Today the 6th edition of the Dutch VMUG has started.

Viktor van den Berg, Dutch VMUG leader, opened the VMUG around the 9.30 with a couple of facts and figures around the Dutch VMUG:

  • There are more than 50.000 VMUG members in the world
  • The Dutch VMUG has 5.131 members
  • There are 181 participants for the workshops
  • During the keynote 3.000 hands were shaken
  • The agenda was opened 6.158 times

Willem van Enter, Regional Directory Benelux, VMware, welcomes all participants and gives a short speech about pride, growth and future about VMware. He hints shortly to the mobile hypervisor, for which they entered a partnership with LG. Their goal is to bring virtualization toe mobile devices so you will be able to use a personal and a business profile/entity/virtual machine on your mobile phone. About one third of the audience heard about this.

Richard Garsthagen, senior Evangelist EMEA, VMware, takes us on the trip to the cloud.

According to VMware, it is not only marketing fluff, but also ‘The Future of IT’.  Virtualization paves the way to a new era in IT, where IT transforms the delivery and consumption of IT services. In the audience today less than a third is considering a cloud in their datacenter.

Employees are expecting the same experience as they have at home. They can buy applications and PC’s within minutes, while at work it sometimes takes months. When it takes that long, it is obvious to start looking at alternatives like Amazon EC2 or applications from the other providers like Google Apps, SalesForce. Most of the time even the internal IT department never know that their employers are using cloud applications filled with business data.

If you want to get on top of your IT environment you have to make sure that you can deliver. As an IT department you cannot get away with the answer ‘It will cost you $ 10.000’ for an application when the same service can be delivered by Amazon for a mere $50,- per month.

Cutting down the cost is one of the most important things you have to do if you want to stay in business. Self service and automation of the workflow is getting more important. Also knowing what it costs to operate your datacenter is important, like the power consumption. vCloud Director and vCloud Request manager are VMware products that will help you in getting the cost down. With vCloud Request Manager you can automate the workflow for requesting and provisioning VMs. You can even request and provision complete cloud environments for departments for exampleda.

Richard also points to VMware Alive, with which you can monitor applications without the need for configuring alarms. It will only trigger alarms when something deviates from normal behavior: What is different today in comparison with last Friday? When you purchase the vSphere bundle before March 15th 2011 it will include two licenses for VMware Alive

Also management will get some extra’s. Everybody is (of course) waiting for the iPad management app. At the VMware booth you can see the mobile app working. When you can’t wait that long, there are already applications in the AppStore. like iDataCenter ( 11.99) and iVMControl 7.99. There is of course also the vCenter Mobile Access appliance (FREE)

Richard also mentions the partnership with LG for the mobile hypervisor, where you can run two operating systems at the same time, with their own phone number. When you want to participate in the beta as company you can mail to mvpinfo@vmware.com. This is for customers aimed at Android.