Thanks to Robert Dell’Immagine and John Troyer from VMware for hosting a very nice cocktail hour last night. The continued development of the VMware community (VMTN) is nothing short of phenomenal.

Just left a session entitled PAR110 – VMware Infrastructure 3 Operational Readiness: People and Process Considerations. Maybe it is me I was a bit confused during this session, following the morning general session where the advertised VMware ASP (average sale price) was 50K I’m not sure how much of a need there is for ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) level process and procedures. With an ASP how large can the addressable market be for these services? Will finding opportunities be like searching for a needle in a hay stack? I sensed similar confusion from others in the room. Who is the target audience for this? I am sure it will play very well in the fortune 100.

Just completed sitting through PAR105 – ware Lab Manager: Technical Sales Overview which ran from 10 AM – 11 AM.

Interesting session although I was a aware of most of this information from some of the briefings I had from Akimbi prior to the ware acquisition. In no particular order here are some of the notes from the session. Note: I was typing very fast and the slides were changing faster so I do not guarantee that this post is 100% accurate.

• ware announced Lab Manager Public Beta 1 today at VMworld 2006
• Defined market space as Virtual Application Automation
• Competition: Surgient
  • Interestingly enough I hit the Surgient web site and on the top of the page there is a quote from EMC See final note…
• Lab Mgr Avg Deal Size approximately 30K but this quickly grows to 100s of thousands of dollars
• Cost and Licensing Model
  • Two Specific Models
    • a la carte – 15K per Lab Manager Server + 1K per 2 CPUs
    • Enterprise which will include Lab Manager w/ VI Ent or Std plus VMware Workstation
• Performance concerns associated with VMDK snapshots
  • Yes, there can be performance degradation but it has not been measured as significant
• Automated IP and SID Management
• Creation of vs
  • Checkout from the Lab Mgr library which creates and exact duplicate environment with the same SID but fencing is used to protect the duplicate environment
  • Creation of a new config from a template
    • Unlike VM templates the creation of a new VM using Lab Manager templates does not copy the base disk but it creates a difference disk so the creation is near instantaneous.
• REDO limitations / best practices
  • # of VMDK files per LUN consideration, depends on how you plan to use the system – number of Vicks per LUN is gated by the number of REDO logs per VMDK.
• Target Markets:
  • Enterprise/Commercial IT – > Target Mage >10,000 Employees
    SIs and VARs -> National and Global
    ISVs -> Small, Medium and Large
• Target Customers
  • CxO – Architecture Committee
  • IT Pops
  • Application Dev – Management
• Service Opportunities
  • 2 Day Jump Start
    • Designed to up and running quickly – takes about an hour to get the base system up and going
    • Organizations will require assistance with architecture and design, integration, dvt process, best practice, etc…

As a final note, it was interesting to me during the key note this morning that em’s logo was scarce on the partner slide. In particular there was a software partner slide that had Symantec but not EMC on it. I have to wonder if the thought was that EMC is implied or if it was left off intentionally?