VMworld 2010 - General Session - Live Blogging

Hello one and all. Its a Live Blog going down today. Enjoy the live blogging and check out @iankoenig on twitter for even more live information.

Update 9:04am:

Hanging out with Virtualization-spotlight.com owner chatting about the cloud. Waiting for the session to start. What coolness do we have this year?

Update: 9:10am:

The opening presentation video asks the great question of "What is the cloud?". A cute Matrix like fun here.. A great quote:

• The cloud is in your mind from the Oracle (not that company that needs some help)

  

Update: 9:27am

Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds. The theme this year.

Starting down this road and it is a journey:

Most customers start with cost efficiency. They find that money savings are huge. As they use it they find out that VMs are easier to manage and use.

The next step is Quality of Service. Businesses find out that can get more reliability without the high cost of delivery. Many applications run better as virtual machines. Sharepoint/Exchange are mentioned all the time to VMware that it is better.

The latest step this year is IT as a Service (ITaaS). Phase 3 is all about agility. How can IT offer computer resources for giving the business the ability to quickly consume these resources to get to value faster is the question?

IT as a Service == Optimizing IT production for business consumption.

Some of the great innovations is that by having OS instances that aren't owning the hardware means you have options. Large change in how IT addresses computing.

Can start talking about the computer food groups of compute, storage, network, security and work on decreasing OpEx and enhancing security. One item that has been missing out of this has been security and is now a serious focus by VMware.

Now because we can separate from hardware and have defined what a datacenter is we can start abstracting away from the datacenter itself and virtualize that.

Realistically Hybrid Cloud is the right approach by Paul Martiz. We need management. We need standards.

Update 9:39am:

The current solutions really address the old applications and approaches. The next true step is how can we make new applications more scalable and cloud friendly. So a new application platform needs to be defined and delivered. What are the common services they need?

Common Management, Common Services and Open frameworks. These frameworks have to be able to handle whatever programming languages are coming. Every time you tie to a language someone will come along with a new language that solves some problem. Need to stay away form that wherever we can.

These Frameworks also need to connect to different clouds. Google App Engine, vmForce, vCloud.

Update 9:47am:

Different devices are coming into the business environment. IT has no choice on this. It will come one way or another and IT will need to figure out how to deliver secure, manageable approaches. iPads are coming in over night.

The third layer of innovation needed called "New End User Access". This is the stack that is now the new IT one for the cloud era.

Update 9:51am:

Steve Herrod's turn to show the details of the theory from Paul Maritz.

Again vSphere is the basis of this all. Can really deliver and is getting better and faster on every release. Policy driven SLAs with Network IO control and Storage IO control. If you know about vSphere 4.1 already this part is a good review.

Integrien, the acquisition of the day. VMware is buying them for their proactive heatmap style management and allocation. This is a new style of management to show the tons of information in easier to process displays. Very graphical.

Update 10:02am:

Herrod: For IT as a Service is key about moving to offering an "App Store" for clients at the business. They want services, not VMs. They want a database server, web server. Not a Windows/Linux/Unix box generally.

Virtual Datacenters are a key way to discuss this. To provide the services you define the SLAs an function of that datacenter. So you can setup just what you need and what levels are necessary.

vCloud Director is live. This is the key management tool for this entire environment.

Update 10:12am:

vShield platform is a critical to making the Cloud work. Need a common set of services that will offer some basic security available everywhere. This is both on the private and the public cloud. vCloud Director is on both sides of the fence and offers the same functionality everywhere and can span the private to the public in a secure way.

Update 10:26am:

Now we are on the Application platform layer and is what vFabric is all about. It is a common set of services available to make new application cloud friendly. The great thing about this is it will work with Ruby, Python, Java etc.

Update 10:27am:

The final area is the End User Computing experience. View 4.5 is the part of modernizing the desktop direction. Released today. View 4.5 has the ability to lower the cost of acquistion below $500 a system which is below the physical desktop costs.

The now is to call User-centric IT. We need to get away from PC Centric. Most consumers are use to using any device. Why not move to User focused?

Project Horizon demo going on. This is focused around User-Centric IT. This allows you to have whatever applications you are licensed are immediately provisioned to your virtual workstation. Single sign on and user focused. Not device. Some applications may not work well on a given devices.

A good demo of View iPad client with Project Horizon. This is the future of IT.

Update: 3 Sept 2010 - Fixed the company name (Integrien) that VMware bought