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

Today is the 1st day of the full public conference, for me the keynote was a repeat of most of the partner session yesterday but with a few tweaks and customer details.

VMware always have good lead-in videos for their conferences and nice to note that Ducati are one of the many organisations that use VMware 🙂

“Virtualization is the tipping point, from the server room to the C-sute virtually anything is possible” etc. etc.

Paul says >70% of IT budget "keeping lights on" – less than 30% going into competitive advantages/new development – VMware aims to reduce this effort, enabling real IT as a service.

Paul confesses that he was blame for the proliferation of underused x86 servers at his time at Microsoft, at least he’s honest 🙂

Google does the level of cloud scale it does through set of highly specialised purpose built applications and DC systems – they could do this as they had the luxury of a green field implementation. Virtualization means encapsulation which means you can do it evolutionary way (take current apps, run them more efficiently).

Mention of Storage virtual appliances as part of vStorage that I missed yesterday, that’s interesting… hopefully something good coming from EMC on this.

vSphere/Next version of ESX will introduce no technical reason for <100% virtualization – significant performance improvements and taking advantage of VM-aware hardware, FT/HA baked-in and Open standards & Extensibility

Terramark showed a nice demo of their web UI for their vCloud platform showing oversubscription tied to billing engine to enable burst based usage

Technology makes them confident enough to implement the cloud with an official SLA with penalty clauses based on pragmatic capacity via burst/over-subscription & HA/FT.

EngineYard demo – a RoR company which supports vCloud & EC2 demo shows it controlling Terramark’s cloud via vCloud delivering “RoR as a service” and federation to multiple vCloud providers

Sungard doing DR as a service using vCloud and Logica extending LabManager and providing as a service – Lab on demand.

Announcements were made around the Client hypervisor and formal announcement of vmware partnering with Intel on client hypervisor

Management vPro

CVP – client virtualization platform

More technical details coming in Steve Herrod session tomorrow.

SAP Managed Services detailing how they are using VMware

SAP Managed Services 28k servers 8k VMs (internal services)

Data backup 340TB/day

Training & demo, QA/support biggest consumers

Moved ops to low-cost countries

Lifecycle Manager for end-end management of services.

Made some interesting comparisons for how the airline industry manages oversubscription and the IT/cloud industry.

A bit disappointed that there weren’t any big announcements or dates for vSphere (other than the public unveiling of the already leaked name) – but it can’t be far off now – will look forward to Steve Herod’s session tomorrow for the details.

New open ask the Exec team session tomorrow at 2pm – ask Paul your questions, etc.