Latest VMware Virtualization news & notes from the VMware Symposia

Recently, I attended the VMware Symposia in Dallas, Texas, USA. This event was free and was put on by VMware to promote their virtualization offerings.

I must say that I was highly impressed by all that they must have spent and prepared for this event. There were 100s of people there and it was at one of the finest hotels in town, the Gaylord Texas Resort.

I have authored training videos on both Microsoft Virtual Server and VMware Server & recently obtained my VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certification so I felt very confident in the current state of my virtualization
knowledge. Because of this, I wasnt sure that I would learn a lot from the event. I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to learn so much about the future of VMwares virtualization line-up. I took copious notes. When I got backto the office, I rearranged and cleaned up these notes.

I post these notes here so that all the HappyRouter.com members can benefit from the latest virtualization what I learned at the VMware Symposia.

** Note that most of the notes below are notes I took while viewing VMware slides. For that reason, many of the notes contain VMware marketing terms or VMware opinions (not always my opinions or statistics from my personal experience). **

Take advantage of server hardware

By using Virtualization, your goal is to take advantage of server hardware. In doing this, you will move CPU utilization from 5-10% up to 50-60%.

By having these pools for CPU, ram, disk, & network you are able to “deliver the always on, on demand data center”.

Automated Resource Assurance

VMware provides “Automated Resource Assurance” with VMotion. VMotion provides:

• Dynamic balancing

• Continuous optimization

• Increased availability

• Automated and works across applications

• On demand capacity

Plug and play virtual data center

VMware allows you to create the “plug and play data center”. With the PnP Virtual data enter, you have non-disruptive scaling, flexibility, & reconfigurability.

The PnP virtual data center is made possible by:

• Hypervisor – allows you to partition & provides the virtualization layer

• Distributed virtualization – resource management, availability, & mobility

• Management & automation – infrastructure optimization, bus continuity, desktop management

Drivers for Virtualization

The drivers for this trend toward virtualization are:

• Infrastructure Optimization – more than just server consolidation – contain growth and continually optimize resources

• Reduce costs

• Business Continuity

• reduce planned and unplanned downtime

• simplify DR

• Desktop management

• enterprise and end users

• Improve security and mobility

• Software lifecycle automation

• rapidly provision machines

• improve software quality

VMware’s Virtualization Offerings

VMware said that VMware’s Virtualization suite offers:

• Functionality

• Ability to run on multiple OS — because 65 percent of customers run multiple OS

• Proven in production -3rd generator product and MANY customers using in production

• High performance

• Easy to manage – only virtualization infrastructure suite

Gartner group says that virtualization will be the most impactful trend in infrastructure and operations through 2010.

Electric companies even offering rebates to companies that will virtualize their servers. For example – California PG&E.

• 87% of VMware Infrastructure customers use it in a production environment
• 63% of companies will virtualize their datacenters in the next 3 years Virtualization is main stream today.

There is a strong ecosystem of support behind vmware.

What is the Road Ahead for Virtualization?

• Multi-core CPUs drive virtualization – 8 CPU CORE or even 16 CPU CORE by 2011.

• 3rd gen virtualization hardware assist that will reduce overhead so you can virtualize any application

• Hardware assisted virtualization. Made up of: Private instruction virtualization, Memory virtualization, and Device & I/O Virtualization

Virtualization is the killer app for multicore systems designed to scale-up!

ESX can use cores that aren’t needed to:

• Shut down cores to save power

• Accelerate I/O in the backend

• Service console could use for backups or security

VMware ACE will provide the mobility needed to run offline.

Virtualization transforms the IT landscape & VMware is undisputed market leader. VMware is the only safe and proven choice.

IT Managers today have a difficult job. They are told to manage or reduce costs, do more with less, improve satisfaction and offerings, & provide competitive advantage. Technology plays more and more an important role in getting that job done.

In the past, the hold up on a new application might be that the IT department has to order and install a new server. With VMware virtualization, you could deliver that server in 15 minutes. What you now need to do is to hold back and say it will take you a few days so that you don’t set their expectations too high.

Statistic from IDC – $ .50 is spent to power and cool every server for every dollar spent on the server. This will increase to $.70 cents by 2010. Data center construction costs are $2,400 per server.

What are the goals for virtualization?

• Increase service levels

• Operational savings

• Bus flexibility / time to market

Look at it from a holistic perspective

Virtual machine to server administrator ratio is 200 to 1 but don’t expect staff reduction.

Operational savings are $25K to $35K per year for each host virtualized (personal note: that is amazing, almost too good to be true!!?)