Steve will introduce the new suites from VMware. The session will discuss how VMware has combined their products to solve key business problems with a focus on the end user space. Steve opens with a few buzz words to highlight growing trends in the consumerization of IT, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) or the IT of consumerization (which describes how technically savvy users are becoming).
Steve talks about how difficult these trends have made things for IT. The disparity in solutions has led to more tools and more point products. This complexity has led to cost increases.
Last year they talked about the transformation from legacy approach of IT into a new services approach. The second challenge that was alluded to is how you broker these new services and tailor them to a user vs a device.
Transformation has not really meant the death of the PC but the move to a multi-device environment. Gartner reports only 30% of business have migrated to Windows 7.
Steve reviews the release of View 5.1. View 5.1 has reduced the aquisition costs and improved the end user experience. Steve also mentions new products that are appliance based and allow you to build out desktops quickly. CISCO has a new device called the ISR G2 that allows you to deploy View in a branch and integrates a number of technology enhancements including VoIP.
Even with all the work done on View you still need to deal with the offline mode. Steve talks about Winova software and specifically the Mirage product. Mirage will decompose a desktop image into layers such as hardware OS, applications and user data. Once you have done this it enables you to quickly change out components of the stack. Mirage enables you to keep these Mirage desktop images synchronized when deployed to the end device. This allows you to keep these images current in near realtime. Mirage enables you to run the View desktop locally but trickle the changes back to the datacenter.
This keys up a demo that takes a user from Windows XP to 7 while online and using their laptop. A reboot completes the migration. The next scenario presented is when the laptop is 'stolen' access is enabled through a thin client to demonstrate that the virtual desktop follows the user. The final piece is the redeployment of the View desktop using Fusion to integrate it into a new Apple iOS laptop.
VMware also introduces the concept of User Interface Virtualization - to allow legacy apps to be tablet friendly. It takes apps and makes them work through gesture. The demo showed movement between applications using a album cover approach. The demo also showed clipboard functionality using gestures.
Now Steve moves to a discussion on brokers. Steve introduces the Horizon Suite. It can broker Applications, Data and Desktops. Project Octopus is integrated into the suite. Steve mentions that this can all be administered from a single place. The Alpha product is shown. When you login you get a dashboard of current use of all the pieces including traditional, thin and mobile applications. You can manage mobile Apps in addition to Web Applications, Thin Apps and low and behold Citrix. The Apple AppStore and Google Apps have also been integrated. Deployment is done through the completion of Class of Service policies. Applications can be self activated by the user provided the administrator allows it.
Steve now introduces Horizon mobile which manages a virtual container for your smart phone allowing personal and business segregation. Currently they support iPhone and Android. Horizon Apps are managed in a separate container on the mobile phone.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
VMworld 2012: Opening Keynote: Paul Maritz and Pat Gelsinger
A number of announcements were made including the attendance and diamond sponsors. The numbers this year are 20,000 attendees and 10,000 watching the keynote online. The diamond sponsors this year are CISCO, Dell EMC HP and NetApp.
Paul Maritz was introduced and begins with a look back to when he did his first keynote at VMworld in 2008. Paul talks to the numbers on virtualization based on Gartner. In 2008 25% of workloads were vitual and in 2012 it is 60%. It is now the default way of running applications. In 2008 there were 25,000 VCPs and in 2012 there are 125,000. 13k attendees in 08 and 20 k in 2012.
Paul talks about the mindset "In 2008 we asked what was cloud in 2012 we are asking how do we implement Cloud?". How does the Cloud effect people and processes? VMware has developed a deep body of how to information on virtualization and Cloud. Paul asks In 4 years how do things look?
Paul believes that a strong set of forces are at work to automate most of the people processes. From physical process to computer based process. Every business is expected to be able to do this. what is happening now is not just the presentation of static information but the tailoring of experiences based on the audience in real time. This has profound implications on what happens underneath to the infra This cannot happen on todays infrastructure. Providing information is not innovative but providing relevance is. How can we take IT more efficient an agile to deliver on these challenges.
We will see an transformation in IT. It will happen in three broad categories: Infrastructure, Applications (real-time demand at exceptional scale) and Access (from a PC dominated world to mobile devices).
Paul introduces Pat Gelsinger to talk about the future (the new CEO Almost)
Pat would like to begin talking about the infrastructure layer. Pat is targeting moving businesses from 60% virtualization to 90% virtualization. We need to continue to make progress on provisioning down to minutes and seconds. To much complexity is involved in deployment. For example the complexity of networking security; can we automate these as wells? The promise is the software-defined datacenter. All infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service and the automation is entirely done by software.
Pat mentions that there is strong push from vendors, database (read Oracle) to make it more proprietary and separated. This is not the approach that VMware will take. The challenge is to do to the rest of the datacenter what was done for servers with virtualization. Can it be done?
Introducing vCloud Suite
vCloud is based on vSphere and layered vShield, SRM and vCloud Director with plugins for operations suite and vfabric. It includes APIs for extensibility, Connector for interoperability and Orchestrator for automation.
It is based on the unmatched, comprehensive and highest performance virtualization product on the market vSphere 5.1.
Pat says that VMware has done a good job of having a yearly cadence of major software releases. VMware is proven. 80% of the 60% of workloads virtualized are running on VMware.
Pat then makes the announcement that many have been waiting for. Pat announces "Today we are striking vRAM from VMware's dictionary. Licensing will be based on CPU/Socket with no core limits.
Pat also mentions a new set of role-based certifications. VMware will provide the tools and services to help you navigate of this change to Cloud computing.
VMware realizes It is a multi-cloud world and explains that Cloud Foundry supports other vendor clouds. In addition VMware aquired Dynamic Ops to support other clouds.
VMware also mentions the opensource Network acquisition Nicira which was completed on Thursday of last week.
What about the Applications in the era of Cloud? Pat mentions the major updates to vFabric this year. Cloud Foundry is the one and only open PaaS platform.
Pat also mentions Wanova and Mirage product. VMware is making Horizon is the broker for the cloud era. In summary VMware has the transformation to Cloud well covered and is here to enable customers.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Paul Maritz was introduced and begins with a look back to when he did his first keynote at VMworld in 2008. Paul talks to the numbers on virtualization based on Gartner. In 2008 25% of workloads were vitual and in 2012 it is 60%. It is now the default way of running applications. In 2008 there were 25,000 VCPs and in 2012 there are 125,000. 13k attendees in 08 and 20 k in 2012.
Paul talks about the mindset "In 2008 we asked what was cloud in 2012 we are asking how do we implement Cloud?". How does the Cloud effect people and processes? VMware has developed a deep body of how to information on virtualization and Cloud. Paul asks In 4 years how do things look?
Paul believes that a strong set of forces are at work to automate most of the people processes. From physical process to computer based process. Every business is expected to be able to do this. what is happening now is not just the presentation of static information but the tailoring of experiences based on the audience in real time. This has profound implications on what happens underneath to the infra This cannot happen on todays infrastructure. Providing information is not innovative but providing relevance is. How can we take IT more efficient an agile to deliver on these challenges.
We will see an transformation in IT. It will happen in three broad categories: Infrastructure, Applications (real-time demand at exceptional scale) and Access (from a PC dominated world to mobile devices).
Paul introduces Pat Gelsinger to talk about the future (the new CEO Almost)
Pat would like to begin talking about the infrastructure layer. Pat is targeting moving businesses from 60% virtualization to 90% virtualization. We need to continue to make progress on provisioning down to minutes and seconds. To much complexity is involved in deployment. For example the complexity of networking security; can we automate these as wells? The promise is the software-defined datacenter. All infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service and the automation is entirely done by software.
Pat mentions that there is strong push from vendors, database (read Oracle) to make it more proprietary and separated. This is not the approach that VMware will take. The challenge is to do to the rest of the datacenter what was done for servers with virtualization. Can it be done?
Introducing vCloud Suite
vCloud is based on vSphere and layered vShield, SRM and vCloud Director with plugins for operations suite and vfabric. It includes APIs for extensibility, Connector for interoperability and Orchestrator for automation.
It is based on the unmatched, comprehensive and highest performance virtualization product on the market vSphere 5.1.
Pat says that VMware has done a good job of having a yearly cadence of major software releases. VMware is proven. 80% of the 60% of workloads virtualized are running on VMware.
Pat then makes the announcement that many have been waiting for. Pat announces "Today we are striking vRAM from VMware's dictionary. Licensing will be based on CPU/Socket with no core limits.
Pat also mentions a new set of role-based certifications. VMware will provide the tools and services to help you navigate of this change to Cloud computing.
VMware realizes It is a multi-cloud world and explains that Cloud Foundry supports other vendor clouds. In addition VMware aquired Dynamic Ops to support other clouds.
VMware also mentions the opensource Network acquisition Nicira which was completed on Thursday of last week.
What about the Applications in the era of Cloud? Pat mentions the major updates to vFabric this year. Cloud Foundry is the one and only open PaaS platform.
Pat also mentions Wanova and Mirage product. VMware is making Horizon is the broker for the cloud era. In summary VMware has the transformation to Cloud well covered and is here to enable customers.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Do you have ‘Actionable Intelligence’ (AI) on your Virtual Infrastructure?
I have been doing a lot of vCenter Operations and have to admit I really like the version 5 product. A little less enamored about the licensing but only because of where they but the demarcation point between Advanced and Enterprise. Let me share a few thoughts with you and explain the AI title.
Actionable Intelligence is something I picked up from interacting with VMware’s sales folks. It is a key differentiator between vCenter Operations (vOPS) and many other systems management tools.
The secret sauce is in the dynamic thresholds. Rather than setting a static threshold such as CPU over 75% utilization (as you get in vCenter), vCenter Operations configures dynamic thresholds. Every 24 hours, algorithms are run to identify what is normal behavior and what is abnormal behavior on the objects that are aggregated in vOPS. The objects and data Is pulled from vCenter.
Why is this so unique? Well the proof is in the patent. All the algorithms are patented from VMware because they have incorporate their intellectual property on what’s best for your vms. VMware, in the development of their systems management products noted that in many tools the data is difficult to interpret or potentially suspect. In the design of vCenter Operations, considerable time was spent to ensure the information and the display is straightforward and provides information you can act on (hence the ‘actionable intelligence’ buzz word).
Does it deliver? Well you need to allow time for the technology to recognize normal and abnormal behavior. For example; if vOPS is running for 1 day and an irregular spike in CPU on a vm occurs it may register an anomaly. If this spike happens every week at the same time then it will be considered normal behavior. VMware generally recommends that you run the tool for a break in period of two weeks. The real-time monitoring will be useful the moment it is installed however.
One of the nice integration points is the inclusion of the Capacity IQ reporting and what-if modeling in a ‘single’ product. I quote single as it is still two vms (the analysis and UI vappliance) released as a ‘single’ vApp.
My only minor point is on the licensing break; essentially standard is real-time monitoring, advanced is everything including long term risk and efficiency. You are restricted in vOPS advanced to a single locked dashboard which is the default console. Enterprise allows you to unlock the customizations so you can build separate dashboards. Enterprise ++ allows you to incorporate physical and virtual machines.
What I find is that the minute it is deployed, customizations are critical. You may want the management team to only see a high level view vs. being able to drill down on all critical alerts for example. To move from Advanced to Enterprise is a license key upgrade on the same product which unlocks the customization utility. It’s almost like they planned it this way to entice the Enterprise upgrade, hmmmmmm…
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