VMworld 2008 - Day 1

VMware | Sep 16, 2008

Overall the first real day here at VMworld was a good one. I was fortunate enough to partake in the TAM day which is always interesting. We discussed some of the newly announced vDatacenter OS, quite a bit about Site Recovery Manager product and the new directions of the VMware Desktop Manager product line. What is interesting is that the vDatacenter OS is not really a single product line. Its more of a framework layout. A set of potential coming APIs that will define all the interfaces openly across all the areas (vStorage, vNetwork, vCenter, vHypervizor (not real.. Just going to the underlying level that's missing in that main picture since its pretty much assumed and is already defined pretty well), vCloud (a standard API for a VM level component), vApps, vSecurity, ), vAvailability, vResourceManagent for example).

As I posted earlier today about the vDatacenter OS, I believe this to be the right direction. Sitting here in my room having time to process everything I heard and some reading I've been doing around the blogosphere has me even more impressed if its true. From my reading it appears that the new CEO Paul Maritz is still as sharp and on the ball as he ever was. His insight when he took the technical and marketing direction of the Windows OS from a miscellaneous OS in a field of OSes to the single most influential OS in the world in the 90s. Like Microsoft or hate them, you can't discount the power Windows has in the industry. I have no doubt that Paul was instrumental in this new higher level view of the datacenter for VMware. Now he's set his sights on what it will take to get VMware to where it needs to be in the industry. Its obvious that Paul is involved with the addition of the Cloud infrastructure concept to the master roadmap. He came from EMC as the President of Cloud Computing Division so this isn't much of a surprise. I understand the direction for VMware on this as many of us customers have been asking for things like this for a while. So far VMware has done fantastic and amazing things (ESX, VMotion, DRS, Workstation, Server, OVF, Open Standards) under Diane Greene and now that Paul is in charge, here's to the future growth of VMware.

Brand spanking new writing from VMworld 2008

VMware | Sep 16, 2008

Nothing like a couple of early morning sessions to kick one in the tush to get the blog up and going.

Checking out the new marketing perspective from VMware and I think they are finally at the right level. Virtual Infrastructure was a step in the right direction about 2 years ago and now they are at vDatacenter OS or vDC-OS. I've been talking about the power of being able to treat most if not all configurations as software for the past 4 years. VMware is now accepting that fact and has most if not all the pieces in place finally with the ability to talk more closely to the Storage and Networks and Manage the environments with tools like Lifecycle Manager (Dunes VS-O).

At the end of the day I want VMware to give me the ability to provide a hardware platform (by the old definition since server virtualization really messes with that concept) that I can manage and provide to application(s). I really don't want another app server OS or general purpose OS. I want something that can run those other OSes and doesn't care what I write those app servers in, be it Linux, BeOS, MacOS, Windows, .NET, Java, etc. I want to be able to manage that underlying service which is plenty complicated.

I look forward to posting more stuff about virtualization/layerization and in general systems administration for larger environments.