VMware
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Sep 2, 2009
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...
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VMware
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Sep 2, 2009
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.
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VMware
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Sep 2, 2009
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.
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VMware
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Sep 1, 2009
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
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Server Virtualization and VMware
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Sep 1, 2009
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.
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