BriForum Day 2
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions! There were so many great sessions today that were in the same time slots, it made picking which sessions to attend really hard! Here’s what I decided to do:
I really struggled first thing in the morning! I was planning on going to “A Deep Dive into the 20 Year History of Citrix Systems” mainly because one of the presenters was Brad Pedersen who is generally considered the “Father of ICA” However I assumed this was going to be more of a trip down memory lane I figured I could catch it when Brian releases the videos and opted for “Quick and Dirty Performance Analysis” presented by Ian Parker. This was a great session and I’m glad I decided to attend it. Obviously, given the economy, a lot of IT budgets have been cut so getting that awesome silver bullet monitoring and root cause analysis system is out of the question. Ian presented some free Microsoft products that can get the job done…well, quick and dirty. Of course everyone knows about PerfMon but the tool presented were Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) and Server Performance Advisor. Both tools take a lot of the guess work out of which counters to measure and generate easy to read reports analysing bottlenecks. Some of the discussion branched off to storage counters. What would make a great session for next year would be PerfMon on VM’s and they’re relationship to the underlying hypervisor.
Again, my next session required me to make a hard decision between “A Complete Application and Desktop Delivery Solution Overview” by Rubin Spruijt and Shawn Bass or “Hyper-V and System Center How good could it be?” by fellow New Jerseyian Mike Burke. I ended up going to the Hyper-V session, in reality I couldn’t go wrong either way, but again, I’m glad I made that decision.
First let me start off by saying, I love VMware…technology; Not so much the company. I personally think they’re rubbing some people the wrong way with their new licensing on vSphere and Enterprise Plus. I also can’t stand the VMware ego about being the best hypervisor on the planet. Mike’s presentation was very refreshing and some of the new features in SCVMM R2 in conjunction with Hyper-V and the rest of the System Center suite may just bring that ego down a few pegs. As I said earlier, with IT budgets shrinking, Hyper-V’s “good enough” approach might be enough to take some market share away from VMware.
After lunch I attended another Joe Shonk session on the “Overview of Microsoft’s Inbox VDI Solution” First let me say Mr. Shonk has some serious cohones to demo an unreleased Microsoft product, I’ll give him many props for that!!! Overall I think the solution is interesting, however there are a ton on manual processes…at least right now. Microsoft is pitching this not so much as a solution but a framework for 3rd party development. This is an intriguing approach. Much like Citrix is an add-on to MS Terminal Services, I wonder if eventually something like XenDesktop, or View (fat chance) will become and add-on to this VDI solution. When it comes to VDI, one thing I try to remember is Microsoft owns the desktop space, which leads me to believe eventually they’ll own the VDI space as well.
Next up…yet another hard decision! Like I said in yesterdays post, I never miss an Ron Oglesby session, however today I did! Ron was doing a presentation on “Workload Sizing for Today’s Virtual Environments” but right now, I’m in some profile hell back at the office so I attended Shawn Bass and Benny Tritsch’s (also 2 fantastic presenters) “Mastering User Profiles in TS and VDI” This one was an eye opener! Everyone knows what user profiles are and how to configure them, but these two gents really went into the details on how user profiles – local, mandatory, and roaming interact with the system during logons and logoffs. They also went into some best practices on when to roam, when to use folder redirection and when not too. Shawn closed out the session by reviewing most of the 3rd party user profile management tools out there in about 30 seconds – they were running out of time and video tape and he still managed to get them all in on time! A great session overall, the room was packed!
My last session of the day was “Project Virtual Reality Check” by Rubin Spruijt and Jeroen Van de Kamp. These two guys each work for competing consulting firms in Europe but jointly started virtualrealitycheck.net to benchmark terminal server and VDI workloads across all 3 major hypervisors (VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V and bare metal) using Login Consultants VSI benchmark tool. The numbers are staggering. I attended this session last year and had to go again this year just to see what’s changed. Basically, the school of thought that virtualizing terminal servers is a bad idea is history. During their benchmarks, terminal servers actually ran more efficiently on hypervisors then they did on bare metal!!! Don’t believe me? The benchmarks are freely available from their website I’m already looking forward to attending this session next year when they benchmark the Nehalum CPU’s with vSphere, XenServer 5.5 and Hyper-V R2.
Today there were some breaks between sessions to visit the vendor demo labs. Unfortunately for me, I had some fires to put out in the office didn’t get much of a chance to see them. However, everyone seems to be talking about nComputing so I stopped by their booth in the morning. nComputing makes a type of thin client/software solution and their niche is that they’re really cost effective. They come in 2 flavors, the first uses a PCI card in the server that connects to the thin clients by what looks like Ethernet cables. This allows for full motion video, sound, etc to be presented to the client, however they are distance limited. There other solution is more of a traditional SBC thin client solution. They were kind enough to send me off with a demo unit and I look forward to testing it out.
The other interesting thing I noticed about this years BriForum….Now that brianmadden.com and BriForum are part of TechTarget, Brian and Gabe seem to have more time on their hands which is great because they’re walking around talking to vendors, and attendees. I made a comment to Gabe yesterday that he’s walking around looking like an attendee, normally he’s running around with a switch under one arm and a three laptops under the other!
