Victor van den Berg opened the 2008 Dutch VMUG meeting by welcoming the crowd. With over 600 attendees a sold out event again. Victor showed some statistics about the VMUG activities and web site usage over the past year.
Keynote
Richard Garsthagen continued with the keynote, in which he gave an overview of the solutions offered by VMware today and in the near future.
Some topics which were already covered by VMworld 2008 were mentioned.
Topics like vCloud, Appspeed and Fault tolerance are some new features where I personally am very excited about. I saw Richard at previous conferences, but this was the first time I attended one in Dutch language by Richard 🙂
A couple of highlights:
Appspeed: This VMware function is the result of the recent acquisition of BHive by VMware. AppSpeed monitors the performance of specific applications that run inside a VM and automates the actions necessary to resolve certain detected performance issues. For example adding extra web servers in case of heavy load.
Fault tolerance: Creates a mirror VM on an other host, which undisrupted can be activated when an host becomes unavailable.
With the vCloud initiative vendors have agreed to use a unified communication protocol. In this way every system reports in the same way wether it’s on-premise or off-premise.
Comments: This makes it much easier for companies to hire extra capacity externally, or even have extra capacity standby in case of emergency. Commercial web sites for example have to deal with extra orders and visitors a couple of weeks before Christmas, in this period it may be convenient and cost effective to have some extra web and transaction servers standby. Using this kind of ‘on-demand’ extra capacity and give the capacity back when not needed can save lot’s of money. From a IT-audit point of perspective this vCloud ‘thing’ can bring some extra complexity regarding external connections. I won’t be surprised when some sort of certification is introduced regarding this vCloud to certify that the (cloud-service) supplier meets certain criteria, and that as a (cloud-service) customer you can be sure that it’s secure.
Main focus of VMware:
1. Virtual Datacenter OS (VDOS) – Flexibility and efficiency
2. Federation Cloud – Scalability
3. Desktop
Richard also mentioned there is a slight possibility of having VMsafe Hands On Labs at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, France.
Video recording
Eric Sloof at NTPRO.nl has uploaded a video impression of the event at his site:
Video Impression of Dutch VMUG Meeting 2008
And guess what, I’m on it too: 1’59: