Early this morning, I got an e-mail from John Troyer that I became a VMware vExpert. If you don’t know what that is, check the vExpert page on vmware.com. A big thanks to VMware and John and others to make this happen and congratulations to all the other vExperts out there.

It was difficult to follow real-time what was going on today as I was busy writing an offer for a virtualization and consolidation project with, you guessed it, VMware VI3.

The keynote promised to be interesting although it was expected to be not all too different from the keynote at VMworld Las Vegas 2008. Lots of people reported about the keynote and here’s just a few of them:

I bet there are many more but by reading the two above you’ll get a good overview of the keynote in just a few minutes. Highlights from the keynote for me were the following:

  • By starting with the increased capabilities of the virtual hardware (256GB of RAM and eight vCPUs) and then switching to databases performance results that show how well things scale, Steve again hinted at the platform being ready to host almost any workload (as did Paul Maritz yesterday). The Exchange Server scaling example also showed that by breaking up the workload in multiple virtual machines, you can really host a lot of mailboxes on a single server. Of course, this increases the customer’s licensing cost but it shows how well the platform scales.
  • vStorage Thin Provisioning where VMware has a software implementation that you can leverage on any storage platform. They also provide APIs for storage vendors to use array-based thin provisioning. This article by Gabrie Van Zanten has some more details about thin provisioning. Good to hear that I can migrate to thin-provisioned disks by performing a migration. We will use this feature in our labs for sure!
  • Steve talked about the “Giant Computer”. Basically we’re going back to the mainframe in a way by combining all compute resources into one big pool of CPU, storage, network and memory resources with DRS, DPM and other components to optimize and tame this beast. Also see this article about the ‘software mainframe’.
  • The VMware PC-over-IP demo by Jerry Chen was interesting but maybe for the wrong reasons. Some two years ago (maybe a bit less) we evaluated a series of options for a customer of ours to implement a solution based on pc blades in the datacenter with thin clients at the user’s desk. Back then, Teradici was included in the study and that was what VMware actually demoed today. Brian Madden had an interesting commentary about it on his site. Indeed, what VMware showed today is possible for a while already and requires physical hardware from Teradici and Jerry clearly stated that. They had a physical desktop behind the scenes and Jerry accessed that with a thin client. Not exactly VDI but brokering the connection to such a physical desktop is what VMware View (and Citrix XenDesktop and Quest vWorkspace and HP SAM with RGS) can do.
  • Focus on vCenter on three levels:
    • Availability: vCenter Server Heartbeat to protect vCenter Server with failover to a standby vCenter Server if needed. Can’t wait to evaluate that!
    • Scalability: vCenter Server Linked Mode to link up to 10 vCenter Servers together and search for virtual machines across the whole infrastructure.
    • Automation: Host Profiles are a welcome addition because, at the moment, it’s a drag to have to manually update all your servers. Of course we automate this today with PowerShell or the Veeam product but it’s good to see this built in.
  • vCenter and all the solutions around it really show that managing, monitoring and automating the platform is where it’s at! Time to decrease the price of the basic stuff such as the hypervisor, VMotion and HA?
  • The mobile hypervisor demo on the Nokia internet tablet was interesting as well. It would be interesting to be able to do this on my company phone and have both Windows Mobile and Android for example. Of course the big question is: “What about the iPhone?”. Knowing Apple, I guess there’s not much hope for this to become a reality! ;-)
  • I am really interested to see how the complete roll-out of VMware View will work in 2009! Today, VMware View provides basic brokering functions with some advanced features such as linked clones. What’s missing today are the “last mile features” where competitors such as Citrix and Quest (vWorkspace) have quite a good solution. Citrix with its use of ICA and Quest with it’s EOP extensions to RDP. Steve promised “the best” experience over WAN, LAN and LOCAL connections (with local referring to the client hypervisor).

Other interesting (and some funny) articles and blog posts today: