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!

Self Service and Workflow Automation for the Private Cloud Weds 13:30

John MacLean, Director, Product Management, VMware

Strategy is virtualization, automation and self-service
Self service drives efficient consumer data collection, is the basis for freedom of choice
Workflow is automation of the regular tasks

vCoud Request Manager interfaces with the vCloud Director vCloud API so that you can layer this over private clouds and compatible ISP cloud services
VMware Service Manager (ex EMC) - service desk, config & change, asst management, service request fulfilment to business users

Service Request Fulfilment:
- Hierarchical view of IT service catalogue - can include chargeback for each service
- When a request is created, data can be collected as per the design required - so can collect data from requestor based on tabs, collapsible sections, dates, drop downs etc.  Includes option to lease the selected resources
- Workflow generated through graphical interface and diagramming.  Many of the workflow tasks are hidden from the user (e.g. update inventory, email notifications).  Audit trailed, role based permissions.
- SLA responses are configurable - e.g. standard vApp driven VM can be minutes but custom can be weeks
- Tasks can call out or use connectors (e.g. VMware config mgr, EMC storage, 3rd party technology), write your own connectors.
- Connectors support discovery, events and push actions
- Connectors include vCloud Director

vCloud Request Manager (launched at VMWORLD Europe 2010)
- Adds workflow approval process to requests
  - Consumer (e.g. developer / trainer) selects an app from service catalogue
  - Feedsback to consumer when the app is up and running, post approval process
- Tracks software licence consumption
  - Need to associate licences with a vApp
  - Consumes and releases licences as apps are created and destroyed
- Policy Based Cloud Computing
  - Admin sets up blueprints that include chargeback etc.
  - Brings consistency through deployment of vApps (they're stacks!)

vApp templates can be exposed according to the permissions of the user

vCloud Design Patterns Weds 10:30

- Packed session - mostly architects in the audience.
- vCloud Director is several integrated products aimed at bridging private and public clouds - you may need further 3rd party tools until VMware plug any gaps.
- Virtualization of the infrastructure continues to be the basis - vCloud is an additional layer - aim is for consumer not to know what's going on "under the hood"
- vCloud Director includes the vCloud API
- vCenter Chargeback and vShield Edge (virtual appliance) and Manager (one per vCenter) are critical components to bring protection and billing
- vRequest Manager brings the workflow piece
- One vCloud Director database supports multiple vCloud Director instances
- vCloud Director needs Oracle which, due to licencing, may exclude the use of a VM for vCloud Director!
- Best practice is to separate the management of clusters of resources from vCloud reource management
- Create your VM clusters based on service qualities.  Create VDCs around consumer organisations.  So a VDC may use resources from across the VM clusters
- The VM clusters have networks to external resources, organisations have networks and vApps have networks between them
- No longer need to create resource pools in the VM clusters - vCloud director becomes the manager of resources
(Comment - there are 3 presenters and they are clearly feeling their way through this stuff as they "clarify" each others' presentation.  Lots of use of the term "we're trying to" which doesn't come across as completely confident)
- Organisations are the security boundaries
- An Organization vDC maps 1:1 for a provider vDC service offering - So Org A Gold, Org A Silver, Org B Gold, Org B Silver etc.
- vApps allow templates of VMs - e.g. 3 tier apps as one package - installed, configured and then booted in the correct order.
- vShield can apply at vApp network to Organisation network and/or from Organisation network to External network
- Some use cases being demonstrated
- Cloud resource group restrictions - no FT, no SRM - need to discuss back up solutions with storage suppliers if they are using vStorage API.  A bit fuzzy on who needs to recover from back ups - looks like its not the consumer
- Organisation vDCs can use a number of different resource allocations and aligned chargeback models, including metered pay as you go

Looks like it would be good to try this for dev and test environments where we can tie down SLA and resource allocations to dev groups and charge appropriately - they can then deploy and destroy vApp stacks as they wish within the organisation.

Building Private Clouds - Actual Experiences Tuesday 14:00

Panel:
Greg Bybee VMware
Alan Russell Experian
Clint Greenwood General Electric
Glenn Harper Sabre Holdings
James Jones LabCorp
Jordan Janeczko Seimens IT Solutions and Services

- The key message about vCloud Director are being replayed - virtual data centres across shared hardware - clear logical boundaries

GE Project Rainmaker
Platform as a service and hybrid cloud is strategy, working on the internal cloud first
Internal cloud - 2011 Q2 delivery
CISCO UCS with vCloud on top
Gone for full VMware suite - chargeback, vShield etc
Using VDCs to deliver differential services to different businesses

Siemens IT Services
Delivering internal services
Delivering cloud services to customers
Focus on helping customers integrate their existing services with cloud and address security etc.
Most customers have hybrid cloud approach
Much adoption of VMware, Spring Source, Zimbra when providing services to customers
Offer secure virtual test cloud (vTC) for customers to run their own test services - the customer uses vCloud Director to help themselves with appropriate billing
HP Blades

Sabre Holdings
Airlines, hospitality, Last Minute, Travelocity etc
Follow the sun development environment
Suffering from VM sprawl
Using vCloud Director to allow devs to self service within the limits of resource that they have allocated in their virtual data centre
Building library of vApps in a catalogue - great for sales and training teams
Took 3 days to set up vCD, most of which was learning the terminology
Packaged a 3 tier app which can then be built and destroyed in multiple environments

EXPERIAN
Follow the sun development
Need to have multiple versions of applications due to local regulatory variations
Want to drive consistency into the organisation
Engage your customers - in this case as the developers what they want
Quick to deploy with very little cost - build the service using VMs on existing VMware clusters

LabCorp
Medical testing
IBM rack servers, EMC storage
vCloud has driven process standardization
30 days to provide physical, 7 days to provide virtual - most of this is through change control across all the infrastructure components
With vCloud a VM can be provisioned in 5 minutes due to pooling of server, network and storage resources - the existing teams provide the pools then the virtual data centre team manages within those pools
Leasing allowed significant resource reclaiming

Licencing can be an issue - are you big enough to have an all you eat contract?

Bella Hall A Tuesday 09:50 Steve Herrod - Tech Innovation & Demos

- vSphere will aggregate across all the infrastructure - internal and external services
- Automate through policy
- Drive to be open and interoperable (comment - but is this really open or is it a vision of VMware being omni-present?)
- Talking about the new features in vSphere 4.1
- Pushing vMotion improvements and I/O QoS
- Pushing vSphere Essentials for small companies
- Announcing vCenter client to the iPad and available in the iTunes store later in October
- Have purchased Integrien for collating events and systems performance
- Making comparisons between ease of use of apps and services at home and the rigidity and lack of agility at work
- Strap line is IT as a Service - Optimizing IT Production for Business Consumption
- App store is equivalent to a service catalogue - use directory services to define who can have access to what apps
- Matching service offerings to business requirements should be visible to the consumers along with pay per use pricing - where the app runs should not be visible to the consumer
- vShield re-launched in support of the virtual data centres - partnering with McAfee and others
- vShield Endpoint protects each VM from the hypervisor
- vShield App is a logical firewall
- vShield edge - boundary protection
- Using vShield internally and in your cloud provider enables secure hybrid cloud
- more than 2,000 ISPs are now offering VMware vCloud services and many of them are adding vCloud Director and vShield - eg Colt, Verizon, Terremark

Eddie Durnell on stage - going to demo vCloud
- service catalogue
- hooks up VMs into a service with a simple diagram
- consumers see a virtual datacenter of services available to them, but they have no idea of where those services are being provided
- aggregates vCenters and datastores internally and ISP provider data centres - same look and feel

VMware vFabric
- New "open" apps fabrics - framework for developer, common platform services - includes vmforce and Google App Engine - will allow apps to move across clouds. Spring now but will add Ruby on Rails, PHP etc.
- Making open, but propose more value if run on VMware products

End User Computing
- Optimizing Windows via View 4.5- offline support (and sync back), Mac OS, Win 7, vShield Endpoint compatible
- Claiming sub $500 virtual desktop costs
- Promoting a move from device-centric to user-centric (comment - still, no suprise here)

Noah joings the stage to demo project Horizon (!)
- allows matching of SaaS apps to users and which devices they can use for each app - permits single sign ons via integration with AD (so federated security then)
- VMware View Client is coming for the iPad
- Horizon is re-formatting the app to suit the device, including screen size and integrated sign on
Audience applause is loudest so far - they must be impressed

Bella Hall A Tuesday 09:25 Paul Maritz

Paul Maritz, CEO

- talking about history of VMware
- "wave 3" is IT as a Service
- in 2009 virtual servers exceeded physical deployments
- 2010 10million VMs will be deployed at a growth rate of 28%
- VMware has 190,000 customers
- thanks to the audience for delivering the virtualization explosion
- talking about virtualization across all data centre resources, not just servers
- £1 spent on hardware leads to £5-10 per annum on management so OpEx is the target
- Automate were possible, manage better where automation is not possible
- VMware releases will focus on automation and management across the whole infrastructure resources for foreseeable future
- Need to move security from physical boundaries to logical boundaries
- Security can be improved as it moves with the apps / data
- vCloud Director enables virtual data centres - associate a policy with applications to enable management of their characteristics - where they run, resource conflict mangement etc. Drives choice of how we pay for resource - internal vs external cloud and appropriate pricing that the business can understand.
- ISPs being encouraged to work with VMware to drive "standards" (are they standards or VMware proprietary interfaces?) across the industry
- Should allow movement across and between clouds to avoid the clouds becoming sticky
- Note PM is talking about building cloud foundations - so we're not there yet (no suprise there then)
- This is about old apps on new infrastructure - what about new apps?  Batch based older apps are not going to respond to upcoming consumer expectations for on demand data and services
- Most new apps are being written in Spring, Ruby on Rails type frameworks so VMware supporting this by developing management and common services around these framworks, sitting on top of a virtualized infrastructure
- These apps frameworks abstract developers from the OS- perhaps the apps frameworks will soon contain just enough OS to operate on the infrastructure cloud?
- Admitting that there will be non-VMware enabled clouds - suggesting that the apps frameworks need to interface to multiple cloud models
- VMware working with Google and Salesforce.com to ensure that the Spring framework can operate on those clouds so apps on Spring will work on multiple infrastructures
- VMware using Software as a Service apps that weren't approved by IT - no integration of security - IT needs to get control (drawing parallels with PCs fiding their way into enterprises in the 1980s)
- Now addressing flood of new devices
- IT should focus on delivering the apps to the users and remove the need to worry about devices - access management will be key
- Automation and management of devices, apps frameworks and infrastructure in horizontal layers will be the key challenges

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!).