VMworld 2010 Reporting: Keynote

The cloud is a collective of computing resources.

Rick Jackson; Chief Marketing Officer

17021 attendees at VMworld

This years event is being serviced by a hybrid cloud, generating 4000 vms per hour. By the end of the week this number will be in 100000. In addition Rick announced the VMUG program has been formalized and now has a board of directors. Attendees were encouraged to join a local chapter.

The tag line for this years event is virtual roads, real clouds. As customers adopt virtualization there are 3 distinct phases. IT production, cost savings. Business production, unprecedented reliability. Phase 3 is SaaS or IT as a service. VMware is the ideal solutions for SaaS because they provide an open framework by supporting industry standards i.e. OVF and vAPI.

IT as a Service = optimizing IT production for business consumption. Customers must move from phase 1&2 to phase 3.

Paul Maritz, CEO

Paul Reviewed the phases; IDC reported the turning point, VMs out shipping physical servers. This year 10 million vms will be deployed. Paul thanks the audience for this collective achievement. Paul segways to theory. More traditional operating systems are being deployed without visibility to the actual hardware. The innovation of the future will be done at the virtualization stack. The requirements are automation to decrease OpEx and integrated security. These are themes for the innovation that will occur.

Another factor is how the virtualization stack will be paid for. On whose books will this expenditure sit? Movement between private and service provider clouds requires work and adherence to a common set of standards. It must allow movement to and from a public or private cloud.

But are old apps on new infrastructure enough? Customers cannot be stuck with a monolithic application that cannot be upgraded or developed properly. The industry has responded by delivering new open framework and tools (Springsource, HTML5) for application frameworks.

This will change the traditional operating system as a general purpose operating system has to much overhead for what it is required to do. It is now just a piece of a larger system.

The other change is the integration of SaaS apps into the business infrastructure. They are coming in "uninvited" and IT will need to figure it out. Also there is a proliferation of new OSes and hardware profiles and once again IT will need to make sense of it all. This introduces a new requirement for innovation in the end user environment. The reality is IT cannot keep pace with these changes.

This new area of innovation will lead to a new stack in the end user environment. This is a change that will impact all of us and is inevitable with or without VMware according to Paul.

This introduces Stephen Herrod's product announcements. He starts with a review of virtual infrastructure. Stephen refers to VI as the virtual giant. The virtual Giant has properties

- Open
- Automation
- Elastic resources
- Efficient pooling of resources

vSphere provides incredible scale. There was a strong focus on vMotion in the 4.1 release allowing more to move with less resources. The issue this technology addresses is scale. The other features of 4.1 is storage and network I/O controls. Think shares based on network and storage properties. (I will cover this in-depth on a different post). The vStorage API offloads some capabilities back to the storage hardware.

Stephen then starts a review of vCenter; capacity, configuration, disaster recovery and compliance features. VMware has acquired Integrien; management through proactive analytics. Predicting what is going to happen based on metrics.

Stephen uses his IT use at home which allows quick consumption of new apps to contrast the pace of IT at work. IT must now consider how business consumes services. VMware presents their App Store vision. The infrastructure is made up with a virtual datacenter (VDC). A VDC allows the business to move a service center to a 3rd party hosting center. New product announcement based on project Redwood "vCloud Director".

There is also an element to of security which leeds to new product announcements

VMware vShield EndPoint
VMware vShield Edge
VMware vShield App

To assure compliance from a security perspective VMware also introduced a new certification program "vCloud Datacenter service".

Demo focused on a portal to present a personal service catalog for a user. Now the management interface is introduced. You can manage multiple vCenters that represent provider vDCs. Now you connect public and private clouds through vShield. The user is unaware of where these resources are running.

Next point is how applications will be written in the near future. VMware introduces vFabric. vmForce was highlighted as a co-development between Salesforce and VMware. Hyperic was mentioned as the management system between the application stack and the virtualization stack.

End User computing and View 4.5 was discussed. Offline and new reference material for how VDI reduces acquisition costs was referred to. Project Horizon was introduced. Single sign on was demo'd and an acquisition was announced to bring this capability to VMware's portfolio.

VMware View Client for the iPad was demo'd. It showed both VDI and applications integrated into the device with a very Apple look and feel.












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