Just got out of the Partner’s session for VMware’s Roadmap for 2009 – the Next Generation Datacenter. The big announcement is that VMware plans to leverage its existing technologies into a new datacenter OS – VDC-OS. The majority of this is just product re-branding and giving a name to the overall strategy they have been pursuing for several years. I’ve compiled a highlight of the session with many of the new introductions for 2009 and how they fit in the virtual datacenter.
Category:
Virtualization
Its still early here in my hotel room at the Palazzo hotel in Las Vegas. I’m up early because I haven’t adjusted to Pacific time. I’m just going through my agenda for the day. Mostly today is a partner and technology showcase day, so not many sessions to attend, but a good time to go through the conference showroom and see what vendors are coming up with. There is one partner session about HP hardware and Site Recovery Manager, so I plan to definitely be there.
I sat with a nice gentleman for Greensboro, NC, on the plane here. He and his co-worker were on their way to the conference also and turns out his co-worker was born in my hometown. We’re probably even related to some of the same people. Just goes to show that maybe my mom was right and whole world DOES revolve around Cheraw… lol
My flight leaves tomorrow to VMworld in Las Vegas. I’m making my last minute plans about what to do and see in addition to attending the conference. For the few of you currently keeping tabs on my blog, I’ll be updating with information I get from the conference and posting some ideas on Twitter (username is pbsellers).   Anyways, its my first VMworld, so I’m excited.
Found out late last month that I will be attending VMworld beginning on Sept 15 in Las Vegas. Â This will be my first VMworld, so not sure what to expect and still trying to arrange my schedule to attend as many sessions as possible on the topics of interest for my company. Â Unfortunately, I was late to register due to internal paper shuffle and now the security lab that I wanted to get into is full. Â I’m going to try and wait list myself to see if I can attend once on site. Â
The overall conference agenda looks great and I’m excited to see some of the road-map announcements and what’s next with VMware. Â The company is undergoing a good bit a change and I’m disappointed that I won’t be hearing from former CEO and founder Dianne Green at the conference. Â
I’ll be posting some of the sessions that I’ll be attending and trying to get my ducks in a row. Â I’ll also try and post daily from the conference with announcements and detail of what I hear.
First, let me say that a wise man once told me that procrastination solves many a problem. While I don’t think it always applies, when it comes to software patches and upgrades – I tend to tread water for a while before applying anything in production.
Everyone else has chimed in with their perspective on why the Update 2 bomb bug is a big deal. I probably approach this from a slightly different angle. I’m never fond of any software company which time limits your software. I don’t really care much if its beta software or final release, but anything which bundles a mechanism to expire the software at some point in time to me is not production software. Any time this is included, you run the risk of the exact scenario that VMware setup on us.  To me, there is only one thing worst – a HARDWARE based license shackle (I have one I absolutely despise in the office right now!).
I have always been a fan of VMware’s solution to licensing – because it wasn’t a date or hardware shackle solution. That’s what makes me so worried with VMware at this point. Why would a company whose central mechanism for license control add a date layer when its not necessary. If you’re VMware, do you really care that someone is running a pre-release version of your patches instead of the final revision? Why did the date of August 12 matter? If someone is crazy enough to run their production systems on pre-release patches, let them.
Those darn pirates
Yeah, yeah. I get that some people pirate software. But many of the anti-piracy measures only serve to agonize the legitimate customers of the software companies. Many years ago during my consulting years, I maintained a dental software package which relied on a parallel port hardware shackle to operate. This was the pain of all pains. There wasn’t a move the office could make without having problems. And should the one workstation with the key go down, well, the office was down.
Microsoft has been combatting piracy for years, with little success IMO. The things that they have added to their operating systems continue to do little other than annoy their legitimate customers. As an enterprise, I find it rediculous that we’d have to activate every copy of Windows we deploy. They already rape extort persuade us into “Enterprise Agreements” on the threats of audits and in the olden days, rewarded us with the ability not to have to activate each copy in the enterprise. With the advent of Windows Server 2008 and Vista on the desktop, we lose that ‘reward’ and are forced to allow this needless traffic through our firewalls and security framework to allow Microsoft to certify that we have legitmate copies of their operating system. [EA’s are for a whole ‘nother blog post]
Then what?
So everyone must wonder what my solution would be? Simple actually. Disable the ability to add new data to the software – whatever the software may be – but NEVER should a software simply stop running cold because of a licensing issue – regardless of type.
Take my dental software – how should it have acted if the hardware shackle was gone? It should have allowed for normal check-in, check-out, appointment scheduling for existing patients. It should allow for day-to day operation. But, perhaps hit the pirate where it hurts – stop them from running financial reports, submitting insurance claims, etc. But don’t stop a legitimate customer with a technical problem from running their office.
It ultimately comes down to whether the software company really values the customer, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.
Since June of 2006, I’ve worked for HTC (Horry Telephone Cooperative), which by the way is the national’s largest telephone cooperative. Its offered me some great experiences and training opportunities. One of those is exposure to virtualization technologies. And this one comes with a story.
When I started at HTC, my wife was pregnant and due in November. In September, we were scheduling a VMware class for the new version of VMware that was being released. VMware was already in our datacenter and operational, but the new version offered a huge leap forward – something we wanted to take advantage of. So the class was scheduled starting on November 1 and moving forward – no big deal – until the doctor’s said we’d have our baby on October 30 (much longer story there). So I began VMware classes two days after my daughter was born, but I haven’t regretted it. Even as distracted as I was during class, I met a really amazing product suite.
