Video from the VMworld Europe 2009 - Party

I participated in the VMworld party in Cannes last night. After a slow start the attendees got pretty enthusiastic when the band entertained at the stage. I didn’t caught the name of the band but they were doing a great job getting people in party mode.

Here’s a little short video from the VMworld Party:

A short chat with Paul Maritz

I got a hold of VMware CEO Paul Maritz on his way out from the VMware Unplugged session today. We had a good talk on Quality Assurance and how much focus VMware puts into this. Is it extremely important for a company as VMware, that positions itself as “the” DataCenter OS on the marked, to have a reputation as extremely stable. Paul Maritz told us that it is an extreme focus point for VMware NOT to repeat things like the August 12 time bomb and there has been laid out strict QA procedures within the R&D departments, but a culture change like that is not done over night.

I think it is an extremely cool thing that the CEO of such a large company actually takes the time to hear “the common man” out, with such an interest as he showed us today. It gives an impression of a man that is very dedicated to the success and reputation of his company. And him actually being a very nice guy also helps tremendously.

Now to catch some zzzzz before the big VMware Party tonight!

Demo of PC over IP with VMware View.

This is pretty awesome. During the key note on stage, VMware demoed which initiatives they are working on in the roadmap on VMware View which is set to go live in 2009.

The setup was a thin client running a Virtual Desktop on the VMware View broker on the PC over IP protocol from Teradici. The demo was showing Google map scrolling, zooming in an out without any glitching. It ran completely smoothly, Next he demoed a 3D rendering application, zooming in and out on the Eiffel Tower schematics.

VMworld Europe 2nd day keynote

Maurizio Carli, VMware’s Don Corleone, started out today by welcoming people back on the last day of the keynotes, then giving the word to VMware CTO Dr. Stephen Herrod.

Stephen went through some performance numbers telling the world what it already knows, VMware virtual machines rocks performance wise.

Going over some of the numbers that VMware has achieved on virtualizing Exchange and webservers, the overall message of breaking large servers down into more, but smaller, virtual machines will give you a significant better virtualization experience.

Going further on to quickly explaining the concept of vStorage and vNetwork. Opening the storage API for the vendors to be able to use stuff like the thin provisioning of the storage vendor when provisioning virtual machines, instead of the built-in VMware thin provisioning.

Of course going over the vNetwork he went….bla bla bla…Cisco Nexus v1000.

Apparently the notion of going back to a “virtual mainframe” is something that has taken hold of the VMware management. Does it make them feel young again?

Quickly touching down on the new Fault Tolerance feature, Stephen went further on to go over security with VMsafe ending with the new vShield.

VShield Zones is a firewall going in between the VM and its surroundings. You can do different zones having multiple VMs that are firewalled from other VM’s. Should be a nice thing for making DMZ…if we can get the network guys to eat it!

A quick demo of the vCenter Linked mode, showing a environment with 4 linked vCenters and the a new search function.

Going on the the next demo on host profiles, showing how easy it is to add a new host to your environment and getting it in compliance with you standard configuration. Having worked on a large installations of 60 ESXi hosts and the “wonders” that it gives, I just love this function.

Taking up where Paul Mauritz left yesterday we came to the inevitable….vCloud. Finally we got more than talk and slides about the cloud. A vCloud add-on for the vCenter client. This was really cool! The demo showed how to easily connecting to an external cloud for adding more power to your system.

More sweetness came up next when we went to the vClient initiative. We got another demo of what is coming for WAN and LAN support PcoIP using the Terradici protocol. An awsome demo using google earth fluently through VMware View, going over to a CAD like programme showing a full 3D drawing of the Eiffeltower, again fluently work experience. I guess i’ll be going to the Terradici stand having a closer look on that. This demo also gave us a new way of pronouncing the words LAAAAN and WAAAAN.

Thank to my fellow bloggers for a good laugh on that one!

Jerry Chan gave us a quick demo of the coming virtual mobile platform, installing a Windows CE and a Android virtual instance on a Nokia n800. Quite cool but can i actually make a phone call?

All in all a good, and SAP free, keynote!

VMworld 2009 - Paul Maritz: VMware initiatives and Cloud Computing

Paul Maritz talked about some of the virtualization initiatives that VMware is working on. IT should be turned into a service that fundamentally should be easier to manage and monitor.

The three initiatives:

VDC-OS              Infrastructure in the internal cloud

vCloud               Extend the internal cloud to external cloud

vClient               Client side computing and user experience

 

The cloud/datacenter VDC-OS as architecture contains:

·       Hardware – building blocks

·       Software – which provides availability and scalability

·       Policies – This provides security and compliance to control the cloud.

·       Management – SLA management model - to take management to a higher level.

·       Existing/New Applications – application models for introducing applications within the cloud

All this is called VDC-OS (Virtual Datacenter Center – Operating System). All the new generation products will be called vSphere. All these products will start to ship in 2009.

The cloud is fundamentally to turn all the resources into one giant computer. Apply policies and management on top of it to control, monitor and dynamically extend the services running in the cloud.

VMware quote: Virtualization is the key to making all of the happen in an evolutionary way.

VMware announced a couple new products and a new name vSphere:

Announcements:

• vSphere is the new name for all their next generation products’
• VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat – high availability for the virtualization management
• VMware vShield Zones – delivers security and compliance to the internal cloud. A new security product suite.

The VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat has really been a long-awaited feature, so we finally can offer high availability for the customers on the vCenter Server it selves. Today 3rd party product or a manual procedure was the options to provide high availability for the vCenter server.

Live blogging from Cannes, the weather is…..

Pretty awesome, compared to -2 degrees and snow in Denmark, we have sun and about 15-16 degrees in Cannes.

I’ve been enjoying a lunch and a cold beer at a café with my colleague Nicolai.

Tomorrow the conference is starting for VAC Partners, which I will participate in from 9 AM to 20 PM. It’s going to be a long day.

Here’s Nicolai in front of Palais des Festival.

I’m sitting at Eden Hotel and doing my first blog from Cannes and the internet connection is unfortunately not very good.

I’ve got a live blogger invite from Richard Garsthagen, VMware, so I will do live blogging during the week and I hope the internet connection in the conference center is better.

This was my first post from Cannes and hopefully we all have a very exiting week in front of us.

Over and out!

Guess i’ll be doing some video blogging at VMworld…

I just got home from work today and on my table a package from VMware was arrived. I excitedly opened it to find out that it was a cool FLIP Mino Video Camcorder with 2 GB built-in memory. This can contain a 60 minutes of video recording in MPEG4 format and in a 640×480 pixels.

I have never played around with video “podcasting” before, so it should be interesting and I’m certainly going to use it at VMworld.

Thanks to VMware and Richard Garsthagen for this cool gadget

VMworld Labs announced.

VMware announced the LAB’s that you can attend at VMworld Europe 2009.

Richard Garsthagen has published a small promo video for us to watch: http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=250

This year all LABs is self-paced giving flexibility to come and go as you like

LAB01	Next Generation Datacenter Exploration	Hands-on Lab
LAB02	Securing the Virtual DataCenter with VMware vShield Zones	Hands-on Lab
LAB03	VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager	Hands-on Lab
LAB04	VMware Life Cycle manager.	Hands-on Lab
LAB05	VMware vCenter Lab Manager & vCenter Stage Manager	Hands-on Lab
LAB06	VMware vCenter Data Recovery Tech Preview	Hands-on Lab
LAB07	VMware vCenter AppSpeed	Hands-on Lab
LAB08	Working with VMware View Manager and View Composer	Hands-on Lab
LAB09	VMware ThinApp	Hands-on Lab
LAB10	VMware View Manager 3 and Offline Desktops	Hands-on Lab
LAB11	VMware VI Toolkit for Windows (powershell)	Hands-on Lab
LAB12	vNetwork Distributed Switch Tech Preview : Cisco Nexus 1000v	Hands-on Lab
LAB13	VMSafe Altor Networks VF Virtual Firewall	Hands-on Lab

Are you going to VMworld and what do you expect?

VMworld is coming up soon in less than 2 weeks and it is always interesting to hear what will be announced from the virtualization vendors in the week before, during VMworld and after.

·       What do you expect will be announced?

·       And what do you really like being announced?

Furthermore, why are you going to VMworld? And have you set yourself some goals on what you want to hear about and what you need to learn more about. It is also a good opportunity to network and get to talk to other virtualization enthusiasts, customers, the VMware crew, bloggers etc.

Primarily, I’m representing my company that I work for and have huge interest in hearing what and how we can build up business in the coming period, based on the new products mostly from VMware, but certainly also from other vendors.

Secondly, I will be live blogging on this site, during the VMworld event and hopefully can participate in delivering the message around virtualization and what’s going to happen the next couple months.

To get back to my two bullets, I do believe it’s hard to tell what the virtualization vendors will announce during the VMworld event. A lot of new products are coming from VMware in 2009 and that will be interesting to hear about. Also Cloud computing is the future for many, but reality for some, and where are we today on this?

I would really like to see VMware announcing the new Virtual Infrastructure 4, or VMware vSphere, which is the new name for the suite of products around ESX and vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter). However I doubt this will happen on VMworld, even several fellow bloggers has argued for that it will happen. We’ll see, I guess.

 Hopefully, I’ll see some of you in Cannes in less than two weeks.