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This week I’ve been researching and planning my trip to Las Vegas, NV for VMWorld 2008, and I wanted to share some of my findings. Specifically, I’ve been trying to make the decision to book a room for the week at one of the official conference hotels listed on the VMworld 2008 web site or try finding a better deal on my own. I figured what I have discovered could possibly be helpful for at least a few of the 10,000 to 12,000 other conference attendees.

Basically, my hotel decision has come down to 2 important factors:

1. The proximity of my hotel to the Venetian (where the conference takes places) and the logistics of getting back and forth.
2. Finding a “wife-worthy” hotel that is affordable and agreeable to my company.

Hotel Logistics

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VMware has officially started registration for VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, NV. Go to VMworld 2008: Registration - VMware
to register now and get the early bird discount. Be sure to use your existing account at VMworld.com if you have previously attended VMworld Europe 2008 or VMworld 2007. VMware has recognized VMworld veterens in the past by giving away a special gift. I can’t confirm if this is the case this year, but if it is then using an exisiting account is definitely the way to make sure you are on the right list!

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Compared to VMware ESX Enterprise Edition, business continuity and high availability features are lacking when deploying Citrix XenServer “out of the box.” Specifically, XenServer does not have the built in equivalent to VI3’s HA feature. Also missing is a solution similar to VMware’s soon to be released Site Recovery Manager (SRM). However, Marathon Technologies and XenSource (now a division of Citrix) have worked together to develop everRun VM as a enterprise class answer to fault tolerant availability for Windows virtual machines hosted on Citrix XenServer. According to Marathon’s Director of Products, Michael Bilancieri, at a recent Atlanta “Virtualization for the Real World” event, the integrated solution will be generally available sometime in the 2008 Q2/Q3 time frame.

Quoting from the Best of VMworld (more on this award later in this post) white paper downloadable from the everRun link above:

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VMworld 2008 will be at The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, NV September 15 - 18. You can go to the VMworld 2008 Pre-Registration page to sign up to be notified when official registration is open.

VMware is expecting more than 12,000 attendees this year!

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I just got back from vacation and wanted to see what has been happening in Cannes at VMWorld Europe. I drove the family to Orlando, FL and “did the Disney thing” for 4 days so I was out of touch. Thanks to blogs like VMTN, NITRO.NL, and virtualization.info I was able to get relatively caught up in a single afternoon.

The first, and most logical place, to start was John Troyer’s VMTN blog. As always, John has done a great job rounding up opinion, news, reactions, and even multimedia covering the event. Scrolling almost to the bottom of the VMTN front page and working my way up walked me through Partner Day on Monday to Day 2 of the Conference on Wednesday.

And we’re off … VMWorld Europe 2008 gave me the link to the recorded keynote webcasts which I listened to in the background while I

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More lab materials from VMWorld for those who can’t download themselves.

Linked to this post are the materials from “Using VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for Hosted Computing”. This lab walks through installation, administration, creating a desktop, creating desktop pools, and finally connecting to desktops and desktop pools.

The Appendix also goes through a detailed process of getting a WinXP VM ready to become a template. Too many template VMs are created without taking the time to optimize the VM for future cloning. This process can be used to prepare any VM for becoming a template - not just for use in VDI.

Using VDI Vmworld 2007 Lab

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The file attached to this post is the VMWorld 2007 “Leveraging VMware Consolidated Backup for Disaster Recovery” lab materials. I am posting this for those that did not get to go to VMWorld and do not have an ID to log on to the VMWorld site.

This .pdf illustrates the requirements for VCB as well as the step by step technical details of using the VCB framework for backing up VMs, restoring VMs, and restoring files.

VCB for DR VMworld 2007 Lab

updated 01.29.08 - You can also download this lab from my Files Page.

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Unfortunately I slept late Thursday morning. Waking up at 7:30 am in Hayward, CA meant that there was no way short of a helicopter I was going to make it to San Francisco before 9. I’m pretty sure my company would not let me expense a helicopter so I decided to catch up on some email from the hotel until traffic burned off. I also had “Smash Head” from the party Weds night!

blog.scottlowe.org has some great notes on this session. Here’s my thoughts on what I missed.

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I rented a Chevrolet HHR for week at VMWorld. I wasn’t expecting to rent a car at all so thank goodness National had cars available Sunday when I arrived at SFO.

The car was fun to drive and it had a lot of pep for a 4 cylinder engine. Although I never had more than three adults in the car, the HR had plenty of room for passengers.

It’s compact design was both a positive and a negative. I was thankful for the ability to maneuver easily in downtown traffic and park in tight spaces, but the cockpit area was cramped. I kept rubbing my leg on the center console just using the accelerator. The windshield was small and very close, and my field of view was at roof level inside the car. I felt like I had to bend down to see.

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If Alcatraz is called “The Rock” then Treasure Island was “The Roll” for Wednesday’s VMWorld 2007 party.

First on stage was the Wonderbread 5. I believe this band was once a Jackson 5 tribute band that has now evolved into 5 white guys wearing afros that definitely know how to start the party!

Associatedentertainment.com describes this local San Francisco band best:

“With their tongue planted firmly in cheek, the Wonder Bread 5 posse fuses hip-hop, country-fied white-trash anthems, disco and hair metal, resulting in a high energy spectacle of fun, grooves and all the songs you love to sing…and sing loudly.”

Smash Mouth topped the evening off with all of their hits as well as some amazing Van Halen covers! The band started a multi song encore with a version of “Running with the Devil” that would have made even David Lee Roth jealous!

According to their web site Smash Mouth has a new album in stores and is also currently working on songs for an upcoming movie soundtrack. I will definitely be adding their newest CD to my collection.

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Another “ton of bricks” moment happened to me when I was talking about SAN replication with NetApp yesterday in the Solutions Exchange. Using your WAN, NetApp’s products can replicate block level data between each other, or they can replicate the data from your existing SAN.

So, this means that I can buy a single NetApp product and put it at my DR site and start replicating my VI for fail-over. I don’t even need to worry about building the ESX infrastructure right away. Although, the ability to test my DR fail-over requires I have ESX servers at my secondary site.

I asked for general pricing for a small office SAN. I guestimated about 3TB of data would be needed. Although they wouldn’t give me a firm quote I was told pricing should be somewhere in the $10k - $15K range.

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I received an email announcing a new release of PowerRecon from Platespin. It sounds like features have been added to the product to take it from being a capacity analysis tool to a VI monitoring and reporting tool. I will have to stop by their booth and get the scoop.

From the email:

PlateSpin is announcing the general availability of PowerRecon 3.1., and the new Virtual Infrastructure Edition.

Highlights of this release:

VIE features:- Integration with VMware Virtual Center

- Discovery and inventory of the complete physical and virtual infrastructure

- Power and Cooling Reporting

- Virtual Infrastructure Chargeback Reporting

- Virtual Machine Sprawl Reporting

- Priced per CPU

Other noteworthy feature enhancements:- Group and matrix reporting capabilities

- Scalability enhancements

- Tighter integration with the virtual infrastructure layer

- Extended platform support

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