Today was the second and final day of BriForum London 2013, today for me was largely about the sessions as I had visited many of the vendors yesterday.
I attended a total of four sessions today kicking off with Hyper-V for VMware Administrators by Mike Nelson, whilst I’m quite happy with the features and functionality of Hyper-V 3.0, I was keen to know if my somewhat biased opinions when it comes to vSphere vs Hyper-V were indeed correct. I found the session really insightful and it was good to get engagement and different opinions from delegates as well as the presenter. Of course the outcome as expected is there is only one hypervisor worth looking at being VMware vSphere (I joke). It was good to hear about the different configuration maximums as well as the meaningful comparison between features and functionality and the considerations when deploying a Hyper-V solution. The general feeling seems to be Microsoft have done a good job with Hyper-V 3.0 but the pricing and packaging regarding the management tools can cause further cost considerations to be a barrier and still leave vSphere a cost effective solution.
My next session was Brian and Gabes 5 x 15mins sessions covering many topics, a few of interest to me were are user installed applications really a requirement, all wifi users should be treated as external users and VDI vs RDS. This was a great session again with audience interaction but it was also great to see how Brian and Gabe work together, with Brian happy to make radical and sweeping statements and Gabe standing back and taking the considered approach, between them they are sometimes able to agree on the middle ground. Im not going to micro analyse this session but if you were at BriForum London and missed it check out the video or be sure to attend Chicago.
During the break I had a chance to catch-up with the few vendors I missed yesterday one stood out for me and that was Lakeside Software, I met these guys at VMworld last year and was pleased to learn that as of July 2012 they now have a UK based EMEA team which has grown significantly since I last saw them, prior to this it was ran purely from the US and this made engagement very difficult. Lakeside make desktop analysis and monitoring software. I have used many other solutions in this space and was pleased to see how Lakeside works in comparison, their UI looks slick and purposeful and I was particularly impressed by the dashboards, reporting and tools that not only help you get the information to plan your desktop refresh but also have tools that help you compute that information to make the final decisions. I’m looking forward to following this conversation up after the conference and seeing it working in my lab. Watch the blog as a blogpost is sure to follow.
My final two sessions were by the guys from PQR and Login Consultants that run the Virtual Reality Check, if you are not aware of what these guys do, I strongly recommend you head over to their website http://www.virtualrealitycheck.com as ever their sessions were insightful and backed up heavily with their various findings. Watch out next week for some new white papers from them.
This was the end of BriForum finished off with a final word from Brian Madden, no announcement was made about next year but hopefully I will be able to attend again.
Virtualised Reality 