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.

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.

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..

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…

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…

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

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.