virtualization.info

This week virtualization.info is following – for the first time – the Parallels annual Summit that takes place at the lovely Fontainebleau in Miami Beach.

Easy to guess, the leitmotif of this edition is cloud computing, pretty much like everywhere else in the Industry.
Parallels doesn’t specifically use the term to mean virtualization-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), even if it’s a virtualization vendor, but rather as an umbrella that has a major focus on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Serguei Beloussov, Parallels Chairman and CEO, is on stage.

Parallels Summit primarily is a conference for partners, and Beloussov doesn’t waste any time to say that cloud computing is an opportunity for profit when you address SMBs.
To Parallels a typical Small Business is a firm that only has part-time employees or a very small number (like 50), without IT staff or capability to plan, deploy and administer a computer infrastructure.

Agreed or not with the definition, this is exactly the market that Parallels is targeting today.
Looking at this strategy from a virtualization angle only, Parallels is working to be the VMware of SMBs, or better, the VMware of ISPs that target SMB customers.

No matter how hard VMware tried to address the smaller firms in these years. Everything in its messaging, roadmap, and pricing structure makes vSphere, and its other products, unreachable for the lower end of market (ESXi is a nice attempt but far from enough).
Focusing its efforts on this market segment, and concentrating primarily on the hosting industry, Parallels is everything but a direct competitor of VMware and other virtualization players (of course this doesn’t involve the direct competition in the Apple consumer space around desktop virtualization).

Beloussov announces that the Parallels is re-engineering its portfolio, moving from a products-oriented portfolio to a services-oriented one.
This means that the existing virtualization solutions will be aggregated in what it’s called Virtualized Infrastructure Services (VPS), which includes control panels, provisioning, billing and of course virtualization platforms (Virtuozzo Containers, Server for Mac and Server Bare-Metal).

Parallels expects the virtualization business for the hosting industry to grow 31% till 2013, up to $5.1B.
Beloussov has no problems in admitting that VMware ESX is the best hypervisor on the market, but he smiles while saying “except for its price”.
This is why he seems particularly proud to announce that Parallels hired Amir Sharif, former VMware ESX Product Manager,  as new Vice President of Virtualization.
Sharif will certainly provide impressive intelligence to Parallels about VMware and how his former company led and controlled the whole virtualization industry so far.

That’s it for today.
As already said, Parallels has a broad scope of products and it’s clear that virtualization is just a small part of the business.
This year’s agenda doesn’t include a keynote dedicated to virtualization, so there’s not much more to add right now.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s live coverage.

Update: Attending a breakout session in the afternoon provided interesting additional details about how Parallels is reshaping its virtualization go-to-market strategy.

During his Best Practices with Virtualization session, the new VP of Virtualization Amir Sharif, offered a couple of extremely valuable insights about the industry.

First, he clarified that is extremely hard to go downstream once you are an established enterprise vendor. Any firm trying to win the SMB market after ruling the Enterprise one risks to compromise its image, to lose its margins, to reduce resources focused on large accounts.
Anybody in the industry knows this, but it’s rather interesting to hear so from a former VMware manager.

Secondarily, he indirectly admitted that Parallels competitor in virtualizing the hosting industry is not VMware, but vendors that offer Xen-based platforms. And this is because Amazon, with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is based on Xen, is leading by example.
In fact, hosting providers may be confident in Xen capabilities because of EC2 and The RackSpace Cloud (formerly Mosso) success achieved so far.

Sharif’s point is that embracing Xen implies a lot of hidden costs that don’t exist with Parallels Virtualized Infrastructure Services (VPS) offering.
While this may be true, it must be seen if hosting providers will have same opinion now that Citrix XenServer is free and open source too, and that the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) approaches a GA status.

Labels: Events, Parallels

Usually virtualization.info doesn’t post stories about industry events (except the major ones related to virtualization like the VMware VMworld) and for sure it doesn’t publish stories about the vendors’ presence at a specific trade show (unless it’s our own Virtualization Congress).

In this particular case we’ll make an exception: VMware just informed its partners that it will exhibit at the Oracle OpenWorld 2009.

This is not the first time that VMware shows up at that event, but it certainly is the first time that VMware and Oracle are in harsh, direct competition.

It doesn’t matter if the Oracle presence in the virtualization space is today near zero.
The experience of the CEO Paul Maritz as a former Microsoft top executive should allow VMware to not underestimate the virtualization stack that Oracle has the potential to build (Oracle VM + Virtual Iron + Sun VM Server + everything else came with the two acquisitions).

Considering this, it will be interesting to see if Oracle will confine VMware in a 10’x10’ booth, just like VMware did with Microsoft and Citrix at the last VMworld.

While VMware called the new event restrictions a standard practice for an industry trade show, pretty much everybody that visited the VMworld exhibit floor could easily recognize that the only two companies impacted were its major and most dangerous competitors.

At VMworld 2009 Red Hat exposed its upcoming KVM-based virtualization offering, which competes with VMware in almost every possible way (from server consolidation to VDI). And yet no restrictions were applied to them.
At the same time, at VMworld 2009 Symantec exposed its upcoming Endpoint Virtualization Suite, which competes with VMware in every possible way (from application virtualization to software streaming to persona management). And yet no restrictions were applied to them.
The list may go on and include at least Novell/PlateSpin, which compete with VMware on the platform, on the enterprise management (including P2V migration tools and capacity planning tools) and on the virtual data center orchestration segments.

It will be interesting to see if Oracle uses the same language VMware uses, and what kind of message will deliver with that language.

Update: By the way, Oracle has a rich agenda around virtualization for this edition of OpenWorld. And it includes many Sun technologies.

Labels: Events, Oracle, VMware

Second day keynote here at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the VMworld 2009.
The yesterday keynote, performed by the VMware CEO Paul Maritz and the COO Tod Nielsen, was mostly focused on the company vision.

Today the CTO Dr. Stephen Herrod is expected to deliver, as usual, a more concrete, technology-wise keynote, dedicating more time to the new products that VMware is delivering or developing for a future release.

Stephen Herrod is on stage.
He starts recapping the three initiatives that make the VMware strategy and how there’s a major refocus on the desktop virtualization area and View. View enables Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS).

DaaS requires the right platform (vSphere) and technology for centralized image and policy management.
A key challenge is providing shared images, managing the user personality and simplifying patching.

About the user personality VMware has just started a OEM partnership to integrate RTO Virtual Profiles in View.

Another area that requires a major effort is the user experience, which has to be the best possible no matter what endpoint the workforce is using.
Of course Herrod is talking about the partnership with Teradici and the software version of their PCoIP remote protocol that was briefly demonstrated yesterday.
View 4.0 with the software version of PCoIP will ship this year.

Now Herrod talks about the most important innovation that VMware is working on: the client hypervisor or Client Virtualization Platform (CVP).
A demo of the product is running now: a virtual desktop is launched through View and executed on the local laptop. It runs large Flash videos from YouTube and 3D graphics using the local GPU. Yet the operating system is running inside a virtual machine and has a fully emulated virtual display card.
The second part of the demo shows PCoIP in action on a thin client and on an Apple iPhone, through the new Wyse PocketCloud application.

Herrod is back on the strategy.
VMware wants to provide easy management for the virtual data center also inside the mobile devices. This will happen through the vCenter Mobile Administrator.
But more than that VMware wants to bring the hypervisor on phones: time for the upcoming Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP).

The Global Head of Product Development at Visa is on stage.
A large R&D mobile device with QWERTY keyboard (three times the size of an iPhone) is used on the demo.
It runs the new mobile hypervisor they acquired from Trango in November 2008.
The host OS is Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and the guest OS is Google Android with a Visa mobile app that connects online and integrates with Google Maps.

That’s enough about the desktop virtualization effort. Herrod moves back to the server virtualization domain and reiterates the new concept that Paul Maritz introduced yesterday: the software mainframe.

VMotion is the foundation of the software mainframe.

So far VMware estimates that virtual administrators perfomerd over 350M live migrations with VMotion, saving over $400M.
VMotion is maturing at a fast pace, with Storage VMotion introduced at the end of 2006 and Network VMotion introduced in May with vSphere. 
Herrod doesn’t say where VMware is with long-distance VMotion but points out that a number of partner have working demos about this.

When you use VMotion for global performance optimization then VMware DRS is the technology to use.
In tests DRS achieved 96% efficiency compared to a manual placement of the virtual machines.
VMware is working to extend DRS to include I/O.

Fast-forward to the new generation of virtual appliances (a name that VMware doesn’t seem to use anymore): the vApps, introduced with vSphere.
Herrod recaps that a vApp has a metadata layer that describes its SLA and security policy, enforced by 3rd party security vendors that use the VMsafe APIs.

Herrod now introduces one of the upcoming modules for vCenter Server: ConfigControl.
ConfigControl is a configuration and change management tool that keeps an historical record of what happens in the vSphere inventory.
It will compete with a number of solutions currently provided by multiple VMware partners.

The product (a technology preview) is shown for the first time ever on stage: the administrator can use a search web interface to find out what changed about a specific object in the inventory.
It can also choose the way the changes are visualized in the console.
For each change that ConfigControl can return the administrator is able to know what are objects were impacted by the change.
The interface seems a little unintuitive but the product is extremely interesting.

Herrod now moves on the last initiative of the VMware strategy: the vCloud.
Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is an example of connectivity between clouds (one is private, the other can be public or private as well).
Long-distance VMotion is another way to connect the clouds. There are a lot of challenges : moving the VM memory, move and sync the VM disk images, and more.
Herrod says that next year there will be more  long-distance live migration solutions.

Now Herrod is back to the most controversial domain where VMware is moving: the SpringSource acquistion.
It seems that VMware made some on-the-fly adjustments to its message to clarify what the acquisition means in the big picture.

Herrod is doing a better job in explaining where enterprise Java applications are in the VMware universe, but his presentation still doesn’t answer the most important question: why the virtual data center administrators should care.

The SpringSource CTO is on stage, hopefully to explain this. Unfortunately people start to leave as soon as they see code.
VMware has a major challenge here: it has to remove all traces of the SpringSource details from the slides and demo, and refocus the message in a way that it doesn’t alienate its core audience.

With the same demo shown yesterday during the Paul Maritz specific keynote about cloud computing this second day keynote ends.

Labels: Events, VMware

Deeply hidden in the VMworld 2009 opening keynote the VMware CEO Paul Maritz introduced three new key concepts that define the new message of VMware:

• the next generation virtual data center will be a software mainframe, fully automated and self-sufficient
• the software mainframe will be populated through a service catalog (more on this later or tomorrow)
• the cloud-ready services available in the catalog are not here yet. The software mainframe services will be Java enterprise applications that ISVs develop, test and control inside the cloud through the SpringSource framework.

VMware is now hosting a second, closed-doors keynote just about cloud computing, where hopefully the three concepts above will be further defined.

Paul Maritz is on stage.  
He summarizes what was already said during the keynote and then calls on stage the first of what seems to be a long series of partners: AT&T.

AT&T starts with a shameless plug about how the company is in a unique position to deliver the promise of cloud computing and then continues by describing its current Synaptic Hosting offering (if every VMware partner will come on stage to do the same show the room will be empty well before the end of the session).

After AT&T VMware moves on something more concrete, promising a demo of a live migration across two federated cloud infrastructures.
Unfortunately the only thing that is actually demonstrated is the simple VMotion of a virtual machine with SQL Server, simulating running transactions, from a virtual center to another, both controlled by the same vCenter.
There’s no proof that what we saw was a real geographical, long-distance live migration.

Next on stage: SAVVIS, which announces today a new cloud computing infrastructure called Project Spirit.
SAVVIS claims that Spirit is the industry first Virtual Private Data Center with multi-tiered Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities.
But as far as we can see from the online website that is projected Spirit is still in beta and Amazon may have something to say on who has the first virtual private data center.

Now VMware addresses the security concerns about cloud computing. Verizon is on stage to help on the impossible task.
Whatever will be addressed in the next 10 minutes will be just a fraction of the hundreds of security implications of moving inside the cloud.
Verizon talks about its recently released Computer-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering and talks about how it has a validation/certification program that allows 3rd party to add security features to CaaS.
In other words Verizon is doing nothing by itself to improve the security of its cloud computing infrastructure.

It’s amazing how this keynote is turning into a propaganda event to educate the press inside the room. 
So far the VMware partners that came on stage were unable to prove anything but their marketing effort in cloud computing. Not a single one was able to cover the many issues that plague cloud computing today and explain exactly how they are addressing the challenges.

Terremark is the next one on stage.
They perform another demo of the vCloud Express portal that we already saw during the opening keynote.
As virtualization.info already described, the portal is able to easily reconfigure the virtual hardware inside a single virtual machine in the cloud, to provision new virtual machines and to define virtual networking in a very simple way.
Anyway it’s not clear yet if this interface comes out of the box (as a sort of white-label self-service protal) or if the cloud provider has to do most of the job in leveraging the vCloud Express SDK and build such product from scratch.

Now VMware announces the availability of the vCloud API, submitted to the DMTF for the ratification as standard.

Again, on stage we have the SpringSource CEO to explain how the vSphere infrastructure can become the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that VMware has in mind.
Compared to the morning keynote one, this time the demo is focused on how the IT administrator deploys the JAVA application inside a public cloud.

Still, the demo is extremely complex and completely far from what most of the people understanding virtualization and the VMware products recognize as familiar.
It doesn’t matter how detailed is the description of the Spring framework and its application server, VMware has to clarify in much, much simpler terms why and how the JAVA applications are now so critical in the company’s vision.

Right Scale is the last one to come on stage.
It’s just launched service is able to interact with multiple public clouds at the same time, abstracting the providers and giving the customers a single super-management console where to configure and provision new virtual machines.

With this last demo the showcase ends. Time for Q&As.

Labels: Events, VMware

In less than one hour Paul Maritz, the VMware CEO, will be on stage to start the VMworld 2009.
This year there are 12,500 attendees, slightly less than last year, but definitively an amazing result considering the economic conditions.

A number of demos are highly expected from the audience. One for sure is the software implementation of the PCoIP remote protocol that VMware is developing with Teradici.
Another is the client hypervisor that will compete with the Citrix Xen Client expected later this year.

Tod Nielsen is on stage.
Nielsen is one of the first Microsoft veteran that joined VMware this year as the new COO.
Every single move, word, joke or smile he has on stage is 100% Microsoft style, which neatly breaks with the usual style of VMware keynotes.

Nielsen’s introduction is about the Fortune 1000 customers that are not using VMware technologies, only 30, and about the company’s goal: energize and save. 

Paul Maritz is on stage.
This is the second VMworld keynote for the former Microsoft executive who replaced the VMware founder and CEO Diane Greene in July 2008.
His first keynote last September was entirely dedicated to the new focus that the company has on cloud computing. We’ll see if this year the message will be exactly the same.

Maritz starts on the key issues of the IT industry today: complexity, inefficiency and inflexibility.
Only 5% of the IT budgets are spent on infrastructure investments.
The current data center have all these issues but are well understood. The demand to solve these issues will drive the adoption of cloud computing technologies, where hardware virtualization is the mandatory building block.
So the vision then is to move from the “simple” server consolidation to an internal/external cloud architecture to the mythical world of autonomic computing.

Interestingly, this year Maritz uses the term software mainframe multiple times when he talks about automating the data center.
Maritz says that vSphere 4.0 is really able now to deliver mainframe performance and mentions the record performance that VMware announced a few months ago (more than 350,000 IOPS from a single server).

The VMware software mainframe will be built on top of the hypervisor using a number of vCenter new modules that the company already announced in January and that has partially released so far: AppSpeed, CapacityIQ, ChargeBack, ConfigControl, Orchestrator, etc.

But Maritz wants to remark that VMware continues to keep the platform open for the interoperability: IBM is on stage and shows how System Director interacts with vCenter in measuring the power consumption of multiple virtual machines running on a blade, through the IBM power meter and the VMware vCenter APIs.

The discussion is back to the new vCenter modules.
Brief demos of the recently released LabManager 4.0 and ChargeBack 1.0 are shown on stage.

Maritz briefly mentions a key new concept: the service catalog. More on this probably tomorrow in the Stephen Herrod keynote.

Now Maritz moves back to the cloud computing and introduces the expected new initiative called vCloud Express.
Over 1000 service providers already joined the vCloud initiative but starting today new partners can use the vCloud Express to further accelerate the adoption of clouds.

Demo time.
A VMware partner exposes its VMware-powered cloud infrastructure through a vCloud Express portal.
The customer connects to the portal, sign up (by submitting financial details for payment) and then goes into a self-service portal where it can immediately customize and provision virtual machines and virtual networks in the partner cloud.

Maritz now shifts the focus on desktop virtualization and View.
HP is on stage and introduces its virtual desktop reference architecture featuring LeftHand Networks storage. 
HP also shows a new product called Insight Control for VMware View, which offers integration with the HP Onboard Administrator interface, power management control and other features.

Finally Maritz talks about the PCoIP protocol.
Telus Communications, a VMware customer, is called on stage to show a demo of VMware View 4.0 and the software implementation of PCoIP.
A PowerPoint presentation about Telus with some transition effects is launched from a virtual desktop. Nothing more than some fading effects, but smooth enough to not compromise the user experience.
The presentation also includes a small video that runs smoothly as well, but it’s not clear if its an animated GIF, a Flash clip or a fully-featured video.

Despite the strategic value of PCoIP and the effort that VMware has put so far in developing it, Maritz doesn’t spend any more time on it and moves on to discuss the SpringSource acquisition.
Hopefully the tomorrow’s keynote will show something more concrete.

Maritz explains that most of the enterprise Java applications are developed with the Spring framework.
VMware will continue to support the Oracle and IBM application servers side by side with the SpringSource application server. 
Maritz states that the acquisition of SpringSource will accelerate the development of new applications that are more cloud-oriented and calls the SpringSource CEO on stage.

A notable number of people in the audience leaves the room. This is because VMware has failed so far to explain in a clear way what will exactly do with the Sprint framework and the Hyperic management layer.
The demo is showing something more adapt to an audience of developers than for the typical virtual infrastructure administrator that attends VMworld.

This last intervention closes the Day 1 Keynote. Within one hour there’s another, closed-doors keynote from Paul Maritz entirely dedicated to cloud computing.
virtualization.info will cover that one as well. Stay tuned!

Labels: Events, VMware

Warning: the following post is not related to any product release, vendors alliances, or any other industry news that we normally cover on virtualization.info.
It’s just a commentary on the (bad) public relation and marketing practices that are so common before the big trade show that VMworld is.

Last year VMworld 2008 broke any attendance record in the history of VMware, surpassing 14,000 attendees and over 200 vendors sponsoring and exhibiting at the event.

It was a huge exposure opportunity even for the smallest startup in the market and so all the PR firms that were involved literally overflooded with news the influencers (analysts, journalists, bloggers, independent technical evangelists, etc.) that were supposed to attend the conference or at least cover the event on their websites.

Of course this activity also implied firing the PR announcements online, bombarding every poor customer that subscribes Google News or other news alert systems for specific keywords about virtualization.

This is a common practice before a big trade show, but it doesn’t mean that it is a good one.

What happened last year is that both most influencers and some customers had the “honor” to receive at least 200 news announcements.
In some cases the vendors had the smart idea to send out one announcement for every single product that was updated in their portfolio, and because the rule that more is better still applies in the IT industry, some vendors released two, three, even four news at the same time.

All of this mess happened during the show, while the news recipients were actually busy attending sessions, visiting booths, doing networking, etc. Everything but reading 200+ emails.

Now the question is: who the hell in the world would has time to pay attention to so many announcements at the same time during the live trade show?
Each one should require a careful analysis considering we are talking about enterprise products that have a major impact on the company productivity. Definitively not something that can be read and digested in two minutes, in-between breakout sessions.

Of course these press announcements are also read by the many that didn’t attend the show, but one of the main purposes to release them during the show is to attract the people on-site to the vendors’ booths.
Quite the opposite, such massive amount of information would scare away even the bravest reader because it requires hours just to separate the concrete announcements from the meaningless hype.

In fact, after a long analysis, an astonishing fact emerged: at least 30% of the VMworld announcements released by exhibitors, were about product upgrades that would become available in one month, one quarter or even the next year.
In other words the vendors put a huge effort to announce something during the event that they couldn’t sell at all during the event.

This is SPAM, and, whatever the PR and marketing department believe about the topic, it hurts the vendor’s image.

So what’s happening this year, one week before the VMworld 2009?

Somebody must have recognized the fault of this approach and has announced its upcoming new products one or two weeks before the event takes place.

Customers and influencers had time to review with calm the new things that will be available on the exhibit floor, and will certainly visit the booths with a more clear idea of what they want to see.

Unfortunately the large majority of the market vendors still believe that flooding the inboxes during the event is a good idea, so this week still is the calm before the tempest.

As every year, virtualization.info will report on the VMworld news after a careful analysis so, dear readers, don’t worry too much about the virtualization SPAM coming your way.
We’ll provide a meaningful digest as we did earlier this year, last year, and the year before that one.

Before that, anyway, we’ll provide the live coverage of the event keynotes and any major announcement that VMware will make during the conference.

Thanks for staying with us.

Labels: Events, VMware

Disclosure: virtualization.info runs its own independent conference about virtualization technologies called Virtualization Congress.
The first edition was arranged in US in May 2009 and was co-hosted with the Citrix Synergy 2009 conference. Even if the Citrix event sponsorship didn’t influence by any mean the agenda of the Virtualization Congress, the sessions’ contents or the speakers line-up, it is still true that Citrix is a competitor of VMware and that the Virtualization Congress may be mistakenly perceived as a very humble attempt to compete with VMworld.

At the end of May Brian Madden highlighted how the imminent edition of VMware’s main conference, VMworld 2009, has some unprecedented, severe restrictions for exhibitors (as many of them are direct competitors).

Specifically, the VMworld exhibitors are not allowed to market or demonstrate products that overlap with or replace VMware offering.
Additionally, all non-VMware partners (read “competitors”) can’t have a booth larger than 10x10ft (virtualization.info received a confirmation about this from one of the event sponsors). 
Last but not least, the exhibitor employees must remain in the boundaries of their booths.

Now Citrix is unveiling an additional limitation:

Exhibitor agrees that it may not use any Organizer event to leverage or promote any other event in which Exhibitor is a sponsor or participant, and therefore agrees that it may not, during the period from two days before until two days after the Event, conduct, promote, endorse, or sponsor any functions, classes, seminars, exhibits, or similar marketing activities within 50 miles of any event similar to the Event that is the subject of this agreement, other than Exhibitor's participation in the Event under this Agreement.

The agreement is so restrictive that it may easily include also all the parallel night parties that vendors arrange at the hotels surrounding the conference center before, during and after the official VMware marketing activities.

Microsoft found a creative solution to circumvent the new cage: advertise the presence of its best resources in sessions and restaurants around the conference center way before the VMworld takes place :)

It’s so ironic that the VMworld tagline this year is Hello Freedom.

Labels: Events, VMware

The rumors that circulated for months are now officially confirmed: VMware postpones the VMworld Europe from Q1 to Q4, just one month after the North America main conference.

This means at least three things:

• The Europeans that planned to go to the VMworld 2010 instead of the imminent VMworld 2009 in San Francisco to limit the travel expenses will have to wait an entire year instead of just few months.
• All the exhibiting vendors will have to build two conference teams to manage the two VMworld logistics with just one month of delay from each other.
  The biggest companies are perfectly ready to do so but the smallest VMware partners may have issues.
• Some customers that plan to attend both events won’t be able to do so because the quarter budget probably doesn’t allow to do so.

The early feedbacks expressed by well-known members of the virtualization community are not exactly positive: here, here and here.
Anyway VMware may have a few reasons to do so:

• Reduce the total amount of attendees for the North America conference
  Last year VMworld 08 scored over 14,000 attendees. Worldwide crisis aside, if this trend continues to grow the profit will certainly increase but also the logistic issues.
  The company may want to rebalance the attendees across the regions and simplify the event management.
• Give more relevance to the European conference
  It’s not a secret that VMware marks the North American event as its flagship conference. 
  European attendees prefer to go there because everybody does the same, so they get more networking opportunities, prime-time speakers and fresh announcements.
• Disturb the Microsoft conference business
  In Q4 Microsoft arranges its TechEd Europe conference, and while the audience is only partially overlapping with VMworld, those attendees are extremely interesting to VMware.
  So far Microsoft didn’t dedicate much TechEd space to virtualization and it certainly doesn’t have a dedicated virtualization conference.
  Virtualization still is one of the main priorities in many European companies and a system administrator with budget for a single event in Q4 may end up choosing VMworld over TechEd.

VMware has a VMworld fan page on Facebook. It may be worth to express some feedbacks there.

Labels: Events, VMware

The Xen.org community and Citrix are arranging an interesting event for late June in Berlin called Xen Direction Europe 2009.

Compared to the well-known Xen Summits, this seems easier to understand for somebody that is not a Xen hacker (read: it contains more marketing material) but no less interesting as the agenda includes some presentations that are probably worth the visit like:

• Virtualization - it's not just for servers anymore Intel
• Highly available virtual infrastructures based on Xen Lufthansa Systems
• HXEN: Hosted Xen Hypervisor Project Citrix

Of course the last one is especially interesting as it will cover the progress of the new hosted VMM architecture that will power a Citrix product called XenWorkstation, at least accordingly to the virtualization.info sources.

One session promises to be very funny (underline is ours):
Virtualization of mission-critical deployments Oracle with Xen: Oracle users choose Oracle VM
Like the Oracle users have a real chance.

Labels: Citrix, Events, Xen

Disclosure: virtualization.info runs its own independent conference about virtualization technologies called Virtualization Congress.
The first edition was arranged in US in May 2009 and was co-hosted with the Citrix Synergy 2009 conference. Even if the Citrix event sponsorship didn’t influence by any mean the agenda of the Virtualization Congress, the sessions’ contents or the speakers line-up, it is still true that Citrix is a competitor of VMware and that the Virtualization Congress may be mistakenly perceived as a very humble attempt to compete with the VMworld.

For the last few years VMware sold its premiere event VMworld as an independent industry conference about virtualization technologies, where even its competitors are welcome to exhibit and speak on stage.

Nobody really knows if and how much VMware really treats its competitors: the company may censor part of the sessions’ contents, it may place their booths on less prominent position on the exhibit floor, it may restrict the access to the highest level of sponsorship, etc.
If VMware does anything of this it doesn’t really matter: VMworld is so successful (last year it scored over 14,000 attendees) that competitors like Microsoft and Citrix simply can’t afford to miss it, and every year are among the first to sign the sponsorship contract.
And the fact that the entire eco-system exhibits at VMworld validates VMware as the industry leader in the virtualization market.

Today Brian Madden suggested that this state of things may change very soon, as VMware is about to transform the VMworld into a much more restricted conference:

…VMware has modified the language of their sponsor and exhibitor agreement to specifically ban vendors from marketing or demonstrating products that compete with VMware’s offerings.

From the agreement:

Sponsors and exhibitors must market or demonstrate products on the exhibition floor and in the sessions which are complementary to VMware products and technologies. Complementary products and services are defined as products/services that do not overlap/substitute with VMware's products/capabilities, and help expand the reach and solution scope of VMware's capabilities solely as deemed by VMware…

In a few hours this excerpt generated some outraged reactions in the community.
The idea that VMware deceived its own principles seems unacceptable.

Additionally, considering that VMware now competes with pretty much everybody in the virtualization market, it’s unlikely that the company would throw out of the window all the money that its competitors would spend to be at VMworld. 

VMware promptly answered and clarified that competition is still welcome at VMworld 2009:

…Just to be clear, the exhibitor sponsorship contract we are using is standard across the industry. Nothing out of the ordinary or meant to limit the value of VMworld.
As you'd expect, Microsoft and Citrix have already signed up and will of course be participating in the conference this year, as well as hundreds of other companies.
We encourage companies to exhibit and participate that compete with us in one fashion, but complement us in others…

Update: After the official answer that VMware published online, Brian Madden further investigated and provide additional, concerning details that seem to not match with the reassuring statements the company just provided:

…What VMware did NOT disclose is that both Citrix and Microsoft are being confined to 10-foot by 10-foot booths this year, even though they both asked for larger ones. VMware will not accept their money for larger booths and is denying them the space. The larger booths, it turns out, are only available to VMware TAP partners, with all non-partners limited to the 10x10 booths.

…

The best part is that a provision in the sponsor agreement says that (1) exhibitor employees must remain in the boundaries of their booths, and (2) no crowds watching demos are allowed to spill out of the booth into the common traffic areas, and if they do, VMware reserves the right to “resolve the situation.” (I am absolutely not making that up…

While this may be still an industry standard sponsorship agreement (as VMware claimed above), it certainly sounds very different from what the audience used to see in the previous years at VMworld.

Labels: Events, VMware

Tomorrow will be the last day of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress and we have a lot of great sessions and top notch speakers to present.

Here’s the breakout sessions and the panel that you’ll see tomorrow here at the MGM Grand:

9.00am - 9.50am

• Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren't Telling You [VC103]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Richard Jones, Service Director, Data Center Strategies, Burton Group
• The Real Cost of VDI [VC112]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Brian Madden, Independent Analyst, Brianmadden.com

10.00am - 10.50am

• Simplifying Virtualization Management Using New Industry Standards [VC110]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Winston Bumpus, President, DMTF
• Lessons from the Real World: Storage in Virtualized Environments [VC104]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Scott Lowe, National Technical Lead, ePlus Technology

11.00am - 11.50am

• My Cloud or Yours? The importance of standards-based virtual infrastructure management [VC111]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Abolfazl Sirjani, Co-chair, Virtualization Management Committee, DMTF
• Virtual Building Blocks: A Modular Approach to a Comprehensive Solution [VC108]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Jason M. Langone, Director of Virtualization Services, Infinite Group

1.00pm - 1.50pm

• Building the Datacenter of the Future [VC204]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer of Datacenter and Cloud Architecture, VMware
• Virtualization Technologies and the Manageability Challenge [VC205]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Brian Duckering, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Endpoint Virtualization, Symantec

5.00pm - 5.50pm

• Panel: The Future of Virtualization [VC303]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Brian Duckering, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Endpoint Virtualization, Symantec
  Richard Jones, Service Director, Data Center Strategies, Burton Group
  Simon Crosby, CTO, Citrix
  Tim Wegner, Vice President, Product Dev, High Availability Solutions, Stratus Technologies
  Alessandro Perilli, Founder, virtualization.info (moderator)

A big thanks goes to our sponsors that made the Virtualization Congress possible: eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, HP, Microsoft, Symantec, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, VMware and of course Citrix.

Labels: Announcements, Events

The first day of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress is just ended and so we are free to focus on what will come next here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Here’s the breakout sessions and the panel that we’’ll have tomorrow, after the Citrix Synergy keynote:

11.30am - 12.20am

• Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro: The Complexity and Insecurity of the Cloud [VC105]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Christofer Hoff
• Storage considerations for Virtual Desktop Deployments [VC203]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Dave Glatfelter, Product Alliance Manager, HP

2.00pm - 2.50pm

• Virtualization Startups Launch [VC401]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Geoff Hayward, President and CEO, Data Gardens

3.00pm - 3.50pm

• Hypervisor management with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 [VC202]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Edwin Yuen, Technical Product Manager, Integrated Virtualization Strategy, Microsoft
• Automating Virtual Infrastructures With PowerShell [VC101]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Cody Bunch, Virtualization Engineer, Rackspace
  Patrick Ancillotti, Virtualization Engineer, Rackspace

4.00pm - 4.50pm

• Best Practices for Designing and Implementing Large Scale Virtualization Projects [VC102]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Ron Oglesby, Practice Executive, Virtualization, Dell
• Preventable Disasters - How Come Many Virtualization Users Never Think Availability? [VC201]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Tim Wegner, Vice President, Product Dev, High Availability Solutions, Stratus Technologies
  Daniel Kusnetzky, Principal Analyst, KG LLC

5.00pm - 5.50pm

• Panel: Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds) [VC302]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Christofer Hoff
  Dave Shackleford, Chief Security Officer, Configuresoft
  Michael Berman, CTO, Catbird
  Alessandro Perilli, Founder, virtualization.info (moderator)

Be sure to check the rest of the agenda to see the other sessions and panel that will take place on May 7.

A big thanks goes to our sponsors that made the Virtualization Congress possible: eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, HP, Microsoft, Symantec, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, VMware and of course Citrix.

Labels: Announcements, Events

The virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress will begin in just one day here at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Here’s the breakout sessions and the panel that we’’ll have tomorrow, after the Citrix Synergy keynote:

2.30pm - 3.20pm

• Project Virtual Reality Check [VC106]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Ruben Spruijt, Solutions Architect and CTO, PQR
  Jeroen van de Kamp, Enterprise Architect and CTO, Login Consultants
• Building Purpose-Driven Applications for Embedded Virtualization [VC206]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Debasish Biswas, VP of HyperSpace/HyperCore, Phoenix Technologies

3.30pm - 4.20pm

• Yes Automation Does Make Life Better [VC109]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Stephen Beaver, Virtualization Evangelist, Tripwire
• Virtual Infrastructure Management: Challenges and Best Practices [VC107]
  Premier Ballroom 319
  Gary Lamb, Senior Director, Data Center Virtualization, INX

4.30pm - 5.20pm

• Panel: I was there when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream [VC301]
  Grand Ballroom 112-114
  Alex Vasilevsky, CTO, Virtual Computer
  David Greschler, Director, Virtualization Strategy, Microsoft
  Dr. Gaurav Banga, CTO, Phoenix Technologies
  Ian Pratt, Chairman, Xen.org
  Alessandro Perilli, Founder, virtualization.info (moderator)

Be sure to check the rest of the agenda to see the other sessions and panel that will take place on May 6 and 7.

A big thanks goes to our sponsors that made the Virtualization Congress possible: eG Innovations, IGEL Technology, HP, Microsoft, Symantec, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, VMware and of course Citrix.

Labels: Announcements, Events

As we said in the previous post the Speakers, the Agenda and the Panels, the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress will happen in just one week in Las Vegas, co-located with the Citrix Synergy 2009 at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino.

As some readers may remember, the conference program will include a particular general session on May 6.
During this slot we’ll present on stage up to six early stage start-ups that just came out of stealth mode or that just released their first product on the market.

Following the successful approaches used by Demo and TechCrunch conferences, we asked these companies to briefly present on stage their brand and then show the juice technologies they are about to offer.
For the attendees, it’s a great opportunity to see what will come out in the coming months and to reconsider their virtualization strategy accordingly.

Today it’s a great pleasure for me to announce that Data Gardens will launch and present on stage its first product for this first edition of the Virtualization Congress: Syntropy.

DataGardens changes the way businesses provide IT services across multi-site data center environments. Its products reduce the cost of IT provisioning and administration, while increasing productivity, utilization, and resiliency. DataGardens software systems extend conventional virtualization services including virtual machine migration, high availability, and load balancing, so they can be leveraged across multiple distributed sites. This unique capability enables DataGardens to offer solutions for remote IT provisioning, multi-site resource sharing, business continuity, and consolidated multi-site backup.

If you didn’t check the agenda it’s definitively time to do it and book a last minute flight to join us there.
(and just in case you need some help to justify the trip, here’s a toolkit ready for you)

See you in a week!

Labels: Announcements, Data Gardens, Events

Here we go. In just one week we’ll have the first edition of the virtualization.info’s Virtualization Congress in Las Vegas, at the MGM Hotel, in co-location with the Citrix Synergy 2009.

I think we are safe to say that the list of speakers we lined up for the event is remarkable.

Some of the biggest and most respected names in the virtualization community will speak on stage about planning, designing, implementing and maintaining virtual infrastructures.

The Virtualization Congress line-up includes professionals like:

• Brian Madden (one of the most accredited expert worldwide in desktop and presentation virtualization)
• Christofer Hoff (the leading, independent voice about security in virtualization and top virtualization blogger in 2008 for virtualization.info)
• Mike DiPetrillo (the reckless and straight-forward unofficial voice of VMware, another top virtualization blogger in 2008 for virtualization.info)
• Richard Jones (a top analyst from one of the most concrete firms tracking the virtualization space today, the Burton Group)
• Ron Oglesby (author of the best-seller book VMware Infrastructure 3 Advanced Technical Design Guide)
• Ruben Spruijt (one of the most respected voices in the application virtualization market, thanks to his independent comparisons about features and performance of the leading products in this space)
• Scott Lowe (top virtualization blogger of 2008 for virtualization.info and author of the upcoming Mastering VMware vSphere 4.0)
• Stephen Beaver (author of several books about virtualization since 2005, one of the restless moderators at the VMware VMTN forums)

With such top-notch speakers it’s easy to guess that the expectations for the agenda are probably very high. Hopefully we’ll not disappoint you with sessions like:

• Best Practices for Designing and Implementing Large Scale Virtualization Projects [VC102]
• Hypervisor Competitive Differences: What the Vendors Aren't Telling You [VC103]
• Lessons from the Real World: Storage in Virtualized Environments [VC104]
• Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro: The Complexity and Insecurity of the Cloud [VC105]
• My Cloud or Yours? The importance of standards-based virtual infrastructure management [VC111]
• Storage Considerations for Virtual Desktop Deployments [VC203]
• The Real Cost of VDI [VC112]
• Virtual Infrastructure Management: Challenges and Best Practices [VC107]

And just to be sure that there’s will be some fireworks at the end of each conference day, we have three panels with bright and competitive minds moderated by an uncomfortable host: me, Alessandro Perilli.

• I was there when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream [VC301]
  Panelists: Ian Pratt (Chairman at Xen.org), Dr. Gaurav Banga (CTO at Phoenix Technologies), Alex Vasilevsky (CTO at Virtual Computer) and David Greschler (Director of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft).
• Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds) [VC302]
  Panelists: Christofer Hoff, Michael Berman (CTO at Catbird) and Dave Schackleford (CSO at Configuresoft).
• The Future of Virtualization - VC303
  Panelists: Richard Jones, Simon Crosby (CTO at Citrix), Brian Duckering (Sr. Marketing Manager at Symantec and Tim Wegner (VP at Stratus Technologies).

See you in a week in Las Vegas!

Labels: Announcements, Events

Just 33 days are left before the Virtualization Congress 2009 takes place at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

For the ones that don’t know it the Virtualization Congress is an independently developed conference by virtualization.info but this year it will run side by side with the Citrix iForum, the Geek Speak Live! and the Network World Live, all together under the umbrella of the Citrix Synergy brand.
So if you like our agenda and you want also to see/try some of the technologies that Citrix is releasing/developing (XenServer for free, Essentials for Hyper-V, Project Independence, the ICA Receiver for the iPhone just to name a few) this may be a great opportunity.

We already offer a bundled ticket to let you attend all of the four events at a discounted price but we’d like to do some more today. Let’s call it a stimulus package to travel.

(of course this is not an April Fool’s prank)

We’ll select 40 people from our event system that registered by 9pm PST on April 15 and give them the following:

• 5 people will get free airfare on round trip domestic or international airfare to the conference
• 10 people will get a 4-night hotel stay at the MGM Grand during the conference
• 25 people will get a $100 room credit for on site expenses

(please see Terms and Conditions for eligibility)

The winners will be notified via email no later than April 20.
The email will provide instructions on how to book the travel using our event system.

To win you have to register.

Labels: Announcements, Events

For the ones that missed the opportunity to attend the second edition of VMworld Europe, virtualization.info published a live coverage of the opening keynotes (Day 1 - Paul Maritz / Day 2 - Dr. Stephen Herrod) and a final wrap-up.

Of course this is definitively not enough. Luckily VMware is filling the gap: two weeks ago it published an impressive number of videos (including the recordings of the keynotes above and a precious, unannounced Q&A session with the company executives).

This week it’s the turn of the breakout sessions, available in slides and videos here after a free registration after paying a $699 yearly subscription.

Among the others virtualization.info recommends to watch the following:

• AP03 Avoiding Pitfalls: The Hidden Costs of Managing your VMware Infrastructure
• AP12 Managing Application Performance with vCenter AppSpeed
• DC01 An Introduction to VMware vCenter Orchestrator
• DC07 What's New in vCenter Server
• DC08 vCenter Server for Linux
• DC15 Hypervisor Competitive Differences: Beyond the Data Sheet 
  (more about this work from the Burton Group at the beginning of April)
• DC18 Introduction to VMware vCenter ConfigControl
• DC25 VMware vCenter Data Recovery: Technical Overview
• DC35 How VMware Uses Virtualization
• DV03 Virtualization on mobile phones? Why do I need that?
• DV06 Desktop Disaster Recover with View and SRM
• TA03 An Introduction to VMware vCenter Chargeback
• TA20 Cisco Nexus 1000V Technical Preview
• TA22 Technology Preview: vCenter CapacityIQ
• TP03 Engineering Developments enabling the Virtual Datacenter - VMware, Cisco and EMC

Labels: Events, VMware

No matter if the stage is in US or in Europe, the new VMware CEO Paul Maritz has the same message for his audience: VMware believes in cloud computing and believes that its virtualization technology is the only way to go there.
So if you already read the VMworld 2008 wrap-up that virtualization.info published at the end of September, you already know pretty much everything.

Anyway, compared to his US keynote, the European version of VMware message sounded a little more concrete, articulated and aggressive.
Paul Maritz already spent six months at VMware and seems now ready to take some risks:

• Google doesn’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware
• Even for Microsoft it’s not trivial to match our level of investment in the virtualization space

Like for VMworld 2008, the second day keynote, performed by the always great Dr. Stephen Herrod (CTO and SVP of R&D), reaffirmed the omnidirectional expansion of VMware.
During his keynote Herrod mentioned almost every new product that will come with vSphere 4.0.
The one-hour long overview painted the company bigger than ever, ready to slam its competitors with a massive product portfolio.
Inside the corporate data center or across solution provider clouds, on mobile phones or business laptops, this company wants to be there.
And it’s doing everything possible to provide all the tools that a customer may ever need so that he doesn’t desire to go back to the physical world.
Because of this, the overall impression is that VMware is a juggernaut that will morph, sooner or later, into the fifth biggest infrastructure management company.

As expected, nobody discussed the EMC/VMware/Cisco merge that is so much rumored.
If Cisco has something to announce, it wants the biggest stage it can have.

Another topic that VMware continues to not discuss is its interest for the SMB market.
When the company executives discuss, for instance, about long-distance VMotion as an area where VMware is actively researching, it seems pretty clear where the focus is.
And of course this major hole in the VMware strategy allowed customers and partners to fervently discuss the announcement of XenServer for free.
Citrix may give away its enterprise-class hypervisor with VMs live migration, resource pools and more, but most customers are waiting for a rich ecosystem around it.
And the partners are carefully evaluating what to do: on one side VMware continues to eat its partners (the just announced vCenter Server Heartbeat is a good example), on the other side if Citrix is really going to increase its market share with this move it may open new profit opportunities that cannot be passed.

A last, interesting thing to note is how many stealth startups were present at the conference: the economy may be awful, the venture capitalists may be more cautious than ever, but the virtualization industry continues to be the most prolific segment of the IT these days.
In the next months a new wave of companies will come out, cooperating and competing with VMware.

If you missed VMworld Europe you may want to see the tens of videos that are available online here:

• http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/agenda/keynotes/
• http://www.vmworldeurope.com/videos
• http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/networking/videos/

Labels: Events, VMware

VMworld Europe 2009, a great event which has just ended, there is another one is about to start: the virtualization.info’s independent conference Virtualization Congress 2009.

The event is really shaping up.
We have already published the first ten sessions that will make the agenda.
We have two stealth startups that will launch their brand and products during the Call for Startups general session.
And very soon we’ll announce the members of our three hot panels:

• I was there when Desktop Virtualization went Mainstream
• Securing the Virtual Data Center (on Earth and on Clouds)
• The Future of Virtualization

If you plan to attend the Virtualization Congress, you will also be able to attend the Citrix iForum, the Network World Live! and the Geek Speak events as the four conferences will take place at the same time in the same location.

We are offering an All-Inclusive ticket that grants access to every keynote and breakout session. And hopefully the news of XenServer for free is teasing some of you to digg more into the Citrix offering.

Please note that the Early Bird for having $400 off ends tomorrow. Go register today!

Before closing we’d like to clarify the reason behind the choice to arrange the event in Las Vegas during this tough time:

• The MGM Grand room rate is only $174 a night plus 9% tax - one of the lowest tax rates in the US
• Direct flights to Las Vegas from over 140 cities have an average airfare of $240
• The MGM Grand is only one mile from McCarren International Airport, which means an inexpensive taxi fare of only $20-$25 (one-way) and an airport shuttle fare of only $7 per person (one-way)
• For staying at the MGM Grand you get a $25 credit to use at restaurants and bars (Starbucks, Diego, Grand Buffet, Studio 54, Tabu, etc.) within the hotel

This is a table of what would cost to attend the conference in any other major convention city in US:

Labels: Announcements, Events

Yesterday the VMware CEO Paul Maritz opened the VMworld Europe 2009 conference with a more concrete keynote compared to his first one given at VMworld 2008.

Besides a formal announcement of the vSphere 4.0 and the Client Hypervisor Platform (CVP), his speech highlighted a couple of key points:

• VMware is becoming serious and aggressive in its positioning on the cloud computing market: Maritz took a bold position saying that the Google approach to cloud computing is not really scalable without virtualization
• VMware won’t let any other virtualization vendor have a competitive advantage through its current partners: Maritz invited Intel on stage to announce a partnership on client hypervisors that sounds pretty similar to the one Citrix announced just one month ago

On stage today we’ll have Stephen Herrod, the company CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D, who should provide a great amount of technical details about vSphere, vCenter Suite and some other technologies that VMware is expected to release during this 2009.

Stephen Herrod is on stage. His presentation is titled The Future of VMware Virtualization.

First of all he describes the upcoming capabilities of vSphere ESX 4:

• 8 vCPUs
• 256GB vRAM

With this virtual hardware set Herrod states that there is no more reason to not virtualize your data base.

After a quick recap of the recent VMware records in performance, he moves on the vStorage part of the strategy and mentions the upcoming capability to provide thin provisioning.

Another jump to vNetwork and the obvious mention to the upcoming vSphere 4.0 Distributed Switch and the Cisco Nexus 1000V.

Herrod moves to other features: Distributed Power Management which will be no more an experimental feature in vSphere 4.0.
He highlights how needful smart power management is in a giant computer like the ones that will make the cloud computing infrastructures of tomorrow.

Herrod moves to application availability and mentions VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) as part of the vSphere 4.0 platform.
As virtualization.info already highlighted in the past VMware FT will be a LAN-only technology, working within the data center as long as the active and passive ESX nodes can share the same backend storage.

Herrod now moves to security and mentions the VMsafe APIs, another part of vSphere 4.0.
Besides VMsafe, VMware is exposing vShield Zones, the firewall virtual appliance that the company acquired from Blue Lane Technology in October 2008.

Now the focus is on the management part, and Herrod covers the the upcoming features of vCenter Suite 4.0.

The first module he discuss is the pre-announced vCenter Server Heartbeat, a hot-standby technology OEM’d from Neverfail Group (a detailed post about this release will be published next week)

The second module Herrod mentions is vCenter Server Linked Mode, a new technology that allows to share the same object inventory across tens and hundreds of vCenter hosts.
Demo time: vCenter 4.0 is shown for the first time in public, and the Search (basic and advanced) feature of the new Linked Mode is demonstrated.

Now Herrod moves on the upcoming Host Profiles feature, which verifies and enforces the compliance of new ESX hosts configuration as soon as they are included in the vCenter inventory (Veeam is already offering since November 2008).

Time for one of the most wanted feature ever: vCenter Server for Linux.
VMware will provide it as a virtual appliance. The beta will be available later today.

Herrod now completely changes the topic, moving to vCloud APIs.
They will be released later this year, and will provide management and federation capabilities.

Herrod mentions a FAQ about vCloud: are you going to provide long-distance VMotion? (meaning the capability to perform a live migration between private or public data centers).
The answer is: it’s very complex but we are seriously investing and cooperating with partners to solve the problem.

Now Herrod briefly mentions Customizable Self-Service Portals to let the end-users interact with the cloud infrastructure (available only for vCloud partners).

Demo time: vCloud Plug-in for vCenter.
A customer using vSphere 4.0 can install the plug-in, log on the cloud service provider he has a contract with and simply drag his production virtual machine inside the cloud infrastructure that appears within the vCenter GUI.
The VM will be automatically migrated inside the cloud without further intervention.

Time to cover the last part of the VMware strategy: vClient.

As Paul Maritz said yesterday the company wants to centrally manage any kind of corporate client, including LAN and WAN clients, thick and thin clients.
To do so VMware will use Linked Clones, ThinApp, security policies (coming from ACE).

To grand great performance for LAN and WAN clients VMware is developing with Teradici the PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol.
PCoIP is going to leverage the hardware acceleration that a local client can provide.

Demo time: Google Maps is running on a quad-core workstation on the backstage. Through PCoIP the workstation is accessed and a fly around Paris is shown. The experience is incredibly smooth.

Last part of the keynote: what will come next.
Stephen Herrod talks about mobile virtualization.
In this space there are several challenges: security, persona management, home / work convergence and applications management.

Herrod mentions the previously announced VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP) and shows a prototype on stage for the first time ever.

The VMware hypervisor is running inside a Nokia N800 device, and boots a Windows CE 6.0 virtual machine side by side with a Google Android virtual machine.
Each VM takes less than 40MBs . The touchscreen capabilities of the N800, leveraged by Android, are still there.

And with this outstanding demo the keynote ends.

Labels: Events, VMware

This is the conference welcome is opened by Maurizio Carli, the former Google executive that became the new VMware General Manager of EMEA in December 2008.

He starts by saying that compared to last year (4,500 attendees) this year VMworld Europe scored 4,700 attendees despite the economical conditions (early reports were talking about only 3,000 attendees).

Just in case one of those 4,700 doesn’t know VMware, he goes on with some numbers about the company size:

• 6,300+ people worldwide, 1,300+ in EMEA
• 42% of customers choose to standardize their virtual data centers with VMware (were 25% in 2007)

Paul Maritz, the former Microsoft top executive that took the place of VMware’s founder and CEO Diane Greene in July 2008, is on stage.

Maritz starts with a breakdown of the IT budget spending, claiming an overwhelming complexity that slows down or makes fail many projects. VMware is working to transform the IT in a service through three initiatives:

• Virtual Data Center OS (VDC-OS)
• vCloud (private and public clouds along with federation across them)
• vClient (for a desktop as a Service)

So Maritz is probably going to replicate the presentation he performed at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas.

Now Maritz details how VMware realize its cloud computing vision: standardized hardware, scalable and highly available software (the VMware Infrastructure), security policies to grant compliance and a management layer that can enforce a SLA management model.
On top of this stack the existing applications will be placed, along with next generation applications designed to run and scale inside the cloud.

Then Maritz sends a message to all the other vendors out there trying to suggest a different cloud computing model: virtualization is the only viable way.
Google is clearly mentioned: they don’t realize that they scale so well only by redesigning their applications and hardware (it’s worth to remind that in 2007 Google clarified how hardware virtualization is definitively not its way).

vSphere is the official (trademark) name of the new VMware platform, which includes six building blocks:

• vCompute
  (hardware assisted virtualization and extended live migration compatibility)
• vStorage
  (for storage management and replication)
• vNetwork
  (for network management, look for Cisco here…)
• Availability
  (for data protection and clustering)
• Security
  (where VMsafe goes to innovate on firewalls, anti-virus, intrusion detection/prevention and compliance)
• Scalability
  (for dynamic resource sizing)

vCenter Suite is the official name of the new VirtualCenter platform all its upcoming new modules / add-ons, which includes nine building blocks:

• Provisioning
• Configuration
• Capacity
• Operations
• Performance
• Availability
• Self Service Portal
• Service Catalogue
• Billing / Chargeback

Maritz makes a remarkable claim at this point: starting later this year, when the first generation of vSphere platforms will be out, there will be no technical reason to not virtualize 100% of your data center.

Time to move on the vCloud initiative.

The most important point for VMware is to provide federation built on open industry standards so that the corporate private cloud can seamlessly integrate with external clouds out there.

To facilitate the growth of a cloud ecosystem based on VMware technology, vCenter Suite and vSphere are designed to make no difference between internals and externals cloud infrastructures.

The Terremark EMEA CTO is now on stage. Terremark is a well-known hosting provider that recently moved to an enterprise cloud architecture with VMware. 
He’s now showing the control panel where resource pools are assigned and managed for a specific customer and how Terremark can provision new servers to increase the assigned resources with a single click.
Through the VMware virtual infrastructure Terremark is able to grand a certain SLA and pays a penalty when they cannot meet the terms of the agreement.

Now on stage EngineYard, a solution provider that allows customers to build and host enterprise-grade Ruby-on-Rails applications inside the cloud.

Next one is IT Structures, a solution provider which offers on-demand multi-tier IT infrastructures inside the cloud.

(this showcase is definitively better than the ones we saw last year when VMware partners took a large part of the stage to push their servers or thin clients)

Maritz goes on mentioning a few other well-known names that are using VMware to deliver an enterprise cloud computing infrastructure today.

Time for the last part of the VMware strategy: vClient.
Time to provision users, not devices.

VMware wants to address all users: Maritz officially mentions a client hypervisor (CVP) side by side with the existing VDI approach.
VMware View will manage at the same time VDI thin clients and client hypervisor instances on corporate desktops and laptops.

VMware will roll-out all the vClient technologies during this 2009, including enhancements for thin clients management (HD video, Flash, 3D graphics) and the client hypervisor.

About this last point Maritz surprisingly announces a partnership with Intel.

The partnership is not surprising per se, but because just one month ago Citrix and Intel announced a major, joint initiative to develop a client hypervisor.
The Citrix-Intel partnership is not exclusive so it’s not clear if and how this second partnership with VMware overlaps.

And with this Paul Maritz closes his second keynote.
Overall the presentation was more concrete than his previous one in Las Vegas, but instead of spending more time on some additional points, like the VMware strategy for SMBs and the competition with others, Maritz is giving away no less than 30 minutes of his time to SAP.

On stage now is Dr. Worlfgan Krips, Senior Vice President of SAP Managed Services which is performing a real propaganda session.
The audience is underwhelmed and leaves in mass the keynote room after the first five minutes.
Why VMware, every year, has to give away at least 30 minutes of its precious keynote time? It’s not like the company has no topics to discuss…

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s live coverage: the VMware CTO Steve Herrod will be on stage covering all the topics discussed today by Maritz with greater technical details.

Labels: Events, VMware