VMware Virtualization Seminar Series 2009 -Bangalore,India

I nominated and got opportunities to attend “VMware Virtualization Seminar Series 2009” held here in Bangalore India on 24^th Nov. They arranged this seminar in one of the leading 5 star hotel in Bangalore. Not sure if it was really required because people like me don’t need to have nice 5 star buffet but required 5/6 …. Star quality technical knowledge sharing from such kind of respected events. But I was so much disappointed with this event. I gave VMWare feedback about conducting such event in future. VMware seems to be so much spiritless about event in India. Such events are carried with great pump and show across the world. May be VMware don’t have target audience? But again such events are to make mass aware of Virtualization offering from VMWare and its partner. It’s not like there are no local markets for virtualization but we need to create awareness in local language. You cannot treat Indian business same as other part of the world. When I put question to their “Senior VMWare technical Director” like

1. What are the challenge you have dealing with local CEO’s compare to CEO’ other part of the world?

His answer was not convincing. He told challenges are almost same, I do not agree at all. What I found that CEO are little hesitance in putting initial investment if they are not virtual and Indian CEO’s will more challenging because of VMWare pricing. So my second question was for pricing .

2. Do you think pricing you can make little bit more flexible in India to tap local Indian market? Same way which MS marketing strategies when it comes to pricing ?

His answer was like he cannot make pricing more competitive because of legal issue. It would be really tough

Well My dear VMWare you need to work on pricing when you want to tap Indian market. You need to adopt Indian marketing strategies .

So here are the break up agenda and I opted for Track II – Advance thinking that it would be very informative.

Time	Topic
8.30 am – 9.30 am	Registration
9.30 am – 9.45 am	Keynote Address by T Srinivasan Managing Director - VMware India & SAARC Region
9.45 am - 10.30 am	The Future of Virtualization: Managing Service Levels Across Dynamic IT Infrastructure by Shrimati Ambastha Director - Technology, VMware India
10.30 am - 11.15 am	Presentation by EMC
11.15 am - 11.30 am	Tea Break
11.30 am - 12.15 pm	Presentation by DELL
12.15 pm - 1.00 pm	Presentation by HP

1.00 pm - 2.00 pm	Lunch
	BREAKOUT
	Track I - Essentials	Track II - Advanced
2.00 pm - 2.:45 pm	The Virtual Reality - Overview of Fundamental VMware Technologies and Solution Offerings Presentation by VMware	Scaling your Virtualization Deployments using Architectural Advances in VMware vSphere 4 Presentation by VMware
2.45 pm - 3.15 pm	Consolidation + Virtualization + WAN Optimization = True IT Efficiency Presentation by Riverbed Technology	From Strategy to Reality - Rapid, Affordable & Automated DR Solutions using VMware SRM Presentation by VMware
3.15 pm - 3.45 pm	Pay Less Do More - Realizing the Return on Investment with VMware Presentation by VMware	Building an agile infrastructure to support cloud-based application delivery by F5 Networks Presentation by F5 Networks
3.45 pm - 4.00 pm	Tea Break
4.:00 pm - 4.30 pm	Analyze to Automate – the evolution of Vizioncore and how we truly extend VMware’s vSphere Presentation by Vizioncore Inc	The Journey from Servers to Desktop Virtualization - Operationalizing Virtual Desktops Presentation by VMware
4.30 pm - 5.00 pm	Practical Approach to Virtualizing your Resource Intensive Tier 1 Applications like Oracle, Exchange, SAP, SQL Presentation by VMware	Presentation by VMware
5.00 pm - 5.10 pm	Break
5.10 pm - 5.30 pm	Virtualization Competitive Differences - What the vendors aren't telling you
5.30 pm - 5.40 pm	Wrap up

First of all they have assigned small booth for their partners. There were only few of them and whatever stall I visited I could not think there were any presence of techies out there to answer your queries. Everyone was telling please drop your visiting card and we will get back to you. VMWare both was little informative but again you can only see video and no hands –on .

So the session started with key notes from VMWare MD India and let me tell you it was not at all informative. Over all every key note should be followed by Q & A but he did not offer one. I guess you should give other chance to understand what VMware India thinks ?

Second key note was from Director Technology and again disappointed. Person was not aware what to say in accordance with target audience. Until I know what vSphare is how will I understand its key feature ?

She made interesting announcement though: Long distance vmotion over WAN. Since she did not gave opportunities to ask any Q hence we are still guessing. Currently it is possible now but I am guessing they will add some feature through which WAN link utilization will be optimized during this process, let’s see.

VMWare partner’s presentation where more disappointing . Dell/HP /EMC were trying to sell their product rather than explaining how they will value add to VMWare solution . HP was trying hard to convince that they are on stop shop for all the virtualization solution. I was surprised when speaker told that they also troubleshoot VMware related issue.

I found EMC solution about “Automation of Storage Tiering ” very interesting. What it does is ,it moves VM’s based on performance. Say if I/O intensive then will put on FC drives but if it is less I/O intensive then may be moved to SATA drives. Not sure how it really work but looks like very it would really help where we have combination of disk and using EMC solution.

Second half was really boarding except presentation from “F5 Networks”.

Presentation from VMWare was very very disappointing . Guy was in so much of rush that he started the session much earlier. We have to stand and attend the session for a while and finally they arrange the chair. He was rushing through each slide. Again I cannot blame him alone . It should be organizer sole responsibilities to see that what speaker has to cover. You cannot cover entire vSphare feature in 45 min. It is not at all possible.

SRM presentation again was very very poor. I came to know that they have invited their QA engineer to give presentation. Some demo video did not run during presentation . Again I was expecting some key feature of SRM to be discussed in detail which did not happen.

I though share my success story with the forum (This was the another drawback of this event that they have not invited single customer to share their success story ). I gave feedback like

a. SRM documentation is very poor from VMWare

b. For multi site DR configuration you cannot expect customer to buy VC licenses.

Presentation from NetAPP was again disappointing . Speaker was explaining about all NetAPP feature rather than explaining what VMWare offering NetAPP has. He should have explain feature like de-dupe in detail and benefits when we are using virtualization.

I like the last presentation by VMware technical director where he was comparing marketing by MS and VMWare . Guy had good amount of technical knowledge and does scan internet for latest happening . He explain DPM feature from VMware and MS hyper-v in great way. MS Hyper V Is based on Core parking and how does it differ from VMware ?

Say if you 10 cubical in office and each cubical has 4 person seating .After 6 PM you will have few people in each cubical . So what MS does is start arranging cubical so that each cubical has 4 person after 6 PM and still location electricity will be powered on consuming for all those cubical which are still vacant. But what VMWare does is move all the people into small location or small office and power off the power of entre building . That makes perfect sense when you want to save power .

Lastly it come for lucky draw session where I myself won 8GB Ipod from Vizioncore. Yeah it is much better than Itouch which I have . It got even2 mega pixel camera .