VMworld Opening Keynote: We're Not in Kansas Anymore

By Keith Gauvin
published: Wednesday, September 02 2009

VMworld 2009 opening keynote showcases both obvious and more subtle strides.

As the IT world and seasons turn, it is that time of year again, time for VMworld.

The first keynote address was delivered by VMware's 2008-minted CEO Paul Maritz. As in his past tenures at Pi, EMC and Microsoft, Mr. Maritz delivered a competent, composed, mild and well choreographed keynote. The presentations and on-stage demonstrations went well and without fail, enhanced by a plethora of larger than life screens and the luminous and evocative green and blue lighting offered by the great AV infrastructure available in the San Francisco-based Moscone Center.

Regardless of the emotion evoked by sheer presence and scale, and in kind with IT at large, it's the information that impacts which is most pertinent. To that end, I present to you, relatively devoid of the mordant sarcasm and an op-ed disposition so often rampant in blogs and beaten ideologues alike, the distilled major take-aways for this year's keynote.

Categorically and in bulleted format, here are the replays, the mainstays and a spattering of new announcements, all ripe with the notion of clouds and an overarching cloud computing paradigm.

vSphere 4 (at large) 

• Folks, prepare to enjoy the option of "cloud" hosting (sending your VMs to someone else's aggregation of hardware) your infrastructure by modularly building the components using vSphere 4.
• The new vCloud Express offering is now complete with an API (submitted to various standards groups for approval) which will let customers quickly and cost effectively move apps and VMs between public and private clouds
• AppSpeed continues to gain attention and continues to introduce vCenter VM concepts of management and automation to applications and associated application events, complete with detailed analytics and dependency mapping.
• Enhance HA and provide continuous availability to critical VMs with Fault Tolerance which utilizes the VM shadowing and vLockstep technology.
• VMware will continue to focus on the vCenter ecosystem by developing components and plug-ins specific to more focused and narrow datacenter requirements.
• Customers should now look to vCenter Chargeback to show-back discreet allocations and utilization of resources. A transparency requisite for the enterprise application market now in the cross hairs.
• vSphere Essentials, all the components and features needed to build the entry level SMB cloud for less than $166.00 per core.

• IBM's System Director Energy Manager (a power meter) is now made available to vCenter (and yes, vice versa) advancing a concept of watts per VM or, more discreetly, watts per application as a measure of efficiency. Co-presented by Tom Brey of IBM.
• HP Insight Manager is now exposed to vCenter and is easily launched and visible by a simple tab.
• HP will soon have a reusable reference VDI architecture, complete with iSCSI storage, available for review and testing in its solution centers. Presented by HP's Steve Dupree.

• PCoIP is indeed real and here, at least by way of demonstration. Unfortunately the much awaited official announcement on availability is still forthcoming. Canada's own Chris Renter of TELUS showed a live demo and claims over TELUS to have 1000 virtualized desktops to be currently under control.
• VMware publicly announced 1 million VMview based desktops deployed. Look for more management enhancements from the industry around thin clients and VDI focused storage offerings with lower price points.

• The intent and soon to be acquired SpringSource with the already widely adopted Hyperic IQ and Spring/Grails object framework enables developers to transiently deploy and monitor applications directly to public and private clouds through a customized version and of the eclipse IDE.

Leaving the auditorium I pondered the latter list and gravitated predominately back to a few major points of interest. The first I concluded was that the extension of vCenter to the underlying hardware and the completeness and value of the free flow of data now available between so many moving parts is indeed wonderful and a testament to collaboration. This was a big hole that could only come about between the coordination major OEMs with discernable product overlaps. Arguably the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle was intentioned to address just this under a single brand, albeit in a more specialized fashion.

The second point ironically occurred at the conclusion of the keynote with roughly only half of the audience remaining. It was the VMware announcement of its signed intent and pending acquisition of SpringSource that to me was the most profound and least witnessed. In the spirit of the show I will illustrate this abstractly: Imagine a world whereupon VMware obtains an open source company, focused on JAVA, with the eclipse IDE, to allow developers to toggle a menu to deploy at will and a full fledged Java application into a cloud (visible and monitored through vCenter complete with the famed blue progress bar). This alone would be a cascade contradictions reaching into IBM's and Oracle's new found backyard. Couple that with the reaching impact that would effectively result from obviating several layers of IT resources with geography indifference betwixt infrastructure and application development and deployment. Well... we don't need to imagine, it's real. Dorothy, we are not in Kansas anymore.

Click here to see the recorded video cast of the VMworld 2009 Paul Maritz Keynote address.