Virtualfuture.info

I stumbled on a nice post on TechStrategyPartners from George Gilbert and Juergen Urbanski. It gives a clear view on which areas VMware will be putting their money on and why. It’s a pretty large piece of reading material and I had a couple of “duh” moments but the core of what they’re telling comes down to this:

We’ve all seen the light concerning server consolidation, it’s (becoming) commodity. So what, at this moment, are the areas where the money is ? According to the authors (VMware stakeholders), VMware has defined 3 waves they are setting out to ride the next period : Read the rest of this entry »

User settings and profiles always make the design of a new Architecture with virtualisation products (are there still any others?) a lot more difficult. Users want to be able to save application preferences, favorites etc etc. and administrators want a good managed performance (network and servers). Due to the different ways to provide a workspace to users (SBC, VDI, Old fahioned deployment etc.), the way of moving user preferences with the users becomes more and more of an issue. Because profiles are becoming bigger and bigger, a roaming profile isn’t much of a solution anymore. So a new way of user profiling is needed, I’ve found three solid options.

Read the rest of this entry »

Unfortunately, live-blogging was not possible during the  general session. The wireless connection was very bad, and they forgot to put tables with wired internet access for the bloggers. A little late, but better than never, here are my quick thoughts on thee keynote speech that Paul Maritz gave: Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday me and my colleague were at the VMworld Lab VMware Desktop preview, this was about the new version 3.0. This version incorporates a lot of new and really cool features like offline VDI, SVI and personal disks. Although an exact date has not been mentioned it was clear that this beta product is pretty close to release and an expected release date could be as early as the end of November. Read the rest of this entry »

Other sessions I attended today showed me a lot of new features. There was one session called:

Sneak peak into future virtual infrastructure Products / Releases

This session was packed! Every seat was taken and there were lot’s of people standing. The woman who presented was Leena Joshi (sr Product marketing manager). There were so many new features that she had to talk very fast to fit all the slides in 45 minutes (she didn’t make it). I couldn’t keep up with her writing it all down, so I took some pictures. Johan and I will explain more about these new features later this week. Read the rest of this entry »

I was looking over the VMWorld 2008 session catalog (I think you’ll need a VMWorld account), and it’s going to be a promising event with a lot of interesting sessions. Off course, there are a lot of best practices sessions, which are always good to attend, but I also found some other interesting sessions. Here is my top 5:

VI Management Assistant (VIMA):
Never heard of this before, it looks like a virtual appliance for deploying agents and scripts to ESX(i) servers.

Virtual Storage Appliances:
How can environments without shared storage still benefit from the high availability features of VC? VMware introduces a new storage architecture: OpenVSA Platform.

VMware Workstation 6.5 Unleashed:
It sounds like VMware workstation 6.5 will be released just before or at VMWorld 2008!

Offline VDI:
This session will introduce the new feature of the upcoming VDM 3.0, I expect to be released at the end of the year.
 
An Introduction to VMO:
The VMware Automation and Orchestration Tool : Find out about the automation engine that powers Life Cycle Manager. I think it’s sort of like Citrix Workflow Studio

Unfortunately, no sessions about Continuous Availability, something VMware showed on VMWorld 2007.

Read the session descriptions: Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe a bit of topic but emBoot release version 2.5 of their product, this is the mail they dropped me:

Our netBoot/i v2.5 diskless iSCSI boot solution for Windows and Linux (now including support for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista) has shipped (read the Press Release).

What’s New in netBoot/i v2.5?
• Supports Booting (Physical or Virtual Servers) Windows XP2000, Windows Server 2003/2008, Windows Vista Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)
• Enhanced Shared-Image Support Including Persistence: Boot multiple clients from a single read-only image and maintain individual user’s settings & data
• P2V, V2P, V2V, P2P Migration Capabilities Across dissimilar hardware and Microsoft or VMware virtual machines Read the rest of this entry »