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You arrived at the weblog of Geert Baeke. I am the technology manager for a company called Xylos (Belgium). I mostly work with Microsoft technologies such as Windows, Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, MSCS, and more. I am also actively busy with VMware's products, focussing on VMware ESX.

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« February 23 | February 25 »

Tuesday, February 24

VMworld Europe 2009: Day 1 from the outside

by rastix on Tue 24 Feb 2009 11:20 PM CET

During my preparation for our VDI seminars next week (only a few seats left), I am trying to keep up with the news coming from Cannes. Here’s a little overview of the news I thought was interesting.

My colleague Vincent Vlieghe has a good overview of the day.
VM /ETC posted a very good overview of Day 1 here. virtualization.info did live blogging as well. Both are reporting about the keynote delivered by Paul Maritz (VMware CEO) and Wolfgang Krips (Senior VP of SAP Managed Services). This keynote was not very technical because that is left to VMware’s CTO, Steve Herrod.
During the keynote, Paul claimed that from the first generation of the new vSphere platform there will be no reason to not virtualize 100% of your datacenter. A pretty bold statement underlining the fact that this is already happening in the trenches now. More and more customers ask us to virtualize their Exchange environment, SQL, SAP or Unified Communications platform. They are only held back by non-technical reasons such as support or technical reasons like dependency on specific hardware.
On Twitter, some were reporting that the SAP part of the keynote was pretty boring and that people were leaving the session. Why am I not surprised? ;-)
Interestingly, VMware talked about the partnership with Intel. VMware CVP (Client Virtualization Platform) will be part of the VMware View suite and is optimized for Intel CPUs with vPro technology. Intel has a similar agreement with Citrix for their “Project Independence”. To learn more about Project Independence and some comparisons with the VMware approach, there’s a good podcast over at dabcc.com with Simon Crosby. I am curious to find out more about the bare-metal client hypervisor implementation of VMware. With Citrix’s solution it is already clear that they are using the same approach as with Xen/Hyper-V: the hypervisor is loaded on the hardware, Windows (Vista?) is the parent partition which means broad hardware support and the corporate desktop is streamed/installed as a child partition. If VMware is using their typical approach by using something similar to ESX, they will have quite a hard time with hardware support on laptops and desktops.
Brian Madden also talked about both Intel partnerships here with some funny commentary.
VirtualLifestyle.nl reported about VMware vCenter Data Recovery with lots of screenshots. Note that these screenshots come from the hands-on labs with a pre-release version of the product.
Of course there was a lot of buzz around the vCloud stuff. Some reports and commentary can be found here, here and here. If the vCloud vision works out it will be pretty amazing. VMware faces tough competition though from open source Xen, XenServer, Hyper-V and others here. If you know what is possible on Amazon’s EC2 for example you know what I am talking about. Of course, VMware goes further here by providing integration between internal and external clouds and good partnerships.
Companies like IT Structures and Terremark were in the spotlight as well. IT Structures and Terremark were featured in Paul Maritz’s keynote. IT Structures released a press release announcing support for vCloud. Other vCloud partners can be found here.
Yesterday, I heard about the vShield Zones product for the first time. You can found more information about it here. The product will be available later in 2009.
It seems Neverfail’s software is the basis for VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat. Sounds logical. I wonder how well this will sell though! Anyway it’s good to have the option from VMware.