Back from BriForum 2010

Just got back from BriForum 2010, it was a great show as usual. This was the largest BriForum yet - both the attendee count and the exhibitor count were higher than ever. We had a table this year and got a lot of traffic. It was nice because most attendees were pretty knowledgeable about desktop virtualization and understood the benefits of client-side execution with central management, so we didn't need a lot of explaining for people to "get" the MokaFive solution. People loved our BareMetal demonstration and the fact you could manage both the BYOPC/work-from-home machines as well as BareMetal from the same management interface.

But without a doubt the best part of BriForum are the quality speakers and technical sessions. BriForum has a core of truly great presenters and speakers who talk technical and avoid FUD and marketing spin. People like Shawn Bass, Ruben Spruijt, Jeroen van de Kamp, Claudio Rodrigues, Steve Greenberg, Ron Oglesby, Tim Mangan, and Rick Dehlinger, just to name a few. And of course the man himself, Brian Madden. The presentations are great with a lot of technical meat behind them and mostly avoid the high-level fluffy marketing speak that you get at most other conferences. They are 75 minutes so you can actually get into some depth. The great presenters are what make BriForum a great event and I'm proud to have had the opportunity to present at the last two BriForums. The organizers also do a good job of treating the presenters well so I'm sure the trend will continue.

This year I did two sessions - one on BYOPC and another on Disk Workloads for Desktop VMs. The BYOPC one was in the first slot of the conference (8:45am!) and was completely full. There was a good mix of people, some of whom had deployed BYOPC, others who were interested in deploying it, and we had a good conversation. The key points were that BYOPC can reduce support costs and lead to happier users (if you do it right), and this change is happening whether you like it or not. Brian in his keynote had a great quote: "If you say there is no way you will allow it (BYOPC) in your organization, pretty soon you won't have to, because your employees will leave and go somewhere else." The other great quote I heard is: "If BYOPC is a competitive advantage today, it will be a requirement tomorrow."

The second one on Disk Workloads was much more technical. I did a deep dive into how I/O in a VM works and what a Desktop workload looks like. The desktop VM workload is quite different than server VM workloads - a typical server VM does 90% reads vs 10% writes, but a desktop is more like 60%/40% or even 50%/50%. Not only that, but the desktop VM workload is very latency-sensitive, and if you have any long latency writes, your user experience will suffer greatly. The load from a single desktop VM can peak at up to 8000 IOPS during certain operations. At the end of the session I did a demo that pitted a VM served from my Blackberry (15MB/sec read, 7MB/sec write, 10-30 IOPS) using MokaFive's optimized virtual disk format versus a normal VMDK on a much faster USB drive. The optimized one booted quickly and was very responsive, whereas the straight VMDK was sluggish, stuttering and unusable. It just goes to show that slow IO performance can make the user experience unbearable, and optimizations can make a big difference.

It was great to meet up again with the BriForum crowd and I'm looking forward to participating again next year!

John Whaley, CTO & Founder