Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

So things have kicked off here in Cannes for VMware partners of which my employer is one, the first session is the keynote/general session – covering general product announcements, some sales woop-de-woop and details of upcoming partner programmes.

Despite the “current economic climate” (a phrase which has been used at least 100 times already today, and it’s only 11am) there VMware are still seeing a strong demand for product and services and the VMworld event itself, this isn’t surprising (to me anyway) as I’ve long seen VMware’s key message as “do more, with less” which is what you need if you are tightening the corporate belt.

There are 1500 partners here today for partner day and they are expecting 4,600 delegates for the full conference which starts tomorrow; it’s already pretty heaving on the 1st floor balcony and I think tomorrow might be pretty crammed – best try to get to sessions early.

I’m not sure what happened but when I signed up for partner day originally there was a full-on technical track for today, which was my main reason for attending – this seems to have vanished without a trace and the remaining sessions are a mix of sales/business/competitive and partner sessions with what look to be some high-level tech session later today – this is a bit disappointing and I’ve not seen anything in the run up to say this was going to be the case, ah well I’m sure there will be some useful information anyway.

There was some interesting positioning of virtualization which I’ve not seen spelled out before – positioning it as enabling the “software mainframe”, building a large, reliable compute resource but using industry standard building blocks, reducing proprietaryness (new word I have invented) like you have with traditional mainframes (ICL, IBM, etc.) through standardisation of constituent parts (no single vendor tie-in).

in the keynote Paul outlined VMware’s key initiatives going forward;

1. VDC-OS – foundation for the cloud; internal now, enabling…
2. vCloud –
   • Service Provider targeted,
   • build clouds using VDC-OS tech
   • allows eventual federation
   • reduce proprietaryness (choice)
   • VMware Working with standards bodies
3. Desktop as a service (DaaS) – programme started with VMware View and ThinApp products, 2009 full rollout of full suite
• People stay, devices come and go
• Current model is device centric, move to user-centric (provision users not PCs.
• Abstract the underlying plumbing through virtualization
• Currently centralised / server hosted only Thin-Client/VDI
• Mobile
• Client hypervisor – make seamless replication of environment delivery and data between server based and local and sync data back
• VMware view – DaaS thin & thick clients with central mgmt.
• take advantage of de-duplication
• currently PCoIP (PC over IP – remote desktop) – blade PCs etc
• Trickle data changes back to cloud (less device dependency)
• possibly enable BYOPC (buy your own PC from say PC world, you get the choice, IT provide a sandboxed environment for you to work in
• Isolation through virtualization from local OS
• VMware would like you to install Win7 to the cloud (easy upgrades, less hardware dependencies, upgrade of lot of distributed PC hardware = resource intensive
• users & IT are Slaves to pieces of hardware.

Interesting  item – Terraditchi (spelling?) is a hardware device that does WAN acceleration for remote desktop sessions  they are a VMware partner and are collaborating to move the implementation entirely into software –less proprietary/dedicated hardware.

Cloud is great but as I’ve talked about before its going to take time (or will never happen) for everyone moves everything to the cloud, there will always be a hybrid internal/external cloud VMware are floating the term "virtual private cloud" through vCloud to describe a federation & choice between internal & various service providers.

this allows this sort of move to be done in an evolutionary way, rather than revolutionary (i.e throw it what you have and rebuild) – virtualization can deliver benefit now (cost saving/consolidation/DR) and position you for a strategic move to the cloud in future through the federation/standardisation from vCloud/VDC-OS.

VMware also officially using/announcing the vSphere; light on details – hope there will be a big announcement tomorrow – but he did say shipping this year.

2 (high-level) product announcements today

vCenter server heartbeat SLA monitoring and HA combined (app awareness and response time and DRS/HA)

vShield zones (leveraging vSafe API to delivery security & compliance products).

VMware are making big moves into the desktop space with the View suite and there could be a good green story here, VMware’s statistics show 684M desktop PCs in the world now

By my very quick workings are @85w each = 58 billion watts )58Million KW of energy) if a thin client + share  of a central VDI datacentre  is 20w that’s a huge energy saving

With the introduction of the client-side hypervisor they mention they have the possibility to solve the problems of this scenario for offline/mobile use.

Lastly, VMware Partner University is announced, accessible via Partner central All VMware technical and sales training materials online. It has been Localised to several language and is Role based (sales/pre/post) and solution specific (VI/VDI/BC)