Day 2 pt. 2

Sorry about the short post last night, I was REALLY tired.  I think I’m finally adjusted to West Coast time and I even woke-up at a decent hour, felt pretty good.

Ok, time for the recap!

Yesterday was focused mostly on virtualization and current technologies.  Since today VMWare is having a huge keynote and unveiling their newest and hottest stuff, yesterday ended up being a good recap of the virtualization world as we know it today. 

My first session was into to Virtualization and VMWare cheerleading aside, it was a pretty good intro into exactly what Virtualization is and how many companies today are using it.  I kind of feel like a bit of a spy since we use Hyper-V in our environment, but it is nice to see what else is out there.

The next session was more focused on the storage aspect of Virtualization and what pains and problems you can run into in that process.  Again, lots of good info, with some suggestions of various monitoring tools currently available on the market to help IT departments manage their virtual environment.   The other big talking point here was VM Sprawl vs. VM stall, while no one on the panel could give a good definition of what VM stall is (according to the panel this is a term created just for this session.) VM Sprawl is a very real issue in the IT world.  The idea behind VM sprawl is that an IT department starts small with only one or two VM’s and then one day they look down and they have 500 VM’s and no real idea where they all came from or how they all got there.  This can cause a massive strain on resources, both on the IT staff and on the hardware.  For me this drove a very good point home, especially in our environment where we have 3 virtual host servers and the only tool we have to manage them is the Hyper-V management tool which is limited at best.  This is something I fully plan on looking into once I get home.

The final session of the day was the first future looking session I attended and it showed off a number of the features that are being talked about in today’s keynote.  The session was called Virtual Desktop Cloud: The future vision of End-User Computing.  A lot of this hit very close to home for me since I could see many of my users wanting to bring many of these technologies into our environment.  The main point behind this was moving away from the old IT thoughts of one workstation per user with a corporate image loaded on it and when a user goes home they leave that workstation with them. In today’s world, everyone wants smartphones, iPads, laptops, tablets, etc. and they want to be able to access their work from their personal devices.  The concept of employee BYOPC was introduced, and it had some merit.  With a lot of the current and new VDI technology out there it’s becoming possible for users to run just on thin clients, tablets, smartphones, etc. while a majority of their data and storage is done in the cloud.  Basically the way VMWare views the future of end-user computing is not so much more powerful desktops and laptops for users, instead desktop computing is done in the cloud, while the end-user is getting less and less powerful systems, but being able to do the same amount work and have access to the exact same environment no matter what device they are connecting with or where they are.  Truly mobile computing! 

So yeah, that about sums up day one sessions.  Like I said, lots of good info with plenty of VMWare cheerleading mixed in :P

Time to get ready for Day 2 of VMWorld, should have recap up this evening since there are no evening events scheduled tonight.

~C