VMworld2010

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VMworld 2010 General Session, Day 4

Thursday, September 2, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | 7 comments

The VMworld 2010 general session on Thursday, September 2, gets kicked off by pictures of the party last night and opening remarks by Rick Jackson around innovation and the definition of innovation. It was nice to see VMware “tip their hat” to IBM for the creation of virtualization.

The first guest speaker to come up and discuss innovation is Pranav Mistry, who spends some time discussing some of the various next-generation interfaces that he’s created and worked with—things like a virtual mouse, a pen that allows designers to draw on the screen, or a paper interface to computing devices. His ultimate goal is to integrate digital information into the real world. He wants to stop having different interactions with digital and physical and have only a single set of interactions. He shows off a few very interesting demonstrations of an experimental project that involves a device integrating a small projector, a camera, and devices that track hand movement to integrate digital information into the real world. It’s pretty interesting and shows off some exciting integrations that lie ahead.

The next guest is Natan Linder, an Intel fellow and member of the MIT Media Lab. He focuses his discussion around adding I/O to the real world and creating new interfaces. The key project is the LuminAR, which is a robotic lamp that provides a natural interface to the digital world. It’s a pretty interesting project that “breaks pixels free of the screen” and allows you to interact with the digital world wherever an whenever you need. The project is different from Pranav’s in that Natan’s project is focused around augmented reality; Pranav’s work focuses on removing the barriers between digital and physical.

The third and final speaker is Tan Lee, founder of Emotiv Systems, who focuses on a new remote control that uses brain waves to control digital devices. Emotiv is working on “brain computer interface technology”. After discussing what Emotiv has been working on, she invites Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware, who will help demonstrate the Emotiv technology in action. Tan walks Steve through some training actions, and then demonstrates how the system actually works. The demonstration is very impressive, and truly does look like some sort of science fiction technology. It’s quite amazing.

At the completion of Tan’s demonstration, all three speakers join Rick Jackson on the screen for a brief panel discussion.

After the panel discussion concludes, Rick Jackson finally answers the question: what do the Golden Tickets mean? Each Golden Ticket holder will receive their own Emotiv headset. Awesome!

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DV7706: View Composer Technical Deep Dive and Best Practices

Tuesday, August 31, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

This is a liveblog of VMworld 2010 session DV7706, titled “View Composer Technical Deep Dive and Best Practices,” in Moscone West 2004. The presenter(s) are Jeff Whitman and Jim Yanik, both with VMware.

We start out the session with a quick review of some limitations. View Composer has a limit of eight ESX/ESXi hosts in a cluster. This is a VMFS limit involving the number of hosts that are accessing a read-only file at the same time. I wonder if VAAI hardware-assisted locking will affect this limit. As for the total number of VMs, you are limited by the usual suspects—HA failover time, vMotion time to put a host in maintenance most, HA limits, etc.

View Composer is installed as a service on the vCenter Server computer. You can connect View Manager to the View Composer service inside the View Manager configuration dialog box. The presenters do recommend using the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) when configuring the connection between the View Manager and the View Composer service on a vCenter Server instance.

The start of every linked clone is the parent VM. Follow the usual best practices for building the parent VM as included in the documentation from VMware. I couldn’t record any of their recommendations because they didn’t leave on the screen long enough.

The parent VM needs a snapshot before you can create linked clones. Be sure to shut down the VM so that memory state isn’t included. View 4.5 has a new checkbox that allows you to show incompatible images; this was added as a way to help administrators troubleshoot potential problems with incorrectly-taken snapshots. (As an example, a snapshot taken while the VM is running would be incompatible.)

Linked clones can be stored on local or shared storage. You can have multiple linked clones per storage pool, and replica and linked clones can be on the same datastore or different datastores. This is new to View 4.5 and it allows you to store the replica on SSD/EFD for maximum performance but place the linked clone on slower-performing storage. Be aware that this is a potential single point of failure.

View terminology appears to be changing again; what was once the user data disk is now called the persistent disk. In my opinion, VMware needs to settle into some consistent terminology.

Some datastore recommendations include using similarly-sized datastores so that View can load balance the linked clones across the datastores (using round robin) fairly evenly. The number of VMs per datastore is really driven by IOPS; best practices run around “50-64 or maybe 128″ (exact verbiage from the presentation).

Quick definition: A replica consists of a clone of the parent VM plus the selected snapshot. Replicas are thin provisioned. Persistent disks (aka user data disks) are also thin provisioned. View 4.5 also introduces a “disposable” or temporary disk that allows View 4.5 to destroy the temporary disk and reclaim that space on a regular basis. The presenters think that the temporary disk is destroyed every time the user logs off. How does it handle the Windows swapfile then? Finally, View 4.5 also stored the Windows machine password in a separate “internal disk” that simplifies the process of refreshing linked clones when they are member of an Active Directory domain.

The presenter next walks through a comparison of storage utilization both without and with linked clones. It’s a comparison that most people have seen multiple times, nothing terribly new or surprising here.

QuickPrep is included with View Composer, and 4.5 also includes Sysprep. You should use Sysprep only in those instances where you specifically need a new SID; in most cases, having a unique SID isn’t as big of a deal as many people suspect that it is. Sysprep is a lot slower than QuickPrep, so be aware. The selection of QuickPrep/Sysprep on a pool is permanent for the life of that pool; you can’t switch it later.

VDMAdmin.exe is a tool provided with View Manager; it was necessary with previous versions of View to attach/detach user data disks. Persistent disks (the equivalent in View 4.5) can be managed directly inside the View Manager GUI. You can also script the interaction with the persistent disks for greater automation.

The speakers just confirmed, as I already knew, that centralized profile management is not included in VMware View 4.5.

Some troubleshooting tips:

  • All machines have same name and hang on customization - typically caused by a missing agent.
  • If customization fails, check the QuickPrep domain setup in View Manager, Also be sure user has permissions to add and remove computers in Active Directory.
  • DNS, DNS, DNS—name reoslution is critical!
  • Be sure that you have adequate host resources for large refresh or recompose operations.
  • Use View Manager to manipulate View desktops, not vCenter!
  • Don’t use static IP addressing in the parent VM.
  • Use SVIConfig to help troubleshoot View database issues.

You can’t use Storage vMotion with linked clones; it’s not supported.

What’s the best way to handle Patch Tuesday? You can manually apply the patches, test, snapshot, and then recompose. You can also use automatic updates, test, power down and snapshot, and then recompose. Finally, if you are using a third-party agent, remove the agent before snapshotting and recomposing (you don’t want the agent included in the linked clones).

What about antivirus? The traditional method was to install the A/V engine and update definitions only; you would use a recompose to roll out a new engine. You could also not use A/V. Because linked clones are disposable, the impact of not using A/V isn’t as great as you might initially think. With vSphere 4.1 you could use vShield Endpoint, which is an extension of the VMsafe APIs that allow the A/V vendors to completely pull their agents out of the guest VMs.

When planning for business continuity, don’t forget to plan for the View Manager database. For DR, be sure to replicate the View Server and install View Composer on the DR vCenter Server.

That’s it!

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VMworld 2010 Keynote, Day 2

Tuesday, August 31, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

I’m going to try to liveblog the VMworld 2010 keynote this morning. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up with the pace, and hopefully the site won’t melt down from additional traffic. Check back regularly and I’ll update this post as the keynote progresses.

As usual, the general session is opening with a video. This time, it’s a mock documentary discussing “What is the cloud?” The video compares “cloud computing” to pizza. The next reference is to The Matrix, where the narrator of the documentary goes to visit the Oracle and is told his mind is a dumb terminal. Pretty funny!

After the video concludes, VMware Chief Marketing Officer Rick Jackson takes the stage. He shares a few interesting statistics: VMworld 2004 was the first conference with about 1400 guests. Last year, there were about 12,500 guests. This year, now in its seventh year, with about 85 countries represented, there are approximately 17,000 attendees this year. Wow—this is a huge increase over last year! Of those, 4,000 new attendees (first time to the VMworld conference). Fifty-five people have attended every single conference; they are the Alumni Elite.

Rick next discussed the hybrid cloud architecture used to power VMworld 2010. The conference uses two data centers on the East Coast along with a private cloud infrastructure here on site.

Next Rick transitions into a discussion of the phases of virtualization. First there’s IT Production, and that gives customers cost savings. Next comes business production, where “applications run better virtualized”. Rick says that most VMware customers are currently in the business production phase. The third phase is business agility, driven by IT agility and enabled by operational savings and efficiency. This is IT as a Service (ITaaS). Rick stressed the “open” nature of VMware’s solutions, harps on VMware’s broad hardware support. He announces that OVF (Open Virtualization Format) is now an ANSI standard. He also reminds the attendees that VMware is working on standardizing the vCloud API as an open standard.

Rick next introduces Paul Maritz, who comes out on stage to take over the presentation. Paul spends a few minutes discussing the breadth of VMware’s adoption across industries and across geographies. He then transitions into a discussion of the role of the virtualization layer, it’s central role in innovation (and being the focus of innovation), it’s impact on operations, resource allocation, and the consumption of infrastructure. As he moves into the discussion of virtual data centers, it’s pretty clear (to me, at least) where he’s headed—he’s laying some foundations and defining some terms for a product announcement, and wants to be sure that the audience is at the same place he is in their thought processes.

After a lengthy discussion of the three layers that need innovation—new infrastructure, new application platform, and new end user access—he now moves out of the theoretical into the practical by inviting Steve Herrod, VMware’s CTO, out onto the stage.

Steve starts out with a discussion of vSphere and the vSphere 4.1 release. He reviews a few maximums and covers some basic functionality like vMotion, and reminds the audience of increases in the performance of technologies like vMotion (faster individual vMotion migrations and more concurrent vMotion migrations). Steve also discusses the solution to the “noisy neighbor” problem where individual VMs take up too many resources; the fix, of course, is Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control. He also discusses the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). As most readers of this site probably already know, VAAI allows the hypervisor to offload storage operations onto the storage arrays themselves.

Steve Herrod announces the acquisition of Integrien by VMware for their proactive analytics functionality. The product looks quite interesting, but I’m unclear how Integrien will integrate with existing products like AppSense.

Steve moves through a discussion of producers, consumers, their different needs, SLAs, service catalogs (App Stores), “pay as you go” models, and virtual data centers. The focus is on the gap between producers who provision hardware and consumers who request services. And finally, after all the build-up, Herrod announces VMware vCloud Director (aka Project Redwood). VMware sees vCD as the enabling technology that helps address the disconnect between producers and consumers, and enables companies to create virtual data centers.

To help address security in the virtual data center, VMware announces VMware vShield Endpoint, VMware vShield App, and VMware vShield Edge. These products provide offloaded virus protection, hypervisor-level firewalling, and a “traditional” stateful firewall, respectively. It will be interesting to see how these products play with VMware’s security partners. Competitor or partner now?

Unfortunately, I have to now leave the General Session to prepare for my 11AM session on EMC Virtual Storage with VMware vSphere. If you’re attending, please feel free to tweet (use the hashtag #TA8101) or blog during the session. See you there!

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VMworld Announcements, Day 1

Monday, August 30, 2010 in Networking, Security, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

A flurry of virtualization-related product announcements flew into my Inbox today, thoroughly disrupting the empty Inbox I’d cultivated before the show. Anyway, I thought readers might be interested in some of the announcements, so here they are:

  • Akorri announced they’ve achieved VMware Ready status with their BalancePoint product. If you’re at VMworld and want to talk to Akorri, stop by booth 1331.
  • Similarly, Avere Systems has also been awarded VMware Ready status for its FXT 2700 appliance. Avere is also at VMworld in San Francisco, but I don’t have their booth number available to me.
  • Start-up company DeskStream has launched a product called Dynamic Virtual Desktop (yes, the acronym is DVD). It’s a “Desktop as a Service” product, according to their information. No word on whether DeskStream is at the VMworld conference. Follow this link for the full launch announcement.
  • Yet another company, CompuWare, has gotten VMware Ready status for CompuWare Vantage. As with DeskStream, I don’t have any indication as to whether CompuWare is at the VMworld conference.
  • I continue to be impressed by security startup HyTrust. Their latest announcement, HyTrust Cloud Control, brings strong authentication, role-based access control, and integration between HyTrust Appliance and VMware vCloud Director.
  • BLADE has announced VMready 3.0 with Virtual Vision, which allows physical networks to “see” virtual machines as they migrate (or are migrated) around the data center. At first glance, it kind of sounds like Arista’s VM Tracer, but I have a meeting with BLADE later this week and intend to find out more about the product. I’ll post more after that meeting.
  • EMC’s RSA division is also announcing the RSA Solution for Cloud Security and Compliance. This solution integrates technologies from Archer into a solution that is intended to help customers have greater confidence that their environments are properly secured and audited according to standards and policies. The full press release is also available here.

I think that’s about it for now. More VMworld 2010 coverage to come, so stay tuned!

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TA8037: vApps, OVF, and Advanced VM Templates

Monday, August 30, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

I managed to score a seat in the vApps/OVF/Advanced VM Templates session. Unfortunately, I arrived late, so I don’t know the presenter’s names (apparently the location of the session was changed from the time I put it on my calendar to today).

The OVF XML descriptor file contains package meta-data and has 10 core sections for describing virtual hardware, EULA, product information, upgrade instructions, etc. The actual software in an OVF is installed in one more more virtual disks, and any public specified virtual disk format is supported. OVF also supports signing, compression, and internationalization.

The presenters showed a quick demonstration of deploying an OVF template using the vSphere Client. (They showed off deploying the SugarCRM vApp.) In particular, they pointed out the product information, version, size, description, etc., stored in the OVF XML meta-data, and mentioned that this can help users avoid downloading the wrong virtual appliance. The presenters also showed deployment options in the OVF XML; this allows the vendor to show recommended configurations for evaluation, production, enterprise, etc.; this is all driven by the vendors and is all stored in the OVF XML package descriptor.

The presenters showed IP address allocation parameters using data stored in the OVF. This functionality simplifies the configuration of the virtual appliance or vApp.

vApps have power commands just like VMs, but they contain multiple VMs. Even though vApps contain multiple VMs, when deploying a vApp via OVF, it doesn’t ask you questions about multiple VMs or such. In general, this is handled by the author of the OVF XML package descriptor for the vApp. In the Inventory view, a vApp can be expanded to show the individual VMs contained within the vApp.

Next the presenters discussed creating a vApp from scratch. To create a new vApp, you just right-click on a host and select Create New vApp. Then you just drag existing VMs into/onto the new vApp. Once the new vApp is created, you can populate additional information like product name, product version, VM startup order, timing sequences, and shutdown actions. The presenter showed shutting down a vApp so that we could see how the shutdown order was enforced.

You can also export a vApp as an OVF template. This is a simple command from within the vSphere Client, and it exports the VMDKs and creates the XML descriptor file.

We also saw how to add vApp information to existing VMs without creating a vApp.

The presenters now moved into a discussion of VM templates and how VM templates can be enhanced and extended with vApp properties. There are two primary roles when it comes to templates: the author, who creates it once, validates it, and certifies it, but this occurs rarely. The user, on the other hand, uses these templates frequently to deploy new VMs.

Behind the scenes during a “normal” VM template deployment, it first makes a clone of the existing template. Then it powers it on and installs an agent into the guest OS. The agent is responsible for modifying the guest OS according to the customization specification settings selected during the deployment process. At the end, the new VM is powered off and the deployment is done.

To avoid some of the common limitations of the “normal” way of deploying VM templates, we can incorporate vApp functionality. In the vApp style of deployment, the author is responsible for creating and providing the agent that will customize the guest OS. This might be a shell script or a PowerCLI script. This agent or tool then responds based on parameters passed to it based on information supplied by the user during the deployment process. (Refer back to the description of vApp deployment.) This makes the authoring process harder (but this occurs rarely) and makes the deployment process easier (this occurs more often).

The presenters next moved into a demonstration of using vApp properties and OVF to enhance standard VM template deployment.

The VMware OVF Tool 2.0 is available with Fusion 3.1 and Workstation 7.1 or can be downloaded from http://www.vmware.com/go/ovf. OVF Tool can convert OVF to OVA and a variety of other tasks. Another tool is called vAppRun, which integrates with OVFTool and lets you work with vApps and OVF Properties while using Fusion and Workstation. It can be downloaded from http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vapprun. The presenters showed a demo of using OVF Tool to deploy OVF templates. They also showed using OVF Tool to deploy from Workstation to vSphere, and finally they demonstrated a more complex deployment like SugarCRM. This showed how to deploy complex vApps from the command line using OVF Tool. (Pretty cool, in my opinion, even if it did include a very long and very complex command line instruction.)

VMware Studio 2.1 is a free application that can help in the creation of virtual appliances/vApps and supports full OVF 1.1 support and integration. It’s available from http://www.vmware.com/go/studio.

After this the session wrapped up and went into a question-and-answer session.

SUMMARY: I like the continued development of OVF and vApps, but I’m not so sure just how useful the idea of using vApp/OVF technologies for VM template deployment will actually be. The primary roadblock is the fact that the author would have to create the customization agent. Otherwise, OVF Tool looks quite handy and is very likely something I will be exploring in more detail.

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Some Pre-VMworld Product Announcements

Tuesday, August 24, 2010 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

There were several new product announcements that hit the wire today. I don’t have time to go in-depth on any of these, but I did want to point them out very briefly. If time permits, I’ll try to provide a bit more detail in the near future.

  • VKernel today announced their new Capacity Management Suite 2.0, which is a bundling of existing VKernel products along with new integration points between the products. CMS rolls together VKernel’s capacity analysis, inventory, VM optimization, and chargeback tools into a single product, and more tightly integrates them. I had the opportunity (thank you VKernel!) to get a preview of CMS 2.0 last week, and it’s pretty nice. There are lots of little touches here and there to help make easier to find the specific information you need to see. For more information, see VKernel’s web site.
  • Arista Networks today announced Arista VM Tracer (read the full press release). Doug Gourlay of Arista has been showing me previews of some of the functionality of VM Tracer. It’s a different approach than Cisco has taken to providing a greater level of integration between virtualization and networking. No less valid, but certainly different. VM Tracer provides visibility into the virtualization environment from the physical network, making it easier to see which VMs are on which ESX/ESXi host, where these hosts are connected, what the current status of the VM is (i.e., is it in the middle of a vMotion event, or is it protected by Fault Tolerance). It will be interesting to see how Arista moves forward from here.
  • EMC also announced Unified Storage today (read the full press release). Many of the technologies that are included in this announcement were discussed at EMC World earlier this year, including Sub-LUN FAST, FAST Cache, Block Data Compression, full support for VMware’s vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), and Unisphere, the single management interface for the Unified Storage line. However, also in this announcement today were a few new items: native FCoE support for the Unified storage systems; new, less expensive 100GB and 200GB Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs); and new models of Celerra gateways, the VG2 and VG8, which boast significantly improved performance over earlier models. All in all, there’s quite a bit of stuff in today’s announcement.
  • FalconStor announced Network Storage Server (NSS) SAN Accelerator for VMware View this morning. This one just popped in my inbox this morning, so I haven’t even had time to dive into and understand what exactly they’re announcing. It appears to be a solution intended to leverage high-performance flash with low-cost SATA drives and geared specifically for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments. The product page for this product doesn’t offer too much more information.

That’s all I have for now. If anyone has additional information they’d like to share about these announcements, please speak up in the comments. As always, if you are a vendor, you must provide full disclosure. This is not to discount your comments—everyone’s comments are valuable—but simply to provide the readers with some context of why you’re saying what you’re saying. Thanks!

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VMworld 2010 Spouse Activities Calendar

Sunday, August 22, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

As many of you already know, this year is the third year that my wife, Crystal, is planning activities for spouses (i.e., “spousetivites”) who are in San Francisco with their VMworld-attending significant others. Crystal has even launched her own site, Spousetivities.com, where you can find more information as well.

While this information is already available on Crystal’s site, in an effort to help promote awareness of some of the stuff that Crystal has put together I’m posting a calendar (of sorts) here that lists all the activities that are available for non-attending spouses.

Note that registration is required for all of these events, including the free “Get to Know You” breakfast. You can register for the events at the Spousetivities Registration page. Where there is a fee/cost to participate, I’ve noted that with an asterisk (*) at the end of the line. Visit the registration page to sign up and pay for activities.

Here’s the list of activities that are available:

8/29: Monterey/Carmel tour, 8:00AM-6:30PM *

8/30: Free “Get to Know You” Breakfast at Jillians, 8:00AM-10:00AM - Registration required!
Spouses who register for this free breakfast also get a free Spousetivities T-shirt (please specify your size on the Spousetivities Registration page) and a gift bag full of cool stuff.

8/30: Wine Country tour, 10:00AM-6:00PM * (Optional private lunch)
If you use the discount code “winetime” when registering you get a $25 discount. Use the discount code “winetimelunch” to get $10 off the private lunch. Limited discount quantities are available!

8/30: Photographic tour, 10:00AM-2:00PM *

8/31: Sausalito Houseboat tour, 9:15AM -3:00 PM * (Optional private lunch)
Use the discount code “houseboatlunch” to get a free private lunch on this tour—a $55 value! Limited discounts available!

9/1: Photographic tour, 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM *

9/1: Muir Woods/Sausalito tour, 9:00AM-2:45PM * (Optional private lunch)

9/2: Wine Country tour, 9:00AM-5:00PM * (Optional private lunch)

9/2: Muir Woods/Sausalito tour, 9:00AM-2:45PM * (Optional private lunch)

9/3: Monterey/Carmel tour, 8:00 AM-6:30 PM *

A quick note on the “Optional private lunch”: these are gourmet lunches reserved only for Spousetivities attendees. In addition, all these events sport private motorcoach transportation. These aren’t your typical tours!

If you are at all interested in any of these activities, please sign up ASAP—if there aren’t enough attendees, some of these tours will have to be canceled. In particular, Crystal is trying very hard to get attendees signed up for the Monday Wine Country tour and the Tuesday Sausalito houseboat tour, so take a look at those and use the discounts that are available. (If you’re interested in hanging out with Crystal, she’ll be attending those two tours.)

If you need additional information, Crystal can help you out. She’s available on Twitter (follow @Spousetivities), you can visit the Spousetivities Registration page for more details on the tours and register, you can visit the Spousetivities site and interact with Crystal there, or you can drop Crystal an e-mail (address is available on the About page of her site).

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My VMworld 2010 Schedule

Friday, August 13, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | 6 comments

This morning I finalized my VMworld 2010 schedule and I wanted to share it here. Here are the sessions for which I’m currently registered:

Monday, August 30, 2010

9:00AM: TA8631 - Future Direction of Networking Virtualization
10:30AM: TA6720 - Troubleshooting Using ESXTOP for Advanced Users
12:00PM: SE7813 - vShield Edge and Application Protection: Architecture and Use Cases
1:30PM: TA8037 - vApps, OVF, and Advanced VM Templates in vSphere
3:00PM: TA8245 - ESXi Internals: Better Understanding for Better Management and Troubleshooting

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

11:00AM: TA8101 - EMC Virtual Storage and VMware vSphere: Best Practices and Design Considerations
2:00PM: SS1004 - Infrastructure Technologies Purpose Built for the Private Cloud
3:30PM: DV7706 - View Composer: Technical Deep Dive and Best Practices
5:00PM: TA7805 - Tech Preview: Storage DRS

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

9:00AM: MA6580 - Bridge the ESX/ESXi Management Gap Using the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA), Tips and Tricks Included
1:30PM: TA8233 - Prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation in ESX Based Virtual Environments Using Storage I/O Control
3:00PM: SP9647 - Enhanced Business Continuity with Application Mobility on Vblocks Across Datacenters
4:30PM: SE8098 - Private Cloud Security: Vendor Secrets and Hypervisor Competitive Differences

Thursday, September 2, 2010

12:00PM: SE9600 - How to Attest Host Platform Security for Cloud Deployments: A Technology Preview from VMware, Intel, and RSA
1:30PM: TA8101 - EMC Virtual Storage and VMware vSphere: Best Practices and Design Considerations
3:00PM: BC8432 - SRM Futures: Host Based Replication

So…are there any really good sessions that I’ve missed? I’m trying to increase my focus on security (especially as relates to service providers) and desktop virtualization, so I’m open to suggestions for other sessions I should consider instead of the ones I have listed.

If you are attending VMworld 2010 and are interested in getting together with me, I’d love to meet up with you (schedule permitting, of course!). My conference calendar is available here; feel free to have a look and propose a potential meeting time.

And while we are discussing schedules and calendars, I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to remind you to visit the Spousetivites home page and register for spouse activities. You are bringing your spouse, right? Of course you are!

See you in San Francisco!

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Spouse Activities Update

Thursday, August 5, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Note: This is a guest post by my wife, Crystal, who is organizing spouse activities for VMworld. This is the third consecutive year for VMworld spouse activities and I’m happy to help support her efforts.)

VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, CA, is right around the corner! I’m excited about the activities planned for VMworld this year and I wanted to give you a quick update on activities planning and deadlines. Make a note of these deadlines—you don’t want to miss out!

  • Today, August 5, is the last day to register for the “Islands of San Francisco Bay” tour. Many of you might have looked at this entry on the Spousetivities registration site and not realized that this is a tour of Alcatraz and Angel Island. Sorry for not being clearer! Here’s why you should consider registering for this activity. First, this activity includes private transportation between the San Francisco Marriott (very near Moscone, where the conference is being held) and Pier 33. Second, this activity also includes a boxed lunch to enjoy on Angel Island. Third, you’ll also get an expert guide from Organized Chaos (my partner in helping arrange some of these tours). Finally, a $50 discount is available for the first 20 people to e-mail me (see the About page for my e-mail address) and request the discount code. Having done the Alcatraz/Angel Island combination tour myself in previous years, I’d much prefer this private tour. Yes, it is a bit more expensive than the standard public tours, but the public tours don’t include private transportation to and from the conference hotel area, lunch, or an expert guide. So, if you’re interested, e-mail me for the discount code and then go register!
  • If you are interested in the Monterey/Carmel/Hearst Castle event, I’ve managed to get the deadline to register for this event extended to tomorrow, Friday, August 6. (Last time I checked the registration site still listed July 30.) This is a fantastic opportunity for couples to get away before the conference starts and enjoy some great scenery and sites! This awesome two-day event includes private transportation, catered reception-style dinner the night of the first day, overnight accommodations in San Simeon, breakfast and lunch on day two, private tour of Hearst Castle, and professional staff from Organized Chaos to coordinate the entire event. Definitely something to consider for couples interested in some private time before the madness of the conference!
  • Don’t forget that free lunch on the Muir Woods/Sausalito or the House Boat tours is available for people who respond to my earlier post so don’t delay!
  • As I’ve mentioned before, all the activities listed on the Spousetivities registration site include private transportation, and many of them include a private lunch as well. These are goodies that aren’t included in the typical public tours.

Don’t forget that all registrants for spouse activities will get a free T-shirt (last year’s shirts were a HUGE hit!), free welcome breakfast, and a nice gift bag with some goodies inside. All these freebies are courtesy of our sponsors this year: EMC, Train Signal, and HyTrust.

Act now if you’re interested in some of these activities! If you have questions, contact me on Twitter (my Twitter ID is @spousetivities) or drop me an e-mail. Thanks, and I look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

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Spouse Activities: Back for Another Year!

Monday, July 12, 2010 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Have you ever attended a technology conference and had your spouse go with you? More than likely, your spouse just sat around the hotel room, bored, waiting for you to get back after a long day of sessions and lectures and labs. Then, when you’re tired and just want to relax, your spouse wants to go out on the town, explore, and see some cool stuff. Does that sound familiar?

Since 2008, my wife (Crystal, @crystal_lowe on Twitter) has organized a fix for this very problem, at least for one technology conference: VMworld spouse activities. Now back for a third year (see information for 2008 activities and 2009 activities), spouse activities—or Spousetivities as it’s informally known—is bigger and better than ever. Backed by corporate sponsors, Crystal is now able to offer more planned excursions, free activities, and lots of goodies for attending spouses. To help streamline communications, she’s even launched a spouse activities-focused website at http://spousetivities.com and a dedicated Twitter account (@Spousetivites). If you aren’t following either of these resources, you should be!

Here’s a sneak peek of some of the great stuff that Crystal has planned for this year:

  • Free Spousetivities T-shirt for the first 250 registered attendees (last year’s shirts were hilarious—wait until you see this year!)
  • Free welcome breakfast on Monday, August 30, for the first 150 registered attendees
  • Discounted tours to the Wine Country, Muir Woods, and the San Francisco Bay islands
  • A tour of privately-owned “trophy houseboats” in Sausalito
  • A fabulous pre-VMworld couples activity that includes Monterey, Carmel, and Hearst Castle

These freebies and discounts are all due to the generous corporate sponsors who helped Crystal make it happen. If you’re interested in registering, see here.

In addition to these organized activities, Crystal will be helping smaller groups self-organize for activities like shopping, sight-seeing, or exploring the city on your own.

As you can see, Crystal has put a ton of work into this year’s activities. If you are planning on attending, you should definitely bring your spouse and get her (or him!) enrolled and registered.

Oh, and did I mention that she’s planning activities for VMworld EMEA, too? That’s right—for those of you that can’t make it to San Francisco but will be in Copenhagen, Crystal is planning some activities there too. Keep your eyes open for more details on the EMEA activities.

Visit the Spousetivities website or follow Spousetivities on Twitter for more details and regular updates.

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