Hiya, folks. Long time, no blog. We're in serious crunch time on the next print issue of the magazine, and that has taken almost all of my time. I hope you haven't forgotten about me.
Anyway, Microsoft made a couple of announcements yesterday that I had to mention. First is that Hyper-V Server is available now. Go here. Microsoft made it available yesterday afternoon, less than a month after the official announcement last Sept. 8. Hyper-V Server is a standalone hypervisor, meaning that you don't need to have Windows Server 2008 to get it, as is the case with Hyper-V.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/02/20086 comments
Since the next print issue of the magazine has kept me from blogging this week, I thought I'd give you a sneak preview of what you can expect when it hits your
real
Inbox.
Our cover story is about VMware, and where the company goes next. With the extraordinary amount of management turnover, how will it respond? Will the virtualization leader stay that way, or is it hearing footsteps from Microsoft, Citrix, Novell, Sun, Red Hat et al.? Is Paul Maritz the right person for the job? We'll try and answer those questions.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/02/20085 comments
Gee, it seems like we just got finished with
VMworld Las Vegas
(wait, we did!), and now comes word of the next event.
VMware announced this morning that VMworld, the gigantic virtualization party, will be heading back to Cannes, France next Feb. 24-26. The first VMworld Europe was held there earlier this year. (Side note: Don't you think your faithful editor has to attend that show? Purely for news-gathering reasons, of course.)
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/25/20083 comments
LAS VEGAS, Sept. 18 -- VMware 2008's almost a wrap, as attendees are hitting their final sessions, and vendors begin to pack up displays. I've had a great time here, learned a lot, and am ready to head home. I've spent a decent amount of time on the exhibit hall floor, and thought I'd share a smattering of interesting-looking products and companies I talked with here in Las Vegas.
Reflex Security, out of Atlanta, is a company we're reviewing in an upcoming issue. I found out something very interesting from CTO and founder Hezi Moore. Reflex was the very first virtual appliance for VMware. As in the first, ever. It's a crowded marketplace now, but Reflex was there first. Anyway, its virtual security appliance has obviously been around a long time (in virtualization-industry years). One of the cool things the appliance does is "revision control." What that means is that you can see previous versions of what your virtual infrastructure looked like. It's like a snapshot. It allows you to go back in time and see what changes have happened, and may allow you to pinpoint problems based on changes made. Very slick.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/18/20082 comments
LAS VEGAS, SEPT. 18 -- Day 2, for me at least, was more about VMware defining its vision, which CEO Paul Maritz laid out in the first day's keynote. CTO Stephen Herrod went into
greater detail
about the three new initiatives -- virtual datacenter OS (VDC-OS), cloud computing and VMware View, the next generation of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).
The reality is that nothing VMware announced is "new", in the sense that we haven't seen it before. The idea of VDC-OS is to make the entire datacenter -- not just server components like CPU, RAM, and so on -- a big pool of resources, all tied together by this umbrella technology. That includes network and storage components.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/18/20082 comments
Day 1 of VMworld is a wrap. Here are some of the highlights, at least for me.
- Paul Maritz' keynote, which I wasn't enthused about, still was an important event because it was his first public appearance as the new VMware leader. What I did like were the two question and answer sessions he had -- one with attendees, and one for the press. At those, he answered questions forthrightly. When he didn't know the answer to a question, he didn't try to tap dance around it; he said he didn't know. It's OK to not know things.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/17/20083 comments
VMware CTO Dr. Stephen Herrod gave the keynote talk this morning. Mostly, he repeated what Paul Maritz
said yesterday
, just with a lot more detail. He certainly is a more dynamic speaker than Maritz, who is at about the same level as Bill Gates as a presenter (and no, that's not a compliment).
Herrod was more animated and more outwardly enthusiastic. He didn't get into any more specifics in terms of products or deliverable dates, but he did talk more about the technology behind VDC-OS, cloud computing and VMware View.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/17/20084 comments
You've already read the news about VMware's
announcements
regarding its new initiatives. I thought I'd give some quick analysis (note that this is always subject to change after more review and digesting of the information; but hey, it's a blog, after all.)
The first is the idea of the Virtual Datacenter OS, or VDC-OS. It's a technology that, to put it in Maritz' words, makes your datacenter "one giant computer." Everything is a pool of resources, including CPUs, RAM, services, storage, I/O, network, and so on. In a way, it's similar to what ESX and XenServer from Citrix already do. The new stuff, as far as I can tell, is extending the virtualization beyond the servers and into network, I/O and storage. Those services are already offered by third parties right now, so I don't know if this new architecture will incorporate what those vendors offer, or if it will replace what they're offering.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/16/20080 comments
LAS VEGAS, Sept. 16 -- Hola from Las Vegas! Executive Editor
Tom Valovic
, Editor-in-Chief
Doug Barney
and I are covering everything VMworld this week.
Paul Maritz' keynote this morning wasn't anything we didn't report on before. He basically reiterated all the points VMware released yesterday, which reporters were briefed on last week. What I found more interesting was what he didn't say.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/16/20088 comments
My 5:40 a.m. (yes, you read that correctly) flight Monday should eventually land me in Sin City mid-morning. We'll be covering every aspect of
VMworld
during the week, along with Executive Editor
Tom Valovic
and Editor-in-Chief
Doug Barney
. Tom and I will be blogging and writing news stories pretty much non-stop, so look for additional
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/14/20084 comments
The virtualization announcements are coming hot and heavy these days; it seems like everyone wants to grab a little of the limelight from
VMworld
, which starts Monday. The latest is Sun's foray into the virtualization mainstream with
xVM Server 1.0
, and version 2.0 of Ops Center, which supports xVM.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/11/20080 comments
VMware continues to hemorrhage executives. The latest is Dr. Mendel Rosenblum, chief scientist and husband of co-founder and recently ousted CEO Diane Greene. The
New York Times
reports
that Rosenblum quit last night and will return to teaching at Stanford.
In addition to Greene and Rosenblum, VMware last week lost Richard Sarwal, the executive vice president in charge of research and development, who left for his old job at Oracle after staying around long enough for a cup of coffee. That was after Paul Chan, VP of product development, said he was quitting in October.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 09/09/20083 comments