I take no credit for any of this content, it go’s to the author, and I mean to only put the content here without having to weed through the varies blogs, I have both the blog link, and article title here, with a link to the article. Thanks to everyone for putting these together for everyone to read!

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http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com : Virtualization innovators vie for Best of VMworld 2009 Awards

“

AN FRANCISCO — More than 200 products were considered in The Best of VMworld 2009 Awards in categories ranging from desktop virtualization to cloud computing. The awards, sponsored by TechTarget’s SearchServerVirtualization.com, highlight the most innovative technologies at the show.

In the Security and Virtualization category, the gold winner was HyTrust Inc. for its HyTrust Appliance. The finalist was Catbird Networks Inc. for Catbird vCompliance.

Related content
Watch video of some of the Best of VMworld 2009 Awards finalists and gold winners.

The HyTrust product "provides a single point of control for hypervisor access management, configuration, logging and compliance," according to a statement from the judging panel, which is anonymous.

In the Business Continuity and Data Protection Software category, Vizioncore Inc. took the gold for vRanger Pro 4.0.

There were two finalists in that category: Veeam Software Inc. for Veeam Backup & Replication and PHD Virtual Technologies for esXpress n 3.6.

"While contenders in this category were close rivals, the winner changed the most for the better," the judges wrote. "The gold winner provides a cleaner interface and all-around faster tool, speed being crucial in this category."

In Hardware for Virtualization, Cisco Systems Inc.’s Unified Computing System (UCS) won the gold.

Judges said that UCS "provides a unified platform for hardware and networking that radically reduces the number of devices requiring setup, management, power and cooling, and cabling. … This offering will be hugely impactful in the marketplace."

A group of engineers from the National Defense and Canadian Forces in Ontario who attended a super session on UCS Tuesday said the UCS system is ideal for dedicated technologies such as desktop virtualization.

"It looks like a good technology. … You could get the system and throw a bunch of desktops on the blades, and it would run great," said one of the engineers, who wished to remain anonymous.

The two finalists were Xsigo Systems for VP780 I/O Director 2.0 and AFORE Solutions Inc. for ASE3300

More than 40 companies entered in the Virtualization Management category, and Netuitive Inc. won for its Netuitive SI for Virtual Data Centers. The product impressed the judges by providing "broad management far beyond virtual environments and a self-learning capability that alerts you to problems hours before they happen," the judges said.

Finalists in the management category were Veeam Software for Veeam Management Suite and Embotics Corp. for V-Commander 3.0.

The gold winner in the desktop virtualization was AppSense for AppSense Environment Manager 8.0. The judges said AppSense "rocked our boat. … It offers the most complete user management environment system out there."

The two finalists in this category were Liquidware Labs for its desktop virtualization diagnostic tool Stratusphere and Virtual Computer Inc. for NxTop.

For Cloud Computing technologies, the gold went to Mellanox Technologies for its Intalio Cloud Appliance. Judges said Mellanox offered "the most impressive integrated private cloud system for building large-scale internal clouds."

The finalists were InContinuum Software for CloudController v 1.5 and Catbird Networks Inc. for Catbird V-Security Cloud Edition.

The best new technology at VMworld 2009 was VirtenSys’ VirtenSys IOV switch VMX-500LSR. Judges considered VirtenSys innovative because of its potential cost savings. "It eliminates an entire layer of switching," the judges wrote. "Without this product, you would have to buy big iron to get all this functionality."

The Best of Show award this year went to HyTrust for HyTrust Appliance because, according to the judges, it offers "the greatest potential to secure virtual environments by providing a single point of access control. It frees admins to set policies once that won’t be overridden by other tools."”

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1740037323

Video, VMworld Awards

—

http://knudt.net/vblog : VMWorld 2009 Day 4: Wednesday

“

Steve Herrod started off the keynote today discussing VDI, including the announcement of an agreement to embed RTO Software’s Virtual Profiles into View. Their goal is to provide end users the same rich experience no matter the situation (WAN, LAN or offline mobile). Like any good Herrod keynote, live demos ensued, including PCOIP and the Wyse iPhone View Client. The demo of the Mobile Virtualization Phone was pretty interesting, especially when he showed that the demo app was running in an android VM, completely seamless within the Windows CE environment. The keynote then switched over to the datacenter, where he came out swinging by describing why VMotion is more mature and proven (and a time-tested marriage saver) compared to other “live migration” offerings. Next, he discussed the fact that VMware is currently working towards I/O based DRS, which will include setting shares and IOPs limits per hard disk. He then covered the big features of vSphere, but didn’t cover anything new until the end when he introduced and gave a quick demo of vCenter ConfigControl. Next up was the cloud discussion, but nothing terribly groundbreaking, though he did mention long-distance VMotion as an upcoming feature. Following up on the cloud discussion, Mr. Herrod described IaaS, PaaS and Saas (Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Service, respectively), and why SpringSource is so key to the cloud strategy. In essence, it helps to continue to break apart the different layers of the datacenter into individual pieces that can be manipulated independently from one another. The CEO of SpringSource then came out to demo their technology. All in all, another great keynote. Steve Herrod is not to be missed!

After the keynote I attended a session on vSphere deployments in the morning and an AppSpeed presentation in the afternoon. Both were okay, but informational. AppSpeed is definitely worth considering, but still has a lot of maturing to do.

Most of my day was spent in the Solutions Expo chatting with many different vendors. The most impressive product I saw was the new HP MDS600, which is a SAS direct storage solution. It holds 70 SAS drives in 5U. Very impressive when you consider some of the futures of the SAS switches in the c-class blade system. Go check it out; I believe they have one set up in the Melanox booth. I also spent some time with VDI related vendors, including the aforementioned RTO Software, AppSense and LiquidWare Labs. All have very interesting products that will need some lab time.

The highlight of the day was the vExpert lunch and meeting. It was a great opportunity to meet and chat with many familiar names. I can’t possibly list them here, but it was great meeting every one of you. We even got to hear from Steve Herrod who told us he was going to be the executive sponsor of the program going forward.

And then the party…

As always, the party was a great time. The food wasn’t great, but the drinks were free and the band was great, as was the company. Unfortunately, by the time the concert was done, we emerged to find that the entire party was shut down, which was very disappointing! We didn’t have near enough time to enjoy anything else that VMware had arranged for us. “

—

http://vmjunkie.wordpress.com : VMworld session DV3260 – Protocol Benchmarking and Comparisons

“

I arrived to this session a bit late as well (noticing a theme here?) but a lot of the basics of this session were very similar to one last year on remote user experience in virtual desktops.

The gist of it is VMware has done some internal benchmarking using the PCoIP beta code (not final!) on vSphere and compared it to PortICA 2.1 – not the newest with HDX stuff, this was asked in a question pretty early and they were (deservedly) given some guff for that – and RDP (to an XP VM so only RDP 5.1).

They talked forever about their testing methodology. Essentially they tested three things:

A synthetic benchmark they created in-house called RPerf (which I saw last year in the similar session) that basically exercises a display protocol in as low-impact a way as possible to the underlying host (so you can measure how much CPU/memory the protocol takes and not how much CPU/RAM running the benchmark takes)

A 320×240, 25fps video with mixtures of different types of video that range from fairly static, pans, zooms, areas of motion on still backgrounds, and random static.

An AutoIT-based workload that tests actual VM performance in addition to the connection protocol.

The results were pretty favorable to PCoIP. In many cases it wasn’t the fastest, but it was never the worst. Sometimes it would barely lose to RDP in the LAN case, and barely lose to PortICA on the WAN case. It was never far behind the in any of the tests they showed results for, and in many cases was the fastest. The other big benefit was PCoIP had lower overhead in CPU and RAM than either PortICA or RDP. Tests were run entirely with the software PCoIP implementation – no hardware.”

VMworld session DV2801 – Integrating View into your Environment

“

I arrived late to this session, but it looks like the beginning was about how to plug into today’s View product and make automated changes or fire off scripts based on events and such. The basics of it was the integration points you have today are very very limited – you have the two CLI tools (SVIConfig and VDMAdmin), log file monitoring, and editing the ADAM LDAP directly.

In View 4 new features will include an event reporting central warehouse – a database with a rollup of events from all clients, agents, and servers. It will include an event database with information on what events mean what along with resolutions, and will allow for querying using VDMAdmin or SQL tools such as Crystal Reports.

The best news though is PowerShell automation support! That makes View the 3rd product (after vCenter and Update Manager) to get PowerShell support. Using PowerShell should obviate the need to ever directly edit the LDAP, which is good because PowerShell can validate your input and will be far less dangerous. You can use PowerShell to stand up an environment from scratch, everything from global config, pairing it with a vCenter server, and making pools and VMs. You can also query the event warehouse for reporting purposes, and perform actions on sessions and VMs managed by View. Some examples:

#Set View License Key Set-license -key AA113-XXXXX...#Set the Pre-Login Message Update-GlobalConfig -PreloginMessage "message"
#Update the power policy of a pool so you can preboot VMs at 5AM to avoid boot storm Update-AutomaticDesktop -id DesktopJoe -PowerPolicy AlwaysOn #Create a new Individual Desktop by using PowerCLI to get VM Object and pipe it to View CLI Add-IndividualDesktop -id DesktopJoe -DisplayName "Desktop" -vm (Get-VM -name JoeVM) #Entitle a user to a desktop Get-User ADUserName | Add-DesktopEntitlement -desktop_id DesktopJoe #Disconnect an active session Get-ActiveSession -User "Joe" | Send-SessionDisconnect

This was the best news I’d heard all day. Finally, I can do all the neato stuff I can do in standard vCenter in View!

They then went into a bunch of Microsoft SCOM integration stuff which seemed pretty useless to me, and I was so buzzed from the PowerShell stuff I barely paid attention.”

VMworld session DV2363 – CVP Tech Deep Dive

“

his session was about VMware’s Client Hypervisor Platform, or CVP. CVP was announced a while back by VMware. Here are the highlights of the session.

CVP is a powerful client hypervisor solution, which is part of the greater VMware View offering. It is not going to be offered standalone, it is a View product only. It helps create what the presenters called a “thin” thick client.

There are two approaches to doing a client hypervisor: Direct Assignment or Advanced Device Emulation.

In Direct Assignment, technologies like Intel VT-D or other software techniques are used to pass through a physical device (such as a video card) directly into the VM. This has some advantages such as lower overhead, and if you’re running Windows in your VM then all you need is a set of Windows drivers, which are easy to find. Passthrough is also much easier to program…

It has several downsides, however. For example, it ties your VM to that particular hardware which reduces portability. It also becomes difficult to interpose on that device. For example, if the video card is owned by the VM, there’s no way for the hypervisor to access it. Same goes for the network card. The point being – if all you’re doing is passing through your physical devices, why do you need a Client Hypervisor? Just run native. You can’t add value when using passthrough on everything. For some device types (such as USB) where the O/S is expecting hardware to appear and disappear, passthrough is okay.

VMware’s strategy is around Advanced Device Emulation. Client only needs a driver for the emulated hardware device, because the hypervisor itself contains the driver for the underlying physical hardware. The advantages here are that it divorces the VM from the hardware, making portability easy, as well as simplifying hardware upgrade and recovery. Also, the Hypervisor can add functionality by managing the devices, such as enforcing network security policies and the like. This does mean that the hypervisor needs to have complete drivers for the underlying hardware.

VMware’s CVP has the following features:

Improved guest 3d support using a new type of virtual SVGA card. Supports DirectX 9.0L for Aero Glass.

Paravirtualized Wireless device. This is important because unlike a wired NIC, a wireless NIC only has one radio, so your hypervisor and VM can’t both be tuned to different networks. You need to give control of the radio to someone, so they allow the guest to control (using its native management capabilities built into the OS) that radio through a special VMware WiFi virtual device. This also means it works with guest-based “supplicants” like iPass.

USB is fully supported and is Passthrough like Workstation.

External Display and MultiMonitor capable. Allows extended desktop, mirroring, rotation either in built-in OS control (Windows 7) or through a special tab from VMware (WinXP, Vista, analogous to the ATI/nVidia control panel applets that do the same)

External Storage support for eSATA (!!) and built-in laptop card readers.

Power Management awareness – respond to guest power state (i.e. allow the VM to suspend or shutdown the physical hardware). Respect the guest power policy and connect special events to guest like the lid switch or the sleep/power buttons on the physical hardware.

Encryption support: the VMX and VMDKs are all encrypted using the onboard Intel vPro TXT and TPM capabilities. Uses 256-Bit AES encryption. When asked if this would be optional or modifiable, that is still to be determined.

CVP is based on linux and in the pre-beta version they showed, it actually had a shell we could break out into. In the final version we were assured this would not be available.

So what good is all this supposed to do? The idea is the user checks out a Virtual Machine (or one is pre-provisioned for them) to their CVP device. That device is managed by View Manager, which accesses an embedded View Agent in the CVP. This is used for policy enforcement, heartbeats, configuration changes, endpoint statistic gathering, and managing transfers from the View Server. The VM can run offline and also is smart enough to adapt its virtual hardware (like number of CPUs, GB of RAM) to the underlying physical hardware. VMware is targetting only a 256MB overhead for CVP. Today the CVP can run one VM only, but could store more than one.

CVP is an embedded Linux Type 1 hypervisor with a minimal set of packages installed. It’s optimized for fast boot time, and will be fully qualified on individual hardware platforms (like ESX). It does not contain a general purpose OS, so no doing work in the CVP. VMware itself provides updates such as patches, bug fixes, and new hardware enablement. It will be updated monolithically like ESXi is (full firmware updates), and this is updated from the View Manager server. The codebase is really unrelated to ESX, it’s more based on Workstation for Linux.

CVP requires Intel’s vPro and integrates with it’s Active Management Technology (AMT) for a bunch of things like Inventory collection, remote power on/off, and configuration backup onto the AMT private storage. It will be compatible with all AMT-enabled management tools like Altiris, LANDesk, etc.

The CVP itself has no listening ports, so it should be impossible to break into via the network. The disks are encrypted, Intel TXT + Trusted Boot protects integrity of the hypervisor in hardware. After installation, laptop will only boot approved hypervisor (no booting to a rescue CD). Encryption keys are stored in the TPM module and are used to encrypt the drives.

I asked several questions at this session:

The demo from last year involved booting from a USB Key. Will boot from flash be supported?

Initial release installs on hard disk and runs there.

Will the CVP also work as a remote View client (with PCoverIP support)?

That is on the roadmap but will not be in version 1, only locally running VMs.

At VMworld 2007, tech for streaming a virtual appliance and booting it while data was still in flight was demoed. Will this be in CVP?

They have the code, but user issues kept it out of first release. How does user know when it’s safe to go offline? When they resolve this issue they will bring that code in.

Overall I am pretty excited about CVP. I understand the HCL may be fairly limited at launch, but it really does have tremendous potential for View environments.”

VMworld session TA3438 – Top 10 Performance improvements in vSphere 4

“

This was a really interesting session that really broke down a lot of the stuff that was improved in vSphere. VMware likes to talk about how vSphere has however many hundred new features, here’s an interesting list of the highlights:

IO overhead has been cut in half. Also, IO for a VM can execute on a different core than the VM Monitor is running on. This means a single CPU VM can actually use two CPUs.

The CPU scheduler is much better at scheduling SMP workloads. 4-way SMP VMs perform 20% petter, and 8-way is about 2x the performance of a 4-way with an Oracle OLTP workload, so performance scales well.

EPT improves performance a LOT. Turning it on also enables Large Pages by default (which can negatively affect TPS). Applications need to have Large Pages turned on, like SQL (which gains 7% performance)

Hardware iSCSI is 30% less overhead across the board, Software iSCSI is 30% better on reads, 60% better on writes!

Storage VMotion is significantly faster, because of block change tracking and no need to do a self-VMotion (Which also means it doesn’t need 2x RAM)

In vSphere performance between RDM and VMFS is less than 5%, and while this is the same as ESX3.5, performance of a VM on a VMFS volume where another operation (like a VM getting cloned) has improved.

Big improvement in VDI workloads – a boot storm of 512 VMs is five times faster in vSphere. 20 minutes reduced to 4.

PVSCSI does some very clever things like sharing the I/O queue depth with the underlying hypervisor, so you have one less queue.

vSphere TCP stack is improved (I know from other sessions they’re using the new tcpip2 stack end-to-end.

VMXNET3 gives big network I/O improvements, especially in Windows SMP VMs.

Network throughput scales much better, 80% performance improvement with 16 VMs running full blast.

VMotion 5x faster on active workloads, 2x faster at idle.

350K IOPS per ESX Host, 120K IOPS per VM.

All reasons to be running vSphere on your infrastructure today.”

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http://blog.scottlowe.org : TA2384 – Deploying the Nexus 1000V

“

Wednesday, September 2, 2009 in by slowe

There is no Internet connectivity in this session, so I’ll have to publish this after the session has concluded.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V is, of course, a Layer 2 distributed virtual switch for VMware vSphere built on Cisco NX-OS (the same operating system that drives the physical Nexus switches). It’s compatible with all switching platforms, meaning that it doesn’t require physical Nexus switches upstream in order to work. The Nexus 1000V brings policy-based VM connectivity, network and security property mobility, and a non-disruptive operational model.

The Nexus 1000V has two components: the Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM). Interestingly enough, the slide shows that the VSM can be a virtual or physical instance of NX-OS; there has been no formal announcement of which I know that has discussed using a physical instance of NX-OS as the VSM for the Nexus 1000V. The second component is the Virtual Ethernet Module (VEM), which is a per-host switching module that resides on each ESX/ESXi host. A VSM can support up to 64 VEMs in a distributed logical switch model, meaning that all VEMs are centrally managed by the VSM. Each VEM appears as a remote line card to the VSM.

The VEM is deployed using vCenter Update Manager (VUM) and supports both ESX and ESXi. The Nexus 1000V supports both 1Gbps and 10Gbps Ethernet uplinks and works with all types of servers (everything on the HCL) and upstream switches.

The Nexus 1000V supports a feature called virtual port channel host mode (vPC-HM). This feature allows the Nexus 1000V to use two uplinks (NICs in the server) connected to two different physical switches and treat them as a single logical uplink. This does not require any upstream switch support. Multiple instances of vPC-HM can be used; for example, you could use four Gigabit Ethernet uplinks, two to each physical switches, could be used to create two different vPC-HM uplinks for redundancy and separation of traffic.

For upstream switches that support VSS or VBS, you can configure the Nexus 1000V to use all uplinks as a single logical uplink. This requires upstream switch support but provides more bandwidth across all upstream switches. Of course, users can also create multiple port channels to upstream switches for traffic separation. There are lots of flexiblity in how the Nexus 1000V can be connected to the existing network infrastructure.

These network designs can be extrapolated to six NICs (uplinks), eight NICs, and more.

One interesting statement from the presenter was that Layer 8 (the Human layer) can create more problems than Layers 1 through 7.

Next, the presenter went through the use and configuration of the Cisco Nexus 1000V in DMZ environments. Key features for this use case include private VLANs (private VLANs can span both physical and virtual systems). Network professionals can also use access-conrol lists (ACLs) and remote port mirroring (ERSPAN) improve visibility and control over the virtual networking environment.

At this point, I left the session because it was clear that this session was more about educating users on the features of the Nexus 1000V and not about best practices on how to deploy the Nexus 1000V.”

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http://dantedog29.blogspot.com : Day 2 Wrap-Up

“

Today was an interesting day. I sat and watched the Day 2 Keynote, looking at what VMware shows as the vision for the future.

I then went to watch a session on Virtualizing Exchange EA2631

I learned some things there:

Exchange has made itself (over time) better suited for Virtualization from Exchange 2003 –> Exchange 2007 –> Exchange 2010 due to less IO, and better design. Also, ESX has improved and the computers have evolved, so they have all joined together.

But on the MS Front, we have updated out sites with some new information from our Exchange and Virtualization Team on Virtualizing this Tier 1 application. Check out Zane’s Blog Post for more information.

After lunch I went to the VMware Head to Head comparison of VMware vSphere and ESX and Hyper-V with some SCVMM, and Citrix. It would have been a better conversation if it would actually have been more than one side. Their big comments on Architecture differences and memory overcommitment were old and tired. They were biased and based on conjecture. They commented that our “integrated” solution is a bunch of applications which we do need to work on, but when they showed them all, they showed many twice, and and some that you wouldn’t use except in some cases, but not when loading other apps that they showed.

They said we don’t have a Host Profile equivalent, when if you look at what System Center Configuration Manager does, it does a lot of what Host Profiles does. Of course they didn’t mention that to get Host Profiles, customers would have to buy the Enterprise Plus SKU.

They failed to mention that if you are comparing vSphere with Microsoft Solutions, you have to include all of the SMSD products, NOT just VMM and a little OM.

They failed to mention that you have to pay 3 times more to get a VMware Solution than you would have to pay to get the comparable solution from Microsoft, I wonder why?

Are we Enterprise Class? Yes, we are.

Do we have some work to do? Yes, we do.

Is VMware scared? Yes, they are.”

Dr. Stephen Herrod’s Keynote

always enjoy Day 2 Keynotes at VMworld. You always get to see something new. Dr. Stephen Herrod started the keynote today by sliding VMware View over to the left emphasizing that it is the biggest focus for VMware right now. He says managing the desktops will be the same as managing the servers. I don’t think that is the right way to look at it. Yeah, I believe it resonates to Server guys, but there are many, MANY differences between how you have to manage the desktop and the datacenter. It seems to VMware, that (like one of our TSPs told me at a conference earlier):

When all you have is a Hammer, everything looks like a nail

Key agreement with rto Virtual Profiles coupled with the ThinApp “bubble”. Create a master image of the OS, plop it down and keep each app out there encapsulated on its own.

Best User Experience to All Endpoints – From a WAN to a LAN environment to Local so you can run it on the net, and on the local machine to leverage the “Media” devices (Graphics, etc). PCoIP releasing later this year.

Employee-Owned IT – rebrand, revamp of ACE – VM on a DVD, or running directly on the laptop No host OS, Client Hypervisor (Client Virtualization Platform (CVP)) with Intel vPro. They have Win7 x64 running in a VM with the CVP underneath.

VMware Mobile Strategy – VCMA – a mobile app to manage your vCenter and now VMware View environment

Mobile Phone to Mobile Personal Computer – “Device Freedom” Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), and “Application Freedom”

All of this client stuff, still makes me think that they are trying to adapt and fit VDI as the solution for everything. Really now, shouldn’t it be that the customer should use the whole toolbox and not just the hammer. VDI works for some cases, but Terminal Services is better for other, and App-V solves other solutions. If you have a local user that needs to run a policy encapsulated VM, MedV will give you this. Microsoft has the Desktop solution that you can use for the challenges you face.

VMotion the Foundation of the Giant Computer – First VMotion, then Storage VMotion, then Network VMotion (Distributed Virtual Switch), now Long Distance VMotion

New workload – HPC

DRS – Shuffling VMs around for best performance. Squeezing more out of your systems, extending soon to include IO not just CPU and Memory. Tiering the needs and the applications with the Resources around you.

This could be interesting if they DRS the VMs, and also the Storage as your storage IO patterns change.

AppSpeed – Nothing new

vApp – IT Service Policy Descriptor SLA as metadata to the group of VMs using OVF.

VMsafe – Always on Security and Compliance via APIs. Aware of the application running in the VM, not the VM, so it can be smart in what it protects and secures.

Choice – Lab Manager to allow for self service portals.

Long Distance vMotion – Proactively move the DC when certain events will occur. Cisco with it Data Center Interconnect up to 200 km. F5 uses BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager to move different iSessions around.

VMware vCloud API – Programmatic Access to resources, Self Service Portals, vSphere Client Plugin (one vCenter to view local and Cloud resources).

After moving View to the left, they now added vApps to the right as a fourth pillar. vSphere provides IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Software is Middleware and Tools that is combined and hooked underneath termed PaaS (Platform as a Service). The middle yellow bar is the Automated, Policy enforcement, scalability. Developers only need to know the application interface, they don’t need to be bothered with anything else, and then there is SaaS (Software as a Service).

PaaS – Open set of interfaces for Ruby on Rails, Python, .Net, PHP, Rod says we want the developers happy, we want them to know about this as little as possible but enough to be productive. Can be deployed internally and externally, wherever.

How popular are these different interfaces? Azure provides this to our Developer community.

SpringSource –

Take advantage of the revolution…

I don’t see a revolution here, but I think some of the new capabilities are nice, and looking forward to see how we respond.”

Interesting comments from VMware’s competition.

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http://www.brianmadden.com : Brian Madden TV #17 – VMworld 2009 wrap-up: software PC-over-IP, client hypervisor, and RTO OEM

“

Gabe and Brian are at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco this week. (Read Brian’s live blogs of the two keynotes – Day 1 and Day 2.) It’s been a busy few days with a lot of demos. We recorded enough video content for probably two or three weeks worth of shows.

Today’s episode includes the following highlights:
An interview with RTO Software CEO Kevin Goodman. (VMware just announced that they’re OEMing RTO’s "Virtual Profile" product for inclusion in a future version of View.)
A demo of VMware’s client hypervisor called "CVP" from VMware’s Robert Baesman.
A demo of VMware’s upcoming software version of Teradici’s PC-over-IP remote display protocol from Wyse’s Aditya Prasad.
And of course, Brian and Gabe’s thoughts and conversation about the show in general.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes, that’s a custom NetApp shirt that I’m wearing. NetApp was the only vendor who met my challenge to use no PowerPoint in their BriForum 2009 breakout session. Thanks Mike Slisinger for making the great presentation!”

Visit the page for the video.

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http://www.compellentblog.com : VMworld 2009: Jon Toor of Xsigo Talks Virtual I/O

“We’re posting two videos from the conversation we had with Jon Toor, VP of Marketing for Xsigo. In this video, Jon talks about how virtual I/O works”

Visit the page for the video.

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http://rodos.haywood.org : VMorld Live Interview : Moving to the cloud and SpringSource

“

Recorded a interview with Dr John Troyer from VMware in the recording booth at VMworld today.”

Visit the page for the video.

—

VMworld 2009 San Francisco, Day 3, Late PM Edition

by Roger Lund September 2, 2009

written by Roger Lund

Yet Even More blogs on VMworld 2009!

I take no credit for any of this content, it go’s to the author, and mean to only put the content here without having to weed through the varies blogs, I have both the blog link, and article title here, with a link to the article. Thanks to everyone for putting these together for everyone to read!

http://blogs.netapp.com : Vmworld 2009: NetApp updates with VMware Site Recovery Manager

“

As we all know, virtualization does an incredible job of reducing costs by creating massively dense pools of computing and storage. With this added density comes increased risk if a single server fails. Technologies like VMware vMoton, VMware Fault Tolerance, VMware Storage vMotion and NetApp DataMotion help reduce those risks. But in today’s 24×7 economy, high availability of resources is a given and the ability to simplify backup and recovery is a mandatory part of any data center administrator’s world.

Building upon the work that we’ve done with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) over the past several years, we’re proud to announce our next phases of expansion with the integration of NetApp and SRM. In the demos videos below (which are also shown in the NetApp booth, #2102), you’ll see our integration with the upcoming version of SRM (which includes support for NFS), and continued integration with NetApp SnapMirror and NetApp SMVI 2.0.

In this demo video, you’ll see our latest vCenter plug-in which truly automates and simplifies the backup and recovery process. Too many other SRM products just handle backup, and then make recovery a tedious manual step of steps that are prone to errors. “

—

http://blog.scottlowe.org : http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/09/02/notes-on-some-vmworld-vendor-meetings/

“

Wednesday, September 2, 2009 in Storage, Virtualization by slowe

I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a few different vendors over the last couple of days here in San Francisco at VMworld 2009. Here are some notes on my meetings.

Virsto

My first meeting of the week was with Virsto, a early storage startup (they just closed Series A funding in the last few weeks). Virsto is led by some long-time storage professionals from companies such as StorageTek, Veritas, and others.

Virsto is unique, to me, in that they have an interesting view of the storage component. I met with Alex, one of the founders, and he used a term that I found quite illustrative and useful: “the I/O blender”. This is the term he applied to the effect that the hypervisor has on I/O as it moves from the virtual server to the physical server to the storage layer. If you think about it, it makes sense: I/O from each virtual server has to be multiplexed onto the same HBAs as the I/O from every other virtual server. The end result is, of course, that the storage array ends up having to deal with small, random I/O workloads instead of large, sequential workloads. This impairs performance.

The Virsto solution combines a software portion that is currently architected only for Microsoft Hyper-V. Virsto’s software component illustrates both the strength and the weakness of Hyper-V’s indirect I/O model. It’s a strength in that it’s very easy to write a filter driver to run in the management partition to modify VM I/O; the weakness is that it’s really easy to write a filter driver to run in the management partition to modify VM I/O. I’m being partially facetious here, but I hope you get the point. In any case, what Virsto’s software layer does is help undo the I/O blender effect by working in conjunction with a storage staging layer. Typically this would be some sort of high-speed local storage, such as an SSD. As a result of the software working in conjunction with the hardware, Virsto can “re-assemble” I/O into workloads that are better suited for performance at the physical layer and thus undo the I/O blender effect.

Virsto’s solution also allows for some forms of storage virtualization, in that different types of underlying block storage can be combined and managed by Virsto. Virsto’s solution also offers snapshots (checkpoints), the ability to split data streams for replication, and better support for disk-to-disk (D2D) backups via their snapshots.

My biggest concern with Virsto is that they are competing in a space with lots of very large, very well-funded organizations that are laser-focused on making their storage work extremely well with VMware vSphere and virtual environments, including Hyper-V. Think of NetApp integration with Hyper-V, or EMC integration with Hyper-V (remember that Virsto supports only Hyper-V at this time). These companies have lots of development talent, lots of money, and an established presence. I fear it will be difficult for Virsto to really gain a foothold in that space.

Xangati

Xangati (pronounced “zan-gotti”) is an application performance solution. I had a spirited discussion with the Xangati folks about what differentiates them versus other solutions like AppSpeed, BlueStripe, etc., in that Xangati relies upon network traffic information to measure application performance. In Xangati’s case, they rely upon NetFlow (or the various vendor-specific implementations of NetFlow). At first, I found this a bit limiting because I wasn’t aware that NetFlow v5 was supported in ESX 3.5 on vNetwork Standard Switches (I know, this is probably something everyone knows). But it indeed is (see here); the real question is whether it will continue to be supported on vNetwork Standard Switches on vSphere. In any case, Xangati insists that using NetFlow to gather network information is very different (and yields different results) than performing packet analysis. I must admit that I don’t fully see the difference; perhaps a network guru can explain it?

Having stated all that, what Xangati does it pretty interesting. It requires that you enable NetFlow throughout the environment—on both virtual and physical switches and other physical network equipment—and then allows you to see end-to-end network usage on an application-by-application basis. From there, Xangati allows the organization to take “network recordings” of the network behavior and then replay that recording later. Different views can be created for different roles within the organization, allowing IT pros to see only the information they need or want to see.

I’ll go back to my earlier statements and say that while Xangati offers some unique functionality—such as the ability for an end-user to initiate a network recording and submit that as a “Visual Trouble Ticket” to the help desk—I’m still at a loss to explain how, in the end, they are different from AppSpeed, BlueStripe, and others who provide end-to-end application performance and correlation. Yes, they use a different way (perhaps a superior way) of gathering information, but what the customer ultimately wants to know is this: “Which part is slow?” It seems that there are other, more well-established solutions already on the market that are trying to address this. Whether or not Xangati is successful in the space is yet to be seen, but I do wish them the best of luck!

I also met with Virtual Instruments and had a great discussion with them, but as I’m running a bit short on time I’ll have to do their write-up later on. Check back here later for the write-up on Virtual Instruments.”

Some Additional VMworld Vendor Meetings

“

Earlier I posted some notes on meetings I’d had with Virsto and Xangati. In this post I’d like to discuss some additional meetings I’ve had with Virtual Instruments and Tranxition.
Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments makes a solution that is intended to help troubleshoot and optimize storage environments. I had the opportunity to grab some coffee with them this morning and hear about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. As a company carved out of Finisar and taken private, their goal is to help drive higher levels of virtualization by providing more visibility into the storage fabric.

Clearly, this message will really only resonate with larger customers, and that is their target market: multiple hundreds of terabytes into the single petabyte range. At this scale, providing visibility into the thousands of virtual machines across hundreds of ESX/ESXi hosts attached to hundreds of Fibre Channel ports is almost impossible. Virtual Instruments tackles this with a multi-prong approach:
First, they use a SAN tap to plug into the Fibre Channel fabric and mirror traffic information to a collection device for analysis. If you’re a networking person, you can think of this as using a SPAN port to mirror traffic. This is done on the storage side to reduce the scale due to fan in-fan out ratios.
Second, they gather SNMP information from the Fibre Channel switches. This enables visibility at the switch level.
Third and finally, Virtual Instruments collects information from VMware vCenter Server. This information provides the final piece necessary to correlate per-host and per-VM traffic to the information being gathered by the fabric taps and the switch monitoring.

What this allows Virtual Instruments to do is to feed information back to vCenter Server to enable I/O-based recommendations for VM movement. It also enables visibility into path utilization so that multipathing information can be configured for optimal performance. Finally, more detailed storage information is exposed that enables organizations to more effectively place VM storage on Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3 according to its storage needs. In some cases, in fact, money saved on buying additional Tier 1 storage can more than pay for an implementation of Virtual Instruments.

Overall, this is very interesting soltuion, albeit limited in scope to larger environments. If this describes your organization, though, it may definitely be worth a closer look.
Tranxition

Tranxition makes software to do “personality virtualization.” Apparently they’ve been around since 1998 and are just now becoming more visible, creating a partner program, and starting to expand coverage. Their key product is Adaptive Persona, which some have said can be called “Softricity for user personality data”. The product seems to work a lot like ThinApp in that it creates a virtual file system and virtual Registry that captures all user personality data. This user personality data, which can reside either inside or outside the traditional user profile file system structure, is then continuously streamed back to a central server. When a user logs off, whatever data has not been synchronized to the server is then copied up to the server, and the local system is scrubbed of user personality data. Then, when that same user logs on to a different system, Tranxition streams down only those portions of the user personality that are needed at that moment. All other data is fetched “on demand”. This helps speed up the logon process by decoupling the size of the profile from the time required to log on.

Overall, I was fairly impressed with the product. They seem to have done a reasonably good job of taking the principles behind application virtualization and applied them to user personality management. If anyone has any additional feedback on Tranxition (vendors, please disclose yourselves!), I’d love to hear it in the comments.”

—

http://vmguy.com/wordpress/index.php

VMWorld 2009 Keynote Day 1

“First up this morning was Tod Nielsen, Chief Operating Officer from VMware.

Tod thanked the sponsors for their support and gave us the number: 12,488 attendees at VMworld 2009. Quite an amazing achievement given this economy. Tod also described the goal of VMware: To Energize and Save, wither that would be Financial Savings, Human Savings, or Earth’s Savings. He then showed a video of customer testimonials from Siemens and Kroger. Next up Tod introduced Paul Maritz, Chief Executive Officer from VMware.

Paul gave a definition of the cloud to the audience. He went on to talk about how VMware will bridge the gap between the datacenter and the cloud of the future. He described the VMware journey, where VMware has come from and where he believes VMware is headed. He reiterated a comment that I’ve heard him say once before: that vSphere had more than 1,500 engineers working on it which was more than any Windows operating system durning his tenure at Microsoft. This is another reason that vSphere is reconized as a true platform. He went on to give a review of the vSphere features and how vSphere integrates into the ecosystem of available software. He talked about customer upgrade plans and how customers polled are planning on upgrading to vSphere in the next few months. He then introduced Tom Brey, Sr. Technical Staff Engineer, IBM.

om showed a great demo of power consumption of a IBM 3850 inside the vSphere client. In the standard performance tab, he had real time counters of power consumption in watts on a per VM basis. Very cool to see how much power your VM’s are using. One thing I did note from his preso, he was running it on ESX 4.1 build 000000 (where can I get a copy of that?)

Paul returns after the demo to give us a explanation of all of the things coming to enhance vCenter and the management of the infrastructure. With that lead in, Paul introduces us to an engineer named Bruce who goes thru a demonstration of Lab Manager 4 and chargeback.

Bruce shows us a demo of checking out a configuration in Lab Manager and then Paul leads that into a new portal called vCloud Express. This portal lets customers check out VM’s or groups of them to use for development or for production. It’s an interface that fulfills the much needed aspect for the cloud: a self-service portal.

Paul next leads into Desktops as a service and what is happening on that front. For this Paul introduces Steve Dupree, Director of Platform Virtualization, Hewlett Packard.

Steve talks about the direction that HP is headed with virtualization. Steve does a great demo of Hp Insight integration into the vSphere client. An extra tab is show for the physical hosts where admins can find all of the Insight information about the health of the physical hardware.

Next up, Paul introduces Chris Renter, Telus Communications.

Chris demo’s a bit on the upcoming functionality and experience customers can expect from VMware View with PCoIP integration. The PCoIP protocol will be a new enhancement for View coming later this year according to Paul.

The last (whew!) of the guests is Rod Johnson, CEO, SpringSource.

od gives us a description of how SpringSource will complement VMware to deliver PaaS (Platform as a Service). He demo’s how easily code can be migrated to the cloud using the SpringSource framework. It’s pretty impressive to see how this migration can happen from a developer’s perspective.

At this point Paul finally closes the opening keynote. On to the press event and more pictures to follow.

*all photos are copyright vmguy.com. Any reuse of these photographs without express written consent is prohibited.”

VMworld 2009 keynote day 2

“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.

*Photos are copyright vmguy.com. Any reproduction without express written consent is prohibited.

”

( Thanks for permission to post the pictures from vmguy.com)

—

and a nice picture of a local MN VMware User, Jason Boche.

Roger L.

September 2, 2009 0 comments

Datacenter News Storage

VMworld 2009 San Francisco, Day 3, Early PM Edition.

by Roger Lund September 2, 2009

written by Roger Lund

Even More blogs on VMworld 2009!

——

http://www.vmguru.nl/wordpress : Building and maintaining the VMworld 2009 Datacenter

“It is becoming a sequel, the datacenter VMware has build for this weeks VMworld 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

In addition to our two previous articles (art1, art2), today we found two very nice videos loaded with tons of techno porno!

The first video shows the VMware team building the complete datacenter on-site at the Moscone Center. During the video footage the awesome numbers representing this huge infrastructure run by.

In short? 28 racks containing 776 ESX servers which provide the infrastructure with 37TB of memory, 6.208 CPU cores and 348TB storage which uses 528KW electricity and is servicing 37.248 virtual machines. You will probably never find such an infrastructure anywhere in the world, at least I know I won’t.

In the second video Richard Garsthagen is interviewing Dan, who is responsible for the datacenter at the Moscone Center, in which he gives inside information on how this huge datacenter is designed, build, connected and what hardware is used. Some interesting figures 85% of the used hardware is new to market, they only used 3 miles of cable to connect all 776 ESX servers, storage, switches, etc and the total cost of all hardware used to build this datacenter is estimated at $35M!

Awesome figures, a very very impressive datacenter and a must see for all technology freaks out there.
Respect for VMware for putting together such a datacenter just for a one week event!”

—-

http://www.vmwarewolf.com : vCloud Express attracting buzz

“

Out of the many product enhancements and releases being marketed at VMworld this week comes one that is really causing a stir and buzz in the user community and that is vCloud Express.

vCloud Express is a service whereby you pay a 3rd party to host your virtual servers on the Internet. Five providers are already ready to host your cloud at very cheap rates (I heard a dollar a day). You don’t get locked in either. If you choose to later host your own internal cloud you can do that.

Look out Amazon EC2

While this service can and will directly compete with Amazon, VMware is going to be hosting the clouds themselves. They provide the API, and providers provide the infrastructure.

As cloud computing gains ground on a commercial basis, VMware seems poised to once again to have the upper hand.”

—

http://netapptips.com : VMworld 2009: Preview of the Day (Wednesday)

“

VMworld2009 continues to roll-on with exciting things being announced every day.
Quick recap of yesterday and then a preview of all things NetApp that
you’ll be able to find in and around the show.

Day 2 (Tuesday)

NetApp extended our 50% Virtualized Storage Guarantee by creating the $1M Challenge. @Vaughn_Stewart includes some commentary around the new program

We posted the first batch of our demos that are running in the NetApp booth (#2102): VMware View Performance with NetApp Intelligent Caching, NetApp DataMotion, NetApp + VMware SRM updates, NetApp SnapMirror Plugin for vCenter, and SANscreen Plugin for vCenter.

Day 3 (Wednesday)

Come visit the NetApp booth (#2102) and check out the mini-theatre
presentations every 20 minutes. DataMotion, Large Scale VDI
Deployments, SMVI 2.0, RCU 2.1, VSC, Secure Multi-Tenant Cloud
Architecture will all be covered by our expert speakers.

NetApp customer @ric_vmwaretips will be participating in the NetApp Technical Reference Roundtable from 12:30-1:30pm in Moscone 270.

NetApp’s Larry Touchette and Jeremy Merrill will be presenting "Best Practices for Recovery with SRM and NFS in vSphere" (BC3210) at 1:30pm in North Hall 110

NetApp founder Dave Hitz and VMware CTO Steve Herrod will be presenting a SuperSession (SS4880) on "Clear up the cloud: Key infrastructure requirements and real-world implementations" at 2:30pm along with our joint customer T-Systems.

@Vaughn_Stewart
and @Mike_Laverick (RTFM) will present "How Storage Enhances Business Continuance: From Backup to Fault Tolerance" (BC3189) at 4pm in Moscone North, Hall E, Room 134.

NetApp customer Marvell will be presenting their "Migration of Exchange 2007 to vSphere" at 4pm in session EA2631, Esplanade 307.

NetApp customer USPTO will be presenting their "Journey to Teleworkers" (using VDI) at 4pm in session DV2861, Esplanade 307. “

—-

http://blog.scottlowe.org : VMworld 2009 Day 2 Keynote

“

The day 2 keynote starts with another entertaining video.

After the video concludes, Steve Herrod, VMware’s CTO, takes the stage. He echoes that virtualization is a “tectonic shift” in the IT industry. Herrod again shows the three pillars—VMware vSphere, VMware View, and VMware vCenter. Herrod’s initial focus is on VMware View, due to the increased emphasis on desktop virtualization and the focus VMware is providing in that arena.

VMware vSphere provides the foundation for desktop virtualization and is the best platform for desktop virtualization due to commonality, security, availability, and efficiency. VMware’s advances in this area are coupled with advances by Intel (Xeon 5500) and storage (high-speed block caching, for example). VMware View builds on this foundation to enable faster and more efficient image provisioning, image updating, and policy enforcement. One piece that helps with this is the effort that VMware has placed into decoupling the OS, applications, and user profiles.

VMware is announcing this morning that they will be OEM’ing RTO Virtual Profiles to assist in decoupling user profile/user personality data from the underlying OS image and the applications. Unfortunately, Herrod did not provide any additional detail on exactly how RTO’s product will be integrated (or if it will even be integrated).

User experience is another key point. To that end, VMware has been focusing on the user experience to enable the “productive desktop” across the WAN, the “PC-like desktop” across the LAN, and the “rich portable desktop” using VMware CVP (Client Virtualization Platform).

To help with user experience on the LAN and WAN, VMware has been working closely with Teradici on PC over IP (PCoIP). VMware’s implementation of PCoIP is software-only, but fully supports hardware acceleration. This enables the use of the same protocol from task workers to knowledge workers to designers. PCoIP will be included in the next version of VMware View and will be shipping later this year.

Employee-owned IT (EOIT) is another area that VMware is trying to enable. This can be accomplished in a couple of different ways. One way is using hosted virtualization with a product like VMware Workstation, VMware ACE, or VMware Fusion. VMware ACE has policy support (and I think that Workstation does as well), but Fusion does not have policy support, so it sounds like VMware is planning on extending policy support across all hosted virtualization platforms.

Of course, CVP is the primary focus for VMware, where they are leveraging their relationship with Intel and using the Intel vPro technology to perform desktop virtualization with a local hypervisor but managed centrally via VMware View. This leads into a demo of CVP. The demo shows Windows 7 running on a local Type 1 hypervisor, and then shows a session using a thin client on a local connection using PCoIP. The demo wraps up with a demonstration of using Wyse PocketCloud on an iPhone.

Regarding VMware’s mobile strategy, Herrod begins to discuss the various ways in which VMware is enabling the use of mobile devices. vCenter Mobile Administrator is one product that VMware is providing, plus the VMware View-approved iPhone clients like PocketCloud, and—of course—virtualizing the phones themselves. This leads into a discussion of VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).

VMware MVP is about device freedom as well as application freedom. Visa takes the stage and, rightfully so, Herrod asks why Visa is on the stage for mobile virtualization. His focus is about enabling financial services on mobile platforms without compromising security. MVP helps cut complexity to enable that functionality. Herrod then introduces Srinivas Krishnamurthy to show an MVP demo.

The MVP demo primarily focuses on the Visa Mobile app, but Srinivas then exposes the relationship of this demo to MVP: the application he’s showing is a Google Android application running on a Windows Mobile phone. This enables users to use whatever application they want regardless of the platform.

Herrod now shifts the focus to VMware vSphere. (He promises not to demonstrate VMware Fault Tolerance again.) Once again Herrod brings up the idea of the software mainframe. VMotion is a key component, a key enabler, of the giant computer (aka the software mainframe aka the cloud). This is the sixth anniversary of VMotion, and VMotion now has maturity, breadth, and automated use. Herrod says VMware estimates a new VMotion migration occurs every 2 seconds. (Where does that calculation come from?)

VMotion was extended to Storage VMotion in late 2006, and with vSphere it was extended again to Network VMotion, and extended again with long distance VMotion via some additional partners and vendors. Herrod sees VMotion as a major part of VMware’s drive to greater efficiency (one of three marketing pillars around vSphere: efficiency, control, and choice). This is because VMotion is a foundational technology for VMware DRS. He uses the recent study about DRS and improved performance as an example. VMware DRS is being extended (no timeframe yet) to include I/O. This includes the ability to assign shares and IOPS values to individual VMs.

VMotion and VMware DRS are combined yet again to form a foundation for VMware DPM, which enables greater power efficiency.

Herrod next moves from efficiency to control, and what VMware is doing is this area. His first topic in this space is VMware AppSpeed, which helps organizations provide a level of control over application performance. Next Herrod moves into a discussion of vApp, which is a logical collection of one or more VMs described using OVF. This will help enable the “IT service” policy descriptor. This means embedding SLA definitions into the OVF standard and enabling vSphere to act upon those definitions appropriately.

The VMsafe APIs are another point of control and are now officially available with VMware vSphere (released back in May). Embedding security policies into the OVF description and integrating it with vApp is another method of extending control in a policy-based way.

Next Herrod moves into a demonstration of VMware ConfigControl. This is the first time ConfigControl has been demonstrated. The demo was a bit limited, but considering that it won’t be shipping until early next year that’s not too terribly surprising.

Herrod finally moves on to the third vSphere marketing tenet: choice. Choice includes choice of hardware and choice of where to run applications. Herrod also sees choice as including self-service IT, which leads to a discussion of Lab Manager. (It sounds to me like Lab Manager is a major central focus point for VMware as enabling self-service IT.)

The last focus point in Herrod’s keynote is cloud computing, i.e., VMware vCloud. (I suspect we’ll see more information on vCloud Express and the official announcements of the vCloud APIs.) Herrod calls out the use case of Site Recovery Manager to connect two internal data centers as a (limited) form of cloud connectivity that customers are using today.

Long-distance VMotion is another level of cloud connectivity that VMware and associated partners are trying to tackle. There are lots of challenges to be addressed here. Why is long-distance VMotion so important or interesting? It could be follow the sun computing, disaster avoidance, etc. In the partner realm, Cisco is one partner that is working on long-distance VMotion, but there are still network identity challenges. F5 is using BigIP to abstract network identity to help address some of the challenges around long-distance VMotion.

Moving on to the VMware vCloud APIs, Herrod talks about a few applications leveraging the API. He also reiterates that the vCloud API has been submitted to the DMTF for consideration as a multi-vendor standard. This will help foster choice.

At the beginning of the keynote, Herrod laid out three initiatives: View, vSphere, and vCloud. Now he adds a fourth one: vApps. This is more related to the SpringSource acquisition, not to the vApp functionality within vSphere (as far as I can tell). Herrod begins to explain how the SpringSource acquisition allows VMware to move “up the stack” from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) into Platform as a Service (PaaS) and provide more products to support Software as a Service (SaaS). Adding SpringSource to the VMware mix gives VMware coverage in 2/3 of the cloud definitions (IaaS and PaaS covered).

This move also allows VMware to optimize the IaaS and PaaS layers to provide even greater performance, mobility, and management for SaaS vendors, developers, and providers. Adrian Coyler, CTO of SpringSource, now takes the stage for a demonstration.

The demonstration shows a Java application being deployed to an external cloud using CloudFoundry, a company that SpringSource themselves acquired just in the last month or so. This demonstration was actually shown yesterday during Maritz’ vCloud event.

Herrod wrapped up the keynote with a summary of the key takeaways.”

—

http://vmetc.com : VMworld 2009 Wednesday Keynote

“

Keynote 2 Live Blog

5:14 am PST – I will begin the live blog when I’m set up in my seat in the Keynote Hall. More then. #vmwkn2 Tweetgrid is up.

7:49 am – in same seat as yesterday. Doors have been open to the hall for about 20 mins. Keynote filling up. Music is playing …

7:57 am – announcement made to silence cell phones. Here we go. Looking forward to Steve Herrod’s demos in this session.

8:01 – lights went down right at 8 am and Herrod is already on stage. No intro today!

Steve is going to build on yesterday’s talk about the journey to virtualization. he says he has 2 goals today – learn about the future and have fun doing it. He emphasizes that with the legal forward looking statements slide.

He begins with VDI and VMware View. He calls out vSphere as the right platform for desktop virtualization. He says Windows desktops were key focuses for making sure performance enhancements in vSphere. Commonality, Security, Availability, and Efficiency are key pillars of VMware’s desktop solution and are displayed the monitor now.

Steve is explaining that centralized image and policy management are keys in the View solution. How to share images, simplify patching, and backup desktops, data and user personalities are key concerns.

Side note : “tentacles must be the new buzz word at VMware. I’ve heard Maritz mention it repeatedly, and now Steve is using it to describe the dependencies to provide the integrated features that meet the focus points on VMware View.

Steve now wants to talk about PCoIP and the best user experience to all endpoints. VOIP, 3D graphics, offline usage, and hardware accelerators in clients are some of the highlights of virtual desktops leveraging the PCoIP protocol. Steve has announced it will be shipping this year, but he did not give a GA date.

Starting to talk about VDI client scenarios, Steve is now talking about hosted desktop solutions such as Fusion, workstation, and Ace. He calls this employee owned IT. The future is bare metal client hypervisors and what Steve calls “corporate owned IT” in the centralized data center.

The first demo is a VMware View demo. We see a CVP connected to a VMware VIew Windows 7 VM. The demo shows the 3D chess game, you tube videos, and the Windows 7 effects. This is all posisble because of the virtualized GPU using the CVP client’s hardware. Next the demo moves to show a remote connection to a View desktop via a View client on a Windows PC. Google Earth is demoed with full graphic functionality via the PCoIP protocol. Finally the Wyse pocket cloud is demoed on an iPhone. The remote connection is shown on the monitors and the iPhone gestures features are used to move around, shrink, and expand the desktop. That gets some spirited applause.

Steve then quickly talks about the VMware CMA available for the phone. This is the ability to manage vSphere and the VMs from a web interface on a mobile phone. Steve also reveals that they are working on a similiar phone admin tool for VMware View Manager too.

Keeping with the mobile phone theme, we’ve moved to a discussion and a demo on MVP – VMware’s effort to virtualize the OS on mobile devices to allow multiple platforms to run on a single device. The demo is a VISA app on a mobile device running MVP. The VISA app keeps track of your transactions and sends you offers. Then a locator function is shown for using Google Maps to find an ATM. We are told this VISA apps is actually an Android app and then shown that both Windows CE and Android are running simultaneously on the device and MVP enables seamless integration between the OSes (like Fusion and Workstation). Nice!

Steve begins to talk about efficiency in vSphere solutions.

Steve shifts to VMotion and how partners are developing products with VMotion built in? VMware has been talking about and offering VMotion for 6 years now, and in that honor “I Like to Move It” from the movie Madagascar is played over the loud speakers. The crowd got a laugh out of that, and Steve declares we won’t be able to VMotion VMs without thinking of that song from now on. He also shows a graphic with estimated marriages saved because of VMotion. The number is a modest 74 and counting …

Steve is now pitching the “ready to virtualize all applications” message and the giant computer example. This leads to a discussion about DRS. The message is that vSphere and DRS make possible a higher peak capacity for workloads. He mentions that disk I/O will be a future factor in the automated VMotion of VMs via the DRS feature. Shares for disk I/O per virtual disk will help make this possible.

He briefly discussed vSphere DPM and the reduction of power consumption in the virtual datacenter.

Expanding on a “control” bullet point of VMware solutions and bridging from the any application theme, Steve is discussing VMware AppSpeed and the ability to drill down in the application stack to determine how applications are performing.

From control we move to security and compliance with VMsafe APIs. Steve mentions that people have been asking why have we not seen any products using this. He mentions that the API is in the shipped versions of vSphere and products are being developed. He mentions looking for announcements from RSA, Symantec, and Trend Micro in a slide.

Next is VMware vCenter Config Control. This is the first time this is shown on stage. The demo begins with an email that one of the Exchange servers is down. There is also another email from Config Control saying that there was a VI configuration change earlier to the Exchange problem. Config Control is used to compare the difference of the Exchange VM between the current problem state and an earlier baseline config. It is determined that the VLAN ID of the portgroup was changed.

Now the topic turns to Choice.

VMware Lab Manager and the ability to generate self-service portals is used as an example to help let get IT out of the way and give customers the choice to quickly provision their own servers.

Steve takes some time to mention the VMworld 2009 infrastructure setup, number of VMs, and number or ESX hosts used. he also talks about how the labs are actually using ESX and vCenter instances that are really VMs themselves, and using technologies such as network fencing they are able to duplicate setup for a large number of hands on labs. This would not be possible without VMware’s virtualization technologies.

Time to talk about the cloud.

SRM is the first product discussed, and it’s usage is emphasized as a means to move between internal and private clouds.

Next is Long Distance VMotion. VMware is working with partners to develop this. Steve mentions a theory about VMotion of VMs from datacenter to datacenter that would effectively follow the sun so that the VMs were always running in a part of the world where it was generally cooler (or at night) to conserve power needs. He admits that’s a bit far fetched but interesting.

Steve is discussing interoperability of the vCloud API and ISV integrations to help manage the cloud.

He mentions open standards and that OVF formats help enable a vCloud end goal of portability of workloads between any providers hosted clouds – whether running on vSphere or not.

Steve starts explaining some cloud terms that have been confusing:

Platform as a Service (Paas)
vSphere – Infrastructure as a Service – Iaas
Apps Services and Tools with Management – Paas
Apps and SLAs – Software as a Service – Saas

VMware has a Paas vision of the development of applicaions that run on ope APIs that can be hosted on internal or external clouds.

Steve welcomes the CTO of SpringSource on stage to show us how to use these concepts. This demo is simlar to the demo I saw yesterday where the SpringSource Tools Suite is used to move the application coding to a cloud environment that is suited to running the necessary load expected. This is all selected via the web interface wizard and the application is created on a cloud based server. The example ends with a live web page at www.code2cloud.com that lets you register for free backstage passes to Foreigner at the VMworld paty tonight. Check it out now, I just entered!

9:14 am – Steve thanks us for coming and says he looks forward to seeing us at the party tonight.”

—

VMworld 2009 : VMware announces vCloud Express

by Roger Lund September 1, 2009

written by Roger Lund

Various blogs have covered this, so I will link them here.

http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php : VMware Announces vCloud Express

“

Today at VMworld 2009, VMware announced vCloud Express! For those still struggling with cloud as a concept, technology, or offering, this is where the tangible rubber meets the road with VMware virtual infrastructure.

The VMware vCloud™ Express service delivers the ability to provision infrastructure on-demand, via credit card, and pay for use by the hour. As a VMware Virtualized ™ service, it ensures compatibility with other VMware environments both internally and with external services.
Quick, easy access to VMware Virtualized™ infrastructure for prototyping and development from external third party providers.
Increase flexibility and time to market, and reduce capex and resource challenges associated with trying to address the fluctuating infrastructure needs of development, staging, and production teams.
By leveraging the VMware platform, the VMware vCloud™ Express service retains the robustness, interoperability and reliability that VMware is known for while delivering the easy access and cost-effectiveness of a transactional service model.
Five partners currently offering VMware vCloud™ Express service (as beta): Terremark, Hosting.com, and BlueLock in the Americas; Logica in EMEA; and Melbourne IT in the APAC.

The announcement was coupled with an on-stage web-based demonstration with Terremark, whom if I remember correctly, was involved with the interactive cloud provisioning presentation during a keynote speech at VMworld Europe 2009. As most keynote demonstrations usually go, the process was very slick, streamlined, and painless.

It will be interesting to watch VMware compete with other big cloud providers in existence. How much market share will VMware gain in the first year? What impact, if any, will “beta” status have on VMware vCloud Express adoption rates?”

——

http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl : VMware announces vCloud Express

“

Today at the Keynote at VMworld 2009 in San Francisco VMware announced VMware vCloud Express. The VMware vCloud Express is part of or if you want a product or spin off from the vCloud initiative that was presented at VMworld Europe earlier this year.

vCloud Express is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering delivered by leading VMware service provider partners. It provides reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services.

So who delivers and what do you get?

The following snap from a slide somewhat covers that question:

A screenshot from the newly launched vCloud Express website (Beta) of Terremark :

The pricing is very clear and is on a pay-per-use basis. In the pricing model Terremark differentiates into a couple of areas:
Servers – The hourly price of the servers depends on their deployed virtual processors (VPUs), memory and system storage configuration.
System Storage /Gb /month
Additional Storage /Gb /month
Public IP /hour /IP – you can activate public IP addresses that stay persistent with your environment until you no longer need them
Internet Service /hour /service – Internet Services allow you to configure a public IP address’s Internet protocol and communication port so your servers can be reached from the Internet. With the Internet Services feature you also can enable network load balancing across multiple servers.
bandwidth /transferred GB – Internet bandwidth is billed based on data transferred in and out of your vCloud Express public IP addresses
Subscription software / month /software license – Pre-build templates with an OS like Windows Server 2003 can be used.”

Thanks to Jason and Gerben for the blog posts.

Roger L.

September 1, 2009 0 comments

Datacenter News Storage

VMworld 2009: Introducing NetApp DataMotion & Introduction to SMVI 2.0

by Roger Lund September 1, 2009

written by Roger Lund

http://netapptips.com has two write up’s on new products from NetApp

VMworld 2009: Introduction to SMVI 2.0

“

SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure 2.0

As some of you may have seen NetApp, announced an enhanced version of SnapManager for VI (SMVI 2.0) which among other things provides support for Single File Restores from within a VMDK. However, this is not the only enhancement provided by 2.0.

What’s New with SMVI 2.0:

Autosupport Integration

Backup Enhancements & GUI Re-design

Snapshot Naming Changes

Scripting

Restore Enhancements

Single File Restore

Self-Service Restore

Limited Self-Service Restore

Administrator-Assisted Restore

Restore Agent “

VMworld 2009: Introducing NetApp DataMotion

“As part of our Cloud vision announcement last week, we announced the availability of NetApp DataMotion. We will be discussing DataMotion in the NetApp booth (#2102) via mini-theatre presentations, demos and whiteboard sessions. For anyone that is not attending VMworld this week, you can view the demo that we’re showing in the booth below.

What I’d like to discuss today is some misunderstading that we’re seeing around when DataMotion should be deployed. The immediate question is whether NetApp DataMotion is a replacement or competitor to VMware Storage vMotion. This is absolutely not the case, in fact DataMotion is a very complimentary technology to both Storage vMotion and to any data center looking to move towards 100% virtualization.

As we’re stated many times in the past, our strategy with VMware is to embrace and extend the strategy of helping our customers. DataMotion builds upon this strategy. In fact, DataMotion takes NetApp to the next level in mirroring the virtual capabilities that Server Administrators have become familiar with in VMware for many years. DataMotion creates the concept of virtual storage arrays (vFilters, NetApp MultiStore), analogous to VMware Virtual Machines (think of them as Storage VMs).

DatMotion simply extends the concept of Storage vMotion to entire datastores and entire vFilers. So if you need granularity in moving storage associated with VMware VMs, continue to use Storage vMotion. But if you’re migrating huge amounts of VM storage (adding new storage arrays, etc.), then DataMotion becomes an outstanding compliment to simplify that migration.”

Thanks to netapptipps for the write up!

Roger L.

September 1, 2009 0 comments

News

More VMwold Pictures.

by Roger Lund August 31, 2009

written by Roger Lund

via tweetpic.

August 31, 2009 0 comments

News

A vSphere 4.0 VMware High Availability cluster may not failover virtual machines when ESX is configured with certain IP addresses – KB Article: 1013013

by Roger Lund August 24, 2009

written by Roger Lund

A new KB from VMware was released on the 20th.

Here are the details.

“

KB Article: 1013013

Updated: Aug 20, 2009

Products:
VMware vCenter Server

Product Versions:
VMware vCenter Server 4.0.

Symptoms

You experience these symptoms:

In vCenter 4.0, VMware HA might not failover virtual machines when a host failure occurs.

When the ESX host’s IP address in a VMware HA enabled cluster is configured with certain IP addresses, the node failure detection algorithm fails.

You are susceptible to this issue when all of your Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) on your ESX host fall within the following range:
3.x.x.x – 9.x.x.x
26.x.x.x – 99.x.x.x

Note: You are not affected if one of Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) on your ESX host falls outside of this range.

Resolution

Switch the Service Console Port(s) or Management Network IP address(s) on your ESX host in the VMware HA cluster to IP ranges that do not fall within the affected range. For example, 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x.

If you have multiple Service Console or Management networks, at least one of your networks must be outside of the affected range. VMware HA still uses the affected range for cluster communication and heartbeating but not for host failure verification.

If changing the IP address(s) of your Service Console Port(s) or Management Network(s) is not possible, you can also install vCenter Server 4.0 Patch 1.”

August 24, 2009 0 comments

News

New Domain Name. http://itblog.rogerlund.net/

by Roger Lund August 23, 2009

written by Roger Lund

New Domain Name.

http://itblog.rogerlund.net/

Point your feeds to the new address! http://feeds.feedburner.com/RogerLundsItVmware/VirutalizationBlog

Roger Lund

August 23, 2009 0 comments