VMworld Day 2 Keynotes – Live
Okay, so I’m at the back of the Grand Auditorium Louis Lumiére along with all the other bloggers. Richard really has put us in a great spot, to report on proceedings.
First up, Maurizio Carli, Head of EMEA, he kicks off with pointing out that last years VMworld attendance was 4500 and this year, despite the difficlt times, attendance is expected to be 4700. Going to show the popularity of the event despite the current climate.
Maurizio went on to discuss the numbers that VMware is touting more and more often:
100% Fortune 100
91% FTSE 100
100% DAX 100
There is now an increase in the percentage of datacenters default build being virtual, up from 27% to 42% in a single year.
Paul Maritz, CEO & President, is up next and he kicks off with an introduction into how the VMware ecosystem is helping to make IT more service driven.
The key behind this being the VCD-OS, the foundation for the cloud and on top of this both the vCloud and vClient. All of these trying to drive towards a Software As A Service model.
A breif history of VMware followed:
1999 – The Client Hypervisor
2000 – The Server Hypervisor
2003 – Cooperating Hypervisors & Management
2009 – The Virtual Datacenter OS
Back to the cloud, the question – How to move IT to a service driven model?
Use standardised building blocks for hardware
Build a scalable software solution
Policy based security & compliance
SLA driven management
Existing & multiple future apps model
One of the key attributes of virtualisation is encapsulation – take an existing application and package it all up and treat it in a flexible way. This allows the injection of new intelligence in a non-disruptive way:
Security
Compliance
Allowing uniform application of these policies across the estate as and where you see fit. Giving unprecedented management and flexibility.
Framework model application development can abstract the Operating System away from the developers. Virtualisation allows the encapsulation of existing applications whilst providing the framework for the new way of writing applications.
Virtualisation is the key to making all of the above happen in an evolutionary way!
VMware vSphere again has become officially official as I mentioned yesterday The key points here are:
vCompute – Hardware Assist & Extended Live Migration
vStorage – Storage Management, Storage Replication, Storage Virtual Appliances
vNetwork – Network Management
Availability – Data Protection, Clustering
Security – Firewall, Anti-Virus, Intrusion Prevention, Compliance
Scalability – Dynamic Resource Utilisation
vCenter Suite, discussed next and elaborates on the SLA management mentioned earlier. Paul Maritz, outlined the fact that vCenter Suite is to be very open and extensible. Also talk of a portal cropped up, that sounded a lot like Life-Cycle manager with a new name, but I might be wrong, I’ll try and find out more when I can.
Paul makes what will be seen by some a bold statement “With the introduction of the vSpehere there is no reason why you cannot virtualise 100% of applications”. I have been saying this for a long time and only really disuade the virtualisation of certain machines based on funky hardware rather than resource utilisation. Nonetheless I think that customers are going to be very keen to test this claim out.
Kurt Glazemakers, from Terremark, came on stage to discuss their Enterprise Cloud. Enterprise Cloud is a hosted cloud of compute resources that essentially provides resource pools to end users. A web front-end to the back-end VMware datacenter allows the end-user to create any number of Virtual Machines within their own resource pool without any manual intervention.
Next up Joe Arnold of EngineYard, a Ruby On Rails specialist company. Bringing a straightfoward interface to creating Ruby On Rails servers via a VMware vCloud without having to bother with what is happening at the back-end. The demo here was seriously underwhelming I must say, a little wizard ran for a couple of minutes, that looked like it was building to a serious finale and then essentially a blank web page appeared with a couple of logos. At this point somebody let out a sarcastic “Woo Hoo”, which I think summed it up fairly well.
Next, Zvi Guterman, IT Structures, a company set up to allow proof of concept environments from a vCloud. The focus here seems to be the rapid deployment of Virtual Appliances for purposes of demonstration and testing. Not a lot to say here, as not a lot happened during the presentation.
vClient next and Paul Maritz is back.
Mottos – Provision Users Not Devices & Address All Users
CVP – Client Hypervisor gets a mention here and is apparently very well developed, but it was very much glossed over, with little detail. I’m planning on interviewing someone from VMware to get more information.
VMware are looking to te get to the point where the end user machine is completely irrelavent and as long as you can get to your corporate VCD-OS you can use your desktop.
Paul announced a new partnership with Intel to bring optimisations for the forthcoming VMware Client Hypervisor. Specifically relating to vPro and writing intelligence:
Use the hardware to verify the correct VM is running
Ensure that security is wrapped around the VM
Out-of-and management of the device
All very wishy washy at the moment, but I’m sure the Intel stand will bring us more information and to that end so will I.
VMware View roll-out will be complete in 2009, which I think will include a client hypervisor, but I’m not entirely sure.
Maurizio Carli is back to introduce Dr. Wolgang Krips of SAP, who starts off with the phrase “for the next 25 minutes I will talk about…” to the sound of collective groans around the room and a near mass exodus.
That’s it for now, but this is only the tip of the iceburg for now.
Stay tuned.
