Last week, from 8th till the 12th of June, I visited, together with @HeresHenry and @ALexGorisNL,
E2EVC 2016 Epic edition in Dublin. This was the thirtieth E2EVC in the past 10 years. With events in
Europe, USA, Singapore and next year also Australia we can say E2EVC is going global.
E2EVC is an Expert 2 Expert event with a strong focus on virtualisation and everything related to it.
Sessions are deeply technical and community driven and therefor everyone who wants to present
has the possibility to do so on E2EVC. For presenters it’s a low level entry to the presenter stage with
good feedback of community peers that will make you better.
Wednesday 8th June
We arrived on the 8th of June in Dublin. After a delayed flight we took the airport coach to the
Clayton hotel in Leopardstown. On the airport we already met some other community members and
after a good lunch by Baan Thai we decided to go downtown Dublin. Downtown we visited the
Temple Bar district and headed for the famous Temple Bar where we had a beer and some good
conversations afterwards we had a nice steak dinner in The Lots Café Bar.
In the evening we headed back to the hotel and met up with some other peers from the community
and some good conversations and a couple of nice Irish pints at the hotel bar.
Thursday 9th June
The first day on an E2EVC event is also known as sponsor day. Alex opened the event with a warm
welcome for all the attendees. After that the first session was held by Eugene Kalayev from
ControlUp and Andrew Morgan, since this year a technology evangelist for ControlUp. ControlUp is a
monitoring tool especially for EUC environments. They showed us the latest innovations in the
ControlUp suite regarding monitoring and managing virtualization workloads.
Next up Spin dat Geek. A session hosted by Warren Simondson, founder of ctr-alt-del consultancy.
Spin dat Geek was a session with 8 CTP’s who had to answer to a thesis. Also Apple Siri played a
great role in this session. Never known that Sire could be so rude . Great session with great topics
and lots of fun.
Todd Shell had the next presentation after Spin Dat Geek. Todd presentation was about end user
monitoring from a different perspective. Todd talked about a new product called OctoInsight from
Layer8 technologies. OctoInsight is a monitoring tool that monitors EUC environments but does that
from the user perspective site. It captures user experience metrics what is a different approach then
the most monitoring tools
RES Software was up next as long time sponsor of E2EVC. I honestly have to say I skipped this session
to have a good chat with other community members.
After the lunch at Baan Thai I had some good conversations with people and I skipped the next 2
sessions.
Andrew Wood and Jim Moyle hosted the next session. Those guys have their own show on stage and
it looks like it’s their second nature. They put op a great show with lots of English humour and also
@PinkVegasMonkey was present. Andrew and Jim talked about quantifying user experience and al
the tooling on the market right now that u could use for it.
Last session of the day as always is hosted bij SMSPascode. But it’s not Only SMSPasscode anymore.
SMSPasscode is acquired by Censornet. Gunnar and Kenneth where talking about this acquisition
and all the added value it put to the SMSPasscode stack. Censornet helps companies worldwide to
meet the challenge of managing the rise in cloud applications in an increasingly mobile world.
Censornet is an comprehensive cyber security solution that provides visibility and control of web
access and cloud application use, adaptive multi-factor authentication and email security.
After this session we went to a Pub in the Dublin hills for beer, burhers and life music. See the Epic
E2EVC photo below. Leprechauns to the rescue.
Friday the 10th of June
A long day again with lots of good sessions. The day started with a good breakfast at the Clayton
hotel.
My first session on Friday was a 2-hour session called What’s New In XenServer 7.0, With a Deep
Dive Into Intel GVT-g. This session hosted by David Cottingham and Paul Durrant focused on all the
new features within XenServer 7.0. David and Paul talked about the new Windows update feature
for XenTools, SMB support but migration between SMB paths is not supported, GVT support for
Intel’s Iris Pro as first commercial hypervisor in the market and the one that interested me the most
where the direct inspect api’s which can be used Bitdefender Hypervisor Introspection. Also the new
features for Active Directory, XenServer Health scan, SCOM and Docker containers passed the revue.
The next presentation was by Jeroen van der Kamp. For the first time in 10 years Jeroen talked at
E2EVC again. His session was about Testing and tuning VDI like a pro. I was impressed how
passionate he told all the findings they did with Login VSI testing and comparing Windows 7 against
Windows 10. Jeroen had Dutch Stroop Wafels for every good question from the audience. It was
good to see the performance impact of Windows 10 in an EUC environment. Jeroen also showed the
VMware OS optimizations tool which can be used in VMware Horizon as well in XenDesktop
environments to tune your virtual desktop image.
The next 2 sessions I skipped and had some good lunch and conversations.
In the afternoon I followed another session called The best of Windows server 2016 by Thomas
Maurer and Michael Rueefli. Thomas and Michael talked about all the new features in server 2016. A
couple of very interesting features passed the revue. Nano containers and Window Server
Containers these features in Windows Server 2016 are in mine opinion game changers for future
software and application deployment. Very interesting new features to get hands-on with. Also de
Storage Spaces Direct solution which Microsoft will introduce in Server 2016 will be a game changer
in the storage market. It’s Microsoft’s own SDS solution. Very interesting session.
The last presentation for me on Friday was a presentation by Shawn Bass. Shawn shared the latest
updates around VMware EUC products and also gave us a bright vision of where the market is
heading in the near future. Sean talked about self-service, applications, one password for all apps
and devices and so on. Another great session.
In the evening a tour bus went sightseeing Dublin. Me and some other guys decided to skip this
party because it was raining cats and dogs and we had a little E2EVC Berlin déjà vu. So we stayed at
the hotel had some good food and beers and had a good evening.
Saturday the 11th of June
The day started with an Nvidia session called Nvidia Grid for the masses by Luke Wignall. Luke did a
short Citrix Synergy review about all the new announcements Nvidia did during Synergy. Talking
about the new M6, M10, M60 Tesla cards for EUC. Luke also talked about the new licensing model.
When Nvidia announced this licensing model at the end of 2015and explained it as a software as a
service model for the NVidia cards.
The next session, Hardware Encoding with NVENC on Citrix XenDesktop, by Simon Schaber, was all
about NVENC. NVENC is the name given to Nvidia's ASIC IP block that performs video encoding.
Currently it’s only supported within XenDesktop 7.8 and only available for the Linux VDA’s. It was a
very technical session for a Saturday morgen.
Next session on Saturday was the GPU Smackdown presented by Bennie Tritsch and Thomas
Poppelgaard. As always a very good session with lots of insights. Thomas Poppelgaard was the mad
scientist as always and refused to stop when Alex told him so which led to hilarious reactions within
the audience.
Next up Adain Finn talking about Azure backup server – Microsoft’s best kept secret. Everybody
probably know that Microsoft offers on-premises backup using System Center, but Aiden showed us
that Microsoft released a free on-premises backup server last year that can also backup to Azure.
Aiden told us about the use cases and that it could be very interesting to use it cost wise. One wise
lesson out of this session is don’t use StoreSimple.
Last sesson of the day was by Nico van der Stok about Automating MCS with PowerShell &
Automation Manager. Zero-Touch from VMTemplate to Production. This was one of the best
technical sessions I’ve seen on this E2EVC. Nico told us how to create a fully automated deployment
for a XA/XD environment. He showed us how to use RES automation manager to automate a full
deployment from a vanilla vm to a working environment. Oh yeah and there was something about a
mysterious layer.
This where my sessions for the Saturday. In the evening we went out with the gents from B-Critical
and had we a very great time in The Temple Bar Ditrict in Dublin. Great city, great music, great bee,
great fun.