VMworld 2009 keynote – day one

From VMworld 2009, this is the day 1 keynote.

VMworld 2009 has officially kicked off. The first keynote didn’t bring much real news. As usually, the keynote consisted of mostly marketing speak, customer testimonials and demos by sponsors and partners. New developments usually are announced during the CTO keynote, which is coming tomorrow.

Here’s a quick play-by-play recap of the keynote. You can check out the archived and live video streams at the VMworld website.

The keynote room is filling up. Goodbye sleep, hello keynote!

Bloggers ready for the #VMworld keynote

Tod Nielsen, COO takes the stage. Last year, 960 companies out of the Fortune 1000 were using VMware. Nielsen wants to get this up to 1000. At PartnerExchange (VMware’s North American partner event) he held up a sign with the 40 companies that weren’t already using VMware, promising a free VMworld pass to partners who signed up any of those companies.

In the last couple of months, 10 out of those 40 companies became vSphere users. This means there are 30 of the Fortune 1000 companies left that are not using VMware.

President & CEO Paul Maritz takes the stage.

There are 12488 attendees at VMworld this year. Or, as the marketing people would say: nearly 15K attendees.

VMworld regulars already know the drill. 70 % of IT costs are spent just to “keep the lights on”. Moving to a more agile environment can lower this maintenance cost.

Everybody’s talking about the ‘cloud’ that will magically solve all of their IT problems. But there are lots of different definitions of what the cloud actually means.
“Customers want to get to the mythical ‘cloud’ world where everything is simple, works together, is stable, secure, …”

This promised land is not here yet. Virtualization can enable it though.

The key is the encapsulation that’s inherent in virtualization, to add new functionality in a non-disruptive way.

The next step is bringing this workloads to external clouds. Later today there will be a press briefing + press release about the new cloud initiatives. (Check Virtualization.com for more news on this announcement as it happens.)

The foundation for this cloud is the platform called vSphere. vSphere is a bigger release in terms of man-years that went into it than any of the Windows releases Paul was involved with at MS in the 90s
(Paul Maritz is a Microsoft veteran)

“vSphere evolved from a “product”, VMware Infrastructure, to a real platform that plugs in to the complete datacenter.”

“The automation and policies helps “Continously defragging the datacenter.” The datacenter becomes a giant computer (the software mainframe)”

A single vSphere cluster can easily (in Maritz’s words) support the complete transaction workload of the Visa network.

Paul’s going over the different components that make up the vSphere platform. Most VMware users will probably know this slide by heart about now.

Now on to the sponsor lovefest. First Tom Brey, sr Technical Staff Manager Power Management from IBM is invited on stage.

VMware and IBM collaborate not only on hardware compatibility (like any other HW partner), but on management and power metering.

Every IBM server contains power meters/sensors. This can be measured and optimized from within vCenter.

The more data we have on power usage, the more we can optimize it. Using this data we can easily measure Performance Per Watt, to see if it’s better to turn off servers (DPM) and let the others run warmer, or distribute the load over several servers.

Brey demoes a server running 8 memtest VMs. As VMs are powered on, the energy consumption is updated in the vSphere client. What’s interesting is that the energy usage is calculated on a per-VM basis.

The energy consumption is updated live. The energy consumption is displayed on a per-VM basis. (See the colored bars at the far right of the graph.)

Demo with the new and old generation of x3650 servers. The new Nehalem-based M2 servers have half the idle power of the previous generation, and support
more VMs per server.

Moving on. A new set of task-oriented management products is being added to the vCenter family of products. Paul Maritz spends a few minutes reviewing the set of vCenter add-ons coming up in the coming months. (CapacityIQ, Chareback, …)

After the full vSphere suite, Maritz moves on to “vSphere essentials”, an edition of vSphere tailored to SMB customers. This “IT in a box” solution is complemented with the new “VMware Go” service announced yesterday.

Maritz is now describing vSphere essentials, the “IT in a box” version of SMB customers. New announcement yesterday: VMware Go.

Of course, he’s not telling there is now way to upgrade the Essentials license to standard if you grow beyond three hosts. Maritz also said Essentials brings “things like Fault Tolerance to SMBs at an attractive price.” This is not correct, as VMotion, Fault Tolerance and other goodies aren’t included in Essentials.

VMware vCloud intro. Enabling mobility between internal virtual datacenters and external clouds through standard APIs and common mgmt tools
The vCloud initiative so far has +1000 service providers signed up.
New announcement: vCloud Express is a new class of self-service services provided by partners.
Another demo of Terremark’s self service portal. Self service signup with just a credit card.
(Note: VMware is an investor in Terremark – and is thus in a way competing with its own partners.)

Amazon EC2 users already know this kind of service for a few years.

Formal announcement of the VMware vCloup API, with connections to inventory, billing, … The vCloud APIs were submitted to DMTF to create an open, standard API.

“Moving on to VMware View. Once again, the story of the “user centric” system instead of the “device centric” environment.”

Steve Dupree from HP ESS, Director of platform virtualization, taking the stage.

In other words, like every year, every sponsor gets his 5 minutes on stage.
HP created a reference VDI infrastructure. Storage is based on LeftHand, a storage company acquired by HP at the beginning of this year.

Funny exchange:
PM: How many customers have you got so far?
SD: We’re just finishing this implementation and putting it out in our services organization.

In other words, zero customers so far…

Tech preview of VMware View with PCoIP demo. This is what Eschenbach was talking about yesterday.

“Maritz referencing “Eating one’s own dog food”, a term he coined and in his words his “only contribution to the IT industry”. Maritz frequently refers to his Microsoft past in his presentations. He’s also known to have said he was responsible for the explosion of the number of servers during the 1990’s (Windows NT and beyond), and is now working on reducing the number of servers (at VMware).

THe keynote was finished with an overview of the SpringSource acquisition.

And that concludes the keynote… Not much news so far. There’s a cloud announcement coming up in a few hours.

Check back tomorrow for more live keynote blogging. In the meantime, follow Virtualization.com on Twitter. Follow @lode for “backstage” news, and @vmlive for live updates.