New England VMware User Group Meeting


I attended the New England VMUG all day meeting on July 23, 2009 in Brunswick, Maine.  The event was well attended with about 1,000 VMware users from across the region spanning all sorts of industries including higher education, healthcare, etc.

I spoke with a number of vendors and consulting firms at the trade show, including AMD, Pano, CAS Severn,VMware.  Most were consulting firms that provide help setting up environments.  Considering our relationship with VMware, I find it unlikely that we would hire any of these firms in the future, but instead work directly with VMware to configure things as I have been doing on the Student Windows VM Project.

They had speaker in the main lecture hall throughout the day and I attended the following talks (click on individual sessions for my notes):

I attended a SIG breakout for Education, which was about half a dozen folks mainly from state schools that have implemented VDI (virtual desktop infrastructures) for student computing lab maintenance.  They talked a lot about what servers and versions they're using.  They were very intrigued by the idea we are pursuing of putting the VM on the students' machines, but it is not something they've done yet.  Many of them also use VMware Fusion to get around the problem of running Windows only apps on Macintoshes.

I also attended a session on Setting up a Proof of Concept for VMware View(aka VDI).  The summary from that you should setup a separate Windows Domain controller, an ESX server and need about 300 GB of storage to get it up and running.  An older server would be fine. I briefly talked with Paul Lembo (VMware Engineer assigned to MIT) and he indicated this could all be done from a single server for proof of concept.  When we get to this point, we'll want to work with our colleagues in OIS.