WoodITWork.com

VMworld Day 3 started a little later than the previous days to give all attendees a little more time in bed to recover from the VMworld party last night.

The day started with the General Session with VMware CEO Paul Maritz which promised an inside look at at the forces shaping Cloud Computing and the next generation of IT. I met up with some London VMware User Group for a more relaxed breakfast watching the session on the screen.

The keynote started with Carl Eschenbach, who brought on stage three customers talking about their IT use-cases.

Ducati, the famous motorcycle manufacturing company with 1000 employees who make 40000 motorcycles a year and also have a racing arm. They have very high uptime requirements and have had zero downtime since using VMware. they use vCloud Director although didn’t explain why or in what capacity.. They have created their own private cloud for their own racing applications. They had a great quote “If you want to forget about troubles, don’t forget about VMware.”

NYSE Eurotext was up next which is a major financial company working in the capital markets. They have built what they call a community cloud which to me is a public cloud offering but specific for the financial community. They call it the capital markets cloud. It’s all about multi-tenancy and security which does sound like a good example of where vCloud Director is aimed at. They also talked about hybrid cloud and their need to move workloads between clouds.

SAP was the last customer story. SAP is a massive software company which creates large Enterprise software. they have a large infrastructure with over 25,000 VMs and 1000 ESX hosts. They have been working with VMware for many years and have a very large Lab Manager installation which they are looking at migrations to vCloud Director. They talked all about not wanting to be running datacenters but writing software so wanting to have flexibility

Paul Maritz was up next who started with the same talk he gave at VMworld Las Vegas saying how 50% of all workloads are VMs. (is that servers but not workstations? what about storage? firewalls? You have to love statistics!) He went on to share some other figures, 1 VM is deployed every 6 seconds, there are 20 million VMs, 5.5 vMotion happen per second so there are more vMotions happening around the globe than planes in the sky! There are 80 000 vSphere admins and 68000 VMware Certified Professionals.

Paul went on to talk about the history of IT and how it has led to the cloud computing evolution of today and the future. The story of the next decade will be enabling and enhancing application development. This requires taking out the operational cost out of infrastructure, giving time to focus on application development to allow the fruits of this development to be available for end-users who want to access their apps on multiple devices anywhere. End users are now expecting to have consumer level access to their applications rather than the traditional enterprise way of delivering IT.

Paul then went to map out how VMware has products as part of the Cloud Infrastructure Suite to do this and then talked about vCloud which is all about hybrid clouds and being able to move workloads to and from public and private clouds.

He then talked about application development saying most new applications will be developed by people under the age of 35. He talked about transforming Applications and Data. Modernizing application development by using Spring and vFabric, Data Fabrics with Gem/SQLFire and vFabric Data Director and enhances to Deployment and Scale with vFabric App Management and Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry is what VMware sees as the next generation, open, cross-cloud PaaS which will ensure we don’t make the mistakes with cloud computing and fall into the traps of a mainframe world which is closed.

This is the future of IT bit. My thinking is VMware will, in fact is already, moving up up the chain and be known for its PaaS with Cloud Foundry rather than concentrating at the Infrastructure Layer which we all work on now with vSphere/vCD. Makes me already feel redundant and irrelevant as I’m not an application developer!

Last up was the third part after IaaS and PaaS which is the End –User computing space with Horizon App Manager and View.

Nothing new in the keynote but its the kind of talk that that C*Os can listen to and see what’s in VMware’s crystal ball. The thing is VMware is actually doing very well to define what the future it going to look from their perspective so defining the future before its here.

Strangely we don’t get this kind of future vision stuff from Microsoft who is still very excited to talk about new operating systems which is so old news. At least VMware has a vision and wants us all along for the ride!

The keynote has been uploaded so you can see it for yourself.

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/europe/learn/generalsessions

I had planned to see a few sessions but the reality is there’s so much else to do at VMworld and I will be able to view the presentations later so only picked one today, BCO2479: Understanding VMware vSphere Stretched Clusters, Disaster Recovery and Planned Workload Mobility – Lee Dilworth and Chad Sakac.

This was an interesting session because it was actually about deciding when you would use stretched clusters and when you would use SRM. Chad and Lee went through how SRM worked and then spent a good amount of time going through how stretched clusters work and making sure you handle split brain scenarios at both the vSphere and storage layer.

Now for me the takeaway is that stretched clusters need advanced networking and storage configurations and these are not going to be cheap. You need to ensure you fully understand the technology required to implement stretched clusters. If this technological leap is too much or too expensive then SRM is technology VMware would suggest you use. If you are going to used stretched clusters, there is a new HCL for what VMware support, see the Compatibility Guide.

I then spent more time in the Solutions Exchange having a look at what’s out there.

VMworld TV had some more today.

Stand off with the Dutch vMafia

Security Solutions for vShield End Point Security

VMware Horizon Mobile will be supported by Telefónica and Verizon Wireless!

VMware’s End User Computing can change your life, just watch!

A quick look at the new vFabric Application Management Suite

A Tech Preview of vCenter Operations for View and an overview of vCenter Operations.

Swag In The Bag For The Blag!

Well, that’s pretty much the end of VMworld for me in Copenhagen. Far too much to see in far too little time, I’m looking forward to catching up on some sleep!