Maritz on vCloud Datacenter

At VMworld yesterday Paul Maritz hosted a supper session after the keynote to explain more about the VMware vCloud Datacenter program.

Here are the session details.

Session Title:		Public Cloud Computing Gets Real: Announcing New Enterprise-Class Service that Delivers on the Promise of Cloud Computing
Schedule Information:		Tuesday, 12:30 PM (Room: Moscone North Room 134)
US Speaker:		Kiran Sanghi Virtualization Strategist Teradata Corporation Bob Evans Senior Vice President InformationWeek Paul Maritz President and Chief Executive Officer VMware, Inc. Bill Chang Executive Vice President of Business SingTel Kerry Bailey Chief Marketing Officer Verizon Business Bates Turpen Senior Vice President, Technical Operations – Global Technology InterContinental Hotels Group James Johnson Senior Vice President, Global Technology Services LAMCO
Length:		60 minutes
Abstract:		VMware CEO, Paul Maritz, will be discussing VMware’s newly announced cloud technology and how it’s being used as the foundation for a secure, high-performance vCloud service that is being introduced by leading service providers around the globe. Paul will be joined by key service provider partners that are delivering this new class of service, as well as enterprise customers who are at the forefront in leveraging public cloud services. In this session, you’ll learn how cloud computing is evolving traditional IT environments, making them more agile, secure and flexible.

It was a great session it was good to hear from the providers and customers on the program. Here is a video which includes most of the session.

Rodos

Disclaimer : I work for a subsidiary of SingTel who were one of the panel participants. Either way, it was still a good session with great information from speakers.

VMware vCloud Director

Well today was a big day at VMworld as well as for my own activities. After much speculation and waiting VMware have now released a Cloud product, yes project Redwood has gone GA.

Like me you may remember VMworld 2008 where VMware first put out their vision for Cloud. I have been blogging about it ever since my first post on the topic on Sept 23rd 2008. Like me you probably remember being disappointed that in 2009 the only thing released was vCloud Express which was not really a product but a program.

Today all of that has changed both for VMware and me. VMware actually launched a product, VMware vCloud Director (VCD) plus a new program called vCloud Datacenter.

First the product, VMware vCloud Director.

I have been working with VCD since before the beta. In fact, as far as I know, we were the first people on the planet to install VCD outside of VMware (we just beat one other company who had the alpha code). Since then we have been through the beta program and have been keenly awaiting the released version. Its been a long road but it means that we are very intimate with the product and have been able to gain lots of operational experience. We have been running some beta trials with some of our own customers on top of VCD to get some field experience for ourselves as well as VMware.

Over the next weeks you will probably see information coming out about VCD, for the moment check out the product pages on the VMware website and I would recommend looking at some of the "Meet the Engineers" videos in the resources page. There are some great sessions on VCD at VMworld alongside the mystery Lab 13 which will show you how to do a quick installation of the product.

Second the program, vCloud Datacenter.

Here is how the VMware press release describes the program.

While public cloud services have created an alternative for delivering compute capacity in a self-service, pay-per-use model, security concerns, uncertain SLAs, lack of compliance and fears of lock-in have limited enterprise adoption. VMware vCloud Datacenter Services provide a way for enterprises to extend their datacenters to external clouds, while preserving security, compliance and quality of service. Delivered by some of the world’s leading service providers, including Bluelock, Colt, SingTel, Terremark and Verizon, VMware vCloud Datacenter Services will use globally consistent infrastructure, management and security models to make it possible for enterprise customers to move computing workloads from internal virtualized infrastructure to an external cloud and back.

You can see that there are five providers that cross major parts of the globe. This includes SingTel, which is the parent company of Optus who owns my company Alphawest. It is great to be part of the program. However I prefer how it was quoted in the press.

Balkansky expects only a "few dozen" partners globally would be certified as 'vCloud Datacenter Service Providers'.

"We needed to have a best of the best, a quality set of partners we could go with jointly to our customers," said VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

So what this means is that VCD is a product from VMware. Anyone can go and purchase it to build an internal or a public Cloud (subject to licensing programs of course). But VMware have worked very closely with a select few providers, especially in this early stage of the product to provide some consistency and assurance around the services that are offered for external Cloud.

As the Principal Architect for a major deployment of VCD in Australia which will be launched sometime in the future (I am of course not allowed to say when) I am very pleased to have the product and the program now publicly available. I have had a few people comment about my lack of blog posts over the last year and I can tell you its been quite frustrating. Much of what people blog about is what you interact with on a day to day basis and for so long everything I have been doing has been under heavy NDA so I just have not been able to talk about it. Today is not the day to be doing deep dives into VCD, I will do that over the coming weeks as I share my likes and dislikes of the product.

Essentially today has been a day to celebrate the end of a long journey for many. It was good to see Eddie Dinel, the product manager for VCD on stage during the keynote. I managed to catch up with the development team as they celebrated tonight the end of their hard work. Here are some photos from the event.

Left to right are some very important people that I have worked with closely on all of this.

Rodos (thats me), Principal Architect - Datacenter and Cloud, Alphawest.

Eddie Dinel, Product Manager for VCD, VMware. Eddie was on stage during the keynote.

Mike DiPetrillo, Principal Systems Engineer, Global Cloud Architect, VMware.

Phil Weiss, vCloud Solutions Architect APAC, VMware.

I also got to meet some of the developers who were let out of their cages. Below is a photo of a team member who worked on the UI experience and a programer who worked on the UI plus a number of other areas.

Now its time for some sleep. VMworld has two more days. I look forward to VCD getting out in the wild, its a good thing for the Cloud market to have some new options and player coming to market.

Rodos

P.S. I don't speak for my employer, this is my personal views and comments. If you are press and you want any comments, contact the media department at my company. If you are a blogger, a virtualisation geek or someone thinking of deploying VCD as a private or public cloud I would be more than happy to discuss with you my experiences of building and deploying one of the first global implementations.

VMworld - Future of Networking

First session this morning at VMworld was by Howie Xu, R&D Director, Virtualisation and Cloud Platform at VMware. Howie is the networking futures guys. There was much expectation for this session with speculation around its content.

Here are some of the items that Howie talked about.

• The lines between servers and networking are being lost. The two are blending. The network needs to be extracted from the workload. Bu the rate of change in virtual environments now at the networking layer is high and companies can't fund the staff to keep up with these tasks, which are generally quite standardised.
• The different networking services from layer 2 to 7 are a headache to manage and co-ordinate. As we head for the Cloud this is going to get worse.
• Moving beyond the Distributed Virtual Switch we need to move to the "Distributed Virtual Network". We need to be able to do networking with anything, anytime, anywhere at any scale. We need a standard network management layer (either physical or virtual)
• Much of the problems can be solved through virtualisation, that is having a first layer of abstraction. but still keep functions, such as separation of duty.
• The network must be made transparent with the same services whilst being able to scale out on demand.
• A new vision for a vChassis which contains a data management and control plane that is a "session centric" virtual platform.
• Todays networking is based on discovering things, such as addressing via DHCP, learning MAC addresses. Yet in this new world the virtualisation layer can be authoritative, it knows all of the details and does not need to learn them.
• a vChassis should talk virtual 3rd party line cards that provide services, such as IDS. These need to be able to interact with hardware in some cases for offload, for example SSL.
• There are problems with doing networking today, the IP address is used for identity and location, VLANs lack features like a hierarchy. You have to pre-provision VLANs to get around things but its a little messy. We need a virtualised a layer 2 . Mention of vShield Zone/App, expect to see more of this detailed and discussed this week.
• A mock-up screen was shown of what this may look like (see picture above).

Being one of the first sessions before the announcements were made I think some of the details which may have been discussed were left out. Hence it was a good session showing where VMware are going but it lacked that little bit of detail which gets your brain really thinking. Great to see that VMware are dealing with the management problems and including facility for the 3rd party vendors to integrate.

Hopefully it will be a little clearer for everyone by the end of the week.

Rodos

Dell acquiring 3PAR

Twitter is all awash with news that Dell have acquired 3Par.

There have been a few who have been suggesting that 3Par was next on the acquisition trail. They have some good technology and certainly a more modern architecture (love those chunklets and what you can do with them).

What is also interesting is that Dell only recently went out and purchased another storage player, Ocarina. I wrote about Ocarina last year when we visited them as part of TechFieldDay. What does Ocarina do, compression for storage. Now 3Par does great thin storage but don't do compression. One wonders what of the Ocarina technologies Dell might be planning on integrating into their new purchase.

Certainly interesting times in the storage industry. The stack wars are heating up maybe?

Rodos

VMworld 2010 Backpacks for Charity - Australian Version

Inspired by the idea from Kevin Houston and the Gestalt IT VMworld giveaway we am running a program for Australians to donate their VMworld swag to charity.

As Kevin has encouraged

This year, IF you receive a bag or backpack that you just don’t want, please don’t throw it away, but instead take it home, go to the dollar store and fill the backpack with pencils, crayons, paper and erasers and donate it to your local school system. You would be AMAZED to find out the numbers of children who don’t get backpacks and whose familes can not afford the costly school supplies that are required each year. You will be making some family happy and you’ll get the name “VMware” marketed throughout the schools, getting the next generation of techno geeks ready to learn all about virtualization.

So that is what we are doing in a more organised way.

We are looking for 20 people attending from Australia who are willing to donate their unused VMworld 2010 bag to the Salvation Army Community Center in Dubbo. They have a great need, especially at the start of the school year for school equipment such as this. The Salvo's are a much respected and loved charity in Australia who do a lot of community work and provide many services to those people in need. Dubbo is a regional down in NSW which has a high indigenous population.

The details :

• We want 20 people to pre-register that they want to participate. If we get more the Salvos have said there is no such thing as to many.
• You need to get your bag in great unused condition to Sydney. If that is a problem I am probably arrange to get it here if you can drop it off at an Alphawest office which is most capital cities.
• You don't have to worry about the stationary, you guys have to pay for it. We will be doing and inventory of materials for each bag and buying in bulk. My wife is a teacher and will assist with the list. The budget will be around $30 to $40 each and you need to be able to put this into a Pay Pal account when needed.
• It would be good to get some "suitable" additional materials to include. Maybe your company can donate something. Something suitable would be a good size USB thumb drive, a piece of sporting equipment or a drink bottle. Being branded is no issue, especially if its a well know brand (like Optus who I am trying to stitch up). Whats not appropriate, junk; such as old 64Mb memory sticks or old marketing junk you just can't get off your hands.
• We will arrange to get them to Dubbo either directly or through the Salvos. However if you are interested in a awesome Road-Trip to deliver them in person let us know.

If you are not going to VMworld or can't participate please do what you can to spread the word.

To express your interest you can go to the form directly or use the embedded version below.

Thanks for your interest and support!

Rodos