VMworld Europe 2011 – Steve Herrod Keynote liveblog

VMworld Europe in Copenhagen is underway. Join us after the jump for the Steve Herrod keynote report

VMworld Europe 2011 – Steve Herrod Keynote Live
 

We’re ready for the Steve Herrod keynote. The program will begin in 5 minutes.

Normally during this keynotes Steve Herrod, CTO of VMware, gives a technical overview of where VMware is heading. Past demos at these keynotes have included “code to cloud” and VMware Fault Tolerance. Let’s see what nice toys Steve is going to announce today.

At VMworld US, Appblast (HTML 5 based remote desktops) and Project Octopus (“Enterprise Dropbox”) were demoed in this talk.

…and so it begins. With a fancy video running across three mega screens in the auditorium.

The theme seems very “the matrix” inspired. Visually describing the journey from computing, through virtualization, to an automated – dare I say it – Cloud.

In the VMworld bag, sponsors and exhibitors can put goodies and flyers. One of those is from Colt, with a sheet to play “buzzword bingo”. One of the squares is “Salad Cream”. Twitter users have dared Steve Herrod to include it in his keynote (in exchange for a donation to his favourite charity). Let’s see if he delivers.

First, Maurizio Carli – VMware general manager for Europe – is giving the intro. More than 7000 attendees.

Time to thank the sponsors. In the past, those were given lots of time during the keynotes (sometimes for quite boring demoes) – now they have to do with a mention on the screen.

Round of applause for the VMUG leaders. 65,000 strong worldwide.

VMworld Europe 2012 will be held in Barcelona, October 16-18. Maurizio hopes it will be a bit less ‘cloudy’ next year.

Before going to Steve Herrod, a short video with some engineers behind vCenter Operations, Project Octopus, etc.

Talking about the new IT, and the new challenges it introduces.

“We need to take VMs further, so that every workload can work in a VM.”

Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO VMware takes the stage.

About 4000 engineers working at VMware R&D.

Already 1200 labs, 14000 VMs yesterday, before the event even started.

A lot of passion in the room.

Virtualization changes everything. Changes how to run, develop and consume applications.

Going to focus on how to optimize the infrastructure, and how end user computing is going to evolve.

When we think about Cloud Computing we need to change the servers and the desktops, but more importantly the services and the way we consume IT.

First chapter: devices. We’re moving to a post pc era. (More iPads on VMworld than Windows laptops, probably)

We need universal access to those apps.
…and we have high expectations. In our personal live, we have less friction than at work.

It’s easy to talk about, quite hard to deliver.

Giving an overview of how VMware wants to deliver this.

Short video of evolution from Windows pc, to a ‘connected enterprise’, with universal access to applications. Giving end users self service access, with IT being in control.

Shared work streams to keep teams up to date (think: Socialcast, a recent VMware acquisition)

“We’re well on our way to delivering this.”

Currently in a world where we think about servers and desktops, we need to go to services and people. Applications and data are often captive in a device today. These days, more and more apps are escaping this, being SaaS or other browser-based apps.

Those that are still in Windows ‘siloes’, need to be brokered to be accessed from any device. The new EUC vision is defined around three big areas: “simplify, manage, connect”.

Simplify: Virtualizing desktops, capturing applications and putting them in an app catalog, moving data from C: drives to a data service.

Users want universal, secure access. From different locations, different devices. What’s needed is a smart access broker.

A broker that knows about users, applications and data policies. Giving access to apps and data based on who’s accessing it from where.

Going to do several demos. First one: Desktop virtualization with View 5.

Automatically creating 1000 VMs in a few clicks. Filling an inventory up with VMs, using smart things like linked clones in the background, creating VMs in a vSphere environment while saving on disk space. All not that new.

New project: Thinapp Factory. Designed to automatically create packaged of virtualized applications, presenting them to Horizon App Manager, which allows single sign-on to SaaS and brokered access to these applications.

This way, IT can create packages of applications, and then assign them to different users. Users can then go to a corporate app store, and access SaaS apps, or transparently install Windows applications that were packaged with Thinapp.

Thinapp Factory scans a file share for setup executables, iso files, … – And can then in a batch process build the necessary packages.
One of the next headaches is data. Quick poll of the audience: Who’s using Dropbox right now. 99% of the hands go up. How many of the audience are allowed by IT to do it. *laughter* from the audience.

Going to demo project Octopus, “enterprise Dropbox” by VMware.
Demoing Octopus Manager, where a user policy is defined to define who can share documents externally, to which domains, ..

Gives a great user experience, while keeping IT in control.

Project Octopus is going to be offered as an on-premise solution (can be installed behind the firewall), and as a hosted solution which can be offered by partners.

All in all this should lead to a well-managed user experience, giving users access to every app and data from any device they want.

Vittorio Viarengo, PM of EUC coming on stage to do a demo.

Playing new employee at fictional insurance company. Luckily he’s had some ‘orientation’, who knows about this enterprise app store, knows how to login to his View desktop, and how to install an app.

Installing link to Socialcast.

Wondering about how to get access on the road. Going to his user portal, and wants to activate his phone.

Gets a text message (on his Samsung Android phone, with an Apple SMS sound), delivering his new ‘work phone’ image.

Access to Socialcast, to his documents on the go using Octopus. Separated from his personal apps and data.

Can switch to his personal phone – “Whoa, Angry Birds is still there” – or his business phone – “There’s my corporate contacts and data”.

Back to Steve, giving a recap of the products Vittorio used.

View 5 to access desktop. New release including virtual profiles so desktop image stays clean and user feels at home on his personal desktop.
Horizon App Manager – Enterprise app store, installing Socialcast for collaboration.
Horizon Mobile – new name for MVP – Mobile virtualization.

New announcements around Horizon Mobile coming in the next few days. Device partners are LG and Samsung, operator partners to be announced in the next few days.

File sync done through Octopus. Steve is already using this, enthusiastic about the possibilities.

Most of us are mobile users today, next part of the demo coming up to show how he can get access to his documents from an iPad.

Working on a fictional insurance claim, a Fiat crashed into a Ferrari – “Do not worry, it’s not a real Ferrari, it’s yellow.”

(Does he know a certain colleague of his is driving a blue Ferrari?)

He’s opening his document on his iPad, and can edit the document in Excel on his iPad through App Blast. “It’s Magic”.

Showing unified communications – including video conferencing and screen sharing – on his iPad. (I do think this is a prerecorded demo. Good job on the lip syncing!)

Another recap: document sharing through Project Octopus, remote desktop access through HTML 5 browser through App Blast.

Vittorio happened to leave his phone at the fictional coffee shop. IT can remotely wipe the work part of the device.

Summing up the new EUC vision. Can’t happen without robust IT foundation.

New announcement today: New version of the iPad vSphere client. Now supports vMotion as well.

Including a cheesy sound effect and slide-to-vMotion. Lots of laughs from the cloud.

Robust infrastructure starts with vSphere 5. More than a million engineering hours, more than 2 million QA hours, more than 200 new features.

Basic idea is: “it should just work, and work well”. Lots of companies upgrading right away.

vSphere 5 continues delivering “firsts”. Going over a few of them.

VMware Go: Browser-based server consolidation, including installing vSphere (aimed towards SMBs), and the vSphere Storage Appliance, bringing SAN-like capabilities to SMBs with stand alone servers.

VMware Go: Browser based, scans hosts over the network, remotely installs the vSphere Hypervisor.

Other feature: VSA. Another great way to get people started and get the full benefits of virtualization, without shared storage.

Aggregates internal disks in servers, mirrors them across and presents them as a NFS share, allowing vMotion, DRS, HA, …

Big companies are creating very large vSphere clusters. New feature in vSphere 5: Auto Deploy. Faster and more compliant installation and upgrades through a combination of PXE boot for installation and host profiles for configuration.

With new hardware and VM capabilities, Steve is now confident vSphere now supports all applications – including the most demanding enterprise apps like Oracle, SAP and Exchange.

Maintaining or improving performance, and increasing flexibility through vMotion, DRS, …

With vSphere 5, a VM can have up to 32 vCPUs, up to 1 TB of GB per VM. (What they call a “Monster VM”.)

(There’s a Monster VM mascotte running around the VMworld floor by the way.)

Peak performance is nice, but policies are even more important.

Policies that are attached to an app, and move along with it when moving from datacenter to datacenter.

(Even to external (vCloud) providers.))

vSphere has long included performance settings for CPU and memory. vSphere 5 includes lots of additional controls and improvements around storage.

First feature: Profile driven storage: Automates placement of VMs across datastores with different tiers.

App owner can define performance requirements for an app, vSphere places VM on the right datastore.

Another new feature: Storage DRS, automatically moving apps between datastores (through Storage vMotion) to change the allocation as the array gets filled up.

To eliminate the “noisy neighbour” syndrome, that can occur within a single datastore, Storage I/O control can control I/O bandwidth between different applications. Network I/O control does the same on a virtual NIC level. (Important with the move to 10 GB ehternet, where generally servers have fewer NICs, thus more sharing.)

Applications need to be up first to manage though, so availability is very important as well.

Lots of improvement around availability across the different levels of the stack. For complete datacenter protection, Site Recovery Manager was updated as well.

SRM has traditionally relied on array replication. Great for high performance environments with high requirements, but requires expensive hardware, links, and identical storage on two sites.

Added host based replication to do replication across the network on a per-VM basis.

Great use case for public cloud: DR to a vCloud service provider.

Another new feature: automated failback, to better test failover and to fail back when the problem is solved.

SRM also used often for disaster avoidance: Planned migrations, hurricanes coming up, generators running out of fuel, ..

Next chapter: Security.

Nosy neighbor is as hard a problem as noisy neighbor.

Shared platform needs defense in depth. New products in vShield family.

Going over them now. First one: vShield Endpoint – partner integration for AV offloading.
vShield App: Multi-tier VM application. (Application firewalling).

vShield Edge for edge protection (firewalling, NAT, VPN, ..)

New features in all of them, like Data Leak Protection in vShield App. (Detecting patterns like credit card numbers and isolating applications if they are not allowed to have this data.)

All of this helps guaranteeing Performance, Availability and Security.

Example: Diebold now shipping ATMs with vSphere for better availability and security.

Final chapter: managing it all.

IT management is about the lowest operational overhead, remove steps when they are not needed, resolve problems automatically, increase agility of It department.

VMware Approach: Embed and automate. – make the platform do as much of the work as possibly.

Converge: Break through silos with different teams, processes and tools.

Filter: Show the right information, depending on who’s looking at it.

Most IT organizations have Infrastructure teams (the “builders” who buy servers, storage, network) and operations teams (who worry about end users, sla’s and tickets).

Often different teams, throwing tickets and hardware around.

New announcement today: vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0 – building on the legacy of vCenter Operations (coming from last year’s Integrien acquisition), Capacity IQ and a new offering, vCenter Infrastructure Navigator.

Demo of the new vC Ops.

Demoing VIN – detecting what’s running inside VM’s and which VM’s communicate with others. Makes sure performance management is checking the right VM’s, or that a complete ‘service’ is protected when using Site Recovery Manager.

Brings together IT and Ops teams, giving them the views they care about.

New example – Developers (icon with a bearded guy in a short an a cap on the slide) and Operations.

New announcement: vFabric Application Management Suite – enabling ‘Devops’.

Example: constructing a three-tier application.

Easily deploy applications, configure the properties of the VMs and the services running inside of them, execute the startup of the VMs in the right order.
Allows developers to create application blueprints, creating the necessary VM’s in the background.

Then vFabric AppInsight gives the necessary performance views of the complete application, aggregating health of the different components, and giving drill-down troubleshooting on the application.
Latest demo: New IT Business Management Suite – Financial view of IT operations for CIO/CFO. Based on the Digital Fuel acquisition VMware did early this summer.

All of this solutions break barriers internally – making IT as a Service more of a reality.

No earth-shattering announcements of tech previews like FT today, but on the other hand a lot of shipping, or nearly shipping products.

That’s it for today, check back in tomorrow for more keynote liveblogging, and through the next few days for more news from VMworld Europe.