The VMguy

Got to the general session early to snag a good seat at the bloggers table.  First up: Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware.

Steve begins on the topic of desktops.  He says the industry wants to go from device-centric to people-centric(I totally agree – it’s a better model).  He talks about the goals the VMware has in it’s desktop strategy and he labels the user experience as the most important.  He describes why vSphere is the right platform for desktop virtualization.  Steve talks about how VMware decomposes the desktop to share images and simplify patching.  Steve announces a OEM agreement with RTO Virtual Profiles (just heard about this, check the link, cool stuff).  Steve goes on to describe PCoIP.  He describes hosted virtualization and how users can check-out a desktop.  He describes a use-case of how users can bring their own device to work and check out a VM.  This seems like a great use case for hosted virtualization where the user is running a base OS on their device and they check out their desktop to run as a VM on top of their own personal OS on the hardware.   He then talks about the scenario of bare metal virtualization for corporate owned IT. This is where you would load a hypervisor onto bare metal laptop hardware and then check-out a desktop VM to it.  He then introduces Mike to show CVP.

Mike shows Windows 7 running on CVP.  He shows the Aero interface and some videos running in CVP.  He then shows the Wyse cloud app and demos accessing the same desktop from his iPhone.  Really cool stuff, I love the iPhone app. Now back to Steve.  Steve talks about mobile access to vCenter and describles how the engineers are working on have mobile access to manage view desktops as well as vCenter mobile management. Steve describes the mobile virtualization platform (MVP) which is a mobile virtualization platform that runs on mobile phones.  For this section he introduces Peter Chiura, from Visa.

Peter demonstrates what Visa is doing.  He shows an Visa application on a phone which can show live transactions from the owner’s Visa card in near real time.  It can then show special offers from vendors you have made purchases thru.  He then backs out and shows the audience that the application is really running on Android in a VM on a windows mobile phone.  Pretty cool demo really. Back to Steve.  Steve talks about the platform.  He describes vSphere as “the software mainframe”.  He describes vMotion and it’s maturity.  He gives the history of VMworld 2003 with 1600 attendees and how they did a early preview of vMotion on stage for the first time at that conference (I was there when I was a customer!).  He describes vmotion migrations and how many have occured, how many dollars it’s saved and how many marriages have been saved due to the reduced time spent working by the administrators (get’s a really good laugh from the crowd).

He talks about the breath of vmotion and how it’s grown to storage vmotion.  He talks about using vmotion to balance workloads with DRS.  He talks about how you’ll soon be able to extend DRS to network and storage, for instance, moving a virtual machine to another host when the network adapter has been saturated.  He goes on to talk about Distributed Power Management and how it powers off servers when they are not in use and how this can be very useful for desktop scenarios.  Talks about AppSpeed and describes how it works and how it can provide the answer on who’s to be called when a multi-tier app is not running optimally.  He then shows vApp and the descriptors that they can have.  He leads into the new VMsafe APIs.  He describes how the vApp descriptors can now have security descriptors.  He then introduces Rob to show a preview of Config Control.

Rob shows how we can see exactly what’s changed in a virtualized enviornment.  He shows a demo with a port group being changed and how it was tracked and what else was impacted by that change.  Actually it was a very technical but cool demo on how to see what changes can impact your environment.

Back to Steve and onto choice.  Lab Manager and providing users a self service portal. Gives some stats on the datacenter for VMworld:  If it were physical, they would need: 37,248 machines, 25 Megawatts, and  3 football fields worth of physical servies.  Running everything virtual and they cut it down to 1 end zone, 776 physical servers, 540 Kilowatts. He leads onto the Cloud.  He gives an overview of the cloud and how vSphere is the foundation for the cloud.  He talks about the connecting of the internal and external cloud.  He talks how SRM is handling connectivity between two internal clouds.  He then talks about how long distance vMotion can be handled.  He descirbes the challenges: memory and disk sync and network identity.  It’s very challenging to keep 2 VMs in sync with their memory changes and disk changes.  Steve explains how Long Distance vMotion can be used to follow the sun/moon, or for DR. He talks about how different vendors are doing this different ways.  He describes Cisco and F5 and their different strategies for doing it. He goes on to the vCloud API and how a console can show your VMs in your datacenter and your VM’s that are running in a hosting provider.  He describes PaaS and how VMware wants to provide the platform and now can provide the framework to run applications. Introduces Adrian Colyer, CTO, SpringSource.

Adrian shows an application written in SprinSource Cloud Foundry. He describes how the application itself and method of delivering it via scale are seperated.  The app can be coded and then delivered and scaled very easily.  I notice a few people exiting as we reach towards the end.  Probably not the most interesting section for non-programmers but I was getting what he was trying to say.

Steve returns to summarize everything that was discussed:  How we are in a pendulm shift in the industry and VMware is posied to assist customers with all of their needs.

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