Category Archives: VMware

VMworld 2009 – Keynote P5

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To expand and handle the next layers of Virtualization is:

vSphere Control:

Appspeed: is the “finger of blame” now.   Instead of Network always getting the finger, now AppSpeed can point the finger at someone else.  

vApps are the containers of the future for applications be it standalone or multi-tier.   The idea is with a vApp is that it has a variety of attributes/metadata such as Availability, RTOs for dR, Max Latency etc.   This info travels with the vApp.  

VMsafe APIs:   This gives control of security and compliance.   The nice thing is this is more appropriate data tied to a vApp via the attributes/metadata and the various vendors such as Trend/McAfee/Symantec/RSA etc.   Example would be Needs these firewall rules and capabilities.  

vCenter ConfigControl:   The demo showed that ConfigControl really has

vSphere Choice:

LabManager is the token self service portal today.

VMworld today:

37,248 machines -

if physical –> 25 MegaWatts – 3 football fields of space

with VMware Virtualization – Down to 776 physical servers running 540 Kilowatts

vCloud

Priority is around the internal cloud.   Next is working on bringing internal datacenter trust and capabilities to the external clouds.   The 3rd innovation is how and what can you do once you have these two pieces and how they interact and connectivity. 

Today Site Recovery Manager is the first step into the Connectivity space.   When and how and what needs to take place to failover from one datacenter to another one. 

Long Distance VMotion:   The challenges – Move VMs Memory, Disk consistency/syncing and VM network id/connections.  

  • Follow the Sun/Moon approaches (moving computing to stay during the night and cheaper issues) 
  • Disaster Datacenter Avoidance – Hurricane coming.   Move the Datacenter somewhere out of the path.

Cisco does this by spanning Layer 2 across both campuses up to 300KM apart. 
F5 uses its iSession technology to move things around through a globally based load balancer system.

Interoperability:  vCloud API

vSphere Plugins with your hosting provider to maintain the Single Pane of Glass. 

Open Standards.   The end goal is it will work regardless of where you go or what hypervizor is used.   The end goal is to have a good eco system and selection for end clients.  

vApps   Automation for the app stacks.   Spring Source helps go down this path.  Much discussion around splitting up Infrastructure, Applications, Platform and separating these to create well defined interaction points.  

Spring Source Demo shows some of the process capabilities to control deployment and put some controls around it.   Things like CloudFoundry.  For those of us the contest is on.. http://www.code2cloud.com for backstage pass to see Foreigner.  (Oh wait.. maybe I shouldn’t post that)  

Till the next time.   I’m off to IO DRS Tech Preview.

VMworld 2009 – Keynote P4

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vSphere is the basis of all the improvements and technology over the years.  Based on Software Mainframe (for those of you over 40), the Cloud (for the under 40 crowd) and decides the best idea is to call it The Giant Computer.   The reason this all works is because of VMotion.   It is the basis of all that has happened.

The reason for the success of VMotion is Maturity, Breadth, Automated Use.

Maturity of VMotion – Estimates (fun or not) put around 360 million VMotions around the world since VMotion started.  About 2 VMotions a second around the world.   VMotion is 6 years old.   (Wow I feel old)

Breadth of VMotion – Storage  & Network VMotioning.   Across protocols and soon across Datacenters.   High performance computing systems are starting to look at using VMware.  

Automation of VMotion – DRS is the initial version that made this work.   DRS has been shown to average 96% of a perfect performance environment compared to a manually setup cluster in a perfect world.     Future will include IO DRS shares and configuration based on IOPS.    DPM allows for power optimization across the datacenter.   Or as has been said a Server Defrag capability.  

vSphere is still driving ahead.. more next post.

VMworld 2009 – Keynote P3

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View also includes the Mobile Technology dicussion.   Mobile Technology is longer term working for functionality.    Visa Product Development is up on the stage.   He sees this space as a huge innovation going forward.    Current development is significantly complicated.   Easing functionality for development is extremely interesting for Visa. 

The Visa demo uses Windows Mobile on a developer version of a phone (kinda big) running an Atom CPU.   The presentation shows some alerting from Visa transactions and finding local ATMs.   The impressive zing is that the Visa demo application is actually an Android app running on the Atom CPU.   Wow.  

Next..

VMworld 2009 – Keynote P2

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A major goal of the View initative is to have the same image while providing the best experience possible with WAN, LAN and Direct machine speeds.    For WAN/LAN the solution will be PCoIP.   The performance numbers are very impressive and no numbers.    This protocol has shown some excellent capabilities over WAN connections.

The other piece for local machine usage is Employee Owned machines.   Hosted Virtualization is being highly developed.    Deals with Intel have gone the next step with Bare Metal Virtualization for Corporate owned machines.   

Demo of the Bare Metal Virtualization (type 1 hypervisor).   Direct3D works fairly well during the demo.   A presentation of OpenGL using the Google Earth demo over PCoIP and over the LAN was very nice.  The WAN demo back to Portland simply rocked.  

Wyse has an iPhone application to make the iPhone act as a thin client connecting over PCoIP to the same virtual machine ruled.   Quick and effectively to scroll around the screen and do what you would normally.   Which is appropriate having seen well over 2 out of 10 people having iPhones, more than Blackberrys here.

More to come.. next post…

VMworld 2009 – Day 2 Keynote – P1

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The morning video is pretty neat and a clean match to yesterday’s video.  Anyone get this video for replay?   Lots of playing with letters flying around and a good theme fitting with the “hello freedom” this year.  

This is mainly Steve Herrod’s presentation.   3 major initatives - View, vCloud, vSphere.   All driven around business need.  

View has over 1,000,000 desktops and 7,000 customers today.   The high focus is around better efficiency day to day.   This is built over the vSphere system.   Over 3 million engineer hours put into vSphere.   vSphere has some nice base to work on such as Commonality for management, Security, Availability, Efficiency.  

Focusing on View some big points are Provisioning, Image Updating & Policy Enforcement.   The key to desktops is breaking them apart into the same separation that has been done on server side.   Separate out the Application Stacks from the OS and pulling out Data Store parts.  

Big news is the announcement on rtoVirtualProfiles agreement.  

More next post…

VMworld 2009 Day 1 Wrap Up

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I went to two other sessions and they just weren’t anything I was intersted in so I left early and spent time talking with engineers from various companies about their products.   So far I’m not really too wowed by much of the products.   This fits into my feelings about the keynote after it was done.   Not really wowed at all.  No new product announcements, version announcements or even serious tech previews.   The one I was all excited to see on the big screen was the PCoIP and they rushed through that.  

The vCloud announcement was nice as it is starting to get somewhat defined for the industry.  Thanks to Jian Zhen (zhenjl) from VMware for pointing me to the vCloud API.  I’ll be reading through that this week.   Probably on the flight home knowing me.   Seeing the investment by companies like Terremark already for “on demand servers access” is nice and in the ranges of cost feasibility. 

Overall the day has been productive and less than exciting.

TA4820 – What keeps a cloud up?

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Arrived at the session early and was easy to get in even though I hadn’t registered.   The CTO of Stratus Tech started and covered the basics for his presentation.  Covering things like his history and what the cloud is.  A pretty common “Cloud is whatever folks want” and 80% of IT management agrees that the cloud will be great.    He feels that SaaS will have a .com style consolidation any day now.

Much of the legacy technology architectures like Mainframe, client server and n-tier applications are not going away even though everyone claims they are dead.   As such the cloud is just moving these legacy systems into a separately  managed group.   Not necessarily removing them from service. 

One of his big points is that Availability is a bit concerning moving to the cloud.   Application Platform, Vendor Trust, Mgmt/Platform monitoring & Billing are 4 major areas of concern to make sure you know and have defined in the contracts.  Can you trust your business to these when the services are down?  VMware offers some of these.  

The Stratus CTO’s comments are that you need a cloud environment with Fault-tolerant hardware platforms, 24/7 services for support, Culture of high focus on availability technologies, and 30 years of experience doing work like this.   99.999% hardware uptime accomplished by heavy investments into monitoring and operational simplicity.  

Stratus provides and develops lockstep hardware technology to keep things running as they provide hardware tandem architectures.   8 of 10 banks, 10 of 13 pharma, 900 health agencies.   This is clock locked systems in sync.   MasterCard & Visa use this so things always work.    100% of credit card transactions in Japan are run through their servers.  They work on Windows, Linux and now VMware.  

This kind of hardware takes you from Basic HA to Better Fault Tolerance to finally Continous Availability.  The FAA has identified that Continous Availability is extremely critical.   They are looking to upgrade from older versions of the hardware and Stratus’s answer was to move to vSphere with Stratus’s ftServer to get to 24 hour and near 100% uptime.

Virtualization works today for much of the functionality of “cloud”  In the near term their will be Private Clouds.   Moving to public clouds is still in the air and there is a lot of hype versus reality.   Security and availability is a major concern for public clouds.  

What keeps clouds up?   Products, Services, Experience & People and Culture.   It is the whole picture and not just pieces and parts.  What is the cost of downtime and is the possibilty of public downtime acceptable?   Many pieces of technology are extremely difficult to deal with in this regard to validate uptime and keep your business working.

VMworld 2009 – Opening Keynote – Tod Throws the Gaunlet

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Today there are 30 Fortune 1000 companies who are not using VMware.   The gaunlet has been thrown.   Free VMworld passes if you can get them to start using VMware.   This was thrown by Tod Nielsen, Chief Operating Officer of VMware. 

update (1 Sept 09 10:31PM):   The list of 30 is as follows – Thanks to Anthony in the comments:

Allied Waste Industries
Amerco
Annaly Capital Management
AutoNation
Beacon Roofing Supply
Burlington Coat Factory
Calumet Specialty Products
Carpenter Production Services
Dole Food
ExpressJet Holdings
Flowers Foods
Fred’s
Group 1 Automotive
Host Hotels & Resorts
Hudson City Bancorp
Ingles Markets
Interactive Brokers Group
Internatonal Assets Holding
Interstate Bakeries
Kansus City Southern
KB Home
Mueller Industries
Mueller Water Products
Mutual of America Life
Nalco Holding
National Life Group
New Jersey Resources
Patterson-UTI Energy
Ryland Group
Scotts Miracle-gro
Sonoco Products
Thor Industries

VMworld 2009 – Keynote Thoughts

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Ok.. Its proven.   No-one in the industry can keep up with Scott with blogging.   You want a live blog go here.  

The Cloud.  Business Complexity.   Give businesses Flexibility.  

The great question is how do you do this?   Much of the point is “Simplify so things can happen since it is so complex today.”   People understand the current environments where application stacks exist on physical hardware instances and it works.   Complex, though it works.  

The Cloud that VMware is proposing is a layer between this hard tie of Physical Hardware to the Application Stack.   Much of this is not anything new to folks.   It is a straight up thought of API development.   Take something that lot of different systems/interfaces do and abstract it into an object with well defined interfaces.  

By adding in this additional layer IT and business can simplify those interactions.  This is an amazing and great piece of simplification that is being offered.   Not something to make light of if one has worked in a seriously large IT shop.   VMware is the only company I’ve seen to date that has taken a serious analysis of these interfaces between the different technologies and domains involved in supplying services from IT to the business side.   This covers all the various pieces of the VMware structure like vSecurity, vStorage, vNetwork, vCompute, vAvailability, vScalability and the other vStuff.  

The individualized components that now have well defined (or at least a first run at it) of these interfaces.  So the complexity can still exist inside of the box that is defined though others can deal with that component in a nice clean way.  

Then too you can start producing some nice flexibility to do auto provisioning and self management.   Since you have this API you can control anything that talks to those interaction points.   This is why VMware is on the cutting edge and Microsoft & Citrix are still behind.

VMworld 2009 – Opening Keynote – Announcements

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Something new.. from VMworld 2009 Opening Keynote

vSphere:

VMware-Go - Helps get ESXi configured and setup for SMB customers.

vCloud:

vmware virtualized – vCloud certified enterprise ready services.  
vCloud Express – Rapid and inexpensive light workload ready functionality by service providers.  (Nice demo on Terremark services)
VMware vCloud API – vApp deployment, Inventory listing, vApp operations, Catalog Mgmt, and more

SpringSource

Key goal is to simplify application frameworks and gain better understandings.