A guest post from Srinivas Krishnamurti, Director of Product Management and Market Development:
I’m very excited to share information about a new and exciting project that a few of our wonderful engineering folks have been working on – VMware vCenter Mobile Access. (Thanks BenK, Cabir, Harish!)
Did you ever get paged when you are in a meeting about some virtual machine that needed to be restarted? Or, did you ever get an alert when you are at your kid’s soccer game or at the movies that a particular server is overloaded? Actually, imagine any scenario where you need to actively manage your datacenter but you are nowhere close to a PC. Wouldn’t it be nice to act on the notification from your mobile phone? After all, we are now a generation that doesn’t leave home without a mobile phone…
Introducing VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA). vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices. Specifically, it allows you to:
- Search for virtual machines in your data center
- Migrate virtual machines from one host to another using vMotion
- Execute recovery plans using VMware Site Recovery Manager
- Access Scheduled Tasks, Alarms and Events
- And much more…
Instead of explaining all the capabilities, we figured it would be easier to show them in a video – you can view a demo here.
In order for you to access vCMA, you will need to deploy a virtual appliance; call it the vCMA server. The vCMA server must be connected to VMware vCenter or any of the ESX servers that you want to manage. Once the server component is set up, you can manage your datacenter from the convenience of your mobile phone.
We will be releasing vCMA as a technology preview in April 2009. You will be able to download the bits (vCMA server virtual appliance) and access the discussion forums at: http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcmobileaccess. We enabled the discussion forums already so if you want to jot down your first thoughts or feature requests once you’ve seen the demo, you can get started now.
I recommend you bookmark the vCMA portal and check back in early April to download the bits.
It’s great fun to blog about projects that we are working on. Over the last 18 months or so, I’ve been knee-deep in our efforts to bring virtualization onto mobile phones and now that the project is out in the open, I can actually write about it in public forums. I will be writing regularly on our mobile virtualization vision in the weeks and months ahead.
If you have not seen the demo of VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), it is a must-see. Click here to view the IT Pro Magazine’s version and here to see it as part of my boss’s (Steve Herrod) second-day keynote at VMworld Cannes 2009. Steve’s keynote is very interesting and I highly recommend viewing the whole session but if you want just the section on mobile virtualization, it starts around 60.00 or so.
