PlanetVM

This is the second of two advisories that VMware sneaked out the door whilst under cover of VMworld. read more »

As day two starts to calm down and the last sessions start to end a lot of news was presented to the VMworld attendees.  Some of the highlights of the keynote from this morning was the release of vCloud Director (formerly known as project redwood), release of security suites from edge to endpoint, acquisition of Integrien, and the introduction to the “cloud stack”.  A lot of this information was anticipated but still a lot of information to take in during the keynote.  A big thing I noticed from Paul Maritz he was pushing a lot of these changes to the cloud was going to happen with or without VMware but they want to be the one to push the issues.  The replay of the keynote this morning can be found at www.vmworld.com

Another busy day at the sessions around the Moscone center, with sessions at capacity again.  For the most part things seemed to run a bit smoother today as people calmed down and realized they were going to eventually get into all the classes they wanted to get into.  I spent the day trying to adjust to this “cloud” idea moving away from our cluster setup.  I decided to switch a session from vSphere best practices to moving your cluster to private cloud.  Unfortunately I ran into a session where the speaker didn’t speak on anything that was in the subject of the session.  There were quite a few angry people, like myself, leaving that session.   Besides that most of the other sessions I was in were informative and useful, and was able to take a few things here and there that I could implement.

After a few years of VMworld I’ve learned a few things about not burning yourself out on sessions early on in the week and allow for networking time where you learn quite a bit.  I made sure today was a shorter day as tomorrow will be long with the VMworld party scheduled and one more day after that.  Hopefully tomorrow will be a quiter day in the solutions exchange as I have mapped out some vendors I would like to sit down with and really learn more about their product.  I’ll have a beer or alcoholic slush puppy  for everyone who wasn’t able to make it down to to VMworld 2010 tomorrow at the party.

While the whole world is focused on VMworld VMware has snuck two more security advisories out the door,  as is PlanetVM.NET’s usual wont they are printed below in full.

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Being the third VMworld I have attended I had a pretty good idea what to expect when I arrived.  I know there were some changes to the setup of sessions and labs going from a sign up format to pick your sessions and first come first serve gets in.  Also with this new format change came many repeat sessions for those who couldn’t get in during their first try.  I have some mixed feelings regarding this new change as I feel the scheduling has fallen into the hands of the lazy attendees who didn’t bother to sign up for sessions before they filled up, but on the other side it allowed everyone a fair chance to get into sessions regardless when they signed up.  What came of the change were extremely long lines for almost every session, making those in line wonder if they were wasting their time in the back trying to get into a popular session.  Along with the long lines you had no idea if you were in the correct line for your session.  All the sessions I was in line I was able to get into.  Another by product of this new setup I think were improved attendance per session as before those sessions that might have shown “full” in past years causing people to not even consider showing up, now everyone is showing up and filling up the rooms.  All sessions I was in today were nearly completely full at the start.  While that is a good thing having full sessions it felt more crowded than a middle row, middle seat of a 747 jet in the back of the plane.

Long lines for sessions made it extremely hard to move around the VMworld conference since most lines were 100-500 people long wrapping around corners and zigzagging through the grounds.  Another crowded space was the eating area. I know it’s hard to compare this year’s conference from past VMworld’s such as VMworld Vegas 2008 which had a giant eating area where everyone could find a seat.   This year lines were extremely long to get into the eat area to just get food let alone trying to find a spare seat or two.

Once 4pm rolled around the solution exchange opened up for the first time and the area filled with attendees, vendors, guests along with everyone asking to scan your badge.  It was busier than usual to the point it was hard to just move around the area let alone talk to any of the vendors with them trying to give away free gear with hopes of winning money or another popular item, the iPad.  It got to the point after 15-30min of wondering around, uneventful booths and less than interesting “shwag” it was time to get out of there and come back later to get some decent information from the vendors later on.  If I get that chance to win the iPad later in the week so be it, but the less spam I get over the next year the better.   According to sources there might be a couple big announcements tomorrow at the key note which I’ll try to get a video for the site.  Until tomorrow and day two of VMworld…

There have been many Tweets and Blog posts (here’s just one example) about the two events being so close together and the impact on attendance and this is my view on the discussion. The general consensus seems to be the San Francisco VMworld is the “better” one as it has far more lab time, probably due to it being a day longer. But also it is the first one and therefore the news will be announced there and Copenhagen will just be a regurgitation of the San Francisco content.

Having the two events virtually back to back is a mistake in my view. Firstly, the perception that Copenhagen is a lesser event due to fewer days and secondly, because both events will suffer in terms of attendee numbers. By holding the events so close together VMware also loses the opportunity to announce major news twice in one year.

Other than lower attendance numbers, VMware also runs the risk of lower income from the sponsors. For some of the smaller eco-system partners, that would have attended both Cannes and San Francisco, having both events so close together is a huge impact on their resources, not just financial but also human. The smaller sponsors, in all probability, would have at least 50% of their staff, if not more, attend both events. They cannot afford to have those folks out of the office for over 2 weeks virtually back-to-back. The other consideration is the type of sponsorship package they would take. If the events were separated by 6 months or so, they would probably take a larger booth at VMworld SanFran and may take a slightly less sponsorship at VMworld Europe. However, I personally know of vendors that have decided to take a considerably smaller sponsorship at VMworld Europe as they too feel Copenhagen is a “lesser” event. This is probably mainly true of US-based vendors but it should still be a concern for VMware. One vendor actually told me when the decision was taken to move the European event from February to October that it would be the death knell for VMworld Europe.

Apart from the overall decision in timing to be a mistake, I also think the location is a mistake. Again, there have been many Tweets about the Copenhagen event being more expensive, for less content, than VMworld SanFran. In part this is due to exchange rate, coupled with the Nordic region being generally expensive. Moreover I think it is a mistake because Copenhagen in October can be pretty unpleasant weather-wise (this is true of most of Northern Europe, so I’m not picking on Denmark, honest!), and the event location is a distance from the main town. Whilst the Palais de Congres in Cannes may be a 1960’s concrete architectural nightmare, at least the location enables VMware to brand the whole area in the local vicinity and the weather in February in the French Riviera is most pleasant!

I do believe there must have been much debate about this internally at VMware and I think that most people agree with me (and many others) that holding the two events so close together is a mistake. But I do hope for the person (or department) that took the decision to ignore the majority of input on moving from February to right after VMworld SanFran, their decision will be right and we will be wrong. However, I will make a prediction; next year, if not the following, the VMworld events will revert to being 6 months apart again.

Jane Rimmer is owner of hiviz-marketing , a strategic marketing consultancy servicing the IT industry.

Well Tom asked me to provide you, his readers, some basics surrounding my black art – Marketing!  This post, therefore, is intended for readers that would like to understand how marketing can help their business, have a fundamental belief that it can, but yet don’t have a clue where to start.

Whilst marketing as a science is deployed in organisations in very different ways – depending upon budgets, size of company, company objectives etc. – there are some basic rules that apply across the spectrum.  I will share some of them with you in the hope that even if you’re an SMB with absolutely no budget assigned to marketing, there are ways that the “black art” can assist you. read more »

A you may already know, Myself and Cody Bunch have actually managed to get a session accepted for VMworld,

The TA8623’s session details are shown below

Session Details:

Now the format for this fun packed session is open format questions from the floor, however some times you little session attendee’s are a little bit shy in coming forward to ask the questions, so I am opening this up to the community. Please add any questions that you would like to ask the panellists as comment to this post, 

Cody and I will choose the best 5 to be used as filler questions, 

so thanks in anticipation.

A change for the usual VMware ESX type post today,  I have recently been working with Server core for the first time,  and have found out that I actually like it :S.  That said for those of you that have been weaned on a GUI it is a bit of a culture shock.

So below are some commands that I hope you will find useful in configuring your ServerCore windows 2008 machine.

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New Security advisory regarding VUM

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Vyatta are slowly becoming one of my favourite networking start-ups…
Not only do they have a first class Router and Firewall/VPN product – boasting higher performance than Cisco – that they give to the community (here), they now offer free training at the Vyatta University!

Back in March, Vyatta Core reached v6.0 providing additional features that make their product more attractive to the enterprise.

• Netflow / sFlow logging and analysis
• 802.11 wireless LAN – (access point + base station)
• Binary image installation – (version mgmt)
• IPv6 readiness (core routing and firewall)
• Firewall enhancements
  • IPv6 firewall
  • P2P firewall
  • time-based and zone-based firewall rules
• QoS Enhancements

You may have read my post on using Vyatta as a Router-in-a-box for VMware and Citrix…
Seeing how this is such an attractive use case for this product, Vyatta have published a course detailing  installation, verification and basic configuration of Vyatta OVF and XVA virtual appliances for adding routing & security to VMware ESX and XenServer environments.

To sign up for the free video click here or to view all Vyatta training offerings click here

I very much like Vyatta’s approach, offering the Core Edition to the community with support subscription available as an uplift and it is even more refreshing to see Training following in the footsteps.
A strong community and easy access to resources  satisfies engineers and will yield a greater amount of knowledgeable/certified individuals should Vyatta choose to go down this route.

Perhaps more Networking vendors could learn from this…