Tod Nielsen, COO spoke first at the keynote this morning.  He started off joking about the slowness of the Labs yesterday.  He blamed it on an unset blinking clock (anyone know how to program a VCR?).  Went over like a lead balloon.  He finished by introducing a typical customer testimonial video.  Paul Maritz, CEO, came up next on stage and stated that engineers at VMware designed vSphere to “Continually defrag the datacenter.”  He had an engineer from IBM on stage to show the reduction in power utilization their servers have achieved.  This was pretty neat, as they showed a new view of the vSphere client that showed the used watts for the server overhead, plus the watts consumed per VM.  Sounds like an important metric for vCenter Chargeback.  He then starts to dig into the vCenter suite of products, including a demo of Chargeback and Lab Manager.  Moving into the cloud, Mr. Maritz announced a new offering: vCloud Express, which is a fast and effective way to purchase and deploy resources in the cloud.  He also announced the vCloud API, but didn’t spend much time on it.  HP came on stage to discuss View and the products they have coming, including a storage array (LeftHand, I believe) that pulls out in order access disks, which results in a much denser disk array, and an HP plugin for the vSphere client that will integrate the vSphere client  directly with HP tools, including the Onboard Administrator.  Next a live demo of a Tech Preview version of PCOIP was given by TELUS, which was very impressive, but could have been more thorough.  He finished up with discussing the SpringSource acquisition, but again didn’t provide a lot of details or vision.

After the keynote I hit a mediocre session that isn’t really worth discussing, then headed into a press/bloggers briefing with Paul Maritz regarding VMware’s vCloud initiative (more on that here).  Ended up eating lunch at the VMUG tables with a bunch of Omaha-area folks for some great conversation (over some mediocre food…do I see a theme?).  After lunch I hit the Expo floor for about an hour before vExpert booth duty.  Didn’t have any questions during my booth time, but plenty of new and old faces came by to chat.  After the Expo, I went to a VDI design session, which was good, if you like convoluted, overly complicated mathematical calculations for determining VDI performance (though Sean Clark and I did have some fun on Twitter).  After the session Sean Clark, Theron Conrey and I had a good discussion regarding VMware gatherings (i.e. VMUG and Community Extravaganza).  Finished up the day’s sessions with a SRM and View integration session (DV2181), which explained some very interesting stuff VMware and EMC have worked out to fail over an entire View infrastructure, including the vDesktops, with SRM and a series of scripts to tweak the ADAM database, Composer database and vmx files.  Definitely worth looking into.

Night life for tonight was a lot of fun as well.  Sat down for a drink with Tripwire before heading to Anchor and Hope for a customer appreciation dinner with Vital’s customers.  Thank you all who attended, it is great having you all as customers!  Ended up heading back to our room early in order to rest up for another long VMWorld (Alcatraz for the wife) day and make sure we can survive The Party.