all sessions may be made available for free. If you can’t wait until then you can always buy a subscription to them for $699 that gets you access to all the sessions and some cool swag.

VMware asked me for input as to which sessions should be in the first batch. Trying to pick only 10 or so sessions was almost impossible. I ended up selecting a lot more than ten, because all of the ones I chose are great and should be released right away. In my opinion this is some of the best training you can get; there is so much great information in these sessions and there is much you can learn from the wisdom and experiences of others.

Most of the sessions come in three formats, a .pdf file of the presentation, an .mp3 file of the audio and an .flv flash video file. I prefer to download all the files locally to my computer so I can view them anytime and without an active Internet connection. The .pdf and .mp3 files are easy to download, just right-click the links and save them. To download the .flv files there are a few methods you can use, such as using a program that can download flash videos on a page such as Orbit, or if you know the URL for the videos (its not hard to figure out) you can disable your browser Flash plug-in, put the URL in and save the file to your PC. Once you have downloaded them you can play them locally using a Flash player like Swiff Player.

So here are my picks for some of the best sessions.  Keep checking the VMworld website for the official announcement of the release.

VMworld 2008 sessions:

AD2764 Managing VMware with PowerShell
BC2215 Top Tips for VMware Consolidated Backup
BC3141 Understanding Options for Virtualized Disaster Recovery
EA2244 Virtualizing SQL Server Using VMware Infrastructure
EA2263 Deploying Exchange 2007 on VMware Infrastructure 3
EA2347 Citrix Presentation Server Virtualization in VI3 - Best Practices
EA2538 Using IBM WebSphere Family Products with VMware
EA2672 VMware is the Best Platform for Java Workloads
PO1323 Best Practices for Virtualizing Active Directory
PO1520 Managing VMware ESXi in the Datacenter
PO2061 VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 Database Best Practices
PO1944 Architecting and Managing your Storage Effectively with Virtual Infrastructure
PO2218 Everyday Usage of the RCLI
PO2841 Virtualization - The Big Picture
TA1401 Understanding Host and Guest Memory Usage and Other Memory Management Concepts
TA1405 VMotion Technical Deep Dive
TA1440 ESXtop for Advanced Users
TA2213 VMware Infrastructure 3 Storage: iSCSI Implementation and Best Practices
TA2375 Intepreting Performance Statistics in VI3
TA2550 ESX Server Best Practices for Performance
TA2554 VI Networking: Advanced Configurations and Troubleshooting
TA2668 VMware ESX Architectural Directions
TA2920 Overview of VMware Product Directions
TA3807 VirtualCenter Directions
VD3261 VDI versus Terminal Services
VI2389 Licensing for a Virtual World
VI2940 VMware ESXi: The Easiest Way to Get Started
VI2715 Making the Case: Selling Virtualization When ROI isn’t Enough
LAB05 VMware Infrastructure - Security Hardening and Best Practices (VMware VirtualCenter/ESX/ESXi)
LAB09 Scripting VMware Infrastructure: Automating, Integrating, and Extending VI

VMworld Europe 2009 sessions:

AP07 Virtualized Oracle Database Server Performance and Best Practices
DC07 What’s New in vCenter Server
DC14 Overview of 2009 VMware datacenter products
DC15 Hypervisor Competitive Differences: Beyond the Data Sheet
DC26 vStorage - Storage integration for the VDC-OS
TA12 Introducing VMware Converter 4.0: What’s New and Different
TA15 Protecting your vCenter Server with Server Heartbeat
TA17 End-to-End Disaster Recovery Approach with Automated SRM Failback
TA20 Cisco Nexus 1000V Technical Preview
LAB02 Securing the Virtual DataCenter with VMware vShield Zones
LAB12 vNetwork Distributed Switch Tech Preview : Cisco Nexus 1000v

Attenting VMworld Europe 2009… virtually

While I could not attend physically, I have been able to attend this year’s VMworld Europe remotely. This has got to be one of the most connected conferences I have had the privilege to virtually attend.  Blogs, tweets, chats, videos and emails have been flying around and because of it all I have had a chance to keep up with all the announcements, sessions, and shenanigans. I even virtually “ran around” looking for the same information I would look for there, specifically on VMware vShield Zones. The guys on Twitter were a great help in getting me information and pointers to other information.

Twitter has been the best source of instantaneous information. I may have trouble walking and chewing gum but there are tweets galore from attendees of all types in a constant flow. Everyone at VMworld must have a PDA phone!

To get in on the virtual action, check out these resources:

• VMware VMTN Blog with its tweetgrid

Videos have also been a great source of information and are fun to check out:

• Gabe’s Virtual World for some fun videos as he takes on some P.I. work.
• Eric Sloof’s interviews
• You can always search on YouTube for “VMworld Europe”

The blogs have been fantastic, from the moment-by-moment blog posts written during keynotes, as well as the end-of-day blogs by presenters and attendees. Some to check out are:

• Virtualization.com
• VMware Virtualization Evangelist
• PlanetVM

If you want to turn on the floodgates, read the PlanetV12N which pulls from many virtualization blogs. (RSS - http://vmware.simplefeed.net/subscription).

Jason Boche, a fellow VMware vExpert 2009 and VMware Communities Round Table Panelist also called in from the VMworld VMware party to give us a brief scoop. Thank you Jason!

Being remote from VMworld I felt disconnected at times as I am waking up six hours after the show day has started, but it was very easy to keep up. I was able to sit back and really think about the announcements and presentations. So now you may wonder, should I forgo attending VMworld 2009 in San Francisco? Not at all. The press, and deluge of information is heady, but at the same time it is hectic at best.

Even so, after having time to think about the announcements, I’ve concluded that there was quite a bit of VI4 clarification, but there was also some new announcements. First, the clarifications and updates:

• a new name (vSphere) for the VMware Virtual Infrastructure, and
• more specs for what vSphere 4 can handle in way of virtual machine hardware (8 vCPUs and 256 GBs of memory), and
• information on new cluster limits (manage 64 hosts and 4,096 cores), and
• information on amount of memory a single ESX host can contain and use (512 GBs), and
• another new name (VMware vShield Zones) for the BlueLane Product, and
• more vendors involved in VMware VMsafe, and
• plus many others

The new Items:

• The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative from Quest
• Fluid Operations eCloudManager Provides Open Source VMFS Driver
• Opscheck from Tripwire
• plus many others

The really cool item, I asked if I could drive over (since the engineers are local) and get them to install this on my own Nokia N810….

• Hypervisor for the Mobile phone

I know I probably missed some announcements and improvements in all this, but I was only there virtually, and VMworld offers just as much if not more information than any other technical show. Perhaps the Cloud is already here!