Social media is the order of the day for VMworld! John Troyer, Luke Kilpatrick, and Tony Dunn have done an excellent job this year of integrating various social platforms into the every day workings of the show!

This of-course mean that there are lots of tweet-ups (gathering where attendees and exhibitors can chat and post live content online via Twitter and other social platforms!

Yesterday I attended several including the VMworld Partner tweetup, and the official VMworld tweetup!

There are load of people you’ll want to follow on Twitter this VMworld.

You’ll obviously want to follow @JTroyer, @LKilpatrick, and @Tony_Dunn.

Here are just a few more of the regular bloggers you’ll find in the lounge: @CXI, @KendrickColeman, @RogerLund, @Sysxperts, @vInf_net, @2vcps, @that1nickguy, @Kiwi_Si, @DavidMDavis,

I’ve been moving around the VMworld conference since it opened yesterday, and thought it best to showcase what PHD Virtual are offering.

This year PHD released the 4.0 version of it’s Backup for VMware product (previously esXpress), released Backup for Xenserver, and now at VMworld are showcasing Backup for vSphere (ESXi)!

PHD Virtual Backup for ESXi is built upon the next generation of PHD Virtual’s award winning VBA architecture, and extends support to vSphere deployments leveraging ESXi.

Features include:

The fastest and most cost effective backup that minimizes storage requirements

The most reliable solution for data integrity with source-side de-dupe and enhanced self-healing backups

Distributed, enterprise-ready architecture supporting fault tolerant deployment

If you are at VMworld drop by booth #115 at the solutions exchange and we’ll demo you any of the three backup solutions!

The solutions exchange at VMworld is now open and it is seriously packed with attendees!

My time is being split between the blogger lounge, and the PHD Virtual Booth (number #115).

PHD are reviewing their Citrix, ESX, and ESXi offerings at the booth. If you drop by you’ll be in the running to win an iPad and an iPhone 4G!

I’ve been hanging out in the blogger lounge at VMworld for most of the morning and have been watching things unfold.

VMware’s Social Media legend John Troyer just sent out the link to the live stream of the blogger lounge update center!

Here it is:

The last few days at VMworld San Francisco have been interesting!

Saturday started with the vBeers meet-up at the Chieftain Irish Pub with @Kiwi_Si, @Sysxperts, @DavidMDavis, @vInf_net, @VMDoug, @KendrickColeman, @RogerLund and @RBrambley.

This provided an opportunity to catch up with all the people we hadn’t seen in a year and meet some new faces!

Today started with a brief visit to the Blogger Lounge where we caught up with VMware’s John Troyer, then we moved on to a meet up in the Sky Lounge of the Marriott hotel. This has the best view of the bay area, and provided networking with more of the usual suspects we run into each year at VMworld.

Later in the day we attended the VMunderground “WupaaS” party which brought together the top industry members in discussion fueled by an open bar and free food.

This had other benefits as I won the prize draw for the TrainSignal DVD package (See picture below).

Tomorrow will see the beginning of the sessions and the expo hall opening up in the evening!

PHD Virtual Technologies, pioneer and innovator in backup and recovery for virtual machines, announces immediate availability of PHD Virtual Backup for Citrix
XenServer®. The new backup and recovery solution is purpose‐built for the growing number of virtualized XenServer environments and is verified to work with XenServer as part of the Citrix Ready® program.
PHD Virtual provides the ability to back up and restore business‐critical information quickly and efficiently, directly within the XenCenter® management console, providing a single pane of glass to manage virtual machine backups. With support for XenServer, XenDesktop® and XenApp™ customers can leverage the same solution across their entire virtual environment.

“PHD Virtual is a value‐added XenServer ecosystem partner,” said Lou Shipley, Group Vice President and General Manager, XenServer Product Group, Citrix Systems. “The new PHD Virtual Backup for XenServer product provides our joint customers a robust, integrated and scalable backup and recovery solution as they accelerate the virtualization of mission critical applications.”

“We are excited about the release of PHD Virtual Backup for Citrix XenServer,” said Ryan Spaeth, Senior Engineer, Mason Valley Quicknet. “Our testing of the beta release has demonstrated that we can reduce our backup window and decrease the time it takes to restore virtual machines in our environment. The direct integration with XenCenter gives us a solution that is incredibly easy to use and provides a single location to configure and manage all of our virtual machine backups.”

PHD Virtual Backup is recognized as the most scalable backup and recovery solution on the market with the highest performance for virtualized servers. Leveraging the unique VBA™ Architecture, PHD Virtual delivers a robust backup solution that integrates directly into the virtualization infrastructure leveraging
virtual appliances for backup and recovery of virtual machines. This unique approach provides a solution that efficiently scales to meet growing demand without the need for dedicated proxy servers, additional hardware or software agents.

“We are seeing growing adoption of XenServer as our customers increasingly virtualize their critical workloads and are excited to extend our award winning backup and recovery technology to the XenServer platform,” said Thomas Charlton, Chairman and CEO of PHD Virtual Technologies. “This new product complements our strategy of providing best in class backup and disaster recovery for virtual infrastructure and supports our customers desire to have flexible solutions for heterogeneous hypervisor environments. Feedback from our beta testers has confirmed that our solution is fast, efficient and easy to integrate into their XenServer environments.”

Customers can dramatically accelerate reliable backup and recovery of XenServer virtual machines leveraging unique patent pending technologies included in PHD Virtual Backup:

PHD Virtual’s solution for Citrix XenServer backup is now available. Download a free trial version of PHD Virtual Backup for XenServer today. Please register and attend for an upcoming webinar on PHD Virtual Backup for Citrix XenServer August 26 and Sept 1.

Visit the PHDVirtual.com for our entire webinar calendar.

At the beginning of this year VMware announced the EMEA VCI of the Quarter award program. The award recognizes exceptional VMware Certified Instructors from the EMEA region. Potential candidates are nominated by VATCs having demonstrated a combination of consistent excellence in customer evaluation scores and an ability to help students make the most of their VMware technology. In addition candidates are evaluated based on their contribution to the VCI community forums, early adoption of new training courses and a commitment to raising the quality of VMware’s education portfolio. Each quarter a VATC can nominate one directly employed and one independent VCI whom they have contracted with the nomination period.
The VCIs nominated will undergo a thorough review process to be considered for the award. A panel that includes members of the EMEA VATC education team evaluates each nominee’s technical expertise and contributions for the past 3 months. The panel considers the quality, quantity, and level of impact of the nominee’s contributions.

Last month Eric Sloof received an email from Kevin Johnson – VMware’s Northern Region Education Manager congratulating him as the best VMware Certified instructor of the quarter saying “The winner for the Independent VCI of the Quarter is Eric Sloof. This was a very easy selection to make. Eric has been very busy over the last 3 months and has delivered 14 classes over a wide range of subjects, two of these classes were LoL. Eric’s scores were also consistently high. Eric is also very active in the VCI community”

Eric says on his blog: “You can imagine that I’m very proud with being awarded as the Independent VCI of Q2 2010. This morning I’ve received the official “Award of Appreciation” plaque from Raymond Boelhouwer. I can only say one thing, many thanks to all, it was my pleasure.”

So Simon Seagrave mentioned a San Francisco vBeers at this month’s London meetup, and he’s now published the info!

There have already been some great events announced such as VMUnderground’s WuPaaS on Sunday evening(for more details see here) and the Official VMworld Tweetup (details here) on Monday.

With VMworld kicking off on a Monday this year many folk will be rolling into town over the weekend so what better time to arrange a nice social get together on the Saturday night before the main event’s festivities begin.

Both Simon Long and Simon Seagrave are the culprits behind the idea of a SF vBeers, so if you’re in San Francisco on the Saturday night and would like to come and meet fellow virtualization enthusiasts then make a note in your diary and come along. All welcome and the more the merrier!

The details on the San Francisco event can be found below:

Date: Saturday 28th August
Time: 7:00pm until whenever we finish
Where: The Chieftain Irish Pub & Restaurant (be on the lookout for Veeam’s @VMDoug here, as he lives in this bar during VMworld!)
Drink/Food: They serve a good range of beers and soft-drinks along with decent bar food – check out their site here for a menu.
Address: Opposite the Inter-Continental Hotel and only one block from Moscone Center and Westfield Shopping Mall.

198 5th Street @ Howard
San Francisco
CA 94103

This video was released by VMware TV this week and describes the Lockdown Mode feature of VMware vSphere 4.1 ESXi and the various ways to enable it.

For more information visit: http://vmware.com/go/ESXiInfoCenter

In today’s virtualized IT environments, providing a simplified way to manage your VMs and ensure your data is backed up and restored is critical. With PHD’s VBA™ Architecture, virtual appliances are used to manage the backup process, requiring no additional infrastructure, eliminating the use of proxy servers and removing the risk of an incomplete or failed backup. The PHD Virtual Management Appliance centralizes control of all hosts and deployed VBAs, and enables simple setup, configuration, and backup, allowing you to proactively manage the backup process within your virtual infrastructure.

Key Advantages:
• Perform Advance File-level restoration without having to go through time-consuming virtual disk mounting procedures
• TrueDedupe™ Technology: PHD deduplication takes place across all VMs over their entire lifetimes, reducing backup file sizes and storage requirements across a virtual infrastructure
• OpenRestore™ Technology: PHD provides the capability to restore data without access to the PHD software or license keys. With proper credentials any user can connect with the host machine and run a restore, thus your data is always available.

Join Us, Tuesday, August 24 at 10 AM EST for the final installment of our three webinar series focused on: Flexibility & Ease of Use.

Stop by our booth at VMworld #115 to see a sneak peak of the future release of PHD Virtual Backup solution for VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi). See a demo on PHD’s unique VBA™ architecture and enter to win an Apple iPad or latest iPhone 4.