prefvmx.consolidateDeleteNFSLocks  = “TRUE”

You will know whether it is working because you will see a .lck file appear in the folder containing the vmx file and snapshots should be opened and closed more quickly (try opening a ping to the VM being snapshotted and see if you lose fewer after making the change).

vCompute

Stephen outlined that in the upcoming version of VMware – vSphere – a single VM has been able to achieve 23,000 total DB transactions per seconds – 250mbmb/sec of disks I/O, which equates to 510 disks spindles to saturate the I/O.  Pretty impressive and as Paul Maritz said yesterday and Stephen reiterated today – “No excuses not to run databases in a VM”

Also an area that has been seen as a weak point for VMware is web workload.  This can now scale so well that VMs have been tested and can scale up to the equivalent of serving 3bn page hits a day  – eBay ‘only’ gets 1bn!

vStorage

Thin provisioning will utilise the vStorage API and can fit straight into the alarms system in vCenter to alert the admins/storage admins as to when thin provisioning thresholds are about to be breached.

vNetwork

Distributed Switch – Allows single confiugration for all hosts and maintains state
Nexus 1000v – brings visitbility at the per VM level, lots more Cisco related functionality and management can be completed by networking team and takes the onus away from the VMware admin team.

Green Credentials

On the green side vSphere will take advantage of CPU related power saving functionality as well as IPMI using DPM.  When using DPM 50% power savings were made when comparing a cluster to it without DPM enabled.  There’s a video of this section of the keynote here.

Fault Tolerance

Fault Tolerance gets particular mention here and the difference between HA & FT were discussed:

HA – restarts a VM on a different hosts, but causes outages whilst the VM is powered up and the VM is in a crash consistent state

FT – lock-steps a VM with a shadow VM of itself on a different ESX Server – it also reproduces another copy onto another ESX Server to ensure it is still protected even while the original ESX Host is down

VMsafe gets briefly mentioned in the context of vSpere & the VMware ecosystem becoming almost completely policy driven in the future.

vCenter

Linked mode was also discussed and a demo also executed by a guy called Bruce.  You can view the video here.  This now means that you can managed 10 VirutalCenters from a single VI Client GUI.

An enhanced search capability has been added that runs across the whole VMware estate.

Host profiles also got discussed, again with a demo by Bruce. You can view the video here.

vCenter Linux Virtual Appliance was announced and met with whoops of delight from the crowd, who seem to ooze their Open Source credentials whenever possible.

Then Jerry Chen came out alongside Stephen and talked about a couple of cool developments.  For which I have videos:

MVP – Mobile Virtualisation Platform
PCoIP – software implementation of PC over IP to be incorporated into VMware View

Jerry Chen’s section was excellent, so check out the official VMware video of the keynote here, when it becomes available.

I have to be frank and say that I’m not sure how well received the name will be , but time will tell.

Other announcements included vCenter Heartbeat, which has cropped up a lot in the sessions lists.  I will be attending the sessions covering this new functionality so will bring more information when I can.