I attended BitNet in Burlington today. More information on virtualization and VMware products. The primary sponsor for the event was BlueRange Technology.

The first speaker was Frank Morassutti from IBM. His topic was on IBM server products and gave us an early announcement on the new eX5 chipset. How does a new chipset fit with virtualization? More RAM with no reduction in throughput on memory access. Doesn’t sound like much until you look at licensing costs, with up to double the memory you can run more virtual hosts on the same number of processor cores. Since servers are licensed by cores you can get more server capacity without increasing your licensing budget. Pretty cool if you have the new servers.

Second speaker was Daniel Beveridge from VMware. His topic was on the new PC-overIP (PCoIP) products from VMware. Comparable to RDP when  on LAN it supposedly offers much higher refresh rates and rich media support over slower VPN links. Here is a VMware blog entry on the subject. He did give an hint that VMware is working on a hypervisor for mobile devices, which could in theory allow you to run Android on a PC or Windows 7 on a smartphone. That I would like to see.

One small nit about the event. Door prizes were great, but sponsors should not be allowed to enter the card draw for door prizes, or at least not accept them. When I worked on the supplier, sponsor or presenter side of an event entering a draw was strictly forbidden (and pretty tacky too).  It doesn’t look good when an employee of a sponsor wins a door prize, regardless of value.

I was asked by one of the VMware staff to give my comments on what I thought of the VMware Express Roadshow on April 27, 2010. Chris Herbert one of the founders of Silicon Halton was kind enough to link to it on Silicon Halton website.

Here is a direct link to the video on YouTube: My comments on VMware 2010 Virtualization Tour

Attended the VMware Express Virtualization tour today when it stopped in Burlington at the VMware Canadian office. Quite an impressive package with servers, LAN and many desktop devices all mounted inside the truck. Hardware included XSIGO I/O Director for I/O virtualization and bandwidth allocation, Dell PowerEdge servers and what looked like an EMC Clariion CX4 NAS. There were other devices in the chassis but I couldn’t see them too well through the tinted glass.

The stars of the show were the VMware products. All of the server products were there but just like the servers don’t have a lot of wow factor in demo. Don’t get me wrong, this stuff is great and has huge possibilities for cost saving/reduction, load balancing and BCP/DR plans, it just doesn’t look as interesting in a walk-by demo environment. The most interesting products on display were on the desktop section of the trailer.

There was hospital type demo with two thin-client WYSE terminals outfitted with proximity cards readers (just like on door security systems) for user authentication. The concept demonstrated here was a nurse checks patient orders then leaves the nurses station and enters a patient room to (for example) change an IV.  The proximity card reader automatically closes her “desktop” at the nurse station and re-opens her desktop on the terminal in the patient’s room so the IV change can be entered into the patient’s chart. The migration of the patient’s chart from one terminal to another was done using a virtual desktop and routed to the correct terminal based on the nurse’s security card.

Another demo that showed the capabilities of the VMware View 4 product was a Samsung Zero Client setup running PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol by Teridici. In this setup the zero or thin) client hardware and firmware is built into the Samsung NC-190 monitor. All you see on the desktop is a monitor, mouse, keyboard and a LAN cable – no “box” with power supply, memory and video processor. This reduces the “thin” client to “zero”. The upside of this is reduced desktop expense and increased security as no data is stored on the client. However, the server does the pixel level rendering so you need beefy servers to run these clients for any rich media or applications that perform 3D rendering.

There was more in Express truck, which I will cover later. All-in-all a very impressive traveling demo. Thanks go out to Jonathan Hemming from the VMware office for passing the word through the Silicon Halton group about this event.

I’m glad to see the end of 2009 and I’m starting 2010 assuming it will be a better year.

I wish everyone a happy and healthy New Year and hope that those in my family as well as my friends and other acquaintances that are unemployed (and the under employed too) get the chance to land back on their feet and put the hardship behind them.

All the best,

Jason…

Choosing a name for anything (person, place or thing) is a very personal and deliberate choice. Finding the right one can take some work…

My parents picked Jason as a first name as something a little different than the usual “Robert”, “Steve” and “Micheal” that was so common in my generation.  I thank them for it and I’ve never felt the need to change it. It was rare to find another Jason, and there was no other Jason Bartlett to be found on the web.

That changed when Jason Bartlett the baseball player and Jason W. Bartlett the politician put me many pages down in the search rankings.  I was so far down on the search results  I couldn’t even find myself on the web anymore.  If I couldn’t find me then who would?

Time for a change.  I added my middle initial and that will fix everything (right?).  As the saying goes “time will tell“.