VMTN Blog

Last week, we posted slides and audio from many of the sessions at VMworld 2006. This week we also added the lab manuals.

I think it's unusual to package up most of a conference and make it available on the web to everyone. We hope this content is useful whether you came to VMworld or not. We track the downloads, but we'd love to hear from you in the comments if you found it valuable.

We haven't packaged these up in a podcast feed for several reasons.

1. Most people won't want to download and listen to 100+ hours of audio.
2. The audio isn't nearly as useful without looking at the slides, although I know of one person who listened to all of VMworld 2005 while painting his house.
3. This is pretty much the full list we will be publishing this year -- there won't be additional sessions coming out over time.

Link: VMworld 2006 Conference Sessions

Over 7000 attendees came to VMworld 2006 on November 7-9 in Los Angeles to participate in the leading virtualization industry conference.

The following selection of presentations and associated podcasts highlights the breadth and depth of the technical sessions presented at VMworld 2006. Enjoy!

Alessandro Perilli of firtualization.info was at VMworld 2006 and gives his wrap-up.

It's a long and thoughtful post, so read the whole thing, as they say. His takeaways were:

• The explicit message of this year has been: software as a service (SaaS).
• The implicit message has been: focus on Enterprises.
• The overall theme has been competition.
• Among several notable sessions it's worth to mention:
  • General sessions
  • VMmark
  • Lab Manager 2.4
  • Next generation ESX Server Storage architecture
  • Workstation 6.0
  • ACE 2.0
  • Workstation for Mac OS (codename Fusion)
• What has been announced during the conference timeframe:
• A final word on the event itself

He's very correct that the focus was on Virtual Appliances and the Changing Role of the OS, on the future of virtualization in the Enterprise, and in trying to foster growth and communication in the whole industry, including VMware' s competitors. The most interesting to me were Alessandro's thoughts on (1) the absence of VMware Server and small-medium business content at VMworld -- as Raghu Raghuram is quoted, we want to work better with small business in 2007 and (2) some very practical comments about the virtualization benchmarking work (VMmark), which although it mirrors real-world scenarios (a mix of OSes and workloads), doesn't allow comparing with single-OS partitioning solutions. In the hands of an organization like SPEC, I'm sure the correct goals and outcomes can be aligned for a virtualization benchmark.

Sun's Warren Ponder was at VMworld and had so much traffic his voice gave out by day 2:

The big buzz was unquestionably desktop virtualization. Diane Greene - President of VMware made it very clear in Tuesdays  keynote that desktop virtualization is happening now and taking off. I strongly recommend you visit VMware's website and  look at the presentation from the keynote.

The feedback from existing Sun customers and the ones that had no idea we offered compelling desktop solutions, was very clear. WOW you guys are doing some really cool stuff. Of course, I am slightly biased and agree we are doing some cool stuff. We also have some work to do too make it better in my opinion. There was only a small handful of people that had requirements that we could not meet and I actually recommended they consider another solution. We are  not going to be the best fit for everyone and this is OK. I did find it ironic though, one of them kept coming back with more questions.

I have a pretty good idea of what  others are doing with their solutions. Most of which, I have started calling a "Desktop on a Desktop". Guess what? The customers are as well! Customers are smart, they are not stupid and I knew it was only a matter of time before they bushwhacked through most of the hype around some of the other solutions out there. Several people made it very clear our solution is the only solution that provides a seemless user experience and appears to be the most streamlined. I try to be fair, we know where our gaps are and I really make an effort not to hide them. I make it clear where we feel we need to improve and listen closely to customers about where they would like to see our solution improve.

Bob Roudebush gives his list of the most interesting news from VMworld, including

• Lab Manager ("Especially interesting: Multiple remote control sessions through the browser interface and the network fencing functionality which keeps test machines from creating conflicts with one another and other machines on the production environment."),
• Virtual Appliances,
• Workstation 6.0 ("I don’t want to come across sounding like a VMware fanboy, but there really is nothing else to do but gush over the progress the development teams have made on this product. While products like Virtual PC have sat stagnate for years, VMW 6 has a list of new functionality that is literally two pages long."), and
• VMware on the Mac.

Brian Berliner gives a wrap-up that lists

• Workstation 6.0 ("The killer feature here is the Record/Replay capability. Nice."),
• ACE 2.0 ("There is absolutely big money to be made here, as IT environments continue to pendulum swing of distributed vs centralized administration and the need to reduce the amount of human time consumed by client administration and maintenance."), 
• the Virtual Appliances Marketplace ("After all, who really wants to install 10 different open source applications just to be able to test out your particular solution?"),
• AMD & Intel's upcoming virtualized memory management, and
• Lab Manager.   

More from Mike Laverick at RTFM Education on the last day of VMworld:
Performance on Citrix:

The actual session turned up no surprises from what we have all gathered from the Forum’s and experience. Single CPU VM’s for MFPS are the way to go; Turning off hyper-threading is still recommended; ESX 3.x offers much better user concurrency than ESX 2.x…. with ALL usual cavats that it depends on your APP and your user activity.

Networking Scenarios & Troubleshooting:

One of the outstanding session of my time here at VMworld. I really couldn’t fault either content or the guy who delivered the stuff. He really knew his stuff - and some more. I will be definitely taking some of this stuff and re-working it into the classes I teach (time permitting)

When you get the chance to download the PDF of this session - make sure you do.

My only gripe - was some of my top questions, this guy wasn’t able to answer. Like clunkiness of the iSCSI setup when you have CHAP authentication; how you can’t reliably and effectively create vmkernel switches with that X in the box to enable VMotion and so on. We were treated to some “pat” answers on that which I just don’t buy.

Troubleshooting Unleashed:

Well, this is my 2nd or 3rd “troubleshooting” style sessions, and unfortunately they are beginning to form a pattern. With very obivious recommendations (such as document, be logical, read log files). This one was a cut above the average session of this type. With a REAL engineer talking about the REAL problems he has faced. Hey, what a novel idea! Troubleshooting based on real experiences (plenty of irony intended!) ... So in short - for future reference. More examples. More war-stories. Keep it snappy…

VMotion between Apples & Oranges:

This was a very interesting session. It took my already good knowledge about some of the processor compatiablities to a new level. I would strongly urge those who were unable to attend this years VMworld to review the PDF of PPT when you have time. ...

[Y]ou will be glad to know that I have taken the decision to try and galvanise some of the Forum members who have been intelligentally experimenting with this feature. Because of the hardware involved this can’t be a one-man-rtfm-effort. It’s going to take a community response. If VMware won’t or can’t give us all info we need - we’re going to figure out for ourselves.

VMworld is a pretty challenging event to develop  -- although everybody's excited to be there, experience levels vary from "boss sent me here to find out about virtualization" to "been using ESX Server since its first beta." We send a large number of our R&D staff to these events, though, precisely so you can dive deep when you need to. Scott Lowe has decided he'll focus just on the deep technical for next near: VMworld 2006 Day 3 and Wrap-Up.

It actually turns out that many of the sessions to which I had looked forward turned out not to provide as much “technical meat” as I had hoped they would.  That’s not to say that they weren’t helpful, since I was still able to glean some useful ideas and helpful tips here and there.  For example, while the command-line session I attended on Day 1 didn’t unveil any major information I didn’t already know, I was able to pick up a couple of useful tricks (like Tab-Tab to show all possible commands that match what you’ve typed—of course, this is a shell feature not a VMware feature).  Likewise, in the NetApp session I mentioned earlier, their discussion of the use of tiered storage (classified as gold, silver, and bronze) and the construction of service levels and service management around those classifications was a pretty good idea.  Even so, I had really hoped that the sessions would be much more technical in nature than they were.

Next year (assuming I get the opportunity to attend), I’ll probably focus almost exclusively on the “internals in-depth” sessions.  The networking internals session I attended was very informative and very technical and helped deepen my understanding of how VMware’s networking infrastructure actually works.  For me, at least, having a deeper understanding of how it works means that it is easier for me to find new ways of utilizing the functionality or integrating the functionality into a customer’s existing infrastructure.

(And congrats on the VCP, Scott!)

VMware's Richard Garsthagen and Jeremy van Doorn have a video report from VMworld.  They visit several booths at the Solutions Exchange floor and cover:

• Kidaro - An addon product for desktop virtualization that provides central management and intelligent update capabilities for virtual machines. Plus an amazing technology that allows you to integrate applications run in a virtual machine with the actual local desktop. Very simulair to the seamless windows technology from Citrix but then not for a remote session, but for an local isolated session (a VM).
• VMware Fusion - a demonstration of the new upcomming product for the Mac. With VMware Fusion you can run any kind of VM including 64 bit operating systems, have USB 2 support so you can access the iSight camera in your VM and use the bluetooth within any VM to connect to other devices. Can’t wait to have the product released and run it on my Mac.
• Dunes VS-O - Demonstration of the power of Dunes Virtual Service Orchestrator. A powerful graphical programming interface to write your own applications or buy existing Templates like their Desktop Orchestrator to manage VDI (centrally hosted desktop clients) environments. Dunes also just released special pricing for independent developers that want to use their technology.
• Microsoft Virtual Appliance Initiative - An interview with Tony Bailey, the senior product manager of Server Virtualization at Microsoft explaining the new Virtual Appliance Test Drive program from Microsoft. The Test Drive program allows Software Vendors to use the Microsoft Windows operating system in their virtual appliances that they can redistribute to potential customers for evaluation purpose.

Techworld's Manek Dubah on VMworld, covering new features in Workstation, ACE, and Mendel Rosenblum's keynote: VMware reveals new product features.

The new version [of ACE] was created, according to VMware, because users asked for greater control over the VMs, especially when, for instance, large numbers of remote users need to attach to the enterprise network. Other areas due for improvement include security and integration with enterprise management tools. ...

Central control is achieved by means of a new product, ACE Management Server, which provides a central view of and control over ACE VMs. The VMs have to check into the server at admin-defined intervals, which allows them to control attributes such as expiry date f the VM, and what it can attach to.

ACE VMs will also be able to run from a USB flash drive, providing amore convenient mechanism for their distribution.

The VMworld 2006 party was held Thursday night at Universal Studios. After the huge crowds made it into the park, a good time was had by all.

Alex Weeks of vi411.org:

The lines to get in the rides were short and the rides themselves were fun. My personaly favorite was the Mummy, with Back to the Future a close second.

The other nice thing about the event was the change to kick back and shoot the breeze with some of the folks from VMware. I live in California, but deal with folks from across the country and don’t always get face to face interaction. This event was a good chance to hang out a little and get to know people.

VMware: Great Event!

Edward Aractingi:

VMware Party at Universal Studios was a great fun after a long day. People were having great time, surrounded by friendly atmosphere and good weather. A lot of food, drinks, and activities. Everything was provided by VMware, even the buckets of rings, basketballs and baseballs to give you a chance to win something (I got a nice stuffed elephant for my daughter!). I also enjoyed Terminator 2 in 3D . Geeks were chatting about technology, counting VMs, hosts, but not beers. We had a blast.... Thank you VMware!

Update: David Marshall, after the initial bus bottleneck, also had a good time:

After eating and drinking, I took in the fun.  The carnival type entertainment was open, and since it was free, you didn't mind trying out the impossible carnival games that your kids usually make you spend $100 on trying to win a $5 stuffed animal. 

It was like having a fast pass, no lines to worry about on anything.  What a great way to actually see Universal Studio... seriously, there is no better way than this.  We walked right into everything.

 

The panelists gave lots of details about the environments in which they run Lab Manager, but I'll summarize the key benefits and issues.  One customer tests against a huge set of permutations of software,  and needed a way to manage the process.  Another customer needed to manage the check-in / check-out of virtual machine images used by developers, which had been done via removable hard-drives on a central set of servers.  The third customer needed to reduce headcount and overhead in provisioning development environments.

One issue faced is resource allocation.  Lab Manager requires lots of IP addresses and lots of SAN storage -- or you'll run out of capacity.  While Lab Manager makes it easy to copy VMs and store them efficiently, you still need more resources as you make more VMs, and you need to plan for it.  One solution for managing IP addresses is to put a router in front of the lab so that it has its own IP address space.  Each customer also had his own method of managing software licenses, including the MSDN subscriptions that their developers used and Windows OS licenses.

Panelists' large development environments (all three, PGP Corporation, Wonderware, and Princeton Softech, are software development companies) face some common issues, including patching guest OSes -- although one customer said that in moving from Akimbi on GSX Server to Lab Manager on ESX Server meant they didn't need to worry about host OS patching anymore. 

Handling VM sprawl is another issue because developers happily provision new machines, but forget to de-provision them when they are done, so they continue to use up server resources.  Steve Kishi, VMware Product Manager, helpfully suggested a lifetime policy when a VM is provisioned, so that at the end of its predetermined life, unless explicit user action is taken, the VM gets automatically archived, freeing up the server resources. In the meantime, at least one customer set up an automated notification system warning users their VMs would be archived.  Steve also recommended installing Lab Manager and seeing what it uses based on your environment, and then scaling resources appropriately.  I guess Steve's a good salesman, since some one of the panelists and at least one audience member indicated that once Lab Manager is installed, users get hooked and don't want to give it up.