You can now view the full keynote of Dr. Stephen Herrod on the VMworld website here.
Some excellent stuff, particularly the demos from Bruce & jerry Chen.
The key focus here was the future of VMware virtualisation, Dr. Herrod went on to point out that this area is particular exciting at VMworld Europe as so much of the development is being done in the VMware EMEA sites
vCompute
Stephen outlined that in the upcoming version of VMware – vSphere – a single VM has been able to achieve 23,000 total DB transactions per seconds – 250mbmb/sec of disks I/O, which equates to 510 disks spindles to saturate the I/O. Pretty impressive and as Paul Maritz said yesterday and Stephen reiterated today – “No excuses not to run databases in a VM”
Also an area that has been seen as a weak point for VMware is web workload. This can now scale so well that VMs have been tested and can scale up to the equivalent of serving 3bn page hits a day – eBay ‘only’ gets 1bn!
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If you nip over to Richard’s website run-virtual, you’ll see a new video posted on yesterdays goings-on at VMworld and I’m in it. I must admit I am dissappointed with myself, before I believed I was the next Brad Pitt, after seeing it, I feel more like an Arm Pitt.
Jessica promised me 5 seconds of fame and that’s about all I got. You may notice that I am rather polished 
well that may have something to do with the fact that I made an appearance on GMTV last year as I left last years Wimbledon tournament after working there. For that appearance I managed to get in a little dance, but no such dancing for VMware.
As someone that implements Brocades SANs on a semi-regular basis, I thought I’d stop by their stand and see if they had anything interesting on show and it turns out they did.
The project I am currently working on has a number of Brocade fabrics (4) after adding 3 new ones and managing them would have been a pain if not for Data Center Fabric Manger. However, there is one massive limitation with DCFM and that’s the free version only manages a single fabric. ‘What do you expect for free?’ I hear you cry, well I expect the jump up from the free version to be a bit more incremental than it currently is. If you want to upgrade you can, to the Enterprise, which will cost you a substantial £30k list. Now this is not bad if you push Enterprise to its limits (1000 ports in a single fabric), but what if you only have 200 ports? well Brocade have obviously noticed this discrepency and are releasing a middle level version and are hoping to release in the next few months.
Something else of interest was the vCenter plugin that connects directly with Data Centere Fabric Manager and can trigger actions within vCenter based on policies set at the fabric level. If an HBA’s bandwidth becomes saturated, a policy can send an alert to vCenter to move it to a host with greater HBA bandwidth availability.
All very neat stuff and the demo worked, so check it out if you deal with Brocade kit.
I attened the VDI vs TS presentation this afternoon presented by, the quite possibly mental, Brian Madden. I have to say that I haven’t been to a presentation that frank in a long time, possibly even ever!
I won’t rehash everything from the presentation because you can read the crux of most of the discussions here. However, I will say that the main points were that VDI is not ready to take on TS at the moment, but if the forthcoming promised features materialise then it soon could be.
If you don’t already subscribe to Brian’s blog you really should here.
Also keep your eyes peeled on Brian’s site as he promised to dig up an old post from Ron Oglesby that discussed VDI back in 2006. He wanted people to check out the comments section for some wild comments on VDI from die-hard TS heads. I think it is this post, but I might wrong so check his site anyway.
My, my I am excited. I know that I do get excited about virtualisation related stuff regularly, but the same can certainly not be said about backup technology. I have made an exception to my no excitement about backup rule after attending the hands-on lab for vCenter Data Recovery, outstanding!!
The best things often are the simplest and this tool is not complicated, but it just did exactly what most SMB businesses want from a backup solution and that is to work, without having to go to another vendor.
A few of the highlights as I saw:
- All managed through an extension to the vCenter Server GUI and completely integrated in a seamless way
- Destination volumes are encryptable
- SAN based backups
- ESX host integrated VCB
- Retention of backups is completely based on policies
- Few – 7 most recent backups
- Medium – 7 most recent backups, but kept for longer
- Many – 15 most recent backups for a similar period to medium
- Custom – Whatever you want them to be
- Schedule driven
- Multiple jobs can be run at once
- Restore jobs can run alongside backup jobs simultaneously
- Exclusions can be applied
- Restore rehearsal can restore a VM backup without overwriting the original
- Data-deduplication of backups is achieved by only backing up changes after the first full backup
- VSS leveraged using VMware Tools in Windows Virtual Machines
File level backups will be in the final release according to one of the VMware guys manning the lab and the documentation also alluded to this functionality.
I might be wrong, but it looked like it was all being driven by another CentOS JeOS Virtual Appliance, so VMware are staying true to their assertion that the future of software is through dedicated appliances!
Start as you mean to go on.
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