Early this morning, I got an e-mail from John Troyer that I became a VMware vExpert. If you don’t know what that is, check the vExpert page on vmware.com. A big thanks to VMware and John and others to make this happen and congratulations to all the other vExperts out there.

It was difficult to follow real-time what was going on today as I was busy writing an offer for a virtualization and consolidation project with, you guessed it, VMware VI3.

The keynote promised to be interesting although it was expected to be not all too different from the keynote at VMworld Las Vegas 2008. Lots of people reported about the keynote and here’s just a few of them:

• From virtualization.info: Live from VMworld Europe 2009: Day 2
• From vinf.net: VMworld Europe Day 2; Keynote

I bet there are many more but by reading the two above you’ll get a good overview of the keynote in just a few minutes. Highlights from the keynote for me were the following:

• By starting with the increased capabilities of the virtual hardware (256GB of RAM and eight vCPUs) and then switching to databases performance results that show how well things scale, Steve again hinted at the platform being ready to host almost any workload (as did Paul Maritz yesterday). The Exchange Server scaling example also showed that by breaking up the workload in multiple virtual machines, you can really host a lot of mailboxes on a single server. Of course, this increases the customer’s licensing cost but it shows how well the platform scales.
• vStorage Thin Provisioning where VMware has a software implementation that you can leverage on any storage platform. They also provide APIs for storage vendors to use array-based thin provisioning. This article by Gabrie Van Zanten has some more details about thin provisioning. Good to hear that I can migrate to thin-provisioned disks by performing a migration. We will use this feature in our labs for sure!
• Steve talked about the “Giant Computer”. Basically we’re going back to the mainframe in a way by combining all compute resources into one big pool of CPU, storage, network and memory resources with DRS, DPM and other components to optimize and tame this beast. Also see this article about the ‘software mainframe’.
• The VMware PC-over-IP demo by Jerry Chen was interesting but maybe for the wrong reasons. Some two years ago (maybe a bit less) we evaluated a series of options for a customer of ours to implement a solution based on pc blades in the datacenter with thin clients at the user’s desk. Back then, Teradici was included in the study and that was what VMware actually demoed today. Brian Madden had an interesting commentary about it on his site. Indeed, what VMware showed today is possible for a while already and requires physical hardware from Teradici and Jerry clearly stated that. They had a physical desktop behind the scenes and Jerry accessed that with a thin client. Not exactly VDI but brokering the connection to such a physical desktop is what VMware View (and Citrix XenDesktop and Quest vWorkspace and HP SAM with RGS) can do.
• Focus on vCenter on three levels:
• Availability: vCenter Server Heartbeat to protect vCenter Server with failover to a standby vCenter Server if needed. Can’t wait to evaluate that!
• Scalability: vCenter Server Linked Mode to link up to 10 vCenter Servers together and search for virtual machines across the whole infrastructure.
• Automation: Host Profiles are a welcome addition because, at the moment, it’s a drag to have to manually update all your servers. Of course we automate this today with PowerShell or the Veeam product but it’s good to see this built in.
• vCenter and all the solutions around it really show that managing, monitoring and automating the platform is where it’s at! Time to decrease the price of the basic stuff such as the hypervisor, VMotion and HA?
• The mobile hypervisor demo on the Nokia internet tablet was interesting as well. It would be interesting to be able to do this on my company phone and have both Windows Mobile and Android for example. Of course the big question is: “What about the iPhone?”. Knowing Apple, I guess there’s not much hope for this to become a reality! ;-)
• I am really interested to see how the complete roll-out of VMware View will work in 2009! Today, VMware View provides basic brokering functions with some advanced features such as linked clones. What’s missing today are the “last mile features” where competitors such as Citrix and Quest (vWorkspace) have quite a good solution. Citrix with its use of ICA and Quest with it’s EOP extensions to RDP. Steve promised “the best” experience over WAN, LAN and LOCAL connections (with local referring to the client hypervisor).

Other interesting (and some funny) articles and blog posts today:

• Commentary on some unanswered questions about vSphere: VMworld attendees demand, but don’t get, vSphere details
• VMworld day 2 – Random stuff and Data recovery from Yellow Bricks. Duncan has a good explanation of the new data recovery solution. Interesting to hear this thing does inline dedupe.
• Desktops moving to the cloud? The cloud looks more and more like a black hole that sucks in every piece of IT infrastructure! ;-)
• Snuggy gate! What is that? ;-)
• Video on VMware FT and performance filmed by Mike Laverick. Very, very interesting! It’s actually a VMworld session but don’t tell anyone. ;-)

During my preparation for our VDI seminars next week (only a few seats left), I am trying to keep up with the news coming from Cannes. Here’s a little overview of the news I thought was interesting.

• My colleague Vincent Vlieghe has a good overview of the day.
• VM /ETC posted a very good overview of Day 1  here. virtualization.info did live blogging as well. Both are reporting about the keynote delivered by Paul Maritz (VMware CEO) and Wolfgang Krips (Senior VP of SAP Managed Services). This keynote was not very technical because that is left to VMware’s CTO, Steve Herrod.
• During the keynote, Paul claimed that from the first generation of the new vSphere platform there will be no reason to not virtualize 100% of your datacenter. A pretty bold statement underlining the fact that this is already happening in the trenches now. More and more customers ask us to virtualize their Exchange environment, SQL, SAP or Unified Communications platform. They are only held back by non-technical reasons such as support or technical reasons like dependency on specific hardware.
• On Twitter, some were reporting that the SAP part of the keynote was pretty boring and that people were leaving the session. Why am I not surprised? ;-)
• Interestingly, VMware talked about the partnership with Intel. VMware CVP (Client Virtualization Platform) will be part of the VMware View suite and is optimized for Intel CPUs with vPro technology. Intel has a similar agreement with Citrix for their “Project Independence”. To learn more about Project Independence and some comparisons with the VMware approach, there’s a good podcast over at dabcc.com with Simon Crosby. I am curious to find out more about the bare-metal client hypervisor implementation of VMware. With Citrix’s solution it is already clear that they are using the same approach as with Xen/Hyper-V: the hypervisor is loaded on the hardware, Windows (Vista?) is the parent partition which means broad hardware support and the corporate desktop is streamed/installed as a child partition. If VMware is using their typical approach by using something similar to ESX, they will have quite a hard time with hardware support on laptops and desktops. 
• Brian Madden also talked about both Intel partnerships here with some funny commentary.
• VirtualLifestyle.nl reported about VMware vCenter Data Recovery with lots of screenshots. Note that these screenshots come from the hands-on labs with a pre-release version of the product.
• Of course there was a lot of buzz around the vCloud stuff. Some reports and commentary can be found here, here and here. If the vCloud vision works out it will be pretty amazing. VMware faces tough competition though from open source Xen, XenServer, Hyper-V and others here. If you know what is possible on Amazon’s EC2 for example you know what I am talking about. Of course, VMware goes further here by providing integration between internal and external clouds and good partnerships.
• Companies like IT Structures and Terremark were in the spotlight as well. IT Structures and Terremark were featured in Paul Maritz’s keynote. IT Structures released a press release announcing support for vCloud. Other vCloud partners can be found here.
• Yesterday, I heard about the vShield Zones product for the first time. You can found more information about it here. The product will be available later in 2009.
• It seems Neverfail’s software is the basis for VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat. Sounds logical. I wonder how well this will sell though! Anyway it’s good to have the option from VMware.

That’s all I have time for today. Looking forward to Steve Herrod’s keynote tomorrow!

I am not at VMworld Europe this year but many of my colleagues are, including Geert Verbist and Vincent Vlieghe. I am staying home because, among other things, my colleague Tim Jacobs and myself are preparing our VDI seminars.

But these days, with Twitter and tools like Tweet Grid and Twitter Fall it’s possible to get a feel for what’s happening at the event realtime without being there.

So this being the day that Citrix officially announced free XenServer Enterprise, what was going on?

• VMware launched Partner University. Only partners (VIP, VAC, …) can access this and it’s a virtual campus with, in my opinion, good information about learning paths for sales, pre-sales and post-sales professionals.
• Microsoft is at VMworld, as they always have been. Maybe this time with a little less controversy than in Vegas?
• Many bloggers reported about partner day. Here and here for example. Gabrie van Zanten has a good overview about partner day at Virtualization Pro.
• Of course there is a strong focus on VDI with 2009 being touted as the year of client virtualization in all its aspects. There was a session about VDI with VMware View followed by a critical article by Brian Madden (he was in that session). Of course he’s right on the mark when he says that VMware should include TS/Citrix as an alternative and point at the pitfalls of application virtualization but you cannot blame VMware for focusing on VDI with the products they have (View/ThinApp and no TS/Citrix-like solution).
• It was known already but more was said about vCenter Server Heartbeat. Technodrone has a good overview. VMguru.nl has a summary with some pricing info at the bottom of the post. Pretty pricey if you ask me.
• VMware also talked about VMware vShield Zones, something they will provide more details about later this week. Session DC13 talks about it in more detail.
• A good post about VMware’s strategy for the coming years and the products that will take center stage can be found at VMGuru.nl. Products like vCenter Chargeback, CapacityIQ, Orchestrator and ConfigControl are what customers expect from VMware to continue to take the lead in the virtualization space. Some VMware partners that make competing products might not like this expansion but in our experience, customers typically expect these solutions from VMware and not some 3rd party vendor. VMware will have to make sure that these new tools integrate well into the existing infrastructure.
• There was a session about AppSpeed as well with more details and a general session coming this week.
• Duncan Epping talked about VMware vCenter on Linux Technology Preview. This is VirtualCenter Server and not the VI Client on Linux.
• Alex Barrett has an article on SearchServerVirtualization.com asking about the beef in VDC-OS. Indeed, the concept of VDC-OS is pretty good but the realization of this concept is still a way off. With the announcements coming this week however, we will be coming a few steps closer.
• Veeam is one of the first with VMware Ready Optimized certification or status. Their management pack for VMware has the logo.
• The Virtualization EcoShell Initiative will be launched. Eric Sloof reports about it here. If you are a PowerShell fan (like me), you will find this interesting.
• As always, Eric Sloof has a collection of movies at his site ntpro.nl.

As today was partner day, the avalanche of announcements from both VMware and its partners will only really start coming down tomorrow. Some interesting sessions are coming up as well like TA03 about Chargeback, DC01 about Orchestrator, DC18 about ConfigControl and TA22 about CapacityIQ.