VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vcloud’

Although my busy VMware Partner Exchange 2010 schedule included various meetings, break out sessions, company dinners, conference parties, and vendor receptions, a daily dose of social networking was found in between it all. Oh yeah, Las Vegas was a part of the equation as well. Here’s a quick list of my extra curricular conference highlights:

• It “cost me” $140 to learn how to play Craps at the Tropicana, but I had a blast with my Softchoice co-workers while rolling some dice! At some point I was actually up $35, but that was a fleeting moment in time. I’m sure many others can tell similar stories with much larger amounts of cash than me.
• I can now personally guide anyone using all means of transport between the Mandalay Bay, Excaliber, The Luxor, New York, New York, and Tropicana casinos. My legs are tired, but I have some great memories scattered at various points now on that end of the Vegas strip!
• Like the Thirsty Bear was during VMworld 2009, The Nine Fine Irishmen seemed to be a common stop for me during PEX2010.

I’ve created a photo collage of some of the good times, and for those that are curious about the #PEX3WORD goings on last week I’ve got a summary report at the end of the post.

Photo Collage

Here’s a collage of images from my week captured with my cell phone camera. Popular Twitter names pictured in various images are vseanclark, vmdoug, theronconrey, djroberts, asweemer, sakacc (really small in front of the tailgate party big screen), herrod (on stage during keynote), stockberger, and bknudtson.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before the Alliance, Coalition, and Partnership start the Cloud Wars, everybody raise your Guinness and say “Brilliant!”

YouTube Guinness Brilliant Six Pack Commercial

It’s obvious now that Cloud Computing is no longer just a concept. Amazon EC2 has been around for a while, vCloud Express was announced late last year, Microsoft is moving full steam ahead with Azure, and new internal cloud infrastructure and storage solutions are appearing on the scene weekly. CTOs and IT Directors are starting to see legitimate solutions for offloading some or all of their development and production workload and infrastructure to alternatives in The Cloud.

Put yourself at the helm of one of the Original Equipment Manufacturer’s (OEMs) that have made their money selling server, switch and storage hardware in the private data center to date. Faced with the future possibility that companies will have an option to run applications and services on infrastructure they don’t buy, build, or maintain, what would be your strategy for generating reoccuring business in the future?

I bring it up because of all the cloud architecture announcements. EMC announced a coalition with Cisco and VMware, NetApp has a Secure Multi Tennancy alliance with Cisco and VMware, and HP has announced an Integrated Infrastructure partnership with Microsoft. The storage OEMs are the first out the gate with the snap together infrastrucure for the cloud, but I imagine other hardware partnerships are not too far behind. VMware and Cisco UCS may already be the first with Microsoft and HP? Microsoft and VMware conveniently can run on top if it all.

Before the Alliance, Coalition, and Partnership start the Cloud Wars, everybody raise your Guinness and say “Brilliant!”

It’s brilliant because Read the rest of this entry »

VMware is purchasing Zimbra, a messaging and collaboration software company, from Yahoo!. Already one of the most popular virtual appliances available for download in VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace, Zimbra will now be optimized for VMware vSphere and probably be offered as a standard service in VMware hosted cloud offerings such as vCloud Express. Eventually I would expect to see Zimbra imported and exported as a vApp for the federated, private vSphere cloud environment. As for now, Zimbra is running more than 55 million mailboxes for both SMB customers as well as in hosted environments that arguably have instantly become VMware customers.

There is no doubt that VMware will provide support, enable high availability, ensure live backup and DR site fail over, as well as  develop scale, automation, monitoring and management capabilities for virtualized Zimbra. The fact that VMware is acquiring a large percentage of SMB mail accounts could mean that virtualizing those servers (if they are not already) will provide the first shining, every day business application in the cloud examples.

VMware CTO Steve Herod explains on his personal blog that purchasing Zimbra is part of VMware’s strategy to simplify IT:

“VMware’s mission is to simplify IT, and every VMware product focuses on attacking the complexity and rigidity that has crept into this world. In many ways we see the excitement over cloud computing to be a longing for a simpler, more flexible way of doing computing. The VMware strategy is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and operational improvements across the major IT infrastructure investment areas.”

Other reports I’ve read seem to suggest that Read the rest of this entry »

Shortly after VMworld  I posted about my experience using vCloud Express. One of the things that I expected to see but found missing from the solution was the ability to perform virtual machine (VM) uploads and downloads between my own vSphere infrastructure and the hosted VMware environment. To be able to move my workloads (running on VMware VMs) from my private data center to the cloud or visa versa was an expectation I had based on the federated and private cloud discussions I’ve listened to over the past year. I expected to be able to at least manually export or import an OVF, but unfortunately did not find that capability while testing.

Before continuing allow me the liberty to reference a common expression - Can’t see the forest for the trees:

“An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole”

VMware has created the opposite scenario described in this expression with their concept of the Cloud. That is, VMware has allowed us to visualize what the forest will be before we have the trees. Of course, they had to. Was anyone besides Amazon talking Cloud before that, and if they were, was anyone even considering allowing companies to create their own internal clouds? I’d have to say VMware put the concept in my head. All I can say for sure is that I know I wasn’t listening to Cloud discussions before VMworld 2008.

Getting back to my vCloud Express testing and expectations, I was finally looking at the trees instead of the forest. I have since found some interesting information about how these trees are growing (if you will). To complete my reference, some of the details about VM transfer between private and public clouds are revealed by a VMware project has been privately referred to as Project Redwood. Read the rest of this entry »

The virtualization blogisphere exploded yesterday with the news of VMware’s plans to bring virtualization to mobile phones with the announcement of the new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). Regular readers of VM /ETC will know I am a fan of the idea of the handheld evolving into a device that can consolidate everything from the wallet to the laptop, so I wanted to add my two cents, not only about VMware’s MVP, but about what this can mean for businesses, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and you and me.

First, here’s some information from the official VMware news article about MVP.

“What is VMware MVP?
VMware MVP is a thin layer of software that will be embedded on a mobile phone that decouples the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It will be optimized to run efficiently on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained mobile phones. The MVP is planned to enable handset vendors to bring phones to market faster and make them easier to manage.”

It should be clear that MVP diversifies VMware’s customer base with a brand new market. MVP is a product for handset manufactures. It doesn’t appear to me that I will ever have to install MVP personally, and I doubt I will have to learn how to P2V a desktop to a Blackberry, for example. In the future, when I buy a new handset MVP will already be on the device.  Alex Barrett expands on this in his post VMware MVP does not equal Windows XP on your phone.

Thinking about why VMware would aquire Trango and develop this product is where it gets interesting, Read the rest of this entry »

I attended the VMworld 2008 EMC Keynote session at 11:00 am today (Weds), but my battery was almost drained so I took manual notes. This post is a translation of those notes.

Chad Sakac, Senior Director and Mr. VMware at EMC, hosted this session titled Designing the Next Generation Data Center. The session was about how storage and networking vendors must work together to build upon the new features available in the new VDC-OS suite of technologies. Specifically, this session zeroed in on the vStorage group of features. Chad explained that EMC, Cisco, and VMware have been working together for a while and he would demo the results of this collaboration for us. Along with Chad onstage was Ed Bugnion, Cisco VP/CTO Virtualization, and Scott Davis, VMware Chief Architect.

Chad began by providing some opinion on how he felt vendors need to evolve their storage products for the next generation data center and the VMware VDC-OS. Some of the points he made were: Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »