Thursday 9.13.07 Keynote – what I missed :(
September 15th, 2007 | 
Author: Unfortunately I slept late Thursday morning. Waking up at 7:30 am in Hayward, CA meant that there was no way short of a helicopter I was going to make it to San Francisco before 9. I’m pretty sure my company would not let me expense a helicopter so I decided to catch up on some email from the hotel until traffic burned off. I also had “Smash Head” from the party Weds night!
blog.scottlowe.org has some great notes on this session. Here’s my thoughts on what I missed.
Several people told me about the “which feature of virtualization do you wish you could do to yourself” interview video. We all can relate to the guy who made the comment about making snap shots of himself he could revert to after saying something stupid to his wife. Personally, Thursday I could have used replication. I wish the San Francisco Marriott had been my DR site for the Hayward Fairfield Inn. I was definitely offline at my primary site that morning! 
VMware co-founder and Chief Scientist, Mendel Rosenblum then talked about, and demo-ed some pretty amazing stuff.
- Storage VMotion is the reverse of normal VMotion. That is, a running guest VM remains in control of a single ESX host while it’s volume folder and all it’s files are transferred from one LUN to another. Tell me you could not use that ability. Mendel provided a live demo for everyone in attendance too.
- Streaming virtual appliances was also discussed. This is the ability to start using a VA before you have completely downloaded the entire VM. With a little prefetching magic the VM could start instantly. This has huge potential in the VDI scenario. Could this change the DR fail-over strategy too? I will have to research this some more.
- Continuous availability is the process of capturing the live stream from one VM and redirecting it to another VM. This would take HA to the next level because instead of a power off / power on recovery between hosts you would now be able to have tradional cluster node-ish fail-over. There was a demo of two Exchange servers running Loadsim to simulate mail usage. When Mendell pulled the power cord on one of the ESX hosts the Exchange clients barely noticed the difference. Can you say “WOW”? (BTW, that’s Wow backwards in case you missed it.)
There was a pre Thursday buzz about the new VMServer. A lot of people believed this product would also be discussed in the morning keynote. Apparently it was not brought up.
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Posted in gen session, stor vmotion, virtual appliance, vmware, vmworld | 
Tags: blog.scottlowe.org, cisco, dell, email, esx, keynote, replication, SAN, storagevmotion, vdi, video, virtual appliance, vmotion, vmware, vmworld2007
