We put together a short video on what you can expect.  Enjoy!

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.

I can’t speak for the other judges but what I do when judging is the following. We get the list of nominees about two weeks before VMworld begins. First we pre-judge to try and make the number of nominees that we have to visit at the show more manageable. There are really no restrictions on who can enter and often times products get nominated that have very little to do with virtualization. For example if you have a product that is a non-virtualization product but you just happen to package it as a virtual appliance and therefore have a very weak tie to virtualization there is a good chance you will not make it past the pre-judging.

When pre-judging often times I have not heard of some of the products in a category so I have to take extra time to research the product and see if it is worthy of consideration. My method for doing this usually starts at the vendor’s website were I’ll read through product datasheets, look at any online demos and sometimes look through the product documentation. Once I’ve determined what the product does I’ll make the call as to if it meets enough of the criteria to make it past the pre-judging and if it has a chance against the other products in the category.

Speaking of criteria, here is the official criteria used to judge products:

• Innovation – Does the product introduce new capabilities or provide significant improvements to standard capabilities? Does it break new ground or redefine the product category?
• Performance – Does the product perform to the degree that it could improve overall data center operation?
• Ease of integration into environment – How easily does the product integrate with other products? Can the product operate effectively in heterogeneous environments? Have vendors certified the product?
• Ease of use and manageability – Is the product easy to install? Are the product’s functions clear and easy to learn and run? Will the product scale smoothly to accommodate growth in an environment?
• Functionality – Does the product deliver as promised? Does the product provide greater or more useful functionality than others in its category? Are there serious functional omissions?
• Value – Does the product represent a cost-effective solution? Can the ROI be easily justified?
• Fills a market gap – Highlight the needs it fills and the problems it solves.

The big one in my book is innovation followed by filling a market gap. Innovative products always have a good shot at winning as do those products that solve a problem that no other product does. Performance can be a bit misleading as we are not performance testing the products we are judging and we are not doing head-to-head performance comparisons. Performance is not about raw performance data like IOPS but is instead meant in more general terms. My interpretation of it is something like this: this process normally takes me two hours to complete and product A lets me complete it in 15 minutes.

After we pre-judge and remove the products that we do not feel have a chance at winning we wait until the show to visit vendor booths to find out more about the products that made it past the preliminaries. We only have one day at VMworld to do this (about five hours total) and I spend anywhere from 30 – 60 minutes with the vendors that I feel have the best chance of winning in their category. (I had a smaller category this year, so in other categories judges may have spent less time at a booth.) While I’m with the vendor I’ll see product demos, ask questions and find out as much about their product as I can to see if it’s a candidate for winning.

I’m only interested in technical information and am not interesting in a marketing speech so the vendors usually pair us up with their best technical people to talk to. Once I’ve found out enough information I move on to the next vendor. After we’ve finished we talk it over with other judges for that category to determine the winner and finalists. Next we move on to a deliberation meeting with all judges to discuss our picks and hear any feedback from other judges. Sometimes a judge in another category may have some good input that would help us decide on a winner.

The bottom line is that judging is just that, it’s a judgment call based on the information that the judges learn about the product and not the result of head-to-head lab comparisons of products. It’s not always easy to name winners but we do the best we can with the information we have. Sometimes vendors make it easy for us by making great products that are clear winners, but often times there are a lot of great products in a category and the decisions are difficult.

This year we had one gracious finalist who did not win the gold acknowledge that the gold winner for that category deserved to win it. That showed a lot of class in my book and helped affirm that we chose the correct winner.

We can only choose one winner; that’s the nature of the beast. We know a vendor’s product is its baby and much like a proud father who wants his child to excel, vendors want their product recognized as the best. Our challenge as judges is to see each product in its best light and then choose a winner based on the criteria of the awards. So before you criticize the winners, the judges, or the process, please take a minute or two to understand the inherent challenge in judging and realize that the judges and editors paired with the judges do take the process very seriously.

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.

Overall I thought it was another good show. There were about 12,500 attendees which is down from last year’s attendance of around 14,000. But this can expected with the economy the way it is with many IT shops tightening their belts. According to John Troyer from VMware the attendance numbers prior to the show were even lower as they had many last minute walkups who registered onsite at the show.

Even with the reduced attendance the show seemed just as busy; I actually liked the Moscone Center over Las Vegas last year. The layout at the Moscone is much simpler and things were very easy to find. Last year it took me days to get my bearings inside the Venetian hotel. The WiFi access at VMworld was much better at the Moscone. I had access to the press WiFi which worked great and was usable even at the Marriott several blocks away from the Moscone.

I heard a lot of gripes about both the breakfasts and lunches this year. Last year at the Venetian they served fabulous hot buffet lunches, this year it was cold box lunches. Fortunately I discovered another perk of having press credentials was they served a decent hot buffet lunch in the press/analyst room each day.

I know many were disappointed with the keynotes this year as there were no big announcements like last year – I jokingly tweeted that Foreigner was the best keynote this year. Most of the keynotes were about future products and services as Paul Martiz and Stephen Herrod outlined how recent acquisitions and partnerships would factor into VMware’s future. 

The new client hypervisor (CVP) is something many people are anxious to see. Cloud talk seemed to dominate the show this year as this is the direction VMware seems to be headed in. In fact there was a whole separate keynote dedicated to VMware’s cloud computing strategy. The problem is that many people still don’t have a firm grasp of cloud computing and how it will affect them, so much of this talk just causes further confusion.

Glasshouse did a nice series of video interviews this year asking people about cloud computing and it was interesting to hear the responses. Keynotes aside, there were still plenty to see and do at the show. A side benefit of VMware’s dominance in virtualization is that they have a very rich ecosystem of third-party vendors with many great products and services to look at. I enjoyed just walking around the Solutions Exchange and taking everything in, seeing new products and finding out new things about old products.

Overall I give VMware high marks for this years show; putting on an event of that size is not an easy task. VMworld will be at the Moscone again next year and I hope VMware (and other vendors) listens to feedback from attendees this year to try and to make next year’s event even better. I know it’s hard to please everyone all the time but there are definitely some things VMware can improve on (hint: food, session scheduling, labs). So the countdown begins until next year’s VMworld, and despite the craziness and hustle and bustle, I can’t wait to go back.

This year I was assigned the security category with another judge who unfortunately ended up not being able to go to VMworld. I also helped out Scott and David with prejudging in the hardware category. Security is something I’ve always been very interested in so I was excited to judge this category again. Surprisingly the number of entrees for the security category was down from last year and there were a number of products that I felt should have been in it and were not. However it’s up to the vendors to nominate their products by filling out an application form for each product. The winner in the security category from last year, Reflex Systems, moved to the cloud category this year as they felt their product had evolved to be more then just a security product.

This year after prejudging in the security category there were three products that we focused on as we thought they were the best candidates to win the category. Those three products were Altor Networks VF Virtual Firewall, Catbird’s vCompliance and HyTrust Appliance. I was familiar with Altor Network and Catbird as I had spend some time with them last year but HyTrust was new to me. I had heard of its appliance and knew it had something to do with virtualization security but never had a chance to look at in-depth until VMworld.

Visiting vendors at the show while judging is always time consuming and by the time we got to HyTrust we were short on time as we were late for our group deliberation meeting to discuss the winners for each category. Consequently we only had about 15 minutes to spend talking with Eric Chiu from HyTrust. But those 15 minutes were all it took to discover they had a great, unique product that solved a big problem in virtual environments by providing a single authentication and authorization mechanism for all the many methods that can be used to access host and vCenter Servers. I was surprised by HyTrust’s implementation method as I figured it would rely on a appliance located on each ESX host, but instead HyTrust only uses an appliance on a single host for the whole environment. Overall they had a great product that really stood out and solved a big security problem in virtual environments.

Once we were done interviewing the nominees it was time for the judges to meet as a group for a deliberation meeting to discuss each category and select winners and finalists. The judges for each category go over the products in their category and explain what they thought about each product in the category and which ones they thought were the best. The group gives their input also and a winner and finalists or two are chosen for each category. This process is not always easy and often times it’s a tough call picking the winners. There are sometimes spirited debates on the close ones as to why one should be chosen over the other.

After the winner for all the categories are selected it’s time to choose a single winner from all the category winners for the Best of Show. This is a group decision where all the judges can give their input and vote, by a mostly unanimous vote this year the HyTrust appliance was deemed the winner for Best of Show.

Each year many great products are nominated and it’s always a challenge to select the winners. Despite being challenging and time-consuming it is also rewarding as you get to meet many vendors and find out detailed information on their great products and solutions. You can check out the all the winners this year here and also see live video interviews here.

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.

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.

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.

This year, VMware no longer has an access list that requirs users to check in at the door to each session, which resulted in long lines and wait times to get into the sessions last year. You should still register for sessions using the session builder as this information is critical to properly sizing the rooms or increasing the size of them if too many people register for a session. The schedule builder is a nice way to plan out each conference day and you can add your own personal meetings to it as well.

In addition to scheduling sessions you can also schedule the instructor led labs, however you are limited to two because seating is limited. The labs tend to fill up quickly but there is a waiting list that you can sign-up for in case people don’t show up for their reserved time slot. There are also self-paced labs that you can attend just by showing up, but you may have to wait in line for others to finish.

With so many great sessions to choose from I thought I would share some of the ones that I was most interested in and reasons why I think you should attend them.

• BC2961 VMware Fault Tolerance Architecture and Performance - Fault Tolerance is a new vSphere feature and if you plan on using it you should make sure you know how to implement it properly.
• TA1523 The Path to vSphere Unleashed – If you plan on upgrading from VI3 to VI4 this session will help you plan your upgrade to make sure you do it correctly.
• TA1541 Cool little things marketing did not tell you about vSphere 4.0 – vSphere has lots of new major features but there are many smaller features that were not publicized that will be of great benefit to VMware administrators.
• TA2231 Securing Virtual Environments - Before and After VMsafe – Not much has been publicized on the VMsafe APIs so this session should help shed some light on how VMsafe works and how vendors are using it.
• TA2384 Deploying Cisco Nexus 1000V in a VMware vSphere Environment – The Cisco Nexus 1000V is not your standard vSwitch and if you are going to use it you should know the differences and how to properly configure it.
• TA2400 Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren’t Telling You – Even if you’re a VMware customer its good to know the competitors. This session by Chris Wolf from the Burton Group provides an independent viewpoint on the differences between the available hypervisors.
• TA2467 Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for the Future of VMware – The very knowledgeable Chad Sakac from EMC covers best practices for designing storage for use with vSphere including iSCSI, FC, NFS and FCoE.
• TA2544 A Comprehensive Look at the Security and Compliance of vSphere 4 – This session covers new security features in vSphere as well as the new vShield Zone product and how to secure your environment to meet compliance requirements.
• TA2627 Understanding “Host” and “Guest” Memory Usage and Other Memory Management Concepts - Memory in VMware can be confusing and is often not understood properly. This session by Kit Colbert well help you understand all the unique memory concepts that virtualization uses.
• TA3438 Top 10 Performance Features of VMware vSphere 4 - This session by VMware’s Chief Performance Architect covers the many performance improvements that were made in vSphere.
• TA3461 Tech Preview: IO DRS – Providing Performance Isolation to VMs in Shared Storage Environments - This session will preview a new upcoming feature that will enable DRS to also take into account storage I/O when balancing VMs across hosts and storage devices.
• TA4242 Securing the Virtual Data Center in enterprises and clouds – The fact that Christofer Hoff is presenting should be enough to get you to attend this session as he is always entertaining.
• TA4341 Virtual Network Performance – This session provides a deep dive into understanding network performance in virtual environments.
• VM4380 Tech Preview: vCenter Server – This session will provide a preview of some of the future technologies that are being developed for vCenter Server.

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]

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

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!