VMworld 2008 General Session Day 2
September 17th, 2008 | 
Author: I am getting ready for the VMworld 2008 Day 2 General Session and sitting at the official bloggers table this morning. Thanks to John Troyer and the team over at VMTN and Planet v12n for getting this set up. We even have a solid wi fi connection so live blogging looks promising. Look for updates to this post every 15 minutes or so.
Lights are down and the opening video is rolling. Today promises to be more about the new technical features.
Stephen Herrod, CTO of VMware, takes the stage and has started the session. Stephen confirms that his presentation will be about the technology behind the VDC-OS.
He is starting by going through the 3 infrastructure layers.
vCompute
This layer is about the VM and making it powerful enough to run all applications. It’s about larger and more powerful ESX clusters. On the other hand, it’s also about being efficient and Green IT.
vStorage
Leveraging all the advanced storage technologies incorporated into the VDC-OS. Stephen lists the storage technologies:
- VMFS
- Storage Vmotion
- Thin Provisioning
- Linked Clones
VMware wants to leverage their storage partners and the various APIs to manage the filers used by the VDC-OS.
vNetwork
This layer is also heavily dependent on VMware technology partners developing solutions for the VDC-OS.
- vNetwork Distributed Switch –network vmotion, or moving not only a VM between hosts but also moving all meta data, policy and personality of a VM between hosts. Stephen mentions Cisco’s Nexus 1000v vSwitch announced yesterday.
Moving now to the Applications vServices.
He starts discussing the layers in this group by explaining the concept of a vApp – combining multiple VMs (based on OVF) into a combination of appliances to provide application services.
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Availability – technologies to ensure redundancy, storage, server, and DR.
- Fault Tolerance – the evolution of the HA feature in the current VMware VI feature set, Fault Tolerance (FT) will sync a primary VM with a second VM on a different ESX host and provide instantaneous fail over.
- VMware Fault Tolerance Demo – Single click ESX cluster configuration of FT. This demo introduces vLockStep which is a new feature that ensures the VMs are in perfect sync and protected. The application is a slot machine game hosted on a VM. Stephen powers off the ESX host and the game pauses briefly (~2 secs), but the application state and instruction level is maintained when the VM continues running on a new host .
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Security
- VMSafe – a security VM has visibility of the entire virtual network in order to provide a self securing virtual data center. Establish new VM policies to provide deployment protection.
Changing gears to the infrastructure Management features now.
Management vServices are provided with the new VMware vCenter. Both infrastructure management and application management will be possible with vCenter.
Stephen begins to discuss the vCenter AppSpeed technology. I believe this is the B-Hive technology VMware acquired. This is not just about collecting data in the VI, but it’s also about making decisions and automating changes
AppSpeed demo
- Application mapping of a Sugar CRM server is e demo-ed. This is done by using the CRM app. We see how clicking on the app interface results in more details populating in the AppSpeed mapping screen. Nothing needs to be done to the application before hand.
- Once the mapping is complete monitoring can be performed. The demo shows us a new tab in VC that provides real time performance, latency, and transaction data in graphs and tables.
- The latency is increased in the CRM application and the real time graphs start to climb in VC. Using the real time monitoring the problem is determined to be not the CRM VM bit the database VM that was being hit by another application. Resource allocation was adjusted and normal performance restored.
Stephen just announced vCenter will also be available as a Linux virtual appliance. He also announced a new multi-platform vClient. The crowd erupted with approval!:)
Next topic is the vCloud services and moving workloads between on site and off site data centers. Challenges exist that require VMware’s technology partners to help address this, but Stephen explains that Geo Vmotion and Fault Tolerance to a DR location acould be topics of future VMworlds.
The last topic is the vClient initiative. This is about following a user personality and not a desktop. The vision is to provide a desktop on any device from anywhere. A user’s applications, profile, and data will follow them to where ever they log in to the cloud. This is the evolution from VDI as it is today to the new VMware View announced yesterday. It’s also about the improved user experience inside virtual desktops. Providing bare metal virtualization, 3D graphics, and multi media experiences in the vClient ate priorities at VMware.
VMware View demo
- Provisioning a new desktop with the VMware View Composer – using a master VM and linked clones to deploy large numbers of desktops. 25 VMs are deployed from a master template in the composer. Switching to VC we watched as VMs are created with their own unique IPs and computer names in about 1 minute. Thin provisioning was used to minimize storage space.
- Updating all 25 VMs with the Google Chrome web browser – A laptop is shown that is running a prototype client hypervisor to host a standard desktop image based on the same image that the 25 VMs were just deployed with. Composer was used to suspend the master VM with a snapshot and and a ThinApp version of Google Chrome was added to the master image. Composer pushes out the changes to 25 linked clones. The laptop receives a message it will be restarted. After logging back in the new Google Chrome shortcut is on the desktop. Browsing the web with Chrome is demonstrated.
- Centralized management – a contractor laptop is running the client hypervisor. The VDM administration interface is used to create new security policies for the contractor. A window pops up on the laptop and the laptop is shutdown. When the laptop restarts with the VM the contractor is unable to log on and the data is encrypted in the VM
In closing the VDC-OS, the vCloud, and the vClient are all designed to work together to provide the new VMware vision.
Sorry about the choppy post, but taking notes while trying not be to be to distracted by the new exciting technologies was difficult. I definitely lost my place a few times!
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Posted in vmetc.com, vmware, vmworld | 
Tags: b-hive, esx, linux, management, vcloud, vdi, virtualization, vmsafe, vmware, vmworld, vmworld2008
