VMworld 2011 - General Session #2 with Steve Herrod
Live Blog and notes taken during the session
Steve Herrod, VMware CTO, presenting for the General Session 2.
One of the great changes is the shift from servers and technology to End Devices and Services. Universal access to the environment is critical part of this. As such these have high expectations compared to past environments in computing. DUH! (Devices, Universal Access, High Expectations).
Directions that need to address the DUH is IT needs to simplify, manage and connect the end folks to the services they care about. Desktop services will be need to be contained and compartmentalized. This includes the full Desktop (View) or just the applications (Thinapp). Now if we can separate the Desktop, the Applications and the Data apart from each other, powerful policies can do quite a bit. Once this is done User/Application/Data policies can take place.
View is the direct solution to handle the Desktop Service. Well known and announced View 5.0.
To handle applications ThinApp is the direction being followed. There is a new service called ThinApp Factory as part of the application store. This tool will help auto create ThinApp packages. Fully automated creations of these packages following some recipes.
Project Octopus deals with the data service layer. This is built around providing a dropbox equivalent services in an enterprise. http://www.vmwareoctopus.com
Horizon has a Mobile piece that allows IT to securely gain access to the application space. Along with that is the Mobile Virtual Machine space. As part of pushing the access/application, can have a controlled/contained environment on the phone.
One of the great things coming is a feature called AppBlast. It can present the application, not a full desktop to devices like an iThing. This works on HTML5, not a custom unique protocol to deliver it. So to edit an Excel presentation on an iPad, just connect to the internal IT and work with Excel.
vSphere 5 is the basis for all of this. The HyperVisor is still not a commodity as many of these powerful features come from the fact that the base is solid and functional.
vSphere 5 can now handle 32 vCPUs, 1,000GB RAM, 1 Million per Host. Melvin the Monster VM has come.
Some of the other great features are around performance guarantees. Storage IO assurance is good. By creating Storage Pools, can organize by application, purpose, performance and other validations. Once a pool is created, automation on placement can take place. Along with that can perform DRS with Storage now using Storage VMotion. This can be done automatically. Setup the policies and forget about it as the infrastructure deals with it.
vSphere 5 allows the IT admin to now set Storage I/O Control to assure performance. Dealing with the noisy neighbor is a significant issue to control as the central system in the hypervisor. Along with that network I/O control has arrived also.
As the future comes to pass, one of the largest challenges is the IP problem. Right now networking in the TCP/IP stack is built with Location = Identifier. If a machine wants to move around, the location and Identifier are tied together. For example moving a VM from an internal Cloud to an External Cloud the VM needs to be given a new IP. This can be a very disruptive activity.
VMware has a solution now called VXLAN which is Virtual eXtensible LAN. This technology has been worked on with Intel, Emulex, Cisco, Arista, Broadcom. The spec has been sent to IETF. This is a big step on the virtualization solution. Once this tie has been broken cloud mobility becomes feasible and deliverable.
Management is the end game after a solid reportable infrastructure is available. From there the approach is
- Monitor
- Correlate
- Remediate