Conrey.org

It doesn’t seem like VMworld 08 was that long ago, but it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything out here. Along side some changes in the Conrey house, there has been another job shift as well. I’m now working over at MMC, Marsh’s parent company, as a *nix, VMware, and Windows Manager. Now don’t snicker too loudly everyone, even though I’ve got to wear a tie to work, I’m still planning on keeping my fingers in the VMware pie. Leaving Dice might have been the hardest job change I’ve ever had to do, but this was an opportunity too good to pass up. MMC is a huge company, with offices all around the globe, and there is a ton of virtualization work to be done.

XenKibbutz is still up and running (It’s been over a year already?!), but I’ve had to shelve a few other side projects to allow for the job change.

Good news from the underground folks, Alliance Technologies has graciously agreed to sponsor our VMworld Underground t-shirts for Wednesday night’s VMware party. If you’re a member of the Underground (it doesn’t take long to sign up), these shirts are going to be raffled off prior to the event. I got an “uh oh” look from John Troyer, so you know they’re going to be good. Thursday morning I’ll post the design and a few of the alternate designs out to the Underground website. I hope everyone is enjoying the show, I know I am.

Just walked out of Paul Maritz’s keynote. Cloud, Cloud, and more Cloud. With a nod to Diane and Mendel, the keynote really focused on where VMware is taking ESX to what they’re calling vCenter. There’s been a significant amount of coverage over Virtual Datacenter OS, the next evolution of ESX, and today’s keynote really solidified the vision of where vmware is trying to go.

Two things really jumped out at me as being a huge conduit for change in our datacenters. The first was the focus on federated services, or the ability to leverage disparate datacenters to carry or handle the same workload in case of a lower than assigned SLA. This is going to be huge.

One of the fears about moving data to the cloud is the amount of control that is retained after the data moves. Today’s announcement will really pave the way for allowing businesses to retain a more granular level of control with data that is outside of their firewalls.

The second big announcement in my opinion was the migration path from VDI to VMware View. Mapping users to “stuff” (OS, apps, data) will allow a users identity to map to whatever hardware they’re using laptop, desktop, mobile device. It really is time to take the IT dept. out of the business of provisioning hardware altogether.

The demonstration of a bootable usb vmimage to a laptop that once running runs a vmimage that maps software 3d graphics calls thru to hardware was fantastic. This is huge. Maybe for my company, and probably for many other companies, the ability to play youtube or browse a rich video heavy web has been the dirty little secret of why VDI hasn’t taken off.

As an aside, a red background? red? really? I was waiting for the slasher to come out from behind the curtain.

Last year, the night before VMworld started, a bunch of folks from the vmtn boards linked up and had a few drinks at Johnny Foley’s Irish House. I got a chance to talk with some people, make some new friends, have a few pints, and hear what people were looking forward too in the coming week. A great start to a great week. Now, I know that a bunch of you are going to be attending one, or maybe more vendor parties Sunday night. Fantastic. The rest of this message isn’t for you lot.

The rest of you downtrodden, jet lagged souls are welcome to head down to the Nine Fine Irishmen. It’s going to be as informal as it gets. If you’re interested in talking about VMware, hop utilization rates, whatever, there will be a few of us down there Sunday night around 7 PM.

To make it more interesting this year, I thought we’d start with a single, simple, agreement. If you start talking about a product that you a) own b) work for c) have financial interest in, or d) sell, you’re buying the next round. VMware engineers are excluded from this as they tend to be extremely funny prior to and after a few pints.

If you’re planning on coming, drop a note over at vmworld.com in this thread, so I’ll have an idea of how much space we may need.

Looking for a yet another great start to a great week. See ya there.

-Theron

Simon Crosby just finished up giving his keynote this morning on Xen at linuxworld08. Some interesting quotes from his keynote:

“Hyper-V is an implementation of the Xen open reference standard”
“No matter what the other vendors say, we utterly crush other big vendor hypervisors”
“beware of Free as in beer hypervisors”
“Hypervisors are just a useful feature set”

Read the rest of this entry »

is a very cool tool that takes a bunch of words and makes a word cloud out of them. You can input documents, web addresses, whatever. Here’s a sample wordle from Conrey.org a few weeks back.

I’ve been having an ongoing discussion with a couple of guys about the cost of actually deploying a virtual environment. One of the key discussion points always falls back to licensing and costs associated around additional features. Mike DiPetrillo, an employee of VMware, has an interesting write up showing (not surprisingly) that VMware is cheaper to deploy in a small or medium sized business than Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution. Already there are a flurry of counter articles, but one of the better ones in my opinion is written by a Microsoft Gold partner.

He comes to the same conclusion, but factors in a host of other data. Both are worth reading. With ESX 3i freely available, there are going to be alot of vendors saying that one solution is better than the other. I’m still an advocate for both Xen and VMware, depending on the environment, I just don’t want presidential candidates forcing my Virtualization environments to reboot.

I didn’t make it out to the Xen Summit Boston 08 this summer. Next year this is on the list of events that I’m trying to attend. It’s always good to stay abreast of the technologies that keeping my work exciting and this is one of those conferences that I’d like to go and get wowed.

From the Presentations that are available online, here are a couple that I found particularly interesting:

Memory Overcommit…Without the Commitment Video - Dan Magenheimer

Quantitative Comparison of Xen and KVM Video - Todd Deshane

Modeling the Overhead…Help with Capacity Planning Video - Tim Wood

http://wordle.net is a black hole. I’ll post an example tomorrow. Pretty cool.

If you’re going to take a questionnaire from a potential employer, it’s best not to ask the “community” to take your test for you. It can only be funnier if your potential employer finds the thread.