Mike Laverick is well-known on the VMTN Forums and is also well-known at VMworld for usually wearing a big "RTFM Education" logo across the back of his shirt. Here’s his take so far on VMworld 2007:
VMworld 2007: Day One: Keynote – ESX 3i
The little story is – through the VMware rumour-mill we knew this
was coming. Plus a couple of weeks ago Xen made a similiar pre-VMworld
pre-announcement. Speaking to a number of guys in the hall who have had
a chance to play with this release. It became clear that this is being
pitched at customers who find ESX and its deployment a scary prospect.
It doesn’t feel as if it is being marketed at the enterprize customers
who use the fully-featured caffine rich ESX product. For a start the
amount of hardware that the ESX 3i release can address is much less
than the enterprise release. So it’s very much a “starter” edition. As
with Xen’s announcement you can upgrade to enterprise release if you
wish to. But if you add the price of ESX 3i to the upgrade costs – then
most “serious” users would have gone to the enterprise release.Still, it’s a “step in the right direction”. After all we all
looking for quick ways of racking up a host and getting ESX on it with
minimal effort. I myself have spent lots of time on this issue with my
work on the UDA. But I could spent that valuable time on something else
if ESX 3i had been around, and been fully-flavoured.
VMworld 2007: Site Recovery Manager
I attended a technology preview session on VMware’s new “Site Recovery
Manager”. What’s the best way to describe this? See it as HA for two
different locations – a Primary and DR location. For it to work you
need some kind of replication (synch or asynch the choice is yours).
The replication of the VM is not being done by VMware but by your SAN,
iSCSI or NAS vendors replication technology. SiteA can protect SiteB,
and SiteB can protect SiteA. So this does offer up the opportunity to
share DR costs – like two universities who can recipocate each others
resources for DR purposes. VM’s can continue to have a “home” location
where they normally reside.
VMworld 2007: VMware’s VDI Solution
VMware’s VDI solution (Beta Program SilverStone) bundles the core
Prospero product to Vi3 who’s chief appeal appears to be a single
solution from one vendor which gives you a level of support and
accountability that other VDI solutions lack. In other words – if a
multi-vendor VDI solution goes wrong – who do you call, or who do they
blame?
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
VMWorld 2007: Panel Discussion
Virtualization at the forefront at the global warming. We have a long
way to go to get even near making headway. The previous speaker spoke
about increasing sales and consumption, and growth rates 5%… I think we
need to aviod patting ourselves on the back too much… Its kind a weird
to be here in the US and talking about energy consumption – like Kyoto
never happened…?
