VMworld 2009 - Keynote P4
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.