Conference Thoughts and Opinion

Event in General
- For me it was fine with the concentration on management / best practice and the move towards cloud technologies - but if you weren't interested in these or client then you'd perhaps be a little disappointed
- The discussion has moved on from why to virtualize to a more mature discussion about how to virtualize well, how to manage the environment and benefits that are beyond pure consolidation
- Well organised, good facilities, good food and plenty of it (its VERY difficult to avoid the breakfast pastries) all the staff were very helpful and friendly, easy registration etc. etc.
- I missed a couple of sessions as they were full before I arrived - but I did leave pretty much every session until 5 mins or so before the start (to make best use of networking facilities and time to catch up on email), so perhaps I should set more time aside to ensure a seat - where I missed the session I wanted to go to, there was always my 2nd or 2rd choice to fall back on

Most Interesting Products / Sessions
- vCloud Director - good to see someone taking the initiative in developing an approach that could work across your internal cloud and external cloud providers.  Will VMware succeed in making this an industry standard?  Time will tell, but when companies try to sell their approach as a new standard, it usually takes a long time to get other companies on board.  VMware do have a massive market lead, so perhaps the can make it happen.
- vCloud Request Manager - nice portal and will work well for internal cloud adoption - see above about industry adoption
- VMware Project Horizon - great concept - re-presenting content to match the client device.
- VEEAM - looks very interesting for VMware management - an award winner and lots of customer interest on their stand.
- EMC VFLEX - picked up on this towards the end of the conference.  Looks like storage federation between datacentres across MAN distances has become a reality.  Excellent potential for much faster DR recovery times and simpler, automated processes.  Early days of course, and some question marks over scalability.  One to watch and I'm sure the other storage vendors will catch up and compete very soon.
- CIRBA - spoke to the guy who invented this stuff and its pretty difficult to keep up with the potential of this software.  Its more than just monitoring, capacity management, planning and what-if scenarios, it could be difficult to know where to start.
- Panologic - "zero client" IP client - tiny, easily replaced by a spare in the cupboard (no need for on site engineers at remote sites), send a new spare out in the post.  Packaging with VMware View to provide the VDI client looks good.  Needs LAN connectivity to the VM though.
- Wyse - similar to Panologic.  Getting expensive to manage thick clients out of the office / branch and into the data centre has to be a good way to go, if the business case can stack up.
- VMware - providing direct access to a number of senior technical team leads to help shape their thinking for new products and functionality upgrades.

Venue
- A long way out of the city centre, but thanks to EMC sponsorship of Metro tickets for the week, that wasn't really a problem - it was a 30 minute walk and Metro ride from our city centre hotel
- Good refreshments - plenty of breakfast pastries
- Well organised and signposted
- Registration was quick and effective
- Other than that, it was very efficient and therefore rather soulless, but that's to be expected


Solutions Exchange
- Large enough to remain interesting to drop into over the 3 days
- All the relevant vendors seemed to be there
- How did I manage NOT to win so many iPad prize draws???
- Most of the vendors seem to have got it now - you have to be able to get your message across in 10 to 15 minutes as most delegates are trying to squeeze in as much as possible between sessions, over lunch etc.
- Shame that some competitors (e.g. Microsoft) are given a compromised stand - VMware should be confident in its own products in the market place
- What happened to the fun and games during the Tuesday evening reception?  I'm guessing its the impact of the economy - it makes sense to cut out the fripperies before anything else
Copenhagen
- I enjoyed the city and its general vibe / atmosphere - its very "central European"
- Being so cycle centric is so refreshing compared to the UK.  Imagine, as you turn left in London, stopping to let all the cyclists go straight on before you complete your left turn - its a different attitude in Copenhagen
- Very expensive.  Food and drinks are almost a luxury
- There's enough to do on a budget to fill 2 or 3 days, but probably not much longer unless you are very keen on visiting every museum and gallery available
- It's not far to Sweden if you fancy a day trip
- Friendly, polite and helpful people - I should feel guilty about speaking English all the time, but the locals are better at it than most of us native English speakers

Hotel
- Excellent.  The room was small but very nicely furnished, modern and warm.
- Great value for money in such an expensive city
- Very well located for easy walking or cycling to all the main attractions and facilities in the city
- Breakfast expensive, so we relied on the pastries at the conference centre

Party
- Good venue - all in one big room meant there was a good vibe and plenty to see and do, including the video games etc.
- Clearly on a lower budget than previous years but the props were still fun and added to the atmosphere - fitting well with both of the bands
- Limited range of drinks available, but they were all included, so it would be churlish to complain!
- Although Bjorn Again were good fun, I would happily have listened to (and sung along with) Mad Hen for the whole of the evening
- Well done VMware for making the social event so informal and fun once again

Could Do Better Department
- VMware defending themselves against other hypervisors was less than graciously delivered
- Microsoft stand where they were banned from discussing Hyper-V unless visitors asked about it - not sure why VMware are so worried about the product - they can stand up to the comparison on merit (and Microsoft's pricing claims) without such blunt instruments
- Find a location where the beer is affordable!

VM Density Thurs 13:30

Eric Horshman, Product Marketing Director

VMs per core / proc / host / cluster / cloud

- Expecting 24 core servers by end 2011, 64 cores by 2014
- By 2013 16GB DIMMs will cost the same as 2GB today
- 10GB networking will be common
- Conclusion is that servers will not be limiting VM density - the virtualization platform and management tools will be the defining factor
- Density dips as larger business critical workloads are deployed, but then it climbs again as larger hosts are deployed and features such as DRS are deployed.
- Use reservations mapped to real memory use by the guest VM
- Making comparisons between virtualization technologies (comment - of course, VMware is best, as you would expect from a VMware presentation!)
- Same comparison being made as the 09:00 session today - see notes below.

Virtualization Platform Comparisons Thur 09:00

Disclaimer from me - this is a VMware presentation

VMware have a lab to examine competitve products to ensure their products stay ahead of the competition

Recent Microsoft TechEd Attendees voted vSphere as best in show product

Hypervisor Comparison
- VMware confirming that ESXi is the strategic platform - its currently 70Mb, however still need 1GB partition to allow for the roll-back version and space for dump files
- Hyper-V and Windows 2008 Server Core is 3.6GB
- VMware supports NIC teaming, Hyper-V is not unsupported by the vendors
- VMware built for clustering, Hyper-V is based on Windows clustering which is complex to set up
- System Center manages vCenter but requires over 10 different tools with various different look and feel, so quite complex compared to vCenter
- VMware Update Manager - select the update, select the hosts, set off automated process to VMotion the guests, patch hosts, VMotion the guests. Hyper-V R2 upgrade is 9 manual steps per host

Storage
- VMware supports multiple storage technologies and mix and match in the same cluster
- RHEV only allows one type of storage per cluster
- Hyper-V doesn't support NAS
- vSphere VMs encapsulated as files that are portable
- Hyper-V and RHEV use complex files that are more difficult to understand and less portable
- VMFS volumes grow from GUI
- Hyper-V allows additional volumes to be added but not grown, RHEL VMs need a reboot
- Storage vMotion unique to VMware
- Storage I/O QoS unique to VMware
- Thin provisioning - vSphere fully supports, Hyper-V its notadvised, Xenserver does not support this on FC/iSCSI
- When LUN fills, vSphere pauses the guest alerts and can restart when LUN has been grown. Hyper-V crashes the guest OS
- Snapshots supported in vSphere, not recommended in Hyper-V without downtime, RHEV also needs downtime

Resource Management
- Fault tolerance avaiable in vSphere (comment - but limited to small VMs).  Not available in Hyper-V. RHEV work with Marthon Everrun to provide something similar, and only with Microsoft OS
- Affinity / anti-affinity possible in vSphere,
- Host affinity only available from vSphere (great for licencing restrictions - e.g. certain database vendors)
- Role based granular access controls to guest VM level in vSphere, XenServer has coarse pre-determined role
- Resource pools - divides up the resources in a cluster and you can assign ownership and roles - vSphere can spread resource pools across the cluster but XenServer can only divide server by server
- Memory overcommitment supported and vSphere and Xen, but not on Hyper-V.  In XenServer the ballooning just prevents the VM from using the memory allocated to it, it doesn't actually allow the VM to use the unused memory allocated to other VMs. VMware forces the quietest guest to go to swap files to free up RAM for the busy guest

Benchmarks and Case Studies
-  Taneja Density report using DVD Store
- Hyper-V handled 11 guests, RHEL KVM max at 14, XenServer and vSphere handled 32 guests
- Virtual Reality Check analysing terminal services on Intel Nehalem using transparent page sharing on vSphere 4.1 - no performance hi. They found no performance difference for XenApp on XenServer vs vSphere
- Graydon Head & Ritchey would have needed twice as many servers to run Hyper-V compared to vSphere

The conclusion is that vSphere is best - but that would be expected from this presentation really.

Comment - no mention of the limitation of VMware toolsets to the virtual platform, didn't give Microsoft credit for managing physical and virtual from the same management tools

Storage Futures Weds 16:30

Today's problems:
- how do we add more capacity without down time?
- how do we manage fault isolation?
- planning and sizing over time is difficult, paticularly with VMs which are dynamic in nature
- how is capacity optimised?
- is the storage SLA matching the application requirements?

Scale Out
- add more arrays to virtualized storage means trivial hardware refresh, scales with servers, difficult to produce differentiated services when all the VM hosts can see all the same datastores
- example is web apps being on one cluster that has no cross site storage replication and those apps that need hot / warm are in a different cluster that has cross site storage replication


VMware Vision
- VM profile of storage specification allows VMs to have different policies within the same cluster
- Define back up and snapshot policy
- The policy is shared with the storage infrastructure so the storage knows what to do with the VM


Desktop Vision
- VDI cheaper storage than desktop
- storage simpler to manage than distributed in the desktop
- stateless desktops are those that don't store anything unique and/or important in the VMDK
- stateful is where the VMDK contains unique or important data
- stateful are expensive as it hampers de-duplication (possible with NetApp today - i.e. up to 90% dedupe.  Of course, other de-dupe vendors are available).  VMware just need to work with this technology, no particular actions
- De-dupe is also possible via image optimization with each VDI referring back to a base image and then only having its differences stored as unique files.  Linked-clones delivers this, but some apps can't cope
- Performance can be a bottleneck for VDI (eg boot storms, virus checkers)
- Ideal might be to have the base VMDK images on local storage on the servers and hold the diff files on the shared storage

Data Centre Storage
- what about VMs moving across clouds - ie between datacentres?
- multi site datastore federation - all storage is available in both data centres and VMs can see the data in either location - an extention on top of synchronisation.  Likely to be costly to acquire and manage?
- DR snapshots into the cloud?  Will include the VM status in the VMDK
- User data in the cloud to allow personalization across devices is effectively a back up scenario
-

Sunday in Copenhagen

EasyJet provided the transport into the main Copenhagen airport via the ubiquitous Boeing 737 from Manchester in an efficient, cost effective manner. Enough and nothing more.
First shock - I was expecting stratospheric beer prices,but 500ml of bottled water at approx £2.20?  Welcome to Copenhagen.

The weather outside the airport was bright and sunny, but EMC were ensuring that it was cloudy inside:

More evidence that the virtual World has arrived in Denmark:

Copenhagen airport is definitely in the efficient class of airports so soon enough I was onto the driverless Metro which has parallels with London's DLR.  Its quick, its effective, very clean and takes you to the centre of the city in 15 mins.  Being from the North of England, it pains me to say this, but suddenly London seems to be good value! £4 compares to an equivalent journey of £2.30 - on the DLR.  Its very clean though, and its quite a different experience once underground with the tunnels being much more modern and illuminated:

The hotel is on the North East side of the city centre and overlooks the "lakes" - which look like very wide canals. James meets me out of the Metro at Norreport and we head off to the Kong Arthur. I get a room up in the roof space - its compact but as all the essentials including tasteful contemporary decor.  If I stand on a chair I have an excellent view over the lakes through the Velux!

We head out to the Norrebro area on the other side of the lake and settle on "Pussy Galore's Flying Circus" to eat on the square at the top end of Sankt Hans Torv.  Clearly someone got confused between or decided to combine Monty Python and James Bond.  Either way, we find something to suit us both on the menu, James opting for the Pollock risotto, myself for the heavily nut based veggie burger.  Both turn out to be delicious, although the burger could've benefitted from being served a little hotter. We sip at our Tuborg Gold lager which is wheaty and very tasty, but at near enough £8 a pint almost seems like an extravagance!  The service was attentive but not overpowering with the venue being quiet but pleasant enough.
Hoping to hit the micro brewery of Norrebro Bryhus on the nearby Ryesgarde we were disappointed to find it closed.  A nearby corner bar served a huge 750ml Tuborg Classic which is a pretty dark larger and this went down well as we started to plan our Monday - mixing some business with some sight seeing.

Next we made for Babarellah on Norre Farimagsgade, not far from the hotel which is described by the Lonley Planet guide as "almost unbearably cool" - clearly designed for us!  Except that it too is closed - I'm reminded of a conversaton James overheard in the reception between the hotel staff and an American tourist "people of Denmark need to rest sometimes".  So we end up in a very small bar in a small square where there is an artwork of a giant cigarette end which is bent up at one end as though it has been stubbed out - it must be a portent or something - as Denmark is somewhat semi-detatched in EU terms - the bar we're in is full of folk smoking. Coming from the UK it's a bit of a culture shock / throwback finding yourself in a tobacco smoke filled atmospherere.  In the Lonely Planet's "When in Rome..." section is mentions "smoke like a kipper" - I think the author must've been in this bar when they wrote those words.  There was a jazz group playing standards and improvs - piano, double bass, 2x Sax and a trombone

Smokin'

James enjoyed the music whilst I found myself admiring the musicianship more than the actual music.  Great to see the players working so well together and meeting the expectations of their audience.  Lovely friendly atmosphere here with James being invited to offer gifts to the locals, but we're not sure if we offended or if certain locals were overstepping the mark!

Jazz Bar James

When in Rome... So When in Denmark, Drink Danish Beer

Earlier in the day we went up to the Bella Center and registered for the VMWORLD conference - its a fair way out of the city centre but the Metro's very effective, much like the registration process which is semi-self service.  We typed our names into a Wyse thin client terminal and a pass is printed and checked against photo id -  all sorted in a couple of minutes.  Our VMWORLD 2010 back packs contain a t-shirt, lanyard, vendor promo leaflets and a 4 day pass for all zones on the public transport - this is very useful and if you haven't set out yet its worth noting that EMC are sponsoring free travel on the local network for all attendees from 10-14 October, so just buy enough travel to get you to the Bella Center and the rest is covered for you through to Thurs.

So off to sleep now, so far so good!

Oh, and what happened to the Halifax?  No comment!

Planning and Printing

Route from airport to hotel on the Metro sorted and EasyJet boarding cards printed, DKK Krone in the wallet so all ready to go on Sunday.

Used the online scheduler to sort out my session plan, but still have 8 sessions with duplicate options - will have to see how it goes as the sessions are first come, first served.

Focussing on management tools, server density, learning how to effectively eliminate and further physical deployments and the private cloud / vCloud Director approaches.

Full week of networking opportunities with the VMware UK & Ireland visit to the Carsberg visitor centre on Tuesday evening and the main gathering on Weds featuring Bjorn Again - must remember to pack my white flairs (not!).