virtualization humor

VMworld is packed! Good God … who’s manning the servers?

When you walk up to the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas this week, it is obvious something big is happening, and it sure as hell isn’t me winning the jackpot on those God forsaken slot machines.

When VMware Inc. announced there would be 14,000 people attending VMworld 2008 this week, they weren’t blowing smoke. Last year’s show in San Francisco held about 10,000 attendees and that seemed like a lot. Apparently, that was just the beginning.

The volume of IT administrators who are here in Vegas this week makes me wonder in a slight panic, who is manning all of the servers?

It reminds me of an episode of the cartoon American Dad, where the main character, a CIA agent named Stan Smith, storms into a Sci-Fi convention looking for someone and sees a place swarming with stereotypical techie types. “Good God, who is manning the Internet?,” he gasped.

Joking aside, the not-subtle point I am trying to make is that the huge turnout at VMworld 2008 signals how popular virtualization is today, reminiscent of the earlier days of Linux when LinuxWorld was a huge show.

Though the LinuxWorld organizers claimed there were 10,000 people at the show in San Francisco last month, it didn’t seem that way. “When Linux was an emerging technology that people were excited about, those LinuxWorld shows were like [VMworld] is today,” said AMD’s commercial products director Margaret Lewis. “But now Linux is mainstream, so the excitement is gone.”

She said AMD didn’t set up a booth at the LinuxWorld show floor this year because turnout the previous year was low. And by the way, AMD has a monster booth set up at VMworld this year.

Which means that when virtualization becomes mainstream, VMworld will no longer be “the place to be.” Maybe VMware 2015 will be held at a small conference center in a small state, like Rhode Island (which is great, by the way).

But for now, VMworld Las Vegas is it.

Microsoft to ship Hyper-V … finally

Word has it that Microsoft is finally getting it together and releasing Hyper-V, putting the tech world on notice that it is now safe to exhale.

Phew, we were all about to turn blue.

Has someone ever told you a story about some aging celebrity, and your first thought is, “Wait, you mean they’re not dead yet?’ I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I read that Hyper-V was coming out, I thought, ‘What do you mean, it’s being released? I thought that already happened!”

My mistake, I had confused the release with another important Microsoft — ahem, milestone — in March: the Hyper-V release candidate (RC).

Excuse me for being flip, but I was bored to tears by this whole Viridian-cum-Hyper-V saga long ago. Two years ago, when I first started covering virtualization, the big news was that Microsoft had made Virtual Server 2005 available for free. Immediately thereafter, VMware returned the volley and made its hosted virtualization platform VMware Server free too, eliminating any real advantage Virtual Server 2005 may have had over the better-established GSX. So much for that story line.

Since then, we’ve lived through name changes, (Viridian to Hyper-V), release candidates, pricing announcements (why $28 dollars, why not $25? $29.99?), delays (will Microsoft meet its 180-days-after-Longhorn deadline? Will it beat it?), feature cuts, feature clarifications (“Quick migration” anyone?), and countless press articles with VMware cast as David to Microsoft’s Goliath — or is it the other way around?

Everything except an actually shipping, nonbeta, nonrelease candidate product.

Until now.

As a journalist, I’m just happy that the wait is over, and we can all stop walking around on tenterhooks, expected to drop everything every time Microsoft comes knocking at our inbox with some virtualization-related announcement that may or may not pertain to the release of Hyper-V.

Now we can all get on with our job of waiting for Microsoft to update us on the status of all the product features that it excised from Hyper-V last year: quick migration, hot add of system resources, increased numbers of CPUs, etc. What a relief!

Happy new version, VMware!

Warning: The following blog post contains biting sacarsm and marginally humorous commentary that may offend sensitive VMware executives. Reader discretion is advised.

An open letter to VMware:

Hey VMware, it’s me again. I know you’re probably still mad at me for last week. Well, I’m going out on a very public limb here to apologize for something that I did.

I’m sorry that I forgot your version.

Yes, you let everyone know that your version was coming up, but I forgot to create a calendar reminder for it and I just plain forgot. You know how that goes, right? 

Now I don’t mind owning up to my bad memory, but here’s the thing – you have sooo many versions! Most people just have one version per year, you have at least five. There’s the version for VMware Infrastructure (VI), currently at 3.5. ESX is already 3.5 versions old, and ESX 3i has its own version too. Then there is the VirtualCenter and the VI client at 2.5. VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) is straggling behind at 1.1. I think the VI SDK is also 2.5 versions old, but with the VI Perl Toolkit at version 1.5 and the VI Toolkit (for Windows) in beta, it is hard to keep up.

VMware, your enterprise portfolio has expanded far beyond simply ESX, and none but two of the versions align. Therefore, with so many available products, it is fast becoming impossible to understand which version works with which. You should release minor point releases between major revisions in order to maintain a consistent major version number for your enterprise product offerings.

I know you’re a busy company, and it is hard to get everybody together on one day out of the year to celebrate your version, but I beg you, please try. Except for those closest to you, it is getting extremely difficult to remember your versions, or figure out which version we actually mean. Here’s an idea: for the rest of the year, skip all of your versions and then start over your versions all at once on a single day. Maybe even at VMworld? It can be your special version day. I’ll even bring party hats and cake (if you will invite me.)

VMware Infrastructure 4 (VI4) can include:

- ESX 4
- ESX 4i
- VirtualCenter 4
- VI SDK 4
- VI Perl 4
- VI Toolkit (for Windows) 4
- VCB 4

I know it will throw people off at first; your customers might think they missed some of your versions. However, I think in the end you’ll have a lot of people thanking you.

I feel real bad about missing your version, and I don’t want to let the announcement pass me by again. Maybe I should use Outlook?