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Category Archives: Cloud Computing

In a Highly Competitive and Fragmented Market, Healthcare ISVs Look to Alliances for Success

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Pramod m
Posted by Pramod
Mahadevan
Technical Alliance Mgr.

For healthcare Independent Software Vendors, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the market is growing rapidly. As an example, look at the electronic medical record (EMR) segment: a recent analyst report predicts 18% annual growth in EMR spending from 2010 through 2015 which is proving to be accurate. The outlook is similar for segments such as picture archiving and information systems (PACS), point of care systems, and health information systems (HIS) for radiology, emergency, surgery, pharmacy, laboratory, and many other specialties.

But the bad news is the highly competitive and fragmented nature of the healthcare market—the EMR segment alone has more than 1,000 players. As a result, ISVs have to achieve competitive differentiation through not just product features, but the ability to meet stringent availability, security and performance requirements that is cost effective for the customer —or risk being overlooked in major procurements. The nature of the competition is also changing. In the past, ISVs won new business with features and functionality. Now, the battleground has shifted to IT issues such as availability, security, performance, compliance and user experience— areas where many ISVs have to invest time and resources on addressing infrastructure issues rather than innovation around their products.

That’s why the most successful healthcare ISVs are building on alliances with data center vendors such as VMware to offer joint solutions for hospitals, clinics, and physician offices. VMware Technology Alliance Partners in the healthcare space include both market leaders and innovative startups. By partnering with VMware, healthcare ISVs can offer validated virtualized solutions that address their customers’ key concerns about availability, scalability, reliability, and performance. VMware technology also provides deployment options: ISVs can deliver clinical applications on-premise or via the cloud.

Healthcare partners

VMware healthcare solutions address three primary areas: Private/Public Cloud for Healthcare, point of care solutions, and compliance and automation.

HC2

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Pearson, a Leading Learning Company, Validates Educational Solutions with VMware View

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Screen shot 2012-06-25 at 9.29.59 AM
Posted by Laurynas
Kavaliauskas
Alliance Systems Engineer

Once upon a time, schools relied only on books to support classroom learning. Today, Pearson’s SuccessMaker and Waterford Early Learning digital programs provide elementary and middle school learners with adaptive, personalized paths to master essential reading, math and science concepts. They also deliver outcome-based data—electronically—to inform educational decision-making.

Educators praise these advancements, but rapidly changing technology has made it difficult for schools to retain control and still provide access flexibility taking full advantage of Pearson’s award-winning solutions. Today’s K-12 administrators are looking for ways to keep improving how students learn while reducing costs and maintaining the highest quality educational resources. Fortunately, an ideal solution is now available.

Pearson customers now can deploy and use both SuccessMaker and Waterford Early Learning on the VMware View end user computing platform. VMware View is designed to deliver the entire desktop—operating system, applications and end-user data—using multiple types of clients (e.g., thick, thin and zero clients), reducing IT investments. The virtual desktop platform also improves application up time, decreasing system maintenance requirements.

Pearson and VMware recently completed the testing to validate both Pearson SuccessMaker and Waterford Early Learning solutions with VMware View. View the testing details, as well as the advantages, technical considerations and recommendations for using each solution. Figure 1 shows a typical architecture for deploying these Pearson programs with VMware View.

Figure 1. VMware View is Fully Compatible with Pearson’s SuccessMaker and Waterford Early Learning Programs
Pearson

Schools Benefit from Pearson-VMware Relationship
With VMware View, K-12 schools can significantly reduce the time and effort they spend on IT maintenance for desktop support. For example, when a student’s desktop malfunctions or fails, VMware View enables a designated administrator to reset the desktop to its original image, rapidly and remotely in minutes, with no direct intervention.

In addition to time and cost savings, the easy-to-deploy VMware View solution enables K-12 schools to:

  • Increase control by providing centralized and automated management of VMware View Virtual Desktop components
  • Gain freedom of choice by delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops as a managed service to many types of clients—thick, thin, and zero clients—anywhere and at any time
  • Improve performance and uptime while providing a flexible, high-performance desktop experience for end users across a variety of network conditions

For Pearson customers, it’s happily ever after with VMware View. To learn more, download the Deployment and Technical Considerations Guide.

World Record Two Socket VMmark Results Just Announced – Driving More Customer Value

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Paul Jones
Posted by Paul Jones
HP WW Business Partner
Manager, VMware

On May 15th, HP posted new VMmark 2.0 results based on our ProLiant DL360p Gen8 server. These results represent the best two socket performance we’ve ever seen. In fact, just 2 weeks earlier we posted two socket results for our Gen8 DL380p server which eclipsed the previous record. Now with the latest posting we have taken another step forward, providing evidence that Moore’s Law is still in play.

Everyone knows that benchmarking is a leap-frog business and the next results are probably not far away. In the race to drive virtualization performance to record highs, it is easy to overlook the real reason we continue to innovate and to wring every cycle of capability out of the server infrastructure.  Performance ultimately enables real customer value. Performance really does matter to our customers, though they may not think of it in terms of VMmark scores or tiles.

Performance matters because it is one of the key factors in driving up VM density. VM density is closely linked to efficiency in the data center and efficiency is a big deal for IT and Business.  Fewer hosts, higher consolidation ratios means better use of floor space, less power, less cooling – overall more intelligent use of facilities – very green.  While VM density is driven by many factors, including storage performance and latency – see HP’s Get Virtual program with 3PAR website for additional tools – the ability to host more virtual machines in your infrastructure starts with server performance.

You can see in the posting notices below from the VMmark website, HP ProLiant Gen8 servers are once again leading the pack in virtualization performance, but it doesn’t stop there.

Hp graphic

When we created ProLiant Gen8 we went back to the drawing board, questioning every assumption about how our servers are used in real world environments. And the result of all that work is a set of revolutionary enhancements that make IT infrastructure easier to manage, faster to deploy, and less expensive to own. Features like our Integrated Lifecycle Automation, which eliminates labor intensive tasks, to Dynamic Workload Acceleration that amps up VMware performance to Automated Energy Optimization for maximizing the efficient use of power, cooling and floor space – all contribute to a better customer experience and the ability to ‘sanely’ host more VMs.

So, we are excited about the VMmark results and how customers can realize the benefits of continuing gains in performance – and especially anxious to demonstrate some of the cool new capabilities mentioned above to make their lives easier.

VMware asks IBM a Few Questions About IBM Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) 5000V

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Rakesh-bio-pic
Posted by Rakesh Saha, IBM
Director, Product Management

Q: What is the current state of the art for networking in large-scale, highly virtualized data centers?

A: With the vast majority of IT organizations now implementing virtualization, clients are seeking to dramatically reduce cost and complexity in highly virtualized data centers. In today’s data center environments, server virtualization is often managed separately from physical infrastructure, requiring the collaboration of server, network, storage, and security administrators. Data center managers are seeking a consistent networking environment across virtual and physical environments, so that virtual and physical servers can use the same configurations, policies and management tools. Network policies should migrate automatically along with mobile virtual machines to ensure that security, performance and access remains intact as virtual machines move from server to server. 

Q: What are the standards in this area?

A: To address the need for massively scalable, highly virtualized data centers, key standards have emerged for network virtualization automation. IBM System Networking has developed and delivered the new IBM Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) 5000V™ alongside switch-resident IBM VMready®, so clients can implement standards-based network virtualization in today’s I/O-intensive virtual switch environments. Using IBM’s innovative VMready virtualization-aware networking on IBM RackSwitch™, as well as embedded Ethernet switches for IBM BladeCenter® and IBM FlexSystems®, along with IBM’s DVS 5000V as the virtual switch in VMware environments, clients can radically simplify and automate virtualization management. VMready works with all the major hypervisors and supports the IEEE 802.1Qbg standard for automating Virtual Machine mobility. VMware clients can further optimize and automate virtualization management with more advanced capabilities using the new IBM virtual switch.

Q: What is the IBM Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V?

A: The IBM System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V is an advanced, feature-rich distributed virtual switch developed by IBM in cooperation with VMware with policy-based virtual machine (VM) connectivity. The IBM Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) 5000V enables network administrators familiar with IBM System Networking switches to manage the IBM DVS 5000V just like IBM physical switches using advanced networking, troubleshooting and management features so the virtual switch is no longer hidden and difficult to manage.

  IBM box

Q: What does support for 802.1Qbg across physical and virtual infrastructures enable?

A: Support for Edge Virtual Bridging (EVB) based on the IEEE 802.1Qbg standard enables scalable, flexible management of networking configuration and policy requirements per VM and eliminates many of the networking challenges introduced with server virtualization. The IBM DVS 5000V works with VMware vSphere 5.0 and beyond and interoperates with any 802.1Qbg-compliant physical switch to enable switching of local VM traffic in the hypervisor or in the upstream physical switch.  No fork lift of physical edge switches is required — a simple firmware upgrade enables IEEE 802.1Qbg support on IBM physical switches. Virtual Machine (VM) traffic is switched at the device — virtual or physical — nearest to the VM in the traditional vSwitch EVB mode or in the transparent or reflective relay VEPA mode. IBM System Networking DVS 5000V is highly recommended for VM switching in VMware vSphere enterprise data center solutions – it designed from the ground up to automate and scale any highly virtualized enterprise workload.

Q: How can a large-scale distributed enterprise business benefit? 

A: The standards-based network virtualization awareness, automation and “Virtual Vision” provided by IBM’s DVS 5000V and VMready provides synergy between VMware and IBM, demonstrates the healthy ecosystem in virtualization-aware networking, and ensures that clients have freedom of choice to implement a multi-vendor network infrastructure that is equipped, enabled and scalable for massive virtualization – with support for up to 4,000 Virtual Machines ports across up to 350 VMware ESX hypervisors in a standards-based approach that enables clients to implement an integrated system network across physical and virtual networks. Target VMware clients for IBM system networks equipped with VMready running on physical switches and DVS 5000V as the virtual switch are ideally those that already use or plan to deploy IBM systems.

For more information on joint IBM and VMware solutions visit the IBM Alliance page or leave a comment below.

Be Sure to Visit VMware at HP Discover!

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Jworkmanphoto
Posted by Jay Workman
HP Alliance Marketing
Director

HP Discover 2012 is just around the corner and as a major sponsor, VMware, will be showcasing our breath of solutions with HP. Las Vegas the week of June 4th will definitely be the place to be if you want to learn how virtualization and cloud computing solutions from VMware running on HP Converged Infrastructure can take your business to the next level.

Make plans to visit the VMware booth (#406) to learn how you can securely manage your cloud, virtualize your business critical applications, enable secure access for remote workers from virtually any device, save ongoing OpEx with Hybrid Clouds and much more! You’ll also be able to sit in on various booth theater presentations and we’ll have VMware experts on-hand to answer your questions about our joint solutions with HP! Sit in on any three of the VMware business or technical sessions listed below and you’ll be entered into a drawing for one of three new Apple iPad’s to be given away at the show. Details are in your conference attendee bag or available at the VMware booth!

VMware Sessions:

Session ID

Title

Day

Time

PSS3302

Cloud Infrastructure, applications, and users: How VMware brings it all together

Tuesday

1:30 PM

BB3303

Haven't virtualized critical applications?  Don't be passed by competitors

Tuesday

2:45 PM

TB2270

A hardened cloud infrastructure with VMware

Tuesday

4:00 PM

BB3304

Security, productivity and compliance in a BYOD World

Tuesday

4:00 PM

TB2755

Implementing a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster with the HP LeftHand

Tuesday

4:00 PM

BB3305

Lowering your costs again – with a Hybrid Cloud

Wednesday

1:30 PM

TB3258

The benefits and right practices of using 10Gb Ethernet with VMware vSphere 5.0

Wednesday

2:45 PM

TB2944

HP and VMware: building the cloud

Wednesday

2:45 PM

TB2756

Simplicity of an automated recovery plan with 3PAR and VMware SRM

Wednesday

4:00 PM

TB2941

Accelerating vMotion with the HP FlexFabric

Wednesday

5:15 PM

TB2102

HP and VMware: fast path to virtualization value and foundation for cloud

Wednesday

5:15 PM

BB2966

Why VMware choose HP ALM to manage its next-generation product lifecycles

Thursday

10:00 AM

BB2420  

VMware’s perspective on reducing lifecycle costs  with HP VirtualSystem for VMware

Thursday

2:45 PM

Follow @VMwareEvents on Twitter to receive news and information live from the show floor. We look forward to seeing you at HP Discover 2012 in June!

EMC and VMware Partner to Develop New Storage Analytics Suite Powered by vCenter Operations

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Rob Smoot
Posted by Rob Smoot
Sr. Director, Product
Marketing

At EMC World this week, VMware and EMC announced a joint solution that extends vCenter Operations Manager to provide a single view of virtualized infrastructures built on VMware vSphere and EMC VNX series storage. I’m pretty excited about our partnership with EMC and wanted to let our customer community know what we’re doing and why.

First, the why. What problem are we trying to solve? Think of the traditional division of responsibilities between server and storage administrators. Today’s virtualized environments are so dynamic that split decision-making leads to poor performance, capacity planning, and utilization. The reason is obvious: neither group has all the necessary information about the infrastructure and they can’t effectively coordinate their activities fast enough to meet service levels—or the expectations of users. Plus, troubleshooting across siloes is a time-consuming, frustrating nightmare. What’s needed is a unified approach.

And that’s just what this solution provides. The secret is the new EMC VNX Connector for vCenter Operations that feeds VNS storage metrics and customized dashboards into vCenter Operations Manager. This rich stream of information, combined with vSphere deep integration, gives vCenter Operations Manager complete visibility and understanding of the full virtual environment—servers, network and storage.  A good fit for any size enterprise that uses VNX storage, the solution scales up for large cloud environments that are especially dynamic and difficult to manage.

vCenter Operations Manager offers a number of features that help administrators stay in control.  They receive notifications of issues and can take steps to keep the infrastructure running at optimal capacity and efficiency—before problems occur. Customizable dashboards continuously update health, risk, and efficiency scores, providing end-to-end visibility into virtualized environments and cloud operations.  Troubleshooting gets easier, too, because vCenter Operations Manager delivers actionable performance analysis that accelerates the resolution of performance and capacity problems.

But what distinguishes vCenter Operations Manager from other management tools is how it implements proactive monitoring.  It actually has self-learning capabilities—powered by a rich set of patented algorithms—that learn the behavior of the infrastructure and set dynamic thresholds accurately. That means far fewer false messages and more reliable information for decision-making.

Vcenter

 

 

vCenter Operations Manager is continuously updated to show current scores for health, risk, and efficiency.

 

There’s a lot more that I could say, but here’s the bottom line: VMware vCenter Operations manager, with EMC VNX Connector for vCenter Operations, delivers full cross-domain visibility and eliminates operational silos across the virtual and physical infrastructure for VNX-based environments. And that translates directly into rapid problem resolution, optimal resource utilization and superior end-to-end performance.  A future blog will talk about real-world uses. Meanwhile, post your thoughts and questions about the joint EMC-VMware announcement.

 

 

CloudOne Hosts IBM Rational Tools in the Cloud

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JustinMurray
Posted by Justin Murray
Systems Engineer

Like everyone else on the planet today, software professionals—developers, QA testers, and group managers—are asking themselves, “How is the cloud going to affect my work?” On the one hand, developers are always looking for better ways to develop, test and integrate code, and they can see how moving certain tasks to the cloud could make their lives easier. At the same time, they need complete control over their rapidly changing code throughout the entire development phase, and question whether cloud-based tools will constrain them. After all, when it comes to the developer’s desktop, freedom of choice is paramount.

Managers share many of their concerns, but also know that strong controls on the iterative check-in/check-out, integration, and testing processes at the back-end are essential to creating a tested, working product. Their wish list is to have the latest tools for development combined with rock-solid version control at the team level.  One company is giving developers and QA testers—and their managers—a great reason to take a hard look at the cloud.  CloudOne, a VMware partner, now offers the IBM Rational tools in a hosted or cloud-based model.

Cloud 1 1
I recently chatted with CEO John McDonald about CloudOne’s hosted offering of IBM Rational ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Team Concert.  Here are highlights of our conversation.

Cloud12
Posted by John McDonald
CEO, CloudOne

Ramp Up Faster with Lower Investment Costs

First, I asked John a basic question: Suppose I’m spinning up a software group and plan to use ClearCase ClearQuest, or Team Concert in my development environment. Why would I choose CloudOne? 

For starters, development groups can benefit from the same economics that are driving enterprises to cloud-based CRM, ERP, and other applications—pay as you go (and grow).  Start with a small Rational environment and scale as you add staff.  Pay a monthly fee instead of investing in server and storage capacity that you might not need for months—or ever. The business model is compelling.

CloudOne also gets you up and running much, much faster—no delays for buying, installing, configuring and deploying servers and software.  You don’t have to devote scarce staff resources to maintaining hardware or installing patches or the million-and-one tasks required to manage a Rational environment.  CloudOne does all that so you can spend your time developing software.
Cloud13

Securing the Crown Jewels

John was once a software manager at IBM, so he knows first-hand the number one concern of development teams: security.  After all, source code is the organization’s crown jewels and managers are understandably reluctant to trust it to someone else.

CloudOne has a unique and effective response, what they call an isolated occupancy service model.  By privatizing the data stream at every layer, they can deploy a secure virtual private cloud (VPC)—in their terminology, an Island.  There’s only one client per Island, so there’s essentially zero chance of anyone compromising their information.  Plus, they use leading-edge WAN technology to ensure a high level of performance. That’s a big part of CloudOne’s success—make it secure, make it perform, and keep the implementation details out of the way.

Making Headway—And Leveraging VMware Technology

Look under the hood of CloudOne and you’ll find VMware vSphere virtualization software and vCenter management tools.  VMware technology allows data center managers to rapidly provision virtual machines for ClearCase and ClearQuest and reclaim those resources quickly when they are no longer needed. It also gives CloudOne maximum flexibility to allocate computing and storage as needed and offers a high level of security.

CloudOne is gaining traction—McDonald’s, Fidelity, and Boeing are customers. Some analysts predict that, in just a few years, hosted applications will generate more revenue than their on-premises counterparts.  That remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt that the cloud is transforming software development. In fact, I’ll be writing soon about new CloudOne innovations for the developer desktop.  You can also learn more about CloudOne’s SaaS approach to delivering Rational software by downloading this white paper.

In the meantime, tell us about your experiences with cloud-based software development—good, bad, or indifferent.

To read more about the business benefits that a customer gained by implementing their Rational environment on the cloud  have a look at this paper.

VMware at EMC World + Instagram

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Share your VMware Instagram experience at EMC World, and win a prize! From May 21-24th at EMC World in Las Vegas, drop by VMware booth #201 to pick up your “VMware +_______” paddle, which is shown above.

See the instructions on the back of the paddle and upload your photos to VMwares Instagram page – it’s easy! Please be sure to upload using the hashtags #EMCworld and #VMwarePlus, so we can seed your photos into the VMware at EMC World + Instagram page. Three prizes will be awarded for the most creative #VMwarePlus photos.

You can still participate even if you can’t attend EMC World! Since we are collecting all of the #EMCworld photos you can check out the sights of the conference as they unfold in real-time on the VMware Instagram page.

Not an Instagram user?  Just download the app to your smartphone for free. Click here for Andriod users or here for iPhone users to get started.

In the comments section of this post, please let us know how your experience was with #VMwarePlus and if you have any questions.

Be sure to follow @VMwareEvents and @VMware_Partners for more information during the conference.

Validation with SAP Signals Strong Support for Virtualization & Cloud Infrastructure

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Andre Kemp
Posted by Andre Kemp
Principal – SAP Business
Practice, Americas

In a post last week, Elliot Fliesler alluded to some exiting news that we would soon share around our SAP partnership. And where better to finally unveil that news than at Sapphire Now 2012 and here on our alliances blog?  It’s now official: SAP has validated its Sybase High Performance OLTP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) Database on VMware cloud infrastructure.

This validation announcement is notable for a number of reasons:

  • It assures customers and prospects running SAPSybase ASE databases as virtual machines that they can achieve high-performance results that match their physical infrastructure.
  • It enables customers and prospects to stop worrying about virtualizing business-critical applications—including their most important databases.
  • It signals the beginning of further testing by VMware and SAP to support the virtualization of other key SAP products, such as SAP Sybase IQ, Replication Server and SQL Anywhere on VMware cloud infrastructure.

 Commentary from the Show

One of the reasons I enjoy coming to Sapphire every year is to hear firsthand how customers are currently using and prospects are thinking about using our joint solutions and services. Yesterday, I co-presented a session (2307) with one of our customers, Fonterra. This $16B (NZD) dairy company virtualized its entire SAP landscape in 2010 and is now deploying automated disaster recovery on the VMware vSphere® platform.

From Fonterra and other attendees, I have learned that the launch of vSphere 5 has really done more to unlock the potential value of SAP landscapes. For example, customers virtualizing their SAP landscape with VMware solutions are benefitting from enhanced business agility. They also are able to provide superior service levels and improve asset turnover while lowering TCO.

More customers today are moving from server consolidation (the IT Production phase that begins the VMware Journey) into virtualizing business-critical applications (phase two or the Business Production phase). What this tells us is that a greater number and a wider variety of customers—enterprises and small and midsize businesses (SMBs)—are embracing IT transformation. They are all moving ahead with us on the journey from virtualization to cloud computing and IT as a service—at their own pace.

As I gather new insights from customers during the many meetings that I’m participating in this week, I’m reminded about how far we have come with virtualization and cloud infrastructure. At first, our products helped technical customers to overcome IT challenges and save money. Now, there is tremendous demand from CIOs and line-of-business stakeholders for more extensive services and solutions that move their business applications to a virtualized and cloud environment that solves real business issues. In this way, we are helping to transform enterprises, and this makes me look forward to working even more closely with SAP on solutions that are yet to come. Let us know how virtualizing SAP has made a difference to your business, in the comments section below.

Sapphire

Photo: A packed VMware theatre session at the booth yesterday.

Transform IT+Business+You with EMC and VMware – See us at EMC World 2012

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Dana v
Posted by Dana Vickey
EMC Alliance Marketing
Director

Whether you are just beginning your journey to your Cloud—or well on your way to IT as a service, see how EMC and VMware help customers transform their business and IT. It’s all at EMC World 2012 on May 21-24th.

Hear Paul Maritz, VMware CEO, speak about the forces shaping Cloud Computing and the next generation IT at his keynote on Tuesday, May 22nd at 8:30AM.

Learn more about EMC and VMware’s joint solutions that can help accelerate your journey to the cloud. Here is just one solution that VMware will be demoing and discussing at EMC World – End User Computing.

Support Your Transformation into the Post-PC Era with End User Computing

To give end users more freedom while IT maintains control, we recently announced unified solutions for the post-PC era. For example, with the newly available VMware View 5.1, your organization can build on the most effective virtualized desktop infrastructure to further end-user computing goals:

  • Simplify – Transform end-user assets from computing silos into centralized managed IT services
  • Manage – Create a single, central point for IT to manage end-user access to IT services across the public and private cloud—with control over when an end user has access and at what level of security
  • Connect – Better connect end users to IT services and to other end users with the freedom to choose the best device, application and service to accomplish a task

At EMC World 2012, we’ll show and tell you more about this vision and our journey stages to support them. Join Scott Davis, VMware end-user computing CTO, for his session on VMware View Deployment Architecture Optimizations. Visit the VMware booth for theater presentations about “What’s New in VMware View 5.1.”

And, just for fun, show us your world. Stop by VMware’s booth #201, and grab a paddle to capture images with VMware. Upload to Instagram using  #VMwarePlus and #EMCworld to see your post.VMware will create a collage with all of the images taken and highlight some fun and interesting ones. Keep an eye out on this blog or follow @VMwareEvents for more information.

Looking forward to seeing you at the conference next week.

EMC World