IO Continuity Group, LLC

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The Aug 31-Sept 2 VMWorld 2010 in San Francisco was well-attended (over 17,000 attendees) driven largely by the opportunities for multi-vendor training, enabling organizations to stay current on key technologies during the tight economic period. VMware Education contacted I/O Continuity Group prior to the conference to obtain our notes from the field on blending VMware with SAN (storage area networks), which includes configuring the infrastructure on which virtualization is built. The important updates from the top VMware leadership were conveyed in their keynote sessions: • Virtualization is now an ANSI standard. o OVF (Open Virtualization Format) the open and secure platform format for packaging and distributing virtual machines, has been designated as ANSI INCITS 469 2010 by the INCITS Executive Board. INCITS is accredited by ANSI, the organization that oversees the development of American National Standards. ANSI accreditation signifies that the procedures used by the standards body in connection with the development of American National Standards meet the Institute’s essential requirements for openness, balance, consensus and due process. • Free Hypervisors (allowing multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a host computer-aka hardware virtualization) are no longer the main draw to selecting and adopting a particular virtualization vendor platform. Nevertheless, early virtualization adopters often consider price tags of competitors to VMware’s free ESXi, at least during the test/dev phase. However, no other virtualization vendor has exceeded VMware’s level of infrastructure administration and management. Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization and Oracle VM (based on Xen platform) are making inroads, with Oracle’s VM templates (pre-installed and configured software images) and combining server clustering with virtualization. Oracle is now considering not supporting Oracle applications running in “third-party” virtualization software. VMware has taken issue with Oracle’s claims of achieving three-times the performance. The industry requires virtualization compatibility, so hopefully Oracle will reconsider this notion. o VMware announced no new whiz-bang features bundled into their hypervisor platform (as an “ESX 5 upgrade”), since last year’s vSphere and ESX/ESXi 4 have fully integrated storage APIs with features such as Storage vMotion, Thin Provisioning, support for N_Port ID Virtualization and VM Cloning, among many, many others. o A new 2010 VMware “enterprise” solution called “vCloud Director” pools virtual infrastructure resources (in your existing datacenter) and delivers them to users as a catalogue-based service. This is the concept of “IT as a Service”(similar to last decade’s version of “storage as a utility” with ease of adding new disk space on-the-fly with no downtime). VMware states that “ IT can give users self-service access to their own isolated virtual datacenters, new units of consumption in the cloud that represent pools of compute, storage, and networking resources. Users deploy into these pools using standardized infrastructure service catalogs through a Flash-based web UI.

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