Today was day 2 of VMworld Europe for me, the show was open to the general public today and today was the start of the sessions and solutions exchange.
I hit the labs at 8am and took the Cloud Reporting lab
To be honest I was looking for a lab regarding vCenter ops in a private cloud rather than vCloud Director reporting but however it was good to look at vCenter chargeback and probably my first look at orchestrator as well.
I was then quickly onto the Troubleshooting View session, there was a lot of good content in this session surrounding what to look for when troubleshooting View, particularly when looking in the the agent, client and connection server log files. I look forward to being able to take a closer look at the slides from this session and looking into the relevant logs.
Upon leaving this session there was a helicopter outside the Bella Center toeing a rather large Trend banner! It seemed to have the desired effect with lots of people watching.
I was then onto using vCenter Ops in real world situations, there were two customers presenting with very compelling results for the product, one in an extremely large environment with many PB’s of storage. vCenter Ops is something I have been looking into a lot recently and this session really helped me understand the value it can give to a customer, I’m looking forward to getting hands in with vCenter Ops Suite 5 that was mentioned in the session.
After this session I then took some time out to meet with a few of the people from the community, it was good to catch up with Mike Laverick and Scott Herold amongst others, I then managed to have a flyby visit of the Solutions Exchange area, on the top of my list was Tintri and Nexenta storage vendors. I plan on doing a separate blog post regarding these vendors shortly so I will save that for another day.
I was then off to the main event of the day Steve Herrods Keynote, I sat with the rest of the London VMUG bloggers, in the blogger and press area. There was a number of demonstrations and announcements during the keynote, the demonstrations that stood out for me were the AppBlast, Project Octopus, ThinApp Factory and Project Horizon Mobile.
AppBlast is a technology VMware are working on that allows legacy applications to be delivered to any HTML 5 browser, the example in the demo was Excel being delivered to an iPad.
Project Octopus is VMware’s answer to DropBox in the enterprise, Steve Herrod asked how many people in the audience used DropBox, to which most people put their hands up, he then asked how many people were supposed to use it, very few people put there hands up. Dropbox is disallowed by many IT departments. Project Octopus has similar syncing and sharing capabilities but allows IT to be in control behind the sciences, it also others options on where the data is stored etc.
ThinApp factory is a new automation and self service portal for creating thinapps, you get a web front end to allow the automatic creation of thinapps from windows installers, it is also able to track updates to these applications and repackage the applications, on the user side of the application they are given an Enterprise Software App store allowing them to choose what applications they need and installed the streamed thin app on demand.
Project Horizon Mobile is the mobile virtualisation platform that has been discussed for some time. The demonstration showed how IT could send a business phone down to a users phone, allowing the user to keep business and personal phone configurations and applications separate.
The main announcement for me was vCenter Operation Suite 5.0 there was a short demo, but I look forward to finding out more and getting some hands on time when released, I plan on blogging more about the announcements when I have had more time to review them.
After the keynote it was onto the solution exchange area again, I caught up with Gina Rosenthal and David Glynn on the Dell stand discussing mainly Dell EqualLogic Storage.
Finally for me it was into the vExpert tweet up, it was good to meet some new faces and catchup with some of the more familiar ones.
Tomorrow I am looking forward to getting some more labs under my belt and attending some deep dive sessions.
Below are a couple of videos from the keynote, he first shows the very impressive visual effects used at the start of the keynote the second is a short video of some of the things VMware engineers are working on at the moment
Virtualised Reality 