Steve Herrod started off the keynote today discussing VDI, including the announcement of an agreement to embed RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles into View.  Their goal is to provide end users the same rich experience no matter the situation (WAN, LAN or offline mobile).  Like any good Herrod keynote, live demos ensued, including PCOIP and the Wyse iPhone View Client.  The demo of the Mobile Virtualization Phone was pretty interesting, especially when he showed that the demo app was running in an android VM, completely seamless within the Windows CE environment.  The keynote then switched over to the datacenter, where he came out swinging by describing why VMotion is more mature and proven (and a time-tested marriage saver) compared to other “live migration” offerings.  Next, he discussed the fact that VMware is currently working towards I/O based DRS, which will include setting shares and IOPs limits per hard disk.  He then covered the big features of vSphere, but didn’t cover anything new until the end when he introduced and gave a quick demo of vCenter ConfigControl.  Next up was the cloud discussion, but nothing terribly groundbreaking, though he did mention long-distance VMotion as an upcoming feature.

Following up on the cloud discussion, Mr. Herrod described IaaS, PaaS and Saas (Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Service, respectively), and why SpringSource is so key to the cloud strategy.  In essence, it helps to continue to break apart the different layers of the datacenter into individual pieces that can be manipulated independently from one another.  The CEO of SpringSource then came out to demo their technology.  All in all, another great keynote.  Steve Herrod is not to be missed!

After the keynote I attended a session on vSphere deployments in the morning and an AppSpeed presentation in the afternoon.  Both were okay, but informational.  AppSpeed is definitely worth considering, but still has a lot of maturing to do.

Most of my day was spent in the Solutions Expo chatting with many different vendors.  The most impressive product I saw was the new HP MDS600, which is a SAS direct storage solution.  It holds 70 SAS drives in 5U.  Very impressive when you consider some of the futures of the SAS switches in the c-class blade system.  Go check it out; I believe they have one set up in the Melanox booth.  I also spent some time with VDI related vendors, including the aforementioned RTO Software, AppSense and LiquidWare Labs.  All have very interesting products that will need some lab time.

The highlight of the day was the vExpert lunch and meeting.  It was a great opportunity to meet and chat with many familiar names.  I can’t possibly list them here, but it was great meeting every one of you.  We even got to hear from Steve Herrod who told us he was going to be the executive sponsor of the program going forward.

And then the party…

As always, the party was a great time.  The food wasn’t great, but the drinks were free and the band was great, as was the company.  Unfortunately, by the time the concert was done, we emerged to find that the entire party was shut down, which was very disappointing!  We didn’t have near enough time to enjoy anything else that VMware had arranged for us.