TSX Sydney Day Two

Jeff Jennings delivered a keynote about operational readiness, this is the conversion of virtualisation from a project oriented implementation to a core technology within the organisation.
Jeff handed over to Thomas Walker for a quick demo of Pocket ACE (keep watching for my experience) and VDI. The demo was pretty quick as there were sessions to follow on each technology.
I missed Thomas’s session on ACE as I went to Andy Meakin’s storage optimisation session. My main takeaway from Andy’s session is that the BuslogicSCSI driver isn’t always slower than the LSIlogic. Also that the default queue length for the Windows 2000/2003 Buslogic driver is 1, so tuning that would help.
The other takeaway was a reminder that copying files onto a VMFS cases a lot of disk locking. This applies to using SCP to copy files into a VMFS, as the file size grows through the copy the whole VMFS is locked each time a block is allocated. This is a good reason not to keep those ISO files on the same VMFS as VMDK files. Using converter to import a machine as the VMDK file is created full size & then filled with data.
Simon Cruso discussed VDI, delivering his presentation using a Wyse thin client to deliver the presentation. I’m looking forward to the release of the VMware Desktop Manager V2.0 (not mentioned at TSX) which should include the fruit from the Propero acquisition in the form of a good desktop broker.
The final breakout session was with Andre Kemp where he outlined some of the top troubleshooting issues he sees. The session brought home to me the value of the Install & Config course, at least half the issues he mentioned are covered in the course. I look forward to the download of his presentation so I have reference information to resolve the other half.
TSX wrapped up with a panel discussion where the standard answer was “We can neither confirm nor deny the presence of that feature in a future product nor a date for that product”
As delegates left we were given a messenger type bag.

Overall a good conference. It’s difficult to balance the needs of the end user customers with the needs of the VMware partners. It’s also hard to add as much value as possible to a free event.
Next TSX Sydney I’d like to see an NDA partner only day in addition to the two or more customer days. This would follow the format at VMWorld. I’d also like to see some repeats of sessions to prevent conflicts.

© 2007, Alastair. All rights reserved.