VMware vCloud Director (vCD)

So go read it and come back.    Pretty powerful stuff even at a 1.0.

If you are familiar with the concepts of organizations, VM Templates, network Fencing and self service that are presented from Lab Manager, you will quickly get about 75% of vCD.   The other 25% is coming from Chargeback and vOrchestrator capabilities.  The challenge with Lab Manager is being able to run true production out of it.   The management is a bit limiting and constrained by size.   vCD takes all those concepts and adds a few more and pushes up the scalability to Service Provider size where you need to deal with limits of 4095 VLANs and Petabytes of storage.

Does this mean that an SMB can’t use vCD.  I don’t believe so.   When I look at this I easily see Lab Manager as dead now.   Why spend any resources on a less functional, less useful, more limited product when you have something you just need to right size in licensing for someone that needs to use it for a “Lab Manager style Test/Dev” environment?   vCD can do everything we do in Lab Manager today along with being able to have production right next to it in the same management interface.

Lab Manager is Dead.   Long Live Lab Manager.

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.