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Posts Tagged ‘vmworld’

I will still be uploading more photos over the next few days, but here is a slide show of some of my photos so far.

Enjoy!

I’ve also created a Tweetdeck after the page break that filters all of my Twitpics from the week.
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I will be live blogging the VMworld 2009 Wednesday Keynote from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA this morning. This post will be frequently updated with my notes and impressions once the Keynote begins.

Keynote 2 Live Blog

5:14 am PST – I will begin the live blog when I’m set up in my seat in the Keynote Hall. More then. #vmwkn2 Tweetgrid is up.

7:49 am – in same seat as yesterday. Doors have been open to the hall for about 20 mins. Keynote filling up. Music is playing …

7:57 am – announcement made to silence cell phones. Here we go. Looking forward to Steve Herrod’s demos in this session.

8:01 – lights went down right at 8 am and Herrod is already on stage. No intro today!

Steve is going to build on yesterday’s talk about the journey to virtualization. he says he has 2 goals today – learn about the future and have fun doing it. He emphasizes that with the legal forward looking statements slide.

He begins with VDI and VMware View. He calls out vSphere as the right platform for desktop virtualization. He says Windows desktops were key focuses for making sure performance enhancements in vSphere. Commonality, Security, Availability, and Efficiency are key pillars of VMware’s desktop solution and are displayed the monitor now.

Steve is explaining that centralized image and policy management are keys in the View solution. How to share images, simplify patching, and backup desktops, data and user personalities are key concerns.

Side note : “tentacles must be the new buzz word at VMware. I’ve heard Maritz mention it repeatedly, and now Steve is using it to describe the dependencies to provide the integrated features that meet the focus points on VMware View.

Steve now wants to talk about PCoIP and the best user experience to all endpoints. VOIP, 3D graphics, offline usage, and hardware accelerators in clients are some of the highlights of virtual desktops leveraging the PCoIP protocol. Steve has announced it will be shipping this year, but he did not give a GA date.

Starting to talk about VDI client scenarios, Steve is now talking about hosted desktop solutions such as Fusion, workstation, and Ace. He calls this employee owned IT. The future is bare metal client hypervisors and what Steve calls “corporate owned IT” in  the centralized data center.

The first demo is a VMware View demo. We see a CVP connected to a VMware VIew Windows 7 VM. The demo shows the 3D chess game, you tube videos, and the Windows 7 effects. This is all posisble because of the virtualized GPU using the CVP client’s hardware. Next the demo moves to show a remote connection to a View desktop via a View client on a Windows PC. Google Earth is demoed with full graphic functionality via the PCoIP protocol. Finally the Wyse pocket cloud is demoed on an iPhone. The remote connection is shown on the monitors and the iPhone gestures features are used to move around, shrink, and expand the desktop. That gets some spirited applause.

Steve then quickly talks about the VMware CMA available for the phone. This is the ability to manage vSphere and the VMs from a web interface on a mobile phone. Steve also reveals that they are working on a similiar phone admin tool for VMware View Manager too.

Keeping with the mobile phone theme, we’ve moved to a discussion and a demo on MVP – VMware’s effort to virtualize the OS on mobile devices to allow multiple platforms to run on a single device. The demo is a VISA app on a mobile device running MVP. The VISA app keeps track of your transactions and sends you offers. Then a locator function is shown for using Google Maps to find an ATM. We are told this VISA apps is actually an Android app and then shown that both Windows CE and Android are running simultaneously on the device and MVP enables seamless integration between the OSes (like Fusion and Workstation). Nice!

Steve begins to talk about efficiency in vSphere solutions.

Steve shifts to VMotion and how partners are developing products with VMotion built in? VMware has been talking about and offering VMotion for 6 years now, and in that honor “I Like to Move It” from the movie Madagascar is played over the loud speakers.  The crowd got a laugh out of that, and Steve declares we won’t be able to VMotion VMs without thinking of that song from now on. He also shows a graphic with estimated marriages saved because of VMotion. The number is a modest 74 and counting …

Steve is now pitching the “ready to virtualize all applications” message and the giant computer example. This leads to a discussion about DRS. The message is that vSphere and DRS make possible a higher peak capacity for workloads. He mentions that disk I/O will be a future factor in the automated VMotion of VMs via the DRS feature. Shares for disk I/O per virtual disk will help make this possible.

He briefly discussed vSphere DPM and the reduction of power consumption in the virtual datacenter.

Expanding on a “control” bullet point of VMware solutions and bridging from the any application theme, Steve is discussing VMware AppSpeed and the ability to drill down in the application stack to determine how applications are performing.

From control we move to security and compliance with VMsafe APIs. Steve mentions that people have been asking why have we not seen any products using this. He mentions that the API is in the shipped versions of vSphere and products are being developed. He mentions looking for announcements from RSA, Symantec, and Trend Micro in a slide.

Next is VMware vCenter Config Control. This is the first time this is shown on stage. The demo begins with an email that one of the Exchange servers is down. There is also another email from Config Control saying that there was a VI configuration change earlier to the Exchange problem. Config Control is used to compare the difference of the Exchange VM between the current problem state and an earlier baseline config. It is determined that the VLAN ID of the portgroup was changed.

Now the topic turns to Choice.

VMware Lab Manager and the ability to generate self-service portals is used as an example to help let get IT out of the way and give customers the choice to quickly provision their own servers.

Steve takes some time to mention the VMworld 2009 infrastructure setup, number of VMs, and number or ESX hosts used. he also talks about how the labs are actually using ESX and vCenter instances that are really VMs themselves, and using technologies such as network fencing they are able to duplicate setup for a large number of hands on labs. This would not be possible without VMware’s virtualization technologies.

Time to talk about the cloud.

SRM is the first product discussed, and it’s usage is emphasized as a means to move between internal and private clouds.

Next is Long Distance VMotion. VMware is working with partners to develop this. Steve mentions a theory about VMotion of VMs from datacenter to datacenter that would effectively follow the sun so that the VMs were always running in a part of the world where it was generally cooler (or at night) to conserve power needs. He admits that’s a bit far fetched but interesting.

Steve is discussing interoperability of the vCloud API and ISV integrations to help manage the cloud.

He mentions open standards and that OVF formats help enable a vCloud end goal of portability of workloads between any providers hosted clouds – whether running on vSphere or not.

Steve starts explaining some cloud terms that have been confusing:

Platform as a Service (Paas)

• vSphere – Infrastructure as a Service – Iaas
• Apps Services and Tools with Management  – Paas
• Apps and SLAs – Software as a Service – Saas

VMware has a Paas vision of the development of applicaions that run on ope APIs that can be hosted on internal or external clouds.

Steve welcomes the CTO of SpringSource on stage to show us how to use these concepts. This demo is simlar to the demo I saw yesterday where the SpringSource Tools Suite is used to move the application coding to a cloud environment that is suited to running the necessary load expected. This is all selected via the web interface wizard and the application is created on a cloud based server. The example ends with a live web page at www.code2cloud.com that lets you register for free backstage passes to Foreigner at the VMworld paty tonight. Check it out now, I just entered!

9:14 am – Steve thanks us for coming and says he looks forward to seeing us at the party tonight.

I also have a Tweetgrid set up for my Tweets from the conference hall. Watch my live tweets from the second page of this post.

Please click the read more link to see the Tweetgrid

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Saying that VMware’s John Troyer is busy at VMworld is a huge understatement, but if you really want to see what he is up to then check out his USTREAM video feed. The feed is always live from the Communities Lounge on the Solutions Exchange floor, and John is grabbing individuals and groups for booth interviews as well.

I’m guessing his normal Wednesday VMTN Roundtable Podcast will be streamed live on this feed this week too.

Go to the live stream here

John is grabbing all of the usual virtualization personalities and getting their impressions on various happenings here at the Moscone Center. It’s also an interactive and social site where anyone watching can participate via chat or Twitter.

I was pulled into a video interview by Troyer last night. I’ve embedded that episode in this post.
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Several of the VMware announcements this week from VMworld are centered on the vCloud API service. This API is designed for VMware partners to leverage for the development of applications that can move back and forth between private and hosted clouds with the same security, management, and availability expected of applications hosted on traditional “behind the firewall” servers. Don’t misunderstand this topic as forward looking concepts, however. This morning Paul Maritz hosted press, analysts and bloggers to a private session that revealed vCloud API solutions that are available immediately.

VMware actually announced the concept of federating private workloads to partner’s running vSphere virtual infrastructure last year at VMworld 2008, but as Maritz explained in this morning’s meeting, there are now over 1,000 hosting providers that have enlisted with VMware to enable public clouds.

Here’s some details from the press kit I was handed:

Expansion of VMware Service Provider Ecosystem
VMware and its more than 1,000 VMware Virtualized™ service provider partners including AT&T, SAVVIS, Terremark and Verizon Business are giving customers improved flexibility and agility to respond to business needs while saving both capital and operational costs

• 10x growth in one year
• Regional breakouts:
• Americas = 487
• EMEA = 496
• APAC = 136
• TOTAL = 1119

Also taken from the press kit, here is a high level explanation of the API

• The VMware vCloud API is an open, REST-based, pure virtual API supporting multi-tenancy.
• Standards-based and platform independent, making it compatible with a diverse range of applications.
• Provides an interface for consuming and managing virtual resources from the cloud, enabling the deployment and management of virtualized applications in both internal and external clouds, as well as enabling interoperability between clouds.

In fact, for those that need to know on the details of the vCloud API there is a  new community site.

As an attendee of this morning’s session, I got to see several partners demo their vCloud API, vSphere infrastructure based solutions that are available today. Most interesting to me was a private workload federation demo by AT&T that used VMotion to move a VM between two datacenters simulated to be 125 miles apart (private cloud to private cloud), as well as Savvis Project Spirit which showed point and click virtual server provisioning, cloning, and then firewall and load balancing configuration from the web interface. Terremark’s vCloud Express was equally interesting, but I’ll have more on that offering in a separate post.

The rest of this post is my raw notes taken while watching the partners demonstrations.

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I will be live blogging the VMworld 2009 Tuesday Keynote from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA this morning. This post will be frequently updated with my notes and impressions once the Keynote begins.

Keynote 1 Live Blog

7:36 am PST – in my seat. Already tweeting. Not sure if I’ll primarily post live notes or just use tweets. Hit F5 to refresh every couple of minutes.

8:02 am – keynote still not started yet. I’m sure we are close …

8:05 am – announcement made to turn cell phones off.  I’ve been tweeting Twicpics in my Tweetgrid on second page of post

8:11 am – we’ve started!!

Discussing the issues reported with the hands on labs yesterday. I had heard through the grapevine that one HP rack was dropped, and this damaged impacted close to 50% of the lab’s compute power. We’ve been told this is almost completely restored.

Just lost wifi. Successfully made switch to Sprint card for now.

Video showing customer testimonials now

8:20 am – Paul Maritz takes the stage

The current slide says Evolution or Revolution? Paul is talking about a hunger to get to the cloud, but he makes the point that it’s a mythical world today that most don’t know how to define how to get there. He is explaining that virtualization is the answer.

New slides this year explain that vSphere is sliding the cloud functionality into the datacenter. I like this approach. In the past the idea of moving the datacenter to the cloud seemed to confuse most.

Now Paul is discussing the virtualization journey. Server Consolidation leads to an internal/external cloud and automatic operations. In turn this means capex and opex savings and ultimately business agility. Images of VI 3 are on the monitors, and then segue to vSphere and a cloud operating system. Paul is running through the VMware vSphere platform slide showing the application and infrastructure services we have sen repeatedly over the last 12 months.

The discussion is now shifting to automatic, dynamically reacting datacenters. Both at the application and the infrastructure levels, VMware is ready to provide this type of scalable and robust service with the help of partners like Intel, Cisco and EMC. Paul is thanking the VMware partners that have added functionality to vSphere. He mentions that vSphere is ready to virtualize all applications, and shows an adoption graph to show the number of companies using VMware datacenter products is continuing to rise.

On to discussing VMware vCenter and the management of vSphere environments

Tom Brey from IBM is invited on stage. He is providing a demo of using IBM’s System Director to provide vSphere utilization per watt? 8 VMs are running on a x3650. Tom is explaining that the idle usage of these VMs is consuming a small amount of energy by displaying this info on the Performance tab of vCenter. IBM has put a lot of energy saving technology on their servers and he is explaining how that helps. He is now starting another 8? VMs to increase the workload on the vSphere host. The Performance tab is shown again and supposedly shows that idle power does not increase that much. I have to admit, they lost me. The graph seemed to double as would be expected. The point is well taken however – IBM servers should help with power consumption when running vSphere servers.

Paul takes back over the stage and starts introducing the new vCenter suite of products. This leads to a LabManager demo.

Bruce ? is on stage with Paul and he is showing the LabManager library and demonstrating cloning a workspace. He mentions the use of linked clones and how quick the cloning the process is. 10 seconds later a new workspace of VMs is ready to go.

Next in the demo is Chargeback. A web interface is being shown on the monitor that is showing the ability to assign costs to ESX resources. An online report is generated for the month of August and is pushed out to a spread sheet and then a graph. Pretty slick.

Paul now shifts to discussing vSphere Enterprise Essentials for SMB. The slide shows “IT in a Box” for the small business.

He has started to explain the new VMware Go – web based automation for the configuration and installation of ESXi. He explains VMware wants to also build a community around this product as well?

Next the topic is a what Paul calls a new concept of virtualization based cloud datacenters. His vision is that the private internal cloud datacenter can be easily moved in entirety to a hosted external cloud provider. Of course, this vision includes a single management interface. I think this is hinting at the vCloud API just announced yesterday. I’ll post more about that later this week. Paul hints that some of the most respected names in the industry will join him in a cloud announcement later this morning. He mentions vCloud Express will be a fast and cost effective way to deploy datacenters.

Bruce is back for a vCloud Express demo

He is showing a web interface with the vCloud Interface. He registers with a credit card, gets an email that everything is ready, logs in, chooses to build an Ubuntu server form a list of vSphere supported OSes, and finally he points out that this server will cost about 5 cents an hour and about  $1 a day. The server finishes and Bruce goes to a URL showing Apache up and running.

Paul is now talking about VMware View and enabling Desktop as a Service. He invites Steve Dupree from HP to the stage. Steve introduces HP’s VDI architecture. HP’s blades combined with [other hardware such as] a Left Hand San and networking [switches - not from Lefth Hand!] all consolidated in the same chassis to reduce footprint. I must have missed the name, but Steve explains it is being shown in their booth at VMworld.

Steve also announces Insight Control for VMware View. This provides full physical hardware manageability from a new tab in vCenter! You will be able to reach HP’s various hardware management interfaces from vCenter.

Next we have a VMware View demo from TELUS. TELUS is explaining who they are and how they provide thousands of virtual desktops in Canada. We ate actually watching his PowerPoint slides with graphic transitions inside a VMware View session utilizing PCoIP.

Now Paul is explaining the SpringSource acquisition and what they offer. He is explaining that there is a Spring/Grails Framework that applications can run on. I’m a little thin on understanding this topic, but apparently Spring can currently be put ton top of environments from companies such as Oracle and IBM. Somehow this will all lead to an open source and web based access to new enterprise applications on vSphere. Spring/Grails will be available on top of vSphere to provide developers the ability to move from code to cloud.

Apparently I am not the only one not too interested because several people are starting to leave as the SpringSource demo is starting.

This demo is a java development example in the SpringSource Tools Suite. They lost me at “Java”. Code telling us to attend Steve Herod’s Keynote tomorrow pops up in a separate window, and we are told it is running on the cloud now.

9:31 am Paul says the keynote is over and Thanks very much!

9:34 am – cleaned up post a little (spelling errors)

updated 09.02.09 – corrected additional spelling and syntax errors.

I also have a Tweetgrid set up for my Tweets from the conference hall. Watch my live tweets from the second page of this post.

Please click the read more link to see the Tweetgrid

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So, you think you are good at Twitter? You’ve figured out how to say everything you want in 140 characters? Then in the spirit of keeping “the cloud in your head” while at VMworld 2009 join me in The VMworld3Word Challenge.

That’s right, keep all your tweets during the VMworld Welcome Reception and the Monday Night Tweetup to just three words. Be sure to include the hashtag #vmworld3word at the end.

I’ve got another live Tweetgrid queued up after this post’s page break for all that are up to it.

Impossible you say?

No can do?

Not very fun?

Don’t be ridiculous!

Tag. You’re it!

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Hello from the Thirsty Bear in San Francisco!

I am (will be) reporting on the goings on at the Sunday Night Warm Up Extravaganza via Twitter, and with some luck I’ll have enough phone battery to send regular updates and twitpics throughout the whole event.

Enjoy! The live Tweetgrid can be found after the page break.

updated 08.31.09 –

I filtered the Tweetgrid down to just rbrambley #xtrav tweets. (Hey, it’s my blog!) To see all tweets from last night go here (tweetgrid – last 100 tweets) or here (search.twitter.com).

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