By now, we know the stats. A mob of 17,000-plus swarmed the Moscone Center for VMworld this week, in hands-down the busiest and most crowded of the three VMworld’s I’ve been to so far.

Couple that with VMware’s “first-come, first-served” approach to session scheduling this year, and there was certainly never a dull moment.

So what was it like being part of such a massive sea of humanity?

Great migratory herds were crossing at every intersection, especially in the mornings and evenings.

The show floor was sometimes all but impassible. This photo was taken during the Best of VMworld 2010 Awards ceremony, but it gives you an idea of what the floor looked like when they first opened it on Monday night — people packed in shoulder to shoulder.

But what caused the most chaos this year was session scheduling.

Prior to the show, this message appeared on the VMworld 2010 website for registered attendees:

This year, there is no Session pre-registration, which gives you more freedom and greater control over your conference experience. Forget trying to plan your daily agenda around Sessions you picked weeks ago – use Schedule Builder to view a complete listing of available Sessions, and then just show up at the ones that work best for you. Plus, we’ll be repeating most Sessions at least once, so you’ll have ample opportunity to attend your top choices.

In fairness, VMware has received complaints in past years when sessions were limited to those who had pre-registered. Inevitably, some people wouldn’t show up, sometimes leaving empty chairs inside the session rooms and people who wanted to get in out in the cold. And freely available, come as you are resources are what the cloud’s all about, right?

VMware also did run parallel sessions, as its message indicates. There was a slide added to the electronic sign screens around the show with a list of the most popular sessions and a notification that they were “most challenging” to attend, so people at least had some warning of which sessions they needed to show up for as early as possible.

But wherever I went in the Moscone Center this week, people were talking about how difficult it was to get into sessions, and I saw some lines, particularly for hands-on labs, PowerCLI sessions, and View 4.5 sessions, that were truly eye-popping.

This is the line outside a View 4.5 session late Tuesday afternoon. You actually can’t see the end of the line in this picture — it stretches all the way down the hallway. There also seemed to be a stricter observation of the fire code at Moscone than in other convention centers I’ve been to, meaning there was no standing room inside the sessions. Judging by the size of the room for this session and the size of this line, I’d estimate no more than a third of the people waiting here actually got in to this one.

I’ve seen shorter lines for roller coasters at amusement parks — and at times the lines at VMworld had to double back on themselves, in a way similar to the lines at a Six Flags.

I don’t know what the solution would be here. Managing this many people in this short a time in limited space is no small feat. But maybe we’ll see even more “parallelization” for better “throughput” next year.

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Moscone West pavilion

VMworld opening keynote video — featuring a Matrix parody. This shot shows “The Oracle”, who told the narrator of the video his brain is now a “dumb terminal,” and got a huge laugh from the audience.  That said, considering the context of The Matrix (a future dystopia brought about by artificially intelligent computers), I’m not sure The Matrix was the reference VMware wanted to be making!

Hope Steve Jobs didn’t take a pass through here on his way to announce his new iPod at Yerba Buena…

This was the Year of the iPad.

An example of the show’s highway-themed decor on the walls of the company store.

Company store, filed under Management.

Dave Welch, CTO of House of Brick, an Oracle consultancy, discusses virtualizing Oracle databases with attendees following a session Tuesday.

Almost all of the ad space in the neighborhoods surrounding the Moscone center was virtualization-related; the spaces not devoted to virtualization ads of various types were dedicated to Apple or Microsoft consumer products.

Moscone West exterior.

Actually, I was hoping you could help me with that…

Tech Target news director Alex Barrett interviews Raghu Raghuram, general manager of virtualization and cloud platforms for VMware.

Beware strangers with company-logo’d candy…

Hey, I laughed.

XSigo’s life-size globe on the show floor.

All aboard the VMware Express.

Heard this word quite a bit over the last week. Maybe next year Journey can be the conference band…

Pano Logic T-shirt

Brian Madden regales the crowd at the Best of VMworld 2010 Awards ceremony Wednesday afternoon.

I gave these guys a big thumbs up after taking a picture of this T-shirt, displayed at their window table in a restaurant near Moscone. I don’t know who they DO work for, but it’s a clever shirt just the same.

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By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — VMware demonstrated its new vShield Edge routing virtual firewall on the VMworld 2010 conference floor, and passersby stopped to give it a look. Most attendees were intrigued by the concept but worried about the cost and complexity of another virtual layer for networking security.

“The complexity of managing VPNs and different networks is always difficult,” said Tony Stauffer, manager of end user services for an automotive manufacturer in the Midwest. “I’ll be testing it out to see if it’s really as simple as what’s been demonstrated.”

Ed Symanzik, information technologist at Michigan State University, said his shop has a virtual stack running 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), but it’s bottlenecked by a 1 GbE edge firewall.

“If I had this, I might be able to do an end-run around that physical firewall,” he said.

But that would only be if money was no object, Symanzik said. As it is, he’s not keen on paying further VMware licensing costs to get vShield Edge.

Other users weren’t comfortable philosophically getting such a product from a virtualization vendor.

“I don’t want to commingle security with the same vendor,” said Ashraf Keval, Windows systems administrator for California’s Department of Water Resources. “I have a relationship with Trend Micro, and I want to stick with that.”

A user from an accounting firm said, “I don’t need another firewall or another point of failure.” And another user from a major credit card issuer said he will investigate host-based firewall alternatives before committing to vShield Edge.

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By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — After the splashy, high-level announcement of VMware’s vCloud Director on Tuesday morning, reality set in at a VMworld 2010 session by Kevin Lees, VMware’s global vCloud delivery team lead. Lees detailed the lessons learned from beta deployments at a handful of enterprise and service-provider customers.

He emphasized repeatedly that users looking to deploy vCloud director should “take a stepwise, evolutionary approach.” He advised attendees to start simple by equating one back-end virtual data center with one vSphere cluster. He also recommended that ESX clusters running management utilities and the Oracle vCD database should be separated from resource pools in virtual data centers.

Lees also said careful planning is crucial for organizations looking to deploy vCloud Director at this stage. In particular, he advised users to follow a “60% rule,” particularly if they are setting up an Oracle vCD at a service provider data center.

“What we’ve found is that when you hit 60% utilization of the virtual data center, it’s better if the service provider doesn’t add any more organizations to it so there’s plenty of room for growth,” Lees said.

Organizations should ideally dedicate a “strong project manager” and possibly even a separate operations team to vCloud Director deployments. Well-defined roles and responsibilities, as well as cooperation with all levels of the IT organization, are essential, Lee said.

“This is not something that can be done from organic proof-of-concept processes — that can then just be turned into production,” he added.

Networking and security require special attention in the design phase, Lee continued.

“Design, design and most importantly, design,” he said. “Determine your templates early and get security to review it as early in the process as possible.”

Lees also provided more vCloud Director fine print to consider:

• Only one storage tier can be assigned per virtual data center.
• Currently, there isn’t a single sign-on in version 1 with existing portals.
• Be careful when configuring Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, because it cannot be reset to default values.
• A Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) utility called compat-libcom_err is required but does not automatically install in RHEL.
• Network File System “transfer storage” is required for users to upload their own virtual machines (VMs) and vApps, but Lees recommended that user self-service follow after initial deployment. At first, he said that IT should control spinning up new VMs, then “evolve into letting end users into the environment directly.”

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By Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — After Tuesday’s VMworld 2010 keynote, there were few details on how VMware would integrate Integrien’s performance analytics code into its products. The next day, Raghu Raghuram, general manager of virtualization and cloud platforms for VMware, filled in some of the blanks and hinted at where VMware might look to broaden its portfolio.

Raghuram said VMware chose the relatively unknown company because Integrien’s algorithms are able to analyze time-series data, which means the product has “broad applicability.” VMware plans to fold a version of Integrien’s dashboard into its vCenter management console and will also offer a standalone version that will have broader coverage of virtual data centers. The product has some significant overlap with AppSpeed, Raghuram admitted, but AppSpeed offers transaction-level analysis of application performance, something Integrien doesn’t do today.

Asked whether VMware still has an appetite for further acquisitions, Raghuram said the company will continue to be “opportunistic” in making small, tuck-in acquisitions. He wouldn’t get too specific but did acknowledge that “there’s plenty of room to grow” in security.

He also emphasized that VMware’s bias is toward small technology acquisitions and “approaches that are significantly different from what has been done before.” During the show, experts speculated VMware could have its eye on HyTrust Inc.

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