More information from around the web, here we go!
I started the day off by talking in the The VMworld Underground Podcast VMworld Europe 2009 – Wednesday Update
http://www.vmworldunderground.com/forum/topics/wednesday-vmworld-europe-2009
We talked about the following, this was the agenda.
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1. VDC-OS – I get it now, and I can evangelize the benefits. I know, I’m slow. 🙂
a. vNetwork, vStorage, vNetwork
1b. vCloud
1c. vClient
2. Performance Cute VMs vs a Sun Sparc cluster circa 2002 – Scale out and Scale up efforts from VMware. Why don’t they use SSD drives in these newer benchmarks??!!
3 Citrix subbing Xen for Hyper-V – Citrix replacing Xen with Hyper-V by VMworld San Fran 09′?? Theron Conrey, thinks so and his arguments seem sound to me, a simple unfrozen caveman vExpert.
4. vExpert ?
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Thanks to http://twitter.com/vseanclark@ http://www.vmworldunderground.com
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http://www.yellow-bricks.com has a write up that shows the mood, titled : VMworld day 2 – Random stuff and Data recovery
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What a day again, and it’s actually not finished cause within a couple of minutes the VMworld Europe 2009 party will start.
The VMTN Experts session was actually, in my opinion, pretty good today. We had way more people coming over that were asking questions or just came over to have a chat with one of the Experts! With the vExperts being announced this morning there was a good atmosphere, even Statler and Waldorf euuuh Boche and Laverick were having fun. For those on twitter and those who have been following the story about VMDougs snuggie, check the video Gabe published, lol.
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http://vinf.net/ has a article VMworld Europe Day 2: Keynote that does a great job summing up what went on.
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vSphere
There were some examples of Oracle OLTP application scaling that have been done in vSphere;
- <15% overhead on 8 way vCPU VM
- 24k DB transactions/sec
vStorage – extensible via API, storage vendors write their own thin provisioning or snapshot interfaces that hook into VMware.
vNetwork – Distributed vSwitch maintains network state in vMotion
vSphere = scale, 64TB RAM in cluster
Power thrifty (CPU power management features)
vShield zones follows vm around DRS – DMZ for groups of VMs (demos tomorrow + breakout)
vCenter HA improvements with VC heartbeat, today 60% of people running VC on physical box to isolate management tools from the execution platform, this delivers high availability for them.
vCenter Server heartbeat which provide an Active/passive cluster solution (but not using MSCS) and configuration change replication/rollback; works over WAN or LAN – IP based with floating IP address, efficient WAN transfers.
Monitors/provides HA for the following components;
- vCenter database
- Licencing server
- Upgrade manager
vCenter Scalability; 50% increase in capacity with 3k vms and 300 hosts per vCenter, in addition the VI client can now aggregate up to 10 vCenter servers in a single UI, with search functionality, can report/search.
vCloud
In terms of vCloud, the federation and long-distance vMotion sound a bit like science fiction – but there was the same opinion of vMotion when it was first announced – look at it now, VMware know how to do this stuff
Long-distance vMotion is the eventual goal but there are some challenges to overcome in engineering a reliable solution, but in the meantime SRM can deliver a similar sort of overall service, automating DR failover with array based replication and an electronic, scripted run-book.
long-distance vMotion has some other interesting usecases, enabling a follow the sun model for support and IT services – I’ve written about this previouslyhere – this is a great goal and I would expand this suggestion to include follow the power, where you choose to move services around globally to take advantage of the most cost-efficient power, local support etc.
VMWare building an extensible and customisable portal for cloud providers based on Lab Manager which is likley to be bundled as a product.
The vCenter vCloud plug-in was demoed, this was more advanced that I had anticipated, with the target scenario being you can use one VI client to manage services across multiple clouds.
Virtual Desktop
this is another key initiative and focus of investment within VMware, building up the VDI offering(s) and providing centralised desktops as well as offline/distributed scenarios in future via the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) – some of my more off the wall thoughts on that here
Key points;
- Central management
- Online/offline scenarios
- Linked clone
- Thick client push full VM down to machine
- Patching is challenge – master disk + linked clones
- Thin-app; makes patching/swapping out underlying OS easier as apps are in a “bubble”.
- Leveraging ACE server; lock USB etc.
- CVP – client checks back to central policy server (polling)
- allows for self-destruct or leased virtual desktop, can’t run away with apps/data
VMware are making heavy investment in PCoIP- providing 3d graphics online offline for high-demand apps (video/graphics) Jerry Chan demoed some of the PCoIP solutions they are working to using Google Earth, whilst impressive – Brian Madden has covered these in more detail here but I did notice that Steve said vClient which is the 1st time I have heard that name.
Finally, there was some coverage of the mobile phone VM platform, which whilst I see what they are aiming for and the advantages of it to a Telco (single platform to test apps against), it’s personally of less interest to me. I do hope that VMware don’t go all Microsoft and start spreading themselves into every market just because they can need to have a presence (live search, live everything etc), rather than focusing on good, core products. Whilst they are the 1st people I’ve heard of seriously working on this I don’t know how it will pan out – but will keep an open mind, I suppose a sandboxed, secured corporate phone build with a VoIP app, some heavy crypto and a 3G connection controlled under a hypervisor could be appealing to certain types of govt. “organisations”.
All in, a very good keynote session – much better focused at the main demographic of the conference and there are some good sessions scheduled for today.
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http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com has their thoughts here.
http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/virtual-tech/vmworld-europe-2009-day-two
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It is day two at VMworld Europe 2009 and it has been an amazing event it has been so far. Once of the coolest things I saw and learned about was the Mobile Virtualization Platform or MVP. There was a demo of two virtual machines running on a Nokia N800. This was really cool to see the demo and hear about the technology. I have two cell phones, one personal and one business. I like to be able to separate my personal life from my professional life. This technology would allow me to have both phones running isolated and independently on a single device. Too cool!! I wonder how long it will be before we can start doing M2V or mobile to virtual?
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http://technodrone.blogspot.com posted on the New Maximums for vSphere
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Announced by Steve Herrod today on stage in Cannes today:
- 8 virtual CPUs
- 256GB per VM
- 40 GB/s network throughput
- up to 64 nodes per cluster
- up to 4096 cores to manage
- full support for Distributed Power Management (DPM), which saves 50% Watts consumption during VMwark benchmarks
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And from VMworld.com the Wednesday keynote.
Wednesday, February 25 (9:00am -10:30am CET) Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Sr. VP of R&D of VMware
Off for some more reading, enjoy all!
EDIT: some good info here as well, please check out http://blog.baeke.info/blog/_archives/2009/2/25/4104570.html
