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VMworld 2009 keynote – day one

September 1, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren 1 Comment

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.

F5 Solution Enables Cloud Connection for Live Application Mobility

August 31, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

F5 Networks today announced that it will be demonstrating a solution that affords businesses seamless flexibility in leveraging both public and private clouds.

During VMworld, F5 will demonstrate how it is possible to perform a secure migration of a live virtualized application, and its associated storage, to and from the cloud with no downtime or user disruption. This solution leverages F5 and VMware products available today.

An agile Application Delivery Network is the fundamental component required to extend virtualization beyond a single data center or VMware vSphere 4 instance. This integration uses F5’s BIG-IP solutions with VMware vSphere 4, VMware VMotion, VMware Storage VMotion, and the VMware vCenter APIs to overcome many of the networking hurdles that previously prevented organizations from migrating live applications to and from the cloud. The integration between VMware vCenter Server, BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager, and BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager simplifies global traffic management to enable easier live migrations. The solution also takes advantage of BIG-IP WAN application delivery services to accelerate VMware VMotion and VMware Storage VMotion events over links that are limited by bandwidth, latency, or packet-loss.

Prior to this solution, virtual applications needed to be cloned or suspended and redeployed separately in the cloud. Neither live virtual applications nor their storage could be migrated to the cloud. This integrated solution enables organizations to fully take advantage of the cost savings of the cloud model, while avoiding the hassles and complexities of rerouting global traffic manually or having to terminate live applications in order to reroute traffic.

VMware To Debut New Products: VMware Go and vCenter Product Family

August 31, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware is launching two new products at VMworld, its annual conference, tomorrow.

The first is a suite of VMware’s existing virtualization solutions, called the VMware vCenter Product Family. The suite is built on top of VMware’s vSphere 4 to help enterprises create and maintain dynamic and flexible IT infrastructures.

VMware says that they have received an overwhelmingly positive response the latest generation of vSphere 4, with approximately 75 percent of customers planning to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4 within the next six months.

VMware’s second product launch is targeted towards small to medium sized businesses. VMware Go is a free beta service that makes it simple for clients to get started with virtualizing their applications. A web-based service, VMware Go will lets companies run multiple operating systems and applications on a single server, helping SMBs to spend less money on hardware, energy and server administration.

Via Between the lines.

VMworld Europe Day 2 – Dr. Stephen Herrod Keynote liveblog

February 25, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren Leave a Comment

Stay tuned for the liveblog of the keynote by Dr. Stephen Herrod, VMware CTO, live from VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, France.

Stephen Herrod was one of the original developers of ESX predecessor SimOS while at Stanford University (His homepage from the time is still online.). He worked at Transmeta, where he worked on their “code morphing” technology (somewhat related to the binary translation VMware is donig). He has been with VMware for a few years now, managing the ESX group.

Expectations for today’s talk are a bit unclear. Will the focus be on the desktop (VMware View, vClient, …), or will it be another “cloudy” day? Given the fact that there aren’t lots of sessions on vSphere (the next generation of the ESX product), expectations in this area are a bit low. This being said, vSphere 4.0 should still be released in the first half of 2009. (Although, given enough beers, some VMware employees are telling us august/september is a more realistic timeframe.)

Let’s find out…

8:44 The room is filling up for the keynote by Stephen Herrod. Keynote starts at 9.00 AM.

9:10 The introduction video (same as yesterday) is rolling.. Getting ready for the keynote. Dr. Steve Herrod seems fashionably late today.

9:11 Maurizio Carli, general manager EMEA is master of ceremonies again, welcoming the audience.

9:14 Small reminder by Carli that this afternoon there will be a session called “VMware Unplugged”, a Q&A session with CEO Paul Maritz, CTO Steve Herrod, Maurizio Carli and the COO Tod Nielsen.

9:14 Stephen Herrod takes the stage.

9:14 A reminder of the three initiatives – VDC-OS, vCloud and vClient. Today those concepts will be demoed in reality.

9:15 Lots of development done in EMEA. Several hundred engineers here.

9:15 The talk is called “The future of virtualization”. Subtitle: “Technical stuff”.

9:16 Herrod is walking through the different blocks of vSphere. First up: vCompute. ESX scales higher than ever before, to cope with today’s platforms and VM demands. Up to 8 vCPUs, 100K IOPS/sec.

9:18 Internal benchmark of Oracle 11g on RHEL running on next generation ESX on a development 8-core Xeon.
The numbers:
less than 15% overhead or 8vCPU VM, 24.000 total DB transactions per second. Near-perfect scalability from 1 to 8 vCPUs. 250 MB/sec disk I/O.

9:18 This is the performance of a 2002 Sun Fire 15k, then costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

9:19 Not every application scales as well as Oracle. A reminder that breaking up hardware platforms can give better-than-native performance. Exchange supports about 8K mailboxes natively on a platform, breaking this up with ESX gives 16K mailbox support on the same hardware.

9:21 Record SPECweb2005 performance, also with VMware ESX Server 3.5. 16 Gbit/second throughput. Would server 3 billion page views per day. (By comparison, eBay servers about 1 billion pages in a day).

9:21 Next block: vStorage: aggregating and optimizing disk usage. One example: Thin Provisioning (on VMFS/VMDK level).

9:22 VMware has a software implementation, but if the hardware array supports it natively (read: with higher performance), it plugs in to ESX and the thin provisioning is done by the hardware.

9:23 vNetwork: distributed virtual switches (which everybody’s heard of by now), enabling third party virtual switches. (Cisco Nexus 1000V)

9:25 Important because the ownership of the network can stay with the networking team (same management tools, IOS, …) and new functionalities can be added.

9:25 vCompute, vStorage and vNetwork are the “bottom layer” that make up the “giant computer” – the software mainframe.

9:25 DRS and related technologies take care of distributing the workloads across the physical building blocks.

9:26 Distributed Power Management, today an experimental feature in ESX 3.5, makes this giant computer power thrifty.

9:27 DPM can throttle CPU speed, and turn off hosts that aren’t needed. When bursting, hosts can be powered on as needed.

9:27 DPM is one of the built-in features that make the “giant computer” as self-managing as possible.

9:28 The “top layer” of vSphere is related to management, policies and SLAs.

9:28 One example: attach an SLA policies to vApps (containers of virtual appliances that make up tiered applications), vSphere will allocate the right resources (and chargeback for the usage).

9:30 Maximizing uptime stays important as well. There are features for planned and unplanned downtime: VMotion, Storage VMotion, Maintenance mode, HA, SRM and of course Fault Tolerance (nee Continuous Availability). Nothing new here.

9:31 A reminder of what FT is all about: for some VMs HA isn’t enough, a reboot introduces unacceptable downtime.

9:32 FT runs a “shadow VM” on a separate server, and cuts over to the machine in case the first one goes down. As this is done in software, it can be configured on a per-VM basis, and it uses “off the shelf” hardware. (as opposed to specialized cluster equipment)

9:33 FT works together with HA: if one of the two copies dies, a new shadow VM is booted up, keeping the protection intact.

9:34 Next topic: Security – VMsafe APIs help protect workloads without needing to install agents in VMs. VMware’s partners have been working with this APIs for a year now (VMsafe was announced last year at VMworld Europe 2008), a lot of products should ship together with vSphere.

9:35 The security settings are a part of the vApp policies, the follow the VM as it moves between clouds.

9:36 Another vSecurity-based feature are vShiled Zones. This technology came to VMware with the acquisition of Bluelane. vShield zones encapsulate and firewall VMs, regardless of where they are running.

9:37 To manage all this nice stuff we’re used to VirtualCenter. This will become vCenter, as a central management hub.

9:39 As vCenter becomes an increasingly important part of a virtual infrastructure, VMware introduces vCenter Server Heartbeat. A passive vCenter server can run in the background and take over in case the first one goes down.

9:39 This monitoring/heartbeat mechanism keeps logging, allowing rollback of misconfigurations.

9:42 VMware infrastructure environments become bigger and bigger. vCenter has several limits – 200 hosts and 2000 VMs today, 300 hosts and 3000 VMs tomorrow. Multiple vCenter servers can be linked together to overcome this boundaries. Up to 10 vCenter can be linked in linked mode.

To keep things manageable, the Virtual Infrastructure client now includes a search mode.

First demo on stage of the new VI/vCenter combo, focusing on the search interface.

Anyone who’s ever used a web browser will know how to use this.

9:42 Advanced search capabilities to refine search results.

9:43 Possible business model: ads in the vCenter search results.

9:44 Automation is not a new concept for VMware: Guided consolidation, Update manager, orchestrator have been around for some time now. vSphere takes this to a next level.

One of the major features of vSphere is Host Profiles.

9:45 Host Profiles attach configuration templates to ESX hosts. Hosts can be configured to a certain standard setting with a simple click, and can be monitored for changes. If a change on a single host breaks the template compliancy, Host Profiles can remediate this and fix it automatically.

9:47 vCenter will be shipped as a Windows binary like it is today, but also as a Linux Virtual Appliance.

9:47 Beta available today.

9:47 Applause from the audience. (Have I mentioned already there are less suits in the audience today?)

9:49 Shout-out to Twitter from Herrod.

9:49 Next major chapter: vCloud.

9:51 Standard APIs for VDC-OS management and federation. (Linking “clouds” across datacenters.)

vCloud manages security, network, storage and monitoring.

9:51 First example of federating clouds: Site Recovery Manager

9:51 Storage is replicated on array-base, vCenter is replicated via IP.

9:53 VMware tries to figure out “long distance VMotion” for live migration. Today this requires very exotic setups and the right network environments.

Challenges for long distance VMotion:
Moving the memory
Moving the disk images
maintaining the network connections.

This is an ecosystem challenge (storage replication, dedup, wan optimization, stretching VLANs, …). Lots of work being done by the partner community and VMware.
9:54 Some long distance VMotion applications: DRS accross DCs, datacenter maintenance/move, DC disaster avoidance (eg. when a hurricane is on its way) and “follow the sun” environments.

9:55 All the cloud providers are nowadays creating their own self-service portals. VMware will offer their own base portal, based on Lab Manager.

9:56 Next demo: vCenter vCloud plug-in to manage clouds.

9:58 Bruce adds credentials of external cloud provider (Telefonica in this case).
The capacity offered by the cloud provider becomes available in vCenter.
Applications can be dragged from internal clouds to the external provider, just like between internal esx clusters.

9:58 Personal note: wow!

10:00 VMware wants to open up the vCloud API, to enable a rich ecosystem of clouds.

10:00 I wonder what Amazon thinks about this…

10:00 Last chapter: vClient initiative.

10:01 Another recap of the “follow the user” model/vision.

10:01 Walking through some View features: View Composer (linked clones, central patching), pushing full VMs to “thick clients” to run on top of client-side hypervisor.

10:02 Patching is made easier by using shared base disks, and application virtualization (ThinApp, formerly known as Thinstall).

10:02 Centralized policy management, based on ACE.

10:03 Major focus is the best user experience for all environments. Wan/Lan: PCoIP (PC over IP), local: rich portable desktop.

10:04 Jerry Chen from the View team is going to demo this.

10:04 The WAN technology is based on a co-development with Teradici, supporting CAD/CAM and 3D over WAN through hardware-assisted optimization.

10:06 LAN use case: traditional VDI: Thin clients, high-bandwidth, true pc experience (HD video, multimonitor, …)

10:09 Demo: thin client connected to rack workstation (a standard workstation blade, in other words, no virtualization). Demo with Google Earth working fluidly over a LAN connection.

10:10 vClient summary: Best user experience, central management, partnership with Intel for client-side virtualization (offline VDI).

10:11 “One more thing”: evolution of the mobile phone

10:12 VMware acquired Trango Virtual Processors, maker of mobile phone hypervisor.

10:12 Mobile phones bring familiar challenges: security/manageability, home/work life convergence, persona management, third-party applications.

10:13 VMware’s Mobile Virtualizaton Platform is a hypervisor for ARM-based devices.

10:15 Live demo with a Nokia N800. (If I’m not mistaken this internet device doesn’t include a phone part, but let’s not bicker about that).

10:15 Demo: downloading Windows CE, running productivity apps (Solitaire).

10:16 Another VM is downloaded and running side by side: Android.

10:18 And with that, the keynote is finished.

10:18 Thanks for following!

VMworld Europe Day 1 – Paul Maritz keynote unveils new vPrefix product naming convention and talks about upcoming VMware vSphere, Intel vPro partnership

February 24, 2009 by Lode Vermeiren 1 Comment

After “day 0”, partner day, VMworld Europe opened its doors for the general audience today.

vSphere is the official name of the new VMware platform, but the VMware marketing department has not applied their new naming convention vPrefix to all products & initiatives yet. Some VMware partners are already doing the same, such as Intel with vPro. How long will it take for Vmworld to be renamed vWorld. Below are the six building blocks of vSphere:

vCompute (hardware assisted virtualization and extended live migration compatibility):
vStorage (storage management and replication)
vNetwork (for network management, look for Cisco here…
Security (where VMsafe innovates on firewalls, anti-virus, intrusion detection/prevention and compliance)
Scalability (dynamic resource sizing)
Availability (data protection and clustering)

Here’s a rush rundown of the keynote by VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

The theme of the conference is a continuation of VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas: “Virtualy anything is possible.” The unofficial theme seems to be the same as in Las Vegas as well: “cloud, cloud, cloud”.

Even though the next release of ESX is just around the corner, we don’t expect major announcements on that scale today.

Update: The stream of today’s keynote is now available.

Maurizio Carli, General Manager VMware EMEA

09.11 Maurizio Carli, General manager EMEA takes the stage.

Last year 4500 people attended VMworld Europe. Even in the current economic climate, 4700 people showed up this week.

9:23 Paul once again takes the blame for the massive proliferation of x86 servers in the datacenters. (Paul Maritz is a 14-year Microsoft veteran)

9:25 In the early 2000s, hypervisors introduced the concept of consolidation. Maritz points out that this is the point where most of VMware’s competition is now. VMware is now talking about “cooperating hypervisors”, and, of course: the cloud.

9:26 The VMware vision is that the Cloud will be built on industry-standard building blocks, starting with the “internal cloud”, based on the Virtual Datacenter OS.
VMware likes to call this VDC-OS the “software mainframe”.

9:27 When internal environments are “converted” to this VDC_OS, it becomes easier to take the encapsulated workloads and migrate them to external, federated cloud providers, in a non-disruptive way.

9:28 VMware knows that hardware and a hypervisor aren’t enough, but that security policies, quality of service and management are just as important.

9:30 Virtualization is the key to making this happen in an evolutionary way: existing applications can be put in the “Black boxes” virtualization provides.

– vSphere architecture

9:33 The product name for the new generation of VDC-OS products will be: vSphere. No surprises there..

9:39 No new stuff so far… vSphere requires a new management suite, now called the vCenter suite. (As opposed to VirtualCenter).

Apparently some stuff will be demoed later. Curious…

General overview of the VMworld stage

9:44 The second initiative, a logical extension of the VDC-OS, is vCloud, where customers will have the choice to go to an external service provider to get their IT infrastructure. VMware aims to build compatible clouds (based on VDC-OS of course), allowing users to build private clouds, where external and internal IT resources are pooled together and managed as one.
9:45 VMware will work with the formal standards bodies to make sure users aren’t locked in to one vendor’s cloud. There should be a broad ecosystem of clouds, giving users choice to move in and out of clouds as necessary.

9:46 (And again, it seems like Amazon EC2 doesn’t exist, even though with them “cloud” is a reality today, sort of.)

9:47 The first guest comes on stage, Kurt Glazemakers, EMEA CTO of terremark.

9:49
Terremark CTO Kurt Glazemakers

9:50

Terremark enterprise cloud

9:51 Pooling resources on a hosting platform gives users the possibility to leverage economies of scale of large environments, providing ample burst capacity if necessary. This reduces provision times. Users don’t have to worry about CAPEX, as the server capacity is treated like a service (OPEX).

9:52 Terremark created a self-service portal allowing users to create VMs as they please, within the limits of their resource pool. Users pay by the GHz of CPU power and GB of memory and disk storage.

9:56 Next guest: Joe Arnold, director of Engineering of Engine Yard, a Ruby on Rails company.

10:00 Engine Yard created a self-service portal to create RoR containers. Pretty short demo. Looks a bit like CohesiveFTs Elastic Server.

10:00 Another guest on stage: Zvi Guterman, CEO IT Structures
10:05 Paul gives some more examples of service providers. Savvis – one of the biggest hosting companies building a giant resource pool for customer VMs. Sungard, providing disaster recovery solutions as a service.

10:06 The third leg of the future VMware stragey is the vClient initiative.

10:08 The management of user workloads should not be done at the device level, but at the user level. The workloads should follow the user wherever he is and whatever device he’s using.

10:09 VMware started as a client-side virtualization company, with “VMware”, now VMware Workstation.

10:09 To allow “offline VDI”, VMware will provide a client-side bare metal hypervisor. (A la Phoenix?)

10:10 This enables the user to checkout his desktop when working on a mobile device, and to check in and work on a thin client when at the office, leveraging central management and intelligent storage (with deduplication, …)

10:13 All the vClient / VMware View stuff announced so far (WAN optimization, thin client optimization, offline VDI, …) should be rolled out completely in 2009.

10:13 No news on the semi-recent mobile hypervisor acquisition so far.

10:14 New announcement: formal partnership with Intel.

Guest on stage: Gregory Bryant, VP Business Client Group at Intel.

10:16 VMware and Intel will work together on a client-side hypervisor.

10:18 The collaboration enables out-of band, centralized management, but gives the user the genuine local desktop experience.

Check back tomorrow for a more in-depth presentation by Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO.

VMware Europe 2009: Call For Papers

January 6, 2009 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

VMworld Europe is coming up soon (February 24-26, 2009) and is once again being held in Cannes, France. The team has just issued a call for papers, deadline January 16th, so if you’re interested in participating don’t hesitate too long to submit.

VMworld Europe is looking for content on the following subjects:

Networking
Security
Storage
Real World Stories from Customers
Programming and Scripting
Business Continuity
Green Computing and Cost
Automation