Today was a little lighter on new content as most of the big announcements were made yesterday during the keynote.  I’ve written in the past about using an iPad more and more during my workday, and I took the opportunity today to visit the end user computing booth in the solutions exchange and talk with Tedd Fox, the product manager for end user computing.  I use the view client on my iPad often – it’s not quite “there” for making it a standard use today in my opinion – but it’s a very functional application that works great in a pinch or for quick tasks.  The View client utilizes only PCoIP (no option for RDP) and one of the minor annoyances I had with the product that Wyse PocketCloud didn’t suffer from (PocketCloud is an RDP connection to View) was that if I switch to another app and then switch back to View – I have to re-login to my session again.  The next version of the View client will support being able to multi task.  It was also mentioned that the next version will have an embedded RSA soft token.  Another new feature I was very impressed with was this:

Just having a big keyboard and trackpad probably doesn’t look like much of a feature, but what you don’t see is that it’s connected to an external display via the iPad display adapter so you get your full View desktop display on the external monitor and a large keyboard and large trackpad above the keyboard on the iPad screen.  I know Apple won’t allow this, but I’d love it if I could pair a bluetooth mouse with the iPad, as well as my bluetooth keyboard (which I already can pair) and then when I’m in the office I could have a very functional and portable thin client device.

My afternoon was a tour of the SwitchNAP datacenter.  SwitchNAP was one of the locations for housing the servers used by the VMware Labs team.  There have been a lot of blog posts about SwitchNAP so I don’t want to duplicate too much of the work that is already out there, but their datacenter sits in the old Enron Broadband building.  Around the early 2000′s Enron was planning on arbitraging bandwidth much like they were doing with power.  Right before they were set to open they declared bankruptcy.  SwitchNAP was across the street at this point and spent the next 9 months pulling that facility out of Enron’s bankruptcy.  As you would imagine I jumped at the chance to tour the facility – especially after finding out it was completely free.  I knew this place was secure, and unlike any other datacenter – when we pulled up this was the view by the security door.

Unfortunately that was the only picture I was able to get, we were informed that pictures of any kind are not allowed once inside the doors and considering we always had a minimum of two security guards with us with arms bigger than my thigh – I didn’t try and sneak any pics…  They did mention we can use the pictures from their website however, this picture is of the main entrance:

And this picture is a close up of the gate we had to go through to get out of the lobby and into the building:

Once through the gate, we walked down a hallway and about halfway down you could see into their NOC(gotta say, the cubes are a little nicer than mine…):

Inside the datacenter there were a number of these(of note is the enclosed hot aisles, our tour guide also mentioned that they currently have the lowest PUE of any datacenter):

And the last picture showing the 3 different feeds, none of which are ever over 66% utilization:

A few stats on the campus:

• 2,200,000 sq ft of space
• 500 MVA power capacity
• 567 MVA of generator capacity
• 294 MVA UPS suply
• 202,000 tons of cooling
• Armed 24/7/365 by military trained security staff

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Day two started out with a keynote from Steve Herrod, which was one of the best VMware keynotes I have seen.  I thought he did a great job not only on the simplicity of the presentation (whiteboard style pictures and not text heavy PowerPoint slides) but also on the content and delivery.  He talked about some of the futures of VMware but blended in just the right about of technical information and screenshots/demos to keep the audience engaged in the presentation.  There were a number of new announcements made and it really tied in well with the keynote given yesterday by Paul Maritz about moving to a post-PC era.  The idea moving forward is that we need to be able to assign policies based on the person, and not based on the device.  It shouldn’t matter matter if I’m using my mobile phone, my tablet device or my laptop – I should have access to the same set of applications, I should have access to the same data – and perhaps most importantly, IT should be able to be manage those applications and data.

One of the demos that was shown was for ThinApp Factory, the idea here is that we can automate the extraction of the app out of our Windows OS.  While there have been comments recently about VMware’s enhancements to View (or lack thereof), this was the first item among many mentioned today that really showed some of the amazing features VMware will have to solidify their post PC era solutions.

Horizon mobile touches on what I covered yesterday in my post about the Day 1 keynote from Paul Maritz, the idea is the user gives their phone number to IT and they can push out a “work phone” down to the users phone and have separation between their personal phone and their work phone.  They mentioned LG and Samsung will soon be coming out with compatible Android based phones in the near future.

AppBlast screenshot courtesy of VMware

I touched on this briefly towards the end of our VDI Kung Fu session on VMware Community TV, but I’m a heavy tablet user – and more specifically, a heavy iPad user.  Going from meeting to meeting all day I’ve stopped bringing my heavy laptop with me all the time and only bring my iPad and a case to hold a stylus, business cards, and VGA Adapter.  I use it for presentations, whiteboarding, light Office work etc.  One of the challenges in using it to work on a Word or Excel file is that you have multiple steps to first get the data into the application but then to get the data back to the original location after you edit it.  It’s far from a simple, seamless process.  The demo today of AppBlast showed an iPad user who was able to access Excel 2010 via the native Safari web browser and edit their spreadsheet.  AppBlast is a service that can deliver any application to any device supporting HTML 5.  Windows vSphere Client?  Microsoft Office?  Putty? Absolutely.  I can’t wait to get my hands on this and I think delivering it via HTML 5 is perfect, with an App you need to worry about the politics of the App Store you are living in – but with HTML 5 any device that supports it can be off and running.  Below was the screenshot VMware used that displays a list of applications the user is entitled to that they can then launch via the Safari browser on their iPad.

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Image courtesy of Tony Dunn from Flickr

Day 1 is is just about in the books for VMworld 2011, with events all day yesterday and a non stop flow of information today, my body was trying to convince myself it’s Friday rather than only Monday.  My day started out with one of my most anticipated sessions, VSP1682: VMware vSphere Clustering Q&A with @DuncanYB @FrankDenneman and @ccolotti.  I was a little worried about making this session due to some Sunday night activities but luckily I made it and I always have the weekend to catch up on sleep…

One session I really enjoyed was ESXi Quiz Show, this was without a doubt the most entertaining session I have ever attended.  It was a game show setup with @johntroyer as the host.  I really hope future VMworld’s will have similar sessions and I’d love it if they could include audience participation via Twitter.

The keynote this year was on the afternoon of Day 1, and a few of the highlights from it were:

• Labs were 100% public cloud this year (last year it was a hybrid cloud model)
• Over 200,000 VMs are expected to be deployed in the labs
• There are over 60,000 VMUG members
• There are more VMs created every second than “physical babies” born per second (as opposed to virtual babies?)
• There are more vMotions per second than planes taking off per second globally
• Touched briefly on View 5 features: Bandwidth improvements, client ubiquity, and improvements around VoIP/Unified Communications.  Personally I can’t wait for View 5 to get released now that there is better bandwidth controls for PCoIP.

A session I didn’t get into today was VSP3205: Tech Preview for vStorage APIs.  This was a futures session with the general idea of being able to store a VMDK as its own entity on a storage array natively.  I’d highly recommend checking out this post by @scott_lowe for his recap on the session.

The solutions exchange/lounge area is very cool this year, with a park theme and games like volleyball, basketball etc.  Check out this pool on Flickr from HP to get an idea.

Tonight isn’t quite over yet, there is still the #CXIparty with my employer, @NexusMN being one of the sponsors.  I will likely have some camera phone pictures of the event to post tomorrow.

If you aren’t out here, follow me on Twitter and catch some of my updates throughout the conference.

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