Useful highlights from day 2 at VMworld.
As usual, the general session is opening with a video. This time, it’s a mock documentary discussing “What is the cloud?” The video compares “cloud computing” to pizza. The next reference is to The Matrix, where the narrator of the documentary goes to visit the Oracle and is told his mind is a dumb terminal. Pretty funny!
After the video concludes, VMware Chief Marketing Officer Rick Jackson takes the stage. He shares a few interesting statistics: VMworld 2004 was the first conference with about 1400 guests. Last year, there were about 12,500 guests. This year, now in its seventh year, with about 85 countries represented, there are approximately 17,000 attendees this year. Wow—this is a huge increase over last year! Of those, 4,000 new attendees (first time to the VMworld conference). Fifty-five people have attended every single conference; they are the Alumni Elite.
Rick next discussed the hybrid cloud architecture used to power VMworld 2010. The conference uses two data centers on the East Coast along with a private cloud infrastructure on site.
Next Rick transitions into a discussion of the phases of virtualisation. First there’s IT Production, and that gives customers cost savings. Next comes business production, where “applications run better virtualised”. Rick says that most VMware customers are currently in the business production phase. The third phase is business agility, driven by IT agility and enabled by operational savings and efficiency. This is IT as a Service (ITaaS). Rick stressed the “open” nature of VMware’s solutions, harps on VMware’s broad hardware support. He announced that OVF (Open Virtualization Format) is now an ANSI standard. He also reminds the attendees that VMware is working on standardising the vCloud API as an open standard.
Rick next introduces Paul Maritz, who comes out on stage to take over the presentation. Paul spends a few minutes discussing the breadth of VMware’s adoption across industries and across geographies. He then transitions into a discussion of the role of the virtualisation layer, it’s central role in innovation (and being the focus of innovation), it’s impact on operations, resource allocation, and the consumption of infrastructure. As he moves into the discussion of virtual data centers, it’s pretty clear where he’s headed—he’s laying some foundations and defining some terms for a product announcement, and wants to be sure that the audience is at the same place he is in their thought processes.
After a lengthy discussion of the three layers that need innovation—new infrastructure, new application platform, and new end user access—he now moves out of the theoretical into the practical by inviting Steve Herrod, VMware’s CTO, out onto the stage.
Steve starts out with a discussion of vSphere and the vSphere 4.1 release. He reviews a few maximums and covers some basic functionality like vMotion, and reminds the audience of increases in the performance of technologies like vMotion (faster individual vMotion migrations and more concurrent vMotion migrations). Steve also discusses the solution to the “noisy neighbour” problem where individual VMs take up too many resources; the fix, of course, is Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control. He also discusses the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). As most readers of this site probably already know, VAAI allows the hypervisor to offload storage operations onto the storage arrays themselves.
Herrod announced on stage the VMware’s acquisition of a company called Integrien.
Integrien flagship product, Alive, is a real-time performance analytics solution that analyzes and correlates data across the monitored IT infrastructure.
To help address security in the virtual data center, VMware announced VMware vShield Endpoint, VMware vShield App, and VMware vShield Edge. These products provide offloaded virus protection, hypervisor-level firewalling, and a “traditional” stateful firewall, respectively. It will be interesting to see how these products play with VMware’s security partners. Competitor or partner now?
Herrod also announced a concept called vFabric, the cloud application platform made with SpringSource, GemStone and other technologies acquired in the last year by VMware.
vFabric offers application management, data management, messaging, dynamic load balancing and app server.
Last but not least, Herrod announced the availability of VMware View 4.5.
It introduces support for Microsoft Windows 7, the offline VDI capability (through a type-2 VMM), a client for Apple Mac OS X (iPAD) and support for vSphere 4.1.