vCenter 4.0 (vCenter is now 4.0 to be on par with ESX) includes linked mode in the standard edition of vCenter.  Those users who have current support on vCenter standard edition will receive linked mode as part of their included subscription.  Linked mode is not included in the foundation edition of vCenter or in the vSphere essentials editions .  Linked mode uses a ADAM (Active Directory Application Mode) database to replicate it’s configuration between multiple vCenter servers.  Some of the things stored in the ADAM database include:

• Connection information (IP addresses and ports)
• Certificates and thumbprints
• License Information
• User Roles

When vCenter servers are "linked," connecting to any one will allow an administrator to see and manage any of the vCenters in the link group thru one vSphere Client assuming they have rights to do so (as seen below).

Permissions can be configured so that an admin may only have rights to certain vCenter servers in the link group and not others.  The scalability has also been increased dramatically.  A single vCenter instance can manage 300 ESX hosts and 3000 VMs.  A linked mode group can manage 1000 ESX hosts and 10,000 VM’s (now you know why a search field was added to the client.)

You can read about linked mode and all of the new features in vCenter here .

Stephen talked about the main focus of VMware.  That is, to enable customers to deliver IT as a service, at the same time remembering 3 key factors:  Efficency, Control, and Choice .  He went on to discuss vSphere.  He gave some awesome statistics on vSphere, particularly: over 3 million Engineering hours have gone into vSphere .  For the Efficiency section, he discussed the scalability and performance.  He talked about power savings and storage savings .  For Control , he talked about Config-Control and how to maintain consistency in host configuration.    He then discussed distributed switches and how they add control to the networking layer.  vApp and how it will let admins control their apps better as a single unit.  He then went on to demo a very polished Fault Tolerant configuration.  This was received very well and with a resounding applause from the crowd.  He talked about vShield Zones and how they protect applications from talking to the infrastructure that they shouldn’t for customers without advanced firewall experience.  Lastly, Choice .  The goal is to allow any server, any storage, any OS, and any app to run local in the private cloud or a cloud in a different location, public or private.  He showed a list of the supported OSes for vSphere compared to those of Hyper-V and it was not even close.  I guess it is an advantage to not have an OS business.

After the functionality section Stephen introduced Bogomil Balansky (below), VP of Product Marketing, VMware.

Bogomil introduced the Partners to the licensing and packaging of vSphere.  I apologize, due to legal restrictions I cannot list those here.  Hopefully we will find out more information from the announcement coming April 21st .

Stephen returned to the stage and discussed the API and plug in capability of vSphere which was a great segway to the next presenters: Adam Famularo (below on left) SVP and GM, Recovery Management and Data Modeling Business Unit, CA, and the second presenter was Roger Pilc (below, seated), Corporate SVP and GM, CA.

Adam showed a great video on the University of Texas, Brownsville, and how they used CA XOsoft to recover their MS Exchange environment on VMware at their disaster recovery site during Katrina.  He went on to discuss CA’s organization and how they are all aligned.  He discussed many of the channel programs that are available (this is a Partner conference after all).  He talked about upcoming Arcserve and XOsoft releases.  I apologize, I don’t know what is public or not from the information that was presented so I’m going to leave the details out on that one.  Roger took the lead at this point.  He discussed the cloud and how it is transforming business.  That management is one of the key pieces needed to take it to the next level.  He closed with an explanation of the VMware – CA relationship and how that joint effort can truly improve overall service quality from the cloud.

Now onto my labs today, I’ll check back in soon.

Great information and thank you all that responded to the poll.

Just as a FYI, I run mine in a VM.

An article by Desmond Chan was written back in September. I saw it on an internal Wiki but did not realize he had published it externally. It’s a good article describing what to consider if you only have a limited amount of bandwidth. The article describes some of the common administrative functions that are performed in VC on a daily basis and the amount of bandwidth they require. Definately some good reading if you need to manage ESX with VC over WAN links.  You can find the full article here .