VMworld Day 2 Start – Keynote Thoughts
Well, just finished up with the opening keynote by Paul Maritz at VMworld 2009. They had a similar theme to VMworld Europe 2009 from last February. Lots of Hello and Goodbye phrases. My favorites: Goodbye Commodore 64, Goodbye Dial-up, Hello Kitty, Hello Microsoft (okay, I made the last one up but a lot of the phrases seemed the results of a meeting in a conference room for keywords). :)
Still, for me, the keynote was only fair. The primary reason for this is that a good portion of the keynote were slides and concepts that were introduced at VMworld Europe 2009 and that VMworld has been talking about since. There really wasn’t anything new or significant shown during Paul’s keynote. Maybe they are tying to save things for tomorrow’s keynote. Also, the whole presentation didn’t seem as energized as the keynotes at VMworld Europe 2009 and VMworld 2008. Maybe it was the early start, as I was still trying to wake up half-way through.
Paul laid out the virtualization journey, which progress from levels of virtualization and the savings that you derive from it. It’s a good concept, very similar to our Dynamic Datacenter message that we’ve been talking about for while.
In the first key focus area of the keynote, VMware is being positioning as a Virtual Datacenter Operating System, a virtualization platform, with all the APIs and links to provide access to the virtual machines. Paul also said that vSphere took 2 years to create, more man-years invested than any Windows OS release he oversaw when he was at Microsoft.
This brings up an interesting issue with VMware marketing. When presenting concepts of integration, power, and services, they are big and powerful, an operating system. When we talk about security and patching, they are super small, not an operating system. You really can’t have both and at some point, they are going to have to decide which VMware they, the strong platform for the future of Virtualization and Cloud or the small, dedicated software, without significant features or footprint.
The other major focus area was expanding the capability of vCenter beyond just VMware, providing insight into the physical hardware with integration with things like IBM and HP, and the insight into applications with SpringSource.
I think the thing to remember is Microsoft already does all of this and more. With Operations manager, we integrate with physical hardware, power monitoring, and other insight to provide that Physical and Virtual management, all from one console. From within Operations Manager now, you can integrate that critical in-guest knowledge that VMware is just starting to talk about.
Most importantly, VMware hasn’t tied any of that information with a Live Migration capability, which we can do with the Performance Resource Optimization (PRO) feature of VMM. You can link all the parameters, physical hardware, OS installation, application and service level, that Operations Manager can monitor with actions that lead to Live Migrations and Optimizations. That’s rebalancing VMs and hosts based on Applications and Service loads, which is really what you need to do. Performing optimizations based on VM load only is not a dynamic datacenter.
That’s all on the keynote. I’ll be heading to several sessions today so look out for blog and tweets on those sessions. Don’t forget, follow me on twitter (@edwinyuen) for a chance to win a ZuneHD!