Archive for September, 2008

Yesterday I missed the Paul Mautriz keynote. Instead I was down on the Solutions Exchange floor doing some judging. SearchSearchVirtualization.com have awards in different catagories, and mine was “New Technologies”. My fellow judge was David Davis of Happyrouter.com. Well, was I wowed? Er, not really but there were some interesting notables.

Firstly, Cisco Nexus Virtual Switch. Something I have been telling my students about for some months (years?) was that Cisco has access to the API’s around vSwitch (in fact someone told me they helped VMware develop the original virtual switch!). But this is the daddy, a fully blown Cisco OS that your Cisco guys can telnet into. It could change the relationship significantly between the VMware Guy and Network Guy.

I was quite impressed by VizionCore’s OptimizerPro (is their an amateur edition?) basically it scans your VMs, find out which ones are wasting disk space – and then it can shrink or grow them depending on your needs. It has a costing system so you can make your SAN more expensive than your NAS – and do the shrink based on storage type. The problem you see is that people are always unsure how big to make their virtual disks – so there is a tendency to over-allocate. Sure, Optimizer is bit of a next-next Windows admin style tool (that’s not neccessarily) a bad thing but it could save you money.

The last exhibitor I was impressed by was vDesk. Basically, its a system that puts a “virtualization” layer between your PC OS, and environment. It will run local, run from a USB stick and from VDI (limited by the quality of graphics rendering by RDP of course). What I like about this is being to have my desktop being portable. I’ve been thinking of giving up running my OS/APPs on my local machine – and instead have them in a virtual machine. There were humorous events in my judging. I like to ask how many people work in a company and how many people they have in support. One of the exhibitors just refused to tell. He was told by his CEO not disclose that information!

In an off the record briefing from the new CEO of VMware, RTFM education is the first blog to annouce a new inovation called VMware vRainbows. vRainbows is VMware’s take on the cloud concept. You see clouds are easy to draw on whiteboards, but they have negative connotations such a storm clouds, darking clouds – plus the other worry is the cloud concept is a bit fluffy – or what’s known to experts in the field like me “Fluffy Clouds”. The worry is that people might not see how concrete a cloud actually is – and the idea of concrete clouds lets just say doesn’t really “fly”….

So VMware have revolutionized clouds as they have revolutionize server provisioning and desktops. In the new VMware vRainbow manager – you get cloud icons, but when you cloud is performing well it is indicated by rainbow and the sun. The cloud is white and fluffy and all is right in the world. But when your experiencing performance problems – the rainbow disappears – the cellphone rings – and the cloud changes from white to grey – if your performance problems persist then little yellow lightening strikes appear. Anyway, as you might suspect this is a spoof announcement and I count myself as cloud skeptic. You see at the end of rainbow there is always a pot-of-gold – trouble is you never find the end of the rainbow do you?

Clouds? Amphorous; Vapourous; Insubstanial; Ever-changing; Trouble is when your in cloud-cookcoo land you cannot see where you going and you cannot see the sky or earth.

So less marketing hype please and more concrete technology….. Please! Just because everyone else is jumping on the cloud bandwagon doesn’t mean you do!

[I might rue the day I write this! Just like when Bill Gates dismissed the internet as mere hype. If clouds do become TNBT (the next big thing) I will just delete this post and pretend I invented the whole darn thang]

VMware Fault Tolerance
http://download3.vmware.com/vdcos/demos/FT_Demo_800x600.html

VMware DVS
http://download3.vmware.com/vdcos/demos/DVS_Demo_800x600.html.html

Host Profiles
http://download3.vmware.com/vdcos/demos/Hostprofiles_Linked_VC_800x600.html

Well, I’m in Vegas for this years VMworld. I’m staying at the Venetian, which my friends from Italy would love. There’s a replica of St Marks from Venice outside! I watched 4 movies during the flight (3 inflight running from a Linux system that kept on rebooting!) and one on my laptop. So I watched again the Mike Myers movie – “Austin Powers: The Spy who shagged me” and then this morning after breakfast whilst I was unwinding I saw the tail end of “Austin Powers: Gold Member”. I was humourously struck at how similiar Dr Evil looks to VMware’s Richard Garsthagen – who I have bumped into twice since arriving.

If you don’t know Richard – he was VMware’s first instructor in EMEA, then became EMEA Technical Marketing Manager, worked on some VDI and is/was the guy behind VMware’s TSX in Europe. He also runs a very good blog called run-virtual.com. Check out the images below – and see if you can work out which is which! Anyway, if Richard is Dr Evil, that must make Eric Sloof “Gold Member”, and me as “Austin Powers”, I’ve got the “British Teeth” for it I can tell you!

I’m up on the 4th floor. You can connect to the Wifi and such, but the internet is another. I’ve a ping -t on some of my kit in the UK. Every other 3rd pack is a request time out. With the ms round-trip varying by as much 160ms to 362ms – I’ve seen it go as high as 1022ms. So all in all wifi in the Venetian suck and doesn’t work. So I won’t be able to use my R&R down time to blog. I will only be able to blog from the main hall. It also means there’s little chance of using Skype to keep in touch with my partner in the UK.

Oh, I’m down in the registration area and the Wifi suck here too, I end up using this thing called a cable… how very 1995…

One of the joys of coming to the US is sampling US television – especially the ads. I can never get over the commericals for drugs, my favourite part is the disclaimers at the end – “my induce vomitting, impotency, and involuntary bleeding from orifices…” mmm, perhaps I will give that one a miss then…

Cash4Gold.com is a website and TV ad. Basically, its business is getting hard-up people to scoup up old jewelery and having it melted down for hard $$$. My favourite part is the woman who examples how she had her gold and diamond wedding ring from previous marriage melted down for money – she had the cash within the day. She looks really happy about the whole darn thing!. I’m sure her husband is just livid that the money he spent on the goddamn thing is now being melted down. Gee, who ever said romance is dead.

On top of taxi I took to Shopping Mall where I bought my guitar – “Drop Dead – Firing Range”. Basically, you can come to the fire range and have go at firing high powered semi-automatics.

SHOUTING MAKES YOUR PRODUCT BETTER. I WATCHED AN AD ABOUT GARDENING GADGET WHICH YOU ATTACH TO A DRILL – IT WILL ROTATE YOUR GARDEN, INCLUDES EXTRA ATTACHMENTS WORTH $30. OH AND THE LOUD YOU SHOUT THE MORE IMPRESSIVE THE PRODUCT. GETS YOU THINK ABOUT SOFTWARE VENDORS WHO SHOUT ABOUT THEIR PRODUCT. WHAT YOU LACK IN FEATURES OR INOVATION YOU CAN MAKE UP WITH SHOUTING!!!

This one feels odd. THE platform for running Windows is VMware, and Microsoft now recognise this fact that’s been true since about 2003/4. Anyway, the fact that VMware was the first company to be enrolled to the Windows Server Catalog SVVP. I guess for me this good – because I now have new story to give my students who ask “Does Microsoft support Windows on VMware”. The answer has always been YES, by the way. Just not very good “best efforts” and “reproduce you problem on physical hardware”. I always thought that was a funny one – generally if I can reproduce a problem, that generally means I usually understand it well enough to fix it! Anyway, I would like to welcome Microsoft to modern world.

Microsoft finally have dropped the patantly dumb licensing restrictions about not being able to move a SQL VM from one physical host to another with in 90-day period. Of course, they had no idea we were doing it, and everyone just ignored the restriction. So it’s kinda like repealling a bad law that could never be enforced by the police.

Well, the FUD Team is in town. Oh, I’m sorry – the PR/Marketing Team is in town. Anouncing a ESX like product (Er, Windows 2008 Server Core with HyperV pre-enabled in the ISO = ESX3i???). MS once again delayed their release of Virtual Machine Migration (aka VMotion) until W2K8 R2 which is slated for 2010. I’ve been doing VMotion’s since 2004/5, but MS can’t offer this feature for another 2 years. Ho hum…

Dianne Green RIP, Mendal Rosenblum RIP, Richard Sarwal RIP. Well, some would ask is this case of rats leaving a sinking ship, but I would say that would be deeply unfair. Mendal took a months holiday after the departure of his wife, and I guess it doesn’t come as suprise. There’s a take on this which is that it is likely that Mendal didn’t have a regular input in the technical direction of VMware, but then again Mendal was always introduced as the Chief Archectect and Founder. You can’t have it both ways.

Anyway, you never got a sense that Mendal was another Gates or Jobs. Whatever you think of departures, I think Mendal/Greene kitchen-table story will in years to come be one of those key stories of the IT industry. You get the feeling there is a being a cull at VMware – clearing people who probably got elevated to positions beyond the abilities just because they were in VMware early, and there was no-one else better to take that role.