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Or are they just playing for stupid???

Today I was reading a blog post on the Windows Virtualization Team Blog, on their 3rd story about Microsoft’s Quick Migration and VMware’s VMotion. It is just too funny to see how Microsoft is dealing with a lack of functionality. According to their research customers are not changing their patterns, even when they have the option to manage physicals hosts in their environments during the day without any form of downtime for their Virtual Machines, they (according to Microsoft research) still want to delay physical server maintenance till the evening hours. Thanks to this research Microsoft is claiming that being able to move virtual machines around physical servers is really not something useful to have. The thing that really amazes me is that I see Microsoft (and others) often make assumptions based on the old-fashion one-app-per-one-physical-box time era. Please wake up! Virtualization is a Disruptive Technology… You shouldn’t be working in the wonderful world of IT is you are not willing to move forward (at least in my opinion). I do know for a fact lot’s of customers are using VMotion (or live migration) in production… sometimes helping them to do server maintenance… and really daring and probably red bull drinking extreme sport IT managers even try this during the middle of the day…

But guess what… the ability to move virtual machines while running without downtime solves MORE then just silly hardware maintenance!!! It creates an environment where workloads can actively be rebalanced so you can better serve your application needs and the end-users using them. And I am sure this new innovative (well at least 3 years ago when it came out) technology is being welcomed by many extreme sport red bull drinking IT managers  It is even better to see that technology is not sitting still again… Storage VMotion, a recent released technology, now-a-days also allows you to dynamically balance storage across different tiers of storage as well (No, Microsoft, this is not just a feature to help prevent storage hardware maintenance). With a bit of patient we will get our hands on the continuous availability technology VMware has demonstrated at VMworld events where a VM can be continuously replicated across a simple network cable, so that when a server does die on you, the VM will keep on running without a hickup… Long live innovation… for the IT people preferring to maintain their hardware in the evenings… I guess you must not live in a neighborhood like mine with a nice strip club 

P.S. Just to clarify, before everyone flames me, yes I work for VMware… But I work for technology, not for a company, so I choose to work for VMware because I like their technology (I am free to switch jobs any time I like). No one in VMware asked me to write this and feel free to comment if you disagree or agree  you might even convince me to apply for a job at Microsoft 

The Microsoft Article

VMware has released this week a new toolkit for virtual disk management that is looking very promising.

The VDDK provides easy access to virtual disk storage. This enables a wide range of solutions including:

The new API supports managing two kinds of disks; Managed Disks (local virtual diskfiles) and Hosted Disk (virtual disk files on you ESX/VMFS systems). This means the API will allow you to access disks remotely and opens a low of new opportunities for companies making virus scanning software, backup, forensic, etc.

More on the new API:
The Virtual Disk API Programming guide
The Virtual Disk Development Kit Homepage

Mightycare Solutions, a consulting company out of germany, released a new extra utility for your VMware Virtual environments. It addresses (like run-virtual’s own VCplus application) the lack of VirtualCenter not doing anything with the available disk information inside VMs.

Mightycare download page

On Gabes Virtual World you can see a nice demonstration (video) of the new unity feature in the workstation product. VMware Fusion was the first product to introduce this ’seamless’ windows in the VMware product line, but it has now also moved into the workstation product

http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=66#more-66

Wow, what a week it has been! The last days has been amazing! I want to thank everyone that came to Cannes this week. The last weeks I have not spend lots on run-virtual as all my attention was given to vmworld, but I am happy to say the ‘event planner’ days for me are over (at least for now), I am happy to return back to focusing on what is going on in this great technology industry instead of being some event planner Hopefully soon I can join the club of plug-in creators

Being so closely involved with the organization of the event, I am probably the worst person to judge how you all found/enjoyed the event. I personally loved the lab rooms space with the orange carpets. Instead of placing the servers in the lab rooms, we decided to create a nice looking server room. I explained to my (non technical) marketing colleague that people actually would come and just stand at the server room and enjoy the view as all the servers together would look really nice… I do not think she understand this concept as she laughed at me and started the whole “you are such a geek thing”

Well if you did not have the chance to come to cannes this week, no worry, you can already watch the keynote sessions online and next week we will start posting the content for the breakout sessions. 16 of the popular breakout sessions where video recorded so you can completely (re)experience those sessions.

Hello everyone,

Sorry I have not been blogging too much lately as I have spend a lot of time on the VMworld Europe project. Things are going well, we are at max capacity with the sponsors and there are only a handfull of tickets still available, so I think we will be sold out before the event starts.

The last week and still the days to come me and lots of VMware System Engineers are building the hands-on labs. We are shipping 6 racks from the UK, 1 Rack from France and 3 Racks from the US (by plane!) to accomodate all the kit we need to run the 9 hands-on labs.

Some of the labs will still be running with ‘beta’ software, like the SRM (Site Recovery Manager) lab and LifeCycleManager Lab, so also exiting to see how it runs on many servers at the same time.
In total I think we will be bringing +100 servers and +50 TB of storage so should be fun… hoping the airconditioning (which one?) will go ok and the building can provide us with all this power

See you all (i hope) in Cannes!

Hello Everyone,

Well I hope you are already aware of the VMworld Europe Event that is starting on February 26th in Cannes, France. I am really looking forward to the event and think we will have a really great week in Cannes with awesome sessions, great hands-on labs, a very large exhibition show floor with many exhibitor and of course a great party!!

We have made some introduction videos of presenters that will be coming to the event. You can watch them here:
VMworld Europe Videos

See you in Cannes!

Mightycare, a german reseller, has release a new free utility to get an overview of all your virtual machines and the status of the VMware tools in all the VMS. It also allows you then to easily change the setting if the VM has time synchronization via VMware Tools.

Mightycare download page

Today Microsoft announced that they have acquired Calista Technologies and funny enough that they are strengthening their relationship with Citrix Systems. The need to express the strong relationship with Citrix is possibly needed to not scare Citrix off to much with the acquisition of Calista as they make a remote display protocol designed for multi media that goes way beyond the Citrix ICA protocol. Calista uses the graphic video card processors (GPUs) on both client and server to get a very compressed rich media stream across, without using any of the normal CPU processing power.

See calista in the works:

We probably will learn more about what Microsoft is doing in the virtualization space tomorrow at the Microsoft Virtualization Deployment Summit.

5 weeks and counting… The first VMworld Europe is going to happen The event planning is going very well and I am really excited about the content. We currently have 81 Solution Sponsors confirmed that will attend at the exhibit floor and 34 of them will also deliver a break out presentation. Going to VMworld Europe will therefor be much more then just about VMware, but pretty much the whole virtualization industry will be present.

We will have 9 hands-on labs at the event, from which 4 are instructor-led and 5 self-paced. Last week the online session catalog went live, so you can now see a selection of the presentations that will be given at the event. Not all sessions are published yet, but the list is growing every day.

Check out the online VMworld Europe Session catalog