VMware

Day 2 and everyone is a little more tired but ready to get their learn on. Today was the day that Steve Herrod gets to take the full spotlight and show some of the cool tech that is happening at VMware. Much like last year, the day 2 keynote was focused on the end user with both the desktop and mobile device.

The View + Mirage technology was slick, no doubt about it. Being able to have a local image syncing back to the server that in case of someone breaking their laptop having their laptop stolen, they can move that image to a view desktop in a few clicks. Seamless! It was pretty impressive.

I’m a little behind on this one so I’ll give the high levels of what I saw.

The keynote was the official handing off ceremony from Paul Maritz to Pat Gelsinger. Paul has done some great things in his past 4 years at the helm of the company with one exception, vRam. On his way out, they made sure to clean that up as well. It was a debate who would get the bigger applause, Paul for his leadership, or vRam going away.

I call this Day 0 as it was simply supposed to be a travel day and the infamous VMunderground party. Unfortunately due to mechanical issues my first flight out, we didn’t make it. Not be a long shot. Instead of getting in at 4:30 we got in at 11:30. Sure I got more time with the family, but was really looking forward to kicking off the conference correctly and catching up with some old friends.

VMworld is just around the corner and for those in the server / virtualization space, its a pretty exciting time to see what the market leader is doing next. The market is getting more crowded with other hypervisors and some of them are challenging VMware more than others. Yes, even I will admit that Hyper-V is making some noise. A lot of talk within companies about Microsoft’s licensing advantage and features that are “good enough” for most workloads, its a conversation that many shops will be having when that VMware contract comes up for renewal.

Recently I spent some time upgrading our corporate VMware environment from ESX4.1 to ESXi 5. Fun times I know. For most of the hosts, I was able to use the update manager to upgrade and only one host was short on space that required a full re-install from CD.

The upgrades weren’t without incident. I had the unfortunate incident of running into an error of “The Unlicensed license for host does not include vSphere HA. Upgrade the License”.