SocialCast: Rise of the Virtual Machine!

Are you ready to friend your VM? It's possible that some time in the future when you try to remove vCPUs or memory or even disk space from a virtual machine, it might just unfriend you and have its VM friends unfriend you too. What a painful painful reconciliation that will be, when you'll have to spend a ton on a new host CPU, faster memory and a bouquet of red hot flash or SSD just to make amends with your VM.

It could happen, VMware gave a glimpse of what could be a future where virtual machines leverage social media to communicate among each other and with us humans. In other words, VMware's R&D intends on bringing Skynet to life.

All joking aside, many attendees at VMworld discounted the idea of VMware leveraging SocialCast in the vSphere infrastructure, but I believe SocialCast will make its way into an actual product. So what might seem farfetched today may be normal tomorrow.

For those of you that missed it, at VMworld, VMware demonstrated how SocialCast can be used with your virtual infrastructure. The first step is to import the virtual infrastructure's hosts and VMs into SocialCast. There, you can also make associations of VMs, hosts and humans. The idea here is if a host or VM is experiencing an issue, it will automatically post a status on its wall. VMs and hosts affected by that issue can like the status, which can be used to indicate that they, too, are suffering from the issue.

I am sure you will arrive at the same conclusion that I have: SocialCast represents the future of advanced monitoring, workflow and problem resolution.

In a world moving towards Big Data, can you imagine the amount of information we can process and learn from by using this type of system? Imagine how easy it could be to alert users when a system they are using has problems or issues.  If the enterprise collaboration tool is where employees spend the majority of their time and if that is the new "desktop" or workspace for launching applications, aggregating data and collaborating, then imagine a better delivery mechanism, a better place for monitoring, acting and reacting to issues. Imagine how much more intuitive this could potentially be for hosts and virtual machines.

I believe VMware showed this preview to inspire startups to begin thinking about building these types of solutions. Comment here, as I am curious to get your feedback.

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/10/2012 at 12:49 PM