• Over 12,500 attendees (still awaiting the final tally)
• Over 300 attendees at VMware’s first Technology Exchange – Developer Day
• Over 200 sponsors and exhibitor companies
• 300 break out sessions across 6 tracks
• 12 Instructor led labs and 9 Self Paced lab courses
• 920 new VMUG members recruited on site
• VMworld 2009 generated a strong volume of coverage with a total of 315 articles. 90 original US articles, 11 ANZ articles, 51 APAC articles, and 163 EMEA articles.
• Strong social media activity with:
  • 4,305 tweets on the event, 1205 contributors and 2,350 followers
  • New VMworld YouTube views: 5,714
• VMware produced 14 VMworld videos on site and released these on VMware TV with 13,509 total views
• 4,459 Self Paced labs taken with 41,043 VMs deployed. This has broken all previous self paced lab records.
• 6,149 Instructor led labs taken across 12 labs on offer during VMworld 2009.

And just for fun (yes these are real and not made up):

• Quantity of sodas purchased     54,742
• Quantity of bananas      14,813
• Quantity of apples         14,813
• Gallons of coffee          1,895
• Quantity of cookies       5,647
• Quantity of brownies     9,188
• # of beers consumed at the welcome reception monday night: 10,200

We’ll have to work on that beer number next year!!!

The set list looked like this:

Double Vision

Head Games

Cold as Ice

Dirty White Boy

Feels like the first time

Urgent

Jukebox Hero (with Whole lotta love in the middle)

for the encore:

I want to know what love is

Hot Blooded

Here’s what it looked like during Cold as Ice:

and during Double Vision:

The concert was held in the general session area where the keynotes were held.  This is an absolute huge room that had 30 foot screens setup (6 of them) for everyone to see.  To give you an idea how big this was, here’s two shots, both left and right.  In the first pic you can see lead singer, Kelly Hansen, in the lower right.

A very fun time had by all.  Well done boys.

*pictures are copyright vmguy.com.  Any reproduction without express written consent is prohibited.

Steve begins on the topic of desktops.  He says the industry wants to go from device-centric to people-centric(I totally agree – it’s a better model).  He talks about the goals the VMware has in it’s desktop strategy and he labels the user experience as the most important.  He describes why vSphere is the right platform for desktop virtualization.  Steve talks about how VMware decomposes the desktop to share images and simplify patching.  Steve announces a OEM agreement with RTO Virtual Profiles (just heard about this, check the link, cool stuff).  Steve goes on to describe PCoIP.  He describes hosted virtualization and how users can check-out a desktop.  He describes a use-case of how users can bring their own device to work and check out a VM.  This seems like a great use case for hosted virtualization where the user is running a base OS on their device and they check out their desktop to run as a VM on top of their own personal OS on the hardware.   He then talks about the scenario of bare metal virtualization for corporate owned IT. This is where you would load a hypervisor onto bare metal laptop hardware and then check-out a desktop VM to it.  He then introduces Mike to show CVP.

Mike shows Windows 7 running on CVP.  He shows the Aero interface and some videos running in CVP.  He then shows the Wyse cloud app and demos accessing the same desktop from his iPhone.  Really cool stuff, I love the iPhone app. Now back to Steve.  Steve talks about mobile access to vCenter and describles how the engineers are working on have mobile access to manage view desktops as well as vCenter mobile management. Steve describes the mobile virtualization platform (MVP) which is a mobile virtualization platform that runs on mobile phones.  For this section he introduces Peter Chiura, from Visa.

Peter demonstrates what Visa is doing.  He shows an Visa application on a phone which can show live transactions from the owner’s Visa card in near real time.  It can then show special offers from vendors you have made purchases thru.  He then backs out and shows the audience that the application is really running on Android in a VM on a windows mobile phone.  Pretty cool demo really. Back to Steve.  Steve talks about the platform.  He describes vSphere as “the software mainframe”.  He describes vMotion and it’s maturity.  He gives the history of VMworld 2003 with 1600 attendees and how they did a early preview of vMotion on stage for the first time at that conference (I was there when I was a customer!).  He describes vmotion migrations and how many have occured, how many dollars it’s saved and how many marriages have been saved due to the reduced time spent working by the administrators (get’s a really good laugh from the crowd).

He talks about the breath of vmotion and how it’s grown to storage vmotion.  He talks about using vmotion to balance workloads with DRS.  He talks about how you’ll soon be able to extend DRS to network and storage, for instance, moving a virtual machine to another host when the network adapter has been saturated.  He goes on to talk about Distributed Power Management and how it powers off servers when they are not in use and how this can be very useful for desktop scenarios.  Talks about AppSpeed and describes how it works and how it can provide the answer on who’s to be called when a multi-tier app is not running optimally.  He then shows vApp and the descriptors that they can have.  He leads into the new VMsafe APIs.  He describes how the vApp descriptors can now have security descriptors.  He then introduces Rob to show a preview of Config Control.

Rob shows how we can see exactly what’s changed in a virtualized enviornment.  He shows a demo with a port group being changed and how it was tracked and what else was impacted by that change.  Actually it was a very technical but cool demo on how to see what changes can impact your environment.

Back to Steve and onto choice.  Lab Manager and providing users a self service portal. Gives some stats on the datacenter for VMworld:  If it were physical, they would need: 37,248 machines, 25 Megawatts, and  3 football fields worth of physical servies.  Running everything virtual and they cut it down to 1 end zone, 776 physical servers, 540 Kilowatts. He leads onto the Cloud.  He gives an overview of the cloud and how vSphere is the foundation for the cloud.  He talks about the connecting of the internal and external cloud.  He talks how SRM is handling connectivity between two internal clouds.  He then talks about how long distance vMotion can be handled.  He descirbes the challenges: memory and disk sync and network identity.  It’s very challenging to keep 2 VMs in sync with their memory changes and disk changes.  Steve explains how Long Distance vMotion can be used to follow the sun/moon, or for DR. He talks about how different vendors are doing this different ways.  He describes Cisco and F5 and their different strategies for doing it. He goes on to the vCloud API and how a console can show your VMs in your datacenter and your VM’s that are running in a hosting provider.  He describes PaaS and how VMware wants to provide the platform and now can provide the framework to run applications. Introduces Adrian Colyer, CTO, SpringSource.

Adrian shows an application written in SprinSource Cloud Foundry. He describes how the application itself and method of delivering it via scale are seperated.  The app can be coded and then delivered and scaled very easily.  I notice a few people exiting as we reach towards the end.  Probably not the most interesting section for non-programmers but I was getting what he was trying to say.

Steve returns to summarize everything that was discussed:  How we are in a pendulm shift in the industry and VMware is posied to assist customers with all of their needs.

*Photos are copyright vmguy.com.  Any reproduction without express written consent is prohibited.

Tod thanked the sponsors for their support and gave us the number: 12,488 attendees at  VMworld 2009.  Quite an amazing achievement given this economy.  Tod also described the goal of VMware: To Energize and Save, wither that would be Financial Savings, Human Savings, or Earth’s Savings.  He then showed a video of customer testimonials from Siemens and Kroger.  Next up Tod introduced Paul Maritz, Chief Executive Officer from VMware.

Paul gave a definition of the cloud to the audience.  He went on to talk about how VMware will bridge the gap between the datacenter and the cloud of the future.  He described the VMware journey, where VMware has come from and where he believes VMware is headed.  He reiterated a comment that I’ve heard him say once before: that vSphere had more than 1,500 engineers working on it which was more than any Windows operating system durning his tenure at Microsoft.  This is another reason that vSphere is reconized as a true platform.  He went on to give a review of the vSphere features and how vSphere integrates into the ecosystem of available software.  He talked about customer upgrade plans and how customers polled are planning on upgrading to vSphere in the next few months.  He then introduced Tom Brey, Sr. Technical Staff Engineer, IBM.

Tom showed a great demo of power consumption of a IBM 3850 inside the vSphere client.  In the standard performance tab, he had real time counters of power consumption in watts on a per VM basis.  Very cool to see how much power your VM’s are using.  One thing I did note from his preso, he was running it on ESX 4.1 build 000000 (where can I get a copy of that?)

Paul returns after the demo to give us a explanation of all of the things coming to enhance vCenter and the management of the infrastructure.  With that lead in, Paul introduces us to an engineer named Bruce who goes thru a demonstration of Lab Manager 4 and chargeback.

Bruce shows us a demo of checking out a configuration in Lab Manager and then Paul leads that into a new portal called vCloud Express.  This portal lets customers check out VM’s or groups of them to use for development or for production.  It’s an interface that fulfills the much needed aspect for the cloud: a self-service portal.

Paul next leads into Desktops as a service and what is happening on that front.  For this Paul introduces Steve Dupree, Director of Platform Virtualization, Hewlett Packard.

Steve talks about the direction that HP is headed with virtualization.  Steve does a great demo of Hp Insight integration into the vSphere client.  An extra tab is show for the physical hosts where admins can find all of the Insight information about the health of the physical hardware.

Next up, Paul introduces Chris Renter, Telus Communications.

Chris demo’s a bit on the upcoming functionality and experience customers can expect from VMware View with PCoIP integration.  The PCoIP protocol will be a new enhancement for View coming later this year according to Paul.

The last (whew!) of the guests is Rod Johnson, CEO, SpringSource.

Rod gives us a description of how SpringSource will complement VMware to deliver PaaS (Platform as a Service).  He demo’s how easily code can be migrated to the cloud using the SpringSource framework.  It’s pretty impressive to see how this migration can happen from a developer’s perspective.

At this point Paul finally closes the opening keynote.  On to the press event and more pictures to follow.

*all photos are copyright vmguy.com.  Any reuse of these photographs without express written consent is prohibited.