Its been a bit of a quite start to the year for me this year - so what gives?

Well I can announce today that I am taking on a new challenge in VMware's newly formed Centre Of Excellence (COE) Asia Pacific/Japan taking up the lead of the End User Computing practice.

VMware have a bunch of exciting technologies lined up in the End User Computing space, from virtual desktop infrastructure, application delivery, single sign on/Identity management, mobility solutions and SaaS applications. Whilst the technology in itself is great the sum of the parts is to bring this together to enable a very new set of solutions for businesses. Cracking the code on transforming from standard desktop management to delivering new types of apps in a world of mobility and mobile staff.

The COE will allow me to focus on as assisting in the adoption of these new solutions, building best practice and spreading these learning through the eco system around them. So a chance to get a bit more of my inner geek on but put this in the frame of business results where I have been focused for the past four years at VMware.

So, @desktop gets back to his roots a bit, I have already had the chance to catch up with some of the technology team this week and get a sneak preview of what @andreleibovici is up to already in the office of the CTO at VMW HQ.

New role, new focus - its guaranteed to be fun!

Last year at Sydney vForum we ran an open panel session where we gave the vForum delegates a chance to ask their questions to an expert panel on  VMware View and desktop virtualisation.

It was one on my favorite sessions, you can hear the session recorded here at this link.

This year we have an amazing panel of experts to repeat the session but with a focus on the future of VDI and to discuss the following question:

"Have we reached the ‘low tide’ for cost reduction and scale of VDI with the current Industry Standard Architecture’s?"

As background, in the past twelve months in particular we have seen cost of adoption of VDI is at an all time low as CPU and memory limits are removed. People are choosing to scale out rather than up in a world where we can easily run hundreds of desktops on a single server. New barriers are emerging where storage throughput and user experience at scale are the barriers to greater density and therefor TCO of View solutions.

VMware View and VMware in general has always been the breading ground for industry treads for VDI - point in case is linked clones which is now becoming the preferred option for many VDI vendor's desktop image management.

VMworld saw many new products and start-ups continue the VMware ecosystem innovation trend with add-in cards for storage, accelerators for protocol, GPU’s, SSD – all proposing a better (and proprietary) way to virtualise desktops for more efficient scale, cost and performance.

Is this the future or science projects to early to adopt? And what is the impact to those of us with existing VDI deployments or designing towards a future deployment? Is shared storage and processing power the only primary system components for concern?

To dig into this we have an truly expert panel this year:

Chris Troiani – vSpecialist Engineer, EMC (@christroiani)

Chris is part of the EMC vSpecialist team and a field expert on virtualisation, Chris has an excellent perspective on the here and now of what works and what does not. How far can we go with current architectures? Chris is the man to ask.

Randy Groves - CTO, Teradici Inc

As the CTO of Teradici, Randy Groves, brings extensive experience in computer systems, software, and semiconductor design to the company. Randy previously served as the VP of Engineering for LifeSize Communications, CTO for Dell Product Group - Randy is here for vForum discussing the new Apex Accelerator card for protocol and an ideal person to discuss this trend in the industry.

John Martin - Principle Technologist, Netapp (@life_no_borders)

John was a guest on last years panel and a well know speaker and expert in the fields on storage and backup. As Principle Technologist at Netapp in region John spends a lot of his time separating fact from fiction and future from fantasy for his technology peers.

Mike Gigante - Chief Scientist, Virsto Software

Mike is has been in a few storage start-ups and is based here in Australia, as someone who is at the very cutting edge of building innovation Mike has a unique insight and focus, of the VDI industry

Jeff O'Connor – Technical Engineering, Australian Securities & Investments Commission (@cloudpimps)

Jeff is a local industry expert and very qualified presenter as one of the local technologists running a multi-thousand View deployment at ASIC. Jeff recently pack the rooms at VMworld speaking to his experiences in the real world and sorting out which technologies will never make it there.

Finally we had hoped to have Alastair Cooke (@DemitasseNZ) from the APAC Virtualisation podcast (http://apacvirtual.com/) however Al will be downstairs running a Quickstart Education session. Al is a certified VMware trainer, consultant and community evangelist so tune into his Podcast, we will record the session for the Podcast  for those, like Al, who can not make the session (@DemitasseNZ)

As we count down into the last day before vForum you can see a few shots of setting up to get you in the mood - look forward to seeing you at the Experts Exchange session, Thursday, 4:00pm - 4:300pm at vForum 2011!

@desktopguy

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Ok, let me say right up front that vForums in APJ are going to be big this year - and I mean BIG!!!

It all starts with vForum Sydney next week, 19th October - that's next week on Wednesday. Never before have I had such a huge array of new technologies present, pure awesomeness. Bringing all this to Australia is no easy task and myself along with a bunch of folks form VMware and the community have been working really hard to make this the best industry show on virtualisation and cloud around APJ. So much so I missed the being on the APAC virtualisation PODcast a few weeks back as I was still in the office working on the show (sorry Al Cook @DemitasseNZ and the crew - I owe you vBeers for showing up late for the POD cast - no excuses)

OK, so what do we have this year?

End User Computing has been turned on its head with the rise of mobility and cloud - VMware have been thinking about this for a while and this yer we will unleash a bunch of new technology to really drive new EUC solutions we can deploy. I manged to get a EUC track at vForum Sydney last year and this year my goal is to take over the entire show - so what's on?

EUC keynote - yep, EUC hits the stage in the keynote to lay out the vision, join me as we kick of the show with ultra cool tech right up front.

Randy Groves, CTO Teradici. Randy is a super smart guy and is coming down under to run a session "taking PCoIP to the next level" and be part of the Genius bar and panel. Randy is a great guy and top notch visionary so I am looking forward to interviewing him in the panel.

Panel Session, speaking of which last year we ran the "Experts Panel" which was huge. We lined up some of the VDI industries best for Q & A and this year we do it again. I want to dig into the SSD revolution, protocole in the next 5 years but more on this tomorrow.

AppBlast, Octopus, Horizon, all there with Todd and Asanga, we pull apart for new technologies

I also went ballistic in the booth demo department:

View 5 vs. HDX - check

View 5 Unified Comms - check

AppBlast - check

Horizon App Manager - check

Project Octopus - check

Hypervisors on Mobile Phones - check

New stuff never shown publicly - check

Finally all this is free, for those looking to spend a few bucks we have live labs, actually we have over a hundred seats of the cheapest education you will ever get on IT so if you have not convinced the boss to coff a few dollars get on to it. Also those paying for the access all areas labs will get Kevin Middleton doing a architecture review for View deployment.

So if you have not registered heads over to http://www.vmware.com.au/vforum2011. If you have registered - are you paying to do the labs? I want to see who competes the most hours on the labs this year!

Looking forward to seeing you next week for VMwar eundergorund, vBeers, labs sessions, keynotes and more...tomorrow I will post on the panel session so check in then

@desktopguy

This year at VMworld amongst all the excitement with the various End User Computing (EUC) announcements it could be easy to forget the desktop visualization suite, VMware View, hit version 5.

Andre Leibovici provided a good round up of the key features on his site however I managed to have a chat to Jeff Dillabough, Teradici VP of Silicon Engineering at VMworld on some of the new changes. You can see Jeff walking through some of the enhancements in the Teradici booth below plus he demos the new Apex card.

The first of these seed cards arrived in last week while VMworld was on and I will certainly be looking forward to putting it through its paces!

"It should just work and just work well"

That's how the lead in slides to Steve Herrod's day 2 keynote kicked off today at VMworld and it was all about working well with End User Computing (EUC) for the Post-PC era

Steve opened the keynote today at VMworld Las Vegas with EUC upfront he spoke about 3 key themes:

• Desktop as a service - Manage Windows
• App catalog
• Data

These all need to be manager by a universal services broker which has users, application and policy management.

For the user it enables secure, universal access to all devices in the post PC era (Not just Windows applications).

There was a awesome demo by Vittorio Viarengo (VP Product Management, EUC) where he walked through the future of EUC and outlines the platform VMware are building to make this happen.

There was so much new technology announced my head (and twitter) are still buzzing:

Desktop as a service:

• Showcased View 5 making VoIP calls with new UC feature

App catalog :

• Project ThinApp factory, automated conversion of windows apps to ThinApp's (virtualised applications)
• Horizon app manager to take those apps and stream ThinApps from a catalog
• Project AppBlast - HTML5 app presentation of Windows, Linux and Mac apps in a browser. This was demoed on the native iPad browser
• Horizon Mobile Manager - push mobile phone managed Android VM to a device
• New partnership with Samsung on handsets with Horizon Mobile

Data:

• Project Octopus, this managed corporate DropBox with data stored either in the enterprise or off premise

Plenty to dig into, I managed to grab Vittorio as he walked off stage - check out the video below