Last Thursday I participated in the Israeli VMUG meeting. The following are my thought and observations from what was presented at this meeting. (The product release dates mentioned below are not mine, but were presented at the event).

First up was someone from the Systems Engineering group from VMware who talked about:
Cloud Vision

It was mentioned that ESX 4.1 will be released in not to distant future.

VMware are working on the options of raising the Maximum number of vCpu's for a VM from 8 per VM. This will assure that there is no CPU workload - whatsoever - that cannot be run as a VM.

From a VMware Customer survey from 2008:

The application is that is most customers are virtualizing is SQL - 56%, followed by SharePoint - 53%, IBM Websphere 50%, Oracle Middleware - 41% and Exchange 36%

The average Oracle DB Server uses 2-4vCPUS, utilization is approximately 6%
Average disk I/O 2000 IOPS

VMware are going to push cloud this upcoming year, and in order to embrace this you should treat your VM as a server - it should be a service - that way it will be easier to define the financial cost for this service as opposed to the single server.

VMware is looking for Service providers for Cloud Services in Israel.

Project Redwood - Middleware - Common service model for  Infrastructure clouds, which will allow for use of services for a user centric perspective - will include API that can communicate between clouds, the focus will be on this for the upcoming year

Next up was a presentation about capacity IQ, I was surprised to see that not many of the 60-80 of the participants knew of any of the other vendors that provide these similar services. I did not receive a satisfactory response regarding what the added benefit that CapacityIQ has over these 3rd party products.

Thereafter was a presentation about AppSpeed. At present, the product is limited to a small number of protocols that it can analyze. Plans  for the future are to enlarge that number for broader application support.

After that was a presentation regarding View 4.0 and the new enhancements - Teradici and PCoIP, a very good explanation was given as to how the graphics rendering works which allows for the better overall user experience using this protocol.

Last  on the Agenda was a session about PowerCLI. The only earth-shattering moment I had in this session was when the presenter asked, "How many of you used PowerCLI for scripting tasks?" , three people put their hand (out of an audience of 80) the presenter, one other person and myself.

I have to really ask, how is it that these people are performing their VI duties efficiently if they are doing everything manually? I mean there were people that manage VMware environments that contain hundreds of Hosts and thousands of VM's. I am wondering how they manage to get their work done - without using PowerCLI.

I do see that the potential for educating VI admins in Israel to use Powershell for management is extremely high - and there is still a lot of work to be done.