Comments on: Thoughts on the VMworld Day 2 Keynote

By: Welcome to vSphere-land! » Day 3 - Wednesday Links

Welcome to vSphere-land! » Day 3 - Wednesday Links — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:28:11 +0000

[...] 2, keynote by Steve Herrod (Virtualization.com) Live from VMworld 2009: Day 2 (Virtualization.info) Thoughts on the VMworld Day 2 Keynote (Chris Wolf) VMworld 2009 – Day 2: Keynote Steve Herrod (RTFM Education) VMworld ‘09 Wednesday Keynote [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:11:56 +0000

Great input, Greg. Thanks for passing this along. Unfortunately I did not have any time for the hands on labs at the show.

By: latoga

latoga — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:28:25 +0000

Chris,

RE: you bullet item on the VMworld Data Center work loads…

My understanding was that the data center at VMworld was running all the hands on labs. If you made it over to the Marriott, the were a couple hundred workstations for hands on labs (as well as the walk in lab in Moscone). Each lab attendee had access to multiple ESX hosts and VMs based upon the lab.

So that would make the VMworld data center a larger private lab cloud since the labs were being brought up and torn down after each session. Which means the workloads were varied based upon what labs were running.

By: Omer Ansari

Omer Ansari — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:25:32 +0000

Good to know Chris. Thank you!

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:10:40 +0000

Hi Omer,

Unfortunately I can’t comment on feature specifics or product timelines, as both would violate my NDA with VMware. At the vSphere launch this spring, I brought up the I/O issue and Steve Herrod said to me “You’re right. We should be dinged for that.” So to me it wasn’t a surprise to hear Steve talking about it on stage last week. I’ve also talked to the product managers in VMware’s management space and they also agreed with my feedback on greater intelligence around security integration. VMware realizes that these points are important for many enterprises, and I expect them to be in their products sooner rather than later. Still, we’re talking about complex elements of virtual infrastructure management, so it will take time. I have an idea of when that time will be, but am not comfortable speculating on it due to the terms of my NDA with VMware. I/O metrics for dynamic VM load balancing are in XenServer 5.5. Evaluating XenServer would give you a good idea of the technology’s current state.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:01:54 +0000

Thanks for the feedback, Paul. I’ll follow-up with you via email on your first question. Regarding Cisco, they do have an uphill battle. Take a typical HP shop, for example. Introducing UCS means that they’ll have to take on additional TCO for device management, being that they’ll need separate tools for the HP and Cisco environments (assuming they are already using OV). This has been a barrier with some Burton Group clients. Still, others are very intrigued. With many enterprises working to modularize hardware refresh cycles, an opportunity exists for Cisco. Still, I don’t expect vendors like HP and IBM to help out with device management for the sake of cannibalizing their own hardware sales. Cisco will get some market share. They have a good platform and they’ll win some deals. Also, they have done well with leading with a message that talks to the server groups (instead of the network team). In many shops, the networking team is already sold, but it’s the server guys that need to be won over. You’re right that this will play out over several years. It will get more interesting once Cisco adds rack mount servers to their lineup.

By: Omer Ansari

Omer Ansari — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:51:06 +0000

Thanks for posting these updates Chris.
You stated:
“To support tier 1 application dynamic load balancing, storage and network I/O must be included in the DRS VM placement calculations. It’s good to see that VMware is heading in that direction. DRS will also need to evaluate non-performance metrics such as vShield Zone membership as part of the VM placement metric (no word on this yet).”

Can you expand specifically what the new modifications to DRS/HA will be, and tell us when these updates to vSphere will come out?

Omer

By: VMworld 2009 (San Francisco) – Linkage » Yellow Bricks

VMworld 2009 (San Francisco) – Linkage » Yellow Bricks — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 20:01:42 +0000

[...] Chris Wolf – Thoughts on the VMworld Keynote Day 2 [...]

By: VMworld 2009 Day 2 Keynote - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:48:05 +0000

[...] VMworld Keynote – Day 2 Live blogging the VMworld 2009 Day 2 “technical” keynote Live from VMworld 2009: Day 2 Thoughts on the VMworld Day 2 Keynote [...]

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 10:04:13 +0000

Hey Chris, your session on Thursday was brilliant and I’d love to somehow get you in front of some of my Australian and South African clients. It was as entertaining as it was interesting. Hey, slightly at a tangent but I find myself perplexed by Cisco’s Swiss army knife approach with their UCS. Seems a mighty bold move. Asked a few folks at the conference whether they’d seriously consider the approach for their next upgrade. Most said the Cisco brand represented ‘trust’ for them (on the upside) but ‘expensive’ (on the downside) and couldn’t really see Cisco winning this one for a long time. I guess they did it in the voice world and dethroned the PBX guys so I guess you never know?