I’m proud to announce that I work in the team that has just been announced as VMware Partner of the Year for 2009.

It has taken a lot of hard work to get to this point in the 9 months I have worked with the team, but it has all been worth it.

Well done to all of my colleagues at ANS Group.

NetApp have finally released the latest and greatest version of their SnapManager for VI product.

An essential addition to any infrastructure running both VMware & NetApp it allows guaranteed crash consistent versions of Virtual Machines to be replicated to secondary sights.

New functionality and enhancements include:

• Singe file restore (SFR)
• A single wizard for creating manual and scheduled backup jobs
• New backup job options:
  • The ability to include independent disks
  • The ability to exclude specified datastores
  • The ability to trigger prebackup or postbackup scripts per backup job (the scripts must be in the server/scripts folder on the SMVI server before you can select them in the SnapManager 2.0 for Virtual Infrastructure user interface)
• An advanced find option to search for specific backup jobs:
  • Most recent backup (default)
  • Backups within a specified time period
  • Backups that include VMware snapshots
• New restore granularity option (besides SFR):
  • VMDKs

So a lot going on here and certainly worth the wait.  You can grab a copy now from the NOW site.

VMware have just announced the 10 highest rated sessions that will be repeated this afternoon (Thursday).  Here’s the list in order:

#1 – TA01 – Managing VMware With PowerShell
#2 – DV02 – VDI versus Terminal Services
#3 – AP02 – Best Practices for Deploying Sharepoint/MOSS 2007 on VMware Infrastructure
#4 – AP11 – Performance Best Practices
#5 – DC21 – VMware – Standardised Platform Provisioning
#6 – AP01 – Best Practice for Successfully Virtualising Active Directory
#7 – DV07 – Server & Storage Sizing for VMware View
#8 – AP05 – SQL Server Performance on VMware: est Practices, Recommendations, Tuning & Troubleshooting
#9 – TA11 – Best Practices to Increase Availability & Throughput for the Future of VMware
#10 – TP12 – Consolidation of Performance Sensitive Applications

I managed to see most of these, but missed a few, so I will be getting in there if I can.  Check this photo here to see what is repeated when and where.

I can highly recommend Brian Madden’s presentation (#2) as I saw it first time round and it was great.

You can now view the full keynote of Dr. Stephen Herrod on the VMworld website here.

Some excellent stuff, particularly the demos from Bruce & jerry Chen.

The key focus here was the future of VMware virtualisation, Dr. Herrod went on to point out that this area is particular exciting at VMworld Europe as so much of the development is being done in the VMware EMEA sites

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!

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If you nip over to Richard’s website run-virtual, you’ll see a new video posted on yesterdays goings-on at VMworld and I’m in it.  I must admit I am dissappointed with myself, before I believed I was the next Brad Pitt, after seeing it, I feel more like an Arm Pitt.

Jessica promised me 5 seconds of fame and that’s about all I got.  You may notice that I am rather polished   well that may have something to do with the fact that I made an appearance on GMTV last year as I left last years Wimbledon tournament after working there.  For that appearance I managed to get in a little dance, but no such dancing for VMware.