Virtual Hints Things I've learned managing an ESX environment.

vmworld 2011 Monday General Session

At vmworld this year, during the Monday general session, we all learned about vmware’s vision of virtualization and cloud computing during the Monday general session. The session started with some obligatory ads for platinum and diamond conference sponsors, then jumped right in to announcements and vision of where vmware (and virtualization in general) is headed. Paul proved that vmware has a fantastic understanding of virtualization and an ambitious and exciting vision for the future.

During his welcome, Rick Jackson talked about the environment powering the hands on labs for vmworld 2011. vmware decided to eat their own dog food this year, so they hosted all of the labs on public clouds. There was no on-site safety net like in years past. The 3 public providers used were switch, terramark and colt.

Paul Maritz came on and talked about the progression of computing and end user interactions. Starting with basic automated book keeping in the 1970’s and moving on to ERP systems, CRM, e-commerce, etc. Today, the next step in this progression, is to move to a more user centric approach. No longer will the user’s interaction with the data be dictated by IT staff. In 3 years, PC’s will account for less than 20% of all client devices. Users are beginning to consume their data and applications wherever they are and via many different devices. Cloud computing is the only way to provide the elastic resources necessary to facilitate this end user experience. It is our job as IT administrators to create new data fabrics and computing resources to enable real-time, highly scalable analytics and commerce.

vmware has laid the foundation for this next stage of IT by providing ways to leverage current infrastructure (compute, storage and networking) to bridge the gap to the next generation of computing. Up to now, the reasons to virtualize have primarily been capital savings and efficiencies. As services become more accessible to end users, these savings will begin to expand into operational savings as well. Employees in the organization will become more efficient as we allow users to get to their data and applications whenever and wherever they want in the fastest, most efficient way possible.

Every year, vmware has announced a major version of ESX/vSphere. 2011 is no exception. vSphere 5.0 just went GA, and View 5.0 was announced. One of the reasons vmware pushes forward on regular update schedules like this is because they believe that the hypervisor layer needs to be like hardware: stable, with consistent updates and refreshes The regular update schedule will begin to be applied to other products such as view, vCenter Operations Manager, etc. New versions of products will be released on a common schedule. These new versions will all be tested together prior to release and version numbers will be brought into sync to minimize confusion.

To see where the IT industry is heading, vmware looked to young programmers. What are they doing? They rely heavily on frameworks to reduce complexity and aren’t concerned with the nuts and bolts under the hood. They want services that are fast, reliable and easy to use. vFabric is a suite of tools that vmware is releasing to provide a stable base for these new frameworks to live on. vFabric Data Director was announced as a simplified database platform, built on PostgreSQL, optimized for virtualization.

Cloud Foundry is the tool that will allow you to plug into vFabric to create and scale applications. The goal is a portable and language independent framework for developers to work with. To help adoption of Cloud Foundry, vmware is releasing MicroCloud Foundry. It is a local, fully functional Cloud Foundry installation to allow developers to work when and where they want.

View 5.0 is continuing to build on the success of previous versions. There are more clients; every platform will be supported. VoIP and UM integration are included and there has been a lot of work to ensure improvements in bandwith usage.

Project Horizon was introduced as a way for IT increase the end user experiences while maintaining a secure environment. A way to associate applications and permissions with people, not devices and programs. One of the pieces of Project Horizon includes partnerships with Samsung and LG, offering phone based virtualization. Multiple versions of Android can run on a single phone enabling seamless separation of work and personal data and applications. This increases security without affecting usability.

At vmworld in 2009, Paul Maritz announced that a major virtualization tipping point had been reached. 50% of all new server deployments were virtual. Virtualization success has continued and now more than 50% of all servers worldwide are virtualized. What about the next 50%? The remaining workloads are largely mission critical apps, and vSphere 5 was designed to address concerns over virtualizing these workloads.

vSphere Essentials was released as a virtualization on-ramp for small and medium businesses to get started in virtualization. There are some tools to remove some of the operational and cost barriers for virtualization. The VSA is included to remove the shared storage dependencies and reduce cost. It allows an ESX host to share local storage with other nodes, enabling features such as vMotion and fault tolerance.

Random Factoids:
60,000 vmug members
19,000+ attendees
800,000 vm admins
New vm provisioned every 6 seconds
Over 20 Million virtual machines
5.5 vmotions per second - more virtual machines in flight than airplanes.
68,000 VCP’s
1,650 ISV partners
6,000 certified apps
48 vCloud service providers
vSphere 5.0 involved 2M man hours of QA and 1M engineering hours
Next year vmworld will be August 27-30, 2012 in San Francisco

The vision of the future that was presented is amazing. Several of the technologies and facts presented were mentioned and hinted at in past years, but it always seems to take me 2-3 times hearing it to wrap my head around the concepts. At the end of the keynote, there were no doubts left that vmware far and away the leader and innovator in the virtualization world. They see where IT is heading and are providing the technologies to get us all there.

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