Yesterday was VMware’s major 2008 partner event for Australia, around five hundred people attended. The event started with the usual keynote material, marketing and “hooray for you and me” kind of stuff. What was great was to have Paul Maritz actually at the event, it helps us to feel more important in VMware’s grand scheme. It was also good to hear Paul articulate the storey around the VDC-OS. This storey is slowly becoming clear to me as the next iteration of what was called Virtual Infrastructure, the idea being that the VDC-OS is the underlying layer between the x86 hardware and the OS/application combination that runs on top of it. Naturally that layer needs to interact with other components and vStorage is the interface for storage, vNetwork for network, vmSafe for security, etc
I leant a new word “marchitecture” that’s marketing architecture, the Powerpoint slides that make the very complex architecture understandable with less than fifty words and a few coloured boxes.
One of the two highlights for me was Andre Kemp’s romp through the futures, Andre is an entertaining speaker and had some interesting things to talk about. One feature of the upcoming VCentre that I hadn’t noticed before was CapacityIQ which does trending analysis on the current infrastructure and can also do what if scenarios about changes to capacity and loading. What out VKernel who are working in that space as well as charge-back that will also come into vCentre. Another interesting note was VMDirectPath is currently delivering 9GBps of network bandwidth into a VM over 10 GBE.
The other highlight was the last minute substitution of Jacob Jensen’s Networking presentation into the schedule, Jacob is Senior Product Manager – Datacentre I/O at VMware in Palo Alto, so know’s the low down on what will be in the new networking. He addressed the current state of vSwitches and the future of distributed vSwitches and 3rd party vSwitches, these along with host profiles will make it vastly easier to deploy new hosts into virtual infrastructure.
Other things of note:
- Deploying Site Recovery Manager properly requires lots of business analyst time before any tech time. The business needs to know what to protect before thinking about how to protect it.
- VMware View will address a number of issues with current VDI offerings from VMware, the use of linked clones will be great.
- Exchange 2007 is way better to virtualise than Exchange 2003, disk IO is no longer a problem.
- vCloud is also about the ability to move VMs from your internal environment to a hosting provider without loss of service or control.
- There were more people who attended the tech track than the sales track, but the tech track was in a smaller room.
I had a great day, met up with lots of people, a high showing of New Zealanders which is good to see. Today is the end user event, should also be fun.
© 2008, Alastair. All rights reserved.
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