VMworld

VMworld 2009 contract verbiage causes kerfuffle

VMware inserted some new language in to its VMworld 2009 sponsor and exhibitor agreement that caused some industry insiders to wonder whether the upcoming show will be as hot a destination as in years past.

In a blog post For shame! VMware is now banning competing vendors’ products from VMworld!, desktop and application virtualization analyst Brian Madden highlighted language that states exhibitors and sponsors can only discuss products which are “complementary” to VMware’s, where “complementary” is defined as “products/services that do not overlap/substitute with VMware’s products/capabilities, and help expand the reach and solution scope of VMware’s capabilities solely as deemed by VMware.”

With this move, VMworld will no longer be a “true industry-wide virtualization event” like it has in the past, Madden wrote, but simply “a big rah rah hug-fest.” Continued »

My favorite schwag item from VMworld 2008

As I sat in my cozy office, drinking from a VMware mug, wearing a SearchVMware.com t-shirt under my dress shirt, saving drafts of a SharePoint training presentation to a 1GB USB stick emblazoned with eG’s logo and watching Jan and Hannah go through their big bag-o-stuff from the conference, I mulled over something … what was the one thing, above all of the other schwag, that I wound up using most? The answer was the lowest-tech item there: Sun’s little black book.

Yup, just a small black notepad. I’ve already filled up ten pages of notes in just around two weeks, and I now carry it with me to all my meetings. I look less rude taking notes on paper than entering them into my Blackberry (the message most people get when they see that: “Is this person note-taking or is he texting?” You tell me!). It fits in whatever bag I carry, whether it’s a notebook case, organizer or nothing at all. It’s better than a USB drive due to the simplicity of “open and write” versus “boot and type.”

So, the Completely Unofficial Best of VMworld Schwag Award (TM, patent-pending, Copyright 2008, all rights reserved) goes to Sun Microsystems for providing such an elegant and simple tool.

Did VMworld 2008 satisfy attendees?

While VMworld 2008 left some attendees and contributors to SearchServerVirtualization.com hungry for more from VMware and its partners, others may have a different take on the conference. In this video blog, Rick Vanover offers his opinion on what VMworld offers to attendees and if it is worthwhile to attend.

EG’s software a hit

EG Innovations took a Best of VMworld award for the application and infrastructure management category, and as one of the judges, it’s my pleasure to tell you why … eG gets it, and it gets IT. The “it” the company gets is business. There were a lot of entries in the category, ranging from desktop virtualization management, cloud computing management and traditional system/network management. EG stood out because its product took a real user problem (in the demo, customers who had problems depositing money via a bank website) all the way through the final root cause analysis, and did so in a clear, consistent fashion that was very easy to trace back to the relative obscurity of a Samba process gone haywire on a file server. The company’s service-level agreement (SLA) awareness was elegant, particularly in that a failure to meet an SLA was a source of system alerts. Its mix of agentless and lightweight agents and its ability to manage system alerts in real time was great, akin to many of the others in the category. In the end, the business awareness put eG over the top.

It was deep level, allowing IT staff to react quickly with appropriate (and relevant) technical information at their disposal to solve problems or initiate handoffs between departments if needed. The business view allows IT to conceptualize the impact of a problem or SLA failure, and thus better align itself with the business. The wide array of hosts, services and vendors supported by the product grants a big boon — having one tool to rule them all (LotR jokes are prohibited, thank you). It’s a tool that a seasoned sysadmin and an entrenched CIO can both love, and better yet, both use.

So … on my trademarked poker scale: EG gets a solid nine pokers. It’s hot, like a fireplace poker, and if you get jabbed by it, you will certainly know it!

On the other side of VMworld ‘08

I’ll keep it short: It was a great conference, but mostly for the networking and meetings. I’ll take the negative nelly role here and say outright that when it came to the products, I wasn’t too impressed, wasn’t too wowed and wasn’t too giddy. I’ve seen a lot of great announcements, heard a lot of great talk and definitely met a lot of great people, but I haven’t seen much else that I’m really going “Wow!” over. The Cisco announcement has been a year in the coming. We heard about it at last year’s conference, and it’s still not fully released. ESX 4 … wasn’t that demo-ed last year? VDC-OS? Show me a product. I’ve sat through press briefings, product announcement, labs and seminar after seminar, and I keep coming back to those Wendy’s commercials from the ’80s … Where’s the Beef?

NEC’s got me piqued. It seems ready to re-enter the American market in a big way, reversing its trend of avoiding the U.S. as a full-systems seller like we all had monkey pox. The company also seems to have the best end-to-end VDI solution out there, extending VMware’s product on its own hardware, with multimedia and USB capabilities.

Cisco’s got me curious. I’m hoping for a product launch soon so I can see the inside of this new plug-in networking module architecture. I’m not holding my breath, however, because this has been in the pipe for a long time without much substance. True, the VMware virtual switches we all know and love today were originally co-designed with Cisco, but that just makes me wonder why there hasn’t been a formal product on the market before now.

On to the cloud. As I told the incomparable John Troyer in the podcast Andrew Kutz and I did … if your product is vapor, don’t call it cloud. Show me a Web OS client that can run virtualized apps. Show me federation over the Web with cloud services that integrate with internal services. Show me something!

The glitz was top notch. The glam was top notch. The parties — I think you see where this is going. Long story short, this conference was one about maintenance mode rather than being unveiling anything major, but it sure was fun.

ThinLaunch not all that impressive

At the New Innovators both at VMworld 2008 was an interesting small booth from ThinLaunch, which was manned by three of the four people in the company. I had a short pow-wow with two of the folks there and came away with mixed feelings. The product, for which the company is named, appears to fulfill a couple of interesting needs, the first being IT shops that want to pilot virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) but don’t want to invest beyond the server room, and the second being smaller businesses that have server virtualization capacity to devote to hosting clients but have been loathe to rip and replace their thick clients with new thin hardware. I’m not too wowed by the product but I can see where it may be useful. That said, I was royally unimpressed with the technology.

ThinLaunch can be cobbled together with a few Group Policy object edits in Active Directory without buying the product. Simply replace the shell with whatever VDI launcher (or other application) you want. Microsoft tells you how to do it here. True, ThinLaunch then monitors this process if it crashes and can automatically restart it, but this is also something that can be managed with an application or by copying the code from this site.

ThinLaunch is available as an MSI package, meaning it’s very easy to deploy via Group Policy. Then again, Group Policies are even easier to deploy via group policy. Duh. ThinLaunch requires .NET 2.0. and GPOs don’t. ThinLaunch supports Windows 2000 through Vista and 2K8. GPOs do too.

I can see the need for this package and I can even see some large enterprise customers who’d want a packaged application to handle the conversion of legacy desktops. I can even see using the product in small businesses with virtualization already in place but a lot of legacy desktops and a lack of cash. What I can’t see is how it’s innovative in its approach.

Sorry, ThinLaunch, but you get three out of ten pokers — there’s just nothing hot there.

EsXpress: A good idea come ’round again

I had the opportunity to spend a little time at the esXPress booth at VMworld 2008 this year, and I could kick myself. Hard.

To go to the start of why … a long time ago, back when my office primarily used VMware GSX3 for virtulization at the server level, I had a real need to do backups of the virtual machine disk files (VMDK). My GSX hosts were Linux servers and I used a simple cron job to launch scripts on a schedule, which triggered a suspension, tarring of the VMs and scp-ing of the tarballs to a network-attached storage (NAS) box before re-starting the guests. It let me avoid buying backup licenses for my guests (which were mostly pre-production units, image builds, etc.) and gave me a complete point-in-time recovery solution better than anything I could buy off the shelf (at the time). It ws so efficient that when my company joined the Core Customer Program, I was asked to give a webinar on the topic. Sadly, that webinar is now so out-of-date that it’s been pulled from VMware’s site and I can’t find it on archive.org.

Now why would I kick myself? Because that simple idea is at the root of esXpress. It does it a lot better than I did and focuses on ESX rather than GSX/Server, but at the core it’s very similar. It gets around the need for downtime and uses gzip under the hood rather than tar, but it has a Linux OS guest that essentially copies, compresses and offloads other guests. I was pretty impressed by how simply and efficiently the product works, though I must admit to being bit jealous — if only I had realized there was a <i>product</i> there in that idea.

So kudos to esXpress for taking a good idea and making a good product out of it!

At CTO keynote, VMworld crowd starts to understand vClient

With all due respect to VMware’s new CEO Paul Maritz, the portion of yesterday’s keynote discussing VMware’s new vClient initiative didn’t seem to register much with VMworld attendees.

After the address by VMware CTO Steve Herrod, however, was a different story. Assisted by VMware’s Jerry Chen, Herrod and Chen finally got a rise out of the audience, who applauded loudly to a demonstration of 25 virtual machines being provisioned out to thin clients and laptops, then updating the master VM image with Google Chrome using ThinApp.

“I need that right now,” said the attendee sitting behind me at the conclusion of Chen’s demonstration. “Heck, I needed that yesterday.”

I think part of the crowd’s enthusiasm simply had to do with finally “getting it.” Unlike Maritz, Chen used the word ‘hypervisor’ to describe the “thin-client virtualization layer” that drives VMware’s vClient idea of being able to manage disconnected laptops as well as connected VDI thin clients. By saying the H word, 14,000 VMworld attendees had a collective aha moment.

Whatever the case, with vClient, VMware has once again taken a top-down approach, tackling the enterprise’s “desktop dilemma” rather than that of the consumer or SMB. In a subsequent conversation with VMware senior director of product marketing Bogomil Balkansky, he said it’s not that those segments don’t have desktop dilemmas of their own, rather, “the problems of the enterprise are very well identified,” and thus, for VMware, the enterprise is “a much easier entry point.”

Looking out a few years, however, Balkansky described a distinctly consumer-focused scenario. Home users today run full-fledged PCs, complete with a host OS, and all the attending management issues. At the same time, home users engage largely in web-focused activities. “Given that everything I do is Web-connected, why isn’t that part of my DSL service?” Balkansky asked rhetorically.

In other words, Balkansky is insinuating that someday, users’ personal desktops will run as VDI images hosted by the Verizons and Comcasts of the world rather than locally on their home PCs. For a small monthly fee, users will enjoy the convenience of a centrally managed, backed up desktop that they can access from anywhere, and easily recover even if their disk drive fails or laptop is stolen. That’s an idea that just about everyone can get their head around.

Bigger and bolder? VMworld 2008

Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware Inc. expects a record 14,000 attendees at VMworld 2008, the company’s fifth annual virtualization conference being held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas starting Sept. 15. Last year’s VMworld conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco housed some 10,000 attendees.

Could it be that the buzz surrounding VMware is so magnificent this year that 30% more people will take flight to Vegas just to learn about virtualization technology? Or is the lure of Las Vegas partially to blame for the increased enthusiasm? Hmmm…

This year’s VMworld conference features 300 breakout sessions in seven tracks: Automating the Virtual Data Center; Building Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery; Exploring Technology and Architecture; Planning and Operations in the Data Center; Running Enterprise Applications in Virtual Machines; Virtualization 101; and Virtualizing the Desktop.

There will also be 13 instructor-led and five self-paced labs with around 8,000 lab seats. More than 200 sponsors and exhibitors have supported the conference, including Platinum Sponsors Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, NetApp and Symantec, all of whom will deliver keynotes.

The keynote I’m most interested in hearing will be from VMware’s new president and CEO, Paul Maritz, who replaced company co-founder and president Diane Greene this summer.

According to a VMware press release, “Maritz will look back at virtualization history and ahead to the industry trends that are influencing VMware’s future and its solutions. Looking ahead, Maritz sees a future of virtualization expanding from the data center to the desktop and beyond to the cloud.”

He will deliver his keynote on Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2008, at 8 a.m. PT, which will also be available via webcast . You can read about his keynote from SearchServerVirtualization.com reporters on our VMworld 2008 coverage page.
I hope Maritz will be willing to field questions after his formal keynote, because with Microsoft Hyper-V nipping at VMware’s heels, he really needs to foster confidence in his leadership and vision for the company.

Also keynoting is VMware CTO Dr. Stephen Herrod, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2008, at 8 a.m. PT, also available via webcast.

This year’s theme is “Virtually anything is possible,” and there will be more than 100 customer stories offering insight into how VMware and virtualization have affected data centers. Featured VMware customers include AT&T, Burt’s Bees, Chevron, eBay, First American, Nationwide, Qualcomm, Siemens AG, United Bancorp and Whirlpool.

Also, like last year, SearchServerVirtualization.com will announce the Best of VMworld awards for the latest and greatest technologies.

Attend the best of VMworld (virtually)

Didn’t attend last year’s VMworld? Don’t worry: You can download many of the sessions for free from the VMworld website.

VMware has been gradually releasing the sessions on the website. After last year’s conference, VMware chose not to release all of the sessions to non-attendees since many of the sessions would be reused at VMworld Europe 2008. Currently 133 out of the 261 total sessions are available to watch online with 20 more sessions being offered each month up until VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas. VMware-enthusiasts can purchase a “virtual conference pass” for this year’s VMworld, which will provide full online access to sessions and labs.

The sessions reflect VMworld’s focus on enterprise virtualization, but several sessions are available on products like Workstation, Server, VDI and ACE. While some of the sessions are of technical benefit to system administrators, other sessions address topics such as business continuity, planning, business metrics and software lifecycle automation.

Of the free sessions available I’ve noted those I would recommend to system administrators who want to expand their technical knowledge. The sessions below are very good resources on understanding, troubleshooting, securing and tuning ESX and VirtualCenter.

• BC23   Bulletproof VirtualCenter
• IO19   ESX Server CPU Scheduling
• IO43   Top Support Issues and How to Solve Them - Batch 1
• IO44   Top Support Issues and How to Solve Them - Batch 2
• IO45   Tips for Troubleshooting ESX Server 3.x Faults
• TA21   Understanding “Host” and “Guest” Memory Usage
• TA37   VI3 Networking - Advanced Configurations and Troubleshooting
• TA56   Security in a Virtualized Environment
• TA57   Security Architecture Design and Hardening VI3
• TA63   Understanding Performance in a Virtualized Environment
• LAB05 Security Hardening and Monitoring of VMware Infrastructure 3
• LAB08 Troubleshooting VMware Infrastructure 3

To access the sessions, simply go to the VMworld website and create a free account. Once you have registered, click on the sessions and labs link to access the free sessions. You can even access sessions from previous years. Although they are dated, these sessions still have some good, applicable information. Once you click on a session, you can download the audio as an .mp3 file, the slides as a .pdf file or you can watch them together as a flash video.