As you probably know VDI -- what I tend to call hosted desktop -- was a big part of the VMworld buzz. CEO Paul Maritz is a lot more committed to building out this line of business for the company than Diane Greene had been. Ideally, a company zigs when it should zig and zags when it should zag. In my slightly jet-lagged opinion, jumping all over VDI in a big way is a good thing for the company overall and puts it in a great position to compete with Citrix in an area where many observers think the latter company is better positioned. VMware refers to this as its vClient Initiative.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/19/20081 comments
Time to head back to Boston and digest a ton of input from this very busy show. It's been a few years since I've been to Vegas and the city has clearly changed. Looking out from my hotel window to the cityscape the other day, I was reminded a bit of Dubai -- new construction booming, a regenerated city rising out of the desert. It's unfortunate, however, that the entire city is still so pedestrian-unfriendly. (Of course, who would want to walk a Vegas city block anyway?)
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/18/20081 comments
Las Vegas, September 17 -- Here at VMworld, Microsoft’s Scott Woodgate made some interesting comments about the company’s stance on the hosted desktop market. This is the competitive segment where Microsoft goes up against VMware’s VDI solution and of course VDI was given major emphasis by CEO Paul Maritz here at the show. I blogged earlier about my doubts and concerns about the company’s short and long term approach to having a competitive offering here.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/17/20080 comments
Las Vegas, September 17 -- I managed to catch up with Ed Bugnion, CTO of the Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit at Cisco to get a little deeper dive on the announcement made in conjunction with VMware's VDC-OS, the centerpiece of the company's VMworld liftoff and the architecture and roadmap for the next generation data center.
Central to this is a new set of capabilities (not a product) called VN-Link. Explaining it would take far more time than I seem to have at the moment (it's a bit of a hall of mirrors) so I'll save that for another blog. But VN-Link the is foundation for a new product called the Nexus 1000V which is a networking linchpin of VDC-OS. The product was jointly developed with VMware and is slated for availability in 1HO9. Interestingly, when Bugnion announced at his keynote that it was the "the first third party ESX switch", there was an almost startling moment of spontaneous applause.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/17/20080 comments
Las Vegas, September 16 -- Arriving in Vegas yesterday, the first thing I did at the hotel was to have a long slow gulp of Fiji water (it was 98 degrees at touchdown) and the second was to fire up my laptop so that I could take in VMware’s slew of announcements. The piece de resistance of course was the unveiling of the company’s Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS).
Trying to unravel this one will be interesting to say the least. (Hint: it's not really an operating system.) There’s not a whole lot new here at least conceptually. My take at this juncture is that it’s essentially more detail and some incremental forward movement on what VMware calls the "data center of the future" and Microsoft calls "Dynamic IT", a complex construct that's all about automating VM-based processes and making them “elastic, self-managing, and self-healing” to use VMware’s terminology. The telecom’s like to use the term “the intelligent network”. Think of this as the intelligent data center.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/16/20080 comments
My former colleague Dan Kusnetzky has made some interesting comments about HP’s approach to desktop virtualization. As he correctly points out, overall the company’s got a very broad reach in terms of their potential hooks into the market. And while Microsoft and VMware have gotten a lot of industry attention over the last few months, the large system vendors are starting to get their ducks lined up in virtualization and will without a doubt become forces to be reckoned with. (Editor-in-chief Doug Barney wrote extensively about all these suppliers in our May/June issue.)
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/14/20080 comments
Ok so it’s off to VMworld next week for full immersion. It’s going to be an extremely busy show. If you haven’t tried out VMworld’s nifty Schedule Builder give it a try, it’s a great tool. (Just don’t make the mistake that I did and print out all of the sessions. Trust me, there are a lot and on just about every imaginable angle.)
Speaking of full immersion, I’ve been doing a lot of digging on the subject of hosted desktop virtualization lately and trying to scope out just where that market is headed. I’ll be having a lot of discussions about it next week so if any of you have any burning questions about this market, feel free to email them. I’ll do my best to get answers and post them here from the show.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/12/20080 comments
No doubt about it. Cisco is a well run company. Right down to the handshake. I remember going to an analyst event at Cisco East in Boxborough, MA a few years ago. After parking our cars in the visitor’s lot, we were very pleasantly assailed by “greeters” -- Cisco employees who were specifically tasked with glad-handing and welcoming us as we walked in the door. After the event, we filled out evaluation forms on the various speakers but the form also asked us to evaluate each greeter as well. (Do you take off points for the proverbial fishy handshake?)
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/12/20080 comments
Listening to Bob Muglia and Kevin Turner speaking yesterday at the
Microsoft virtualization launch
more or less confirmed my perceptions (and doubts) about the company’s approach to hosted desktop virtualization or what it likes to call “centralized desktops”.
Hosted desktop virtualization is one of the four types of client virtualization as defined by Forrester, which also includes local desktop, local application, and hosted application elements. (Client virtualization tends to be a semantic wormhole, proceed with caution!)
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/09/20081 comments
Sharmila Mulligan is the chief marketing officer, Business Technology Optimization, for HP. On a call regarding the company’s latest announcement, I asked her about the major pain points they were hearing from customers about virtualization. At the top of the list: server virtualization ratios and making the right decisions about how many VMs to put on servers.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/08/20080 comments
It’s dueling press releases time folks. Microsoft’s announcement today should be more than interesting but, in the meantime, VMware has issued a release previewing next week’s festivities. Don’t you just love competition? I’m a serious tennis fan and it’s great to see these two companies going at it the way Andy Murray and Rafa Nadal did in the outstanding conclusion of the US Open men’s semifinal yesterday.
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/08/20080 comments
In looking at HP’s recent press advisories about a slew of virtualization offerings, I was a bit surprised by the decidedly downbeat nature of the announcement positioning. The hook for the release -- which urged us to “rethink” virtualization -- was a survey commissioned by the company on virtualization deployment. Here’s what it said:
“Recent global research conducted on behalf of HP revealed that while 86 percent of technology decision makers have implemented virtualization projects, the vast majority of respondents expect to have virtualized just 25 percent of their technology environments by 2010. While many of those surveyed anticipate eventually reaching 75 percent virtualization of their total environments, only one-third of these technology implementers recognize virtualization as a valuable business tool. Two-thirds of implementers relegate virtualization to the role of technology enabler.”
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Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/07/20080 comments