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I have had the pleasure today of presenting at the second  UK VMware User Group. at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull, near Birmingham.

My presentation was titled vSphere Networking and Converged IO with Blade Servers.

I discussed how converged networking incorporating 10GE and FCoE is become more important as we try to utilise bandwidth more efficiently which is especially important with blade servers which have limited IO expansion. I explained the architecture of Cisco UCS and HP Virtual Connect as examples and how they can work with vSphere.

I went through some of the IO convergence options and also how to still protect your traffic by using either physical or logical separation or software.

No need to repeat everything else in this blog post, you may as well have a look at the presentation and best of all plan to attend a VMUG near you!

The official VMworld Barcelona session catalogue was huge and full of VMware sanctioned content. However running in parallel there was a fantastic community run fringe event.

The #vBrownBag guys stepped up to the plate and spent a lot of personal time to put together a whole series of short Tech Talks where anyone with something to say could have the spotlight.

Now, this wasn’t some soap box in the corner of a room with some nutters yelling into a megaphone but a super organised, livestreamed sponsored event with some serious content.

There were VMware employees and engineers talking about how you can run some seriously awesome yet unsupported VMware configurations as well as some seriously brainy and very highly regarded community members who have a passion for virtualisation and in their own time put together presentations that they thought the VMware community would be interested in.

Luckily these were all recorded so you can take some time out and see for yourself what the VMware community has to contribute.

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Short notice I know but I’m attempting go gather people for a vBeers this Friday. There are VMworld attendees heading to London after sunny Barcelona including head socialite, John Troyer. vBeers will be a great way to catch up after VMworld.

After toying with trying somewhere new, its probably best to use the same tried, tested and enjoyable watering hole starting at 6:00pm in ‘The Cittie of Yorke’ pub which is placed centrally to both London’s West End and The City. This venue serves a fine of selection of (Cheap) English beers along with soft drinks and bar snacks. We will head for somwehere to eat when we’re hungry, traditionally this has been a vCurry but we can make that call on the night.

Location: The ‘Cittie of Yorke’, London
Address: 22 High Holborn, London, WC1V 6BS, Map: here
Date: Friday – 12th April
Time: 6:00pm – Till we get asked to move on and/or get hungry.

VMware UK is running a competition giving away a free ticket to VMworld Europe 2012 in Barcelona from 9-11 October.

Along with the free ticket which gives you access to all the normal great conference activities, the lucky winner will also win some additional perks:

• €100 spending money
• Access to VIP-only facilities
• A ticket for the exclusive UK customer party
• Opportunity to contribute guest posts to the VMware UK blog

To enter you need to some up with some snazzy reason why you want to attend the conference and its probably a good idea to think of something along the theme of transformation. If you can’t think of anything inspiring you can also list the session you are most looking forward to attending.

There are two ways to enter:

1. Send a tweet to @vmware_uk and include #VMworldTicket along with your clever reason.
2. Post a comment on the blog post announcing the competition and of course add your email address so they can get hold of you if you win.

The competition ends on 28th September to give you time to book your own flights and hotels (not part of the competition).

Good Luck!

VMworld Day 4 started a little later than the previous days to give all attendees a little more time in bed to recover from the VMworld party last night after belting out Bon Jovi hits!

The day started with the Genius Machines general session featuring three researchers who are working at the frontier of machine technology Kevin Slavin, Co-Founder, Area/Code; Dr. Dennis Hong, Director, RoMeLa who showed some awesome robots and Chris Urmson who showed the Google Self-Driving Car Project. These were fun presentations showing how far technology has come. It was a welcome break from all things cloud and virtual and seeing some cool other technology stuff.

The Solutions Exchange wasn’t open today which I think was a bad decision. The last day of the conference is normally the day when attendees have completed their preferred sessions and have free time to wander around the Exchange and see what the vendors are up to. Hopefully this will be rethought for next time.

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VMworld continues with day 3 of the conference. There was no general session this morning so I caught about with of the other bloggers in the Hang Space.

It was then unofficially announced that VMworld US 2013 would be back again in San Francisco from 26-29 August also at the Moscone Center.

I then attended INF-BCO1505 – VMware vSphere Replication: Technical Walk-Through with Engineering by Ken Werneburg and Aleksey Pershin from VMware.

vSphere Replication (VR) used to be part of SRM but as of this year is now a standalone product available free for SMBs if you have Essentials Plus license or above. SRM can still be added on top of vSphere Replication. VR allows you to simply replicate VMs to a DR site or locally for intra-site recovery with application level consistency with VSS. Protection is set on an individual VM basis and you can set a RPO from 15 minutes up to 24 hours.

VR is a virtual appliance which is registered in vCenter. You can only have a single VR appliance per vCenter but you can protect up to 50 VMs per appliance. What is great is you can pre-seed your initial replication set so can ship a tape or USB drive to your DR site and copy the initial files to your destination datastore and VR can pick up from this initial replication state and continue to protect your VMs.

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VMworld US 2013 will return to San Francisco from 26-29 August 2013 in the Moscone Center.

The VMworld juggernaut keeps going today with Day 2 of the general conference. We were treated to a True American Breakfast.

Today the conference started with another general session keynote where VMware CTO Steve Herrod brought out the toys to demonstrate “Delivering the Promise of the Software Defined Datacenter”

This was talking about the End User Computing space. VMware Mirage was announced which deconstructs the PC into layers and allows you to sync these layers to physical or VDI devices so creating a very flexible way to allow Window desktops to be available on non Windows devices and also offline.

Read and see more from Eric Sloof – http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/2116-Video-VMware-Mirage.html

A quick demo of something called Project Appshift which is billed as user experience virtualisation which makes using windows apps and desktop a little easier on a tablet. You can cut and paste from a windows desktop running remote on a tablet to the local tablet OS. There are also some gestures to make navigating windows apps easier as maximising and minimising apps is really painful on a tablet.

Horizon Suite was announced which should available as a beta by the end of the year.

Horizon Data is the rebranded Project Octopus which is Enterprise Dropbox (Octopus was a much better name in my opinion!).

Horizon Application Manager is the store front which shows all application, desktops and data that your IT department has provisioned for its users. These apps can be drawn from web SaaS apps such as Salesforce, Thin-app packages and newly announced was integration with Citrix XenApp applications so you can see your Citrix apps. Interestingly I wonder whether this could also be used to show XenDesktop desktops alongside View. Management of all these apps was shown which explained how simple it is to add new services and either automatically install to users or allow users to request them from the same portal.

Horizon Mobile which was originally only for Android running a secure “work” phone VM on your personal phone. Now this has been extended to iOS but rather than having a whole virtual phone, you can deploy secure sandboxed applications which cannot even cut and paste between the phone OS. This is similar to what Good Technologies has been doing with its email client.  For me this is how it should work on Android as well. I don’t really care about having another virtual phone VM, just secure applications.

Next up were some partner demos, ranging from the bizarre to the dull!

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VMworld US in San Francisco is in full swing today with about 20000 expected attendees.

Eric Sloof is happy to Welcome everyone to VMworld.

The conference kicked off with the launch keynote  featuring VMware’s soon to be outgoing CEO Paul Maritz, incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger and CTO Steve Herrod. This was billed as IT Transformation as the Enabler of Business Transformation.

You can watch the keynote at VMware Now, which is VMware’s new online destination for breaking news, product announcements, videos and demos: http://vmware.com/go/now.

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Part of VMworld US opened today in San Francisco with Partner Day which is not open to general attendees but for VMware’s partners to be enlightened with their tailored VMworld info. I flew in yesterday and managed to make it (barely) to vBeers at The Chieftain. Was great to see the #LonVMUG crew (a bit strange to fly half way across the world and then enjoy a Guinness with people you see in London

Today, I started the day getting stuck into some serious networking over vBreakfast, fuelling up for the day ahead. I was very glad to meet Brent Quick, Chris Well of NetApp, Matthew Brender and Will Huber and see again Jane Rimmer and Gabrie van Zanten. The anticipation, excitement and interest in all things virtual was a good primer for the day.

I then headed off to register at the Moscone Center which is decked out in resplendent VMworld everything. As a blogger rather than partner I took the opportunity to head off to the Hands on Labs. Labs have changed a little this year. The labs will be available to access remotely after the show so perhaps the stats busting numbers of VMs deployed may take a hit this year. Labs can be completed in an hour or less and there are now lightning labs which are 15 or 30 minute modules of a bigger lab that you can take when you have limited time and come back and finish the other modules later.  Also for the first time you can use your own device via wireless and run the labs from your laptop or tablet within the conference venue. Labs are open at the following times but remember as the labs take up to an hour you need to be there in time before closing.

• Sunday August 26, 2012: 11:00am – 8:00pm (extended to 10pm)
• Monday August 27, 2012: 10:30am – 8:00pm (extended to 10pm)
• Tuesday August 28, 2012: 7:00am – 7:00pm (extended to 10pm)
• Wednesday August 29, 2012: 7:00am – 7:00pm (extended to 10pm)
• Thursday August 30, 2012: 7:00am – 3:00pm

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