Last night I presented the following at the SDForum Cloud SIG in Palo Alto (you’ll have to bear with the animations that didn’t come through well on the online version..).

We had a great turnout considering we are in the middle of summer vacations.  Thanks to Dave, Dave Nielsen & Bernard Golden for coordinating and everyone for attending!  (Even thought I have my brand new camera waiting to be used, I completely forgot to take photos!  Luckily others did and I’ll update this post there photos once they have them online)

My goals for the presentation was to first help everyone understand that Virtualization lies at the heard of cloud computing. Second was to explain that private clouds are just the evolution of an enterprise’s existing virtualized data center (their internal cloud) with the flexibility to expand the private cloud to external cloud provider’s data centers if and when needed.  The key point of clarity here is that an enterprise’s data center could be referred to as both an internal cloud and a private cloud.  But, the cloud that federates the internal cloud with an external cloud should always referred to as a private cloud. And my third goal was to detail the VMware components that go into creating a private cloud.

I was glad to see that everyone mostly understood that an enterprise’s cloud needs are not the same as a internet application’s cloud needs.  Enterprise’s have to deal with legacy applications that can’t or don’t need to be re-written to become fully cloud aware.  And with a vCloud enabled private cloud they don’t have to be.  But, if you have an application that you want to be cloud aware that flexibility is there.  Enterprises also have demands that require features like HA and Fault Tolerance and understand that adding those features may increase overall cost due to technical requirements these features require.

There will be a lot of additional cloud related announcements in the march up to VMworld 2009.  (Dave did a good job of trying to get a scoop on some…)  All the attendees showed great patience with my answers of coming soon with regards to more details.  And today they get a small reward with the Rackspace announcement: Rackspace Private Cloud leverages VMware to Extend Enterprise Computing on Demand.

If you’re attending VMworld 2009 in San Francisco in a few weeks, I included a list of a few sessions that help build on the overview that my presentation gives:

• DE-03 – Introduction to vCloud APIs
• TA3326 – Building an Internal Cloud-the Journey and the Details
• TA3901 – Security and the Cloud
• TA4100 – Internal Clouds: Customer perspective and implementations
• TA4101 – Buying the Cloud: Customer perspective and considerations on what you should send to an external cloud
• TA4103 – Engineering the Cloud-The Future of Cloud
• TA4102 – Unveiling New Cloud Technologies
• VM2706 – Improved cloud interoperability using virtualization management standards

There are many other cloud related sessions during VMworld, so make sure you check the schedule.  And Register early! Last year I had clients who registered too close to the show and couldn’t get into a number of the sessions they wanted.  Some are hands on labs and there are only so many VMs to go around…

And now, some links based upon some of the questions that were asked and items that I promised:

• My Fault Tolerance: Diamond in the Rough with links to additional FT resources
• VMotion between Data Centers—a VMware and Cisco Proof of Concept (check out VMworld session TA3105 – Long Distance/Data Center VMotion and watch for other announcements on this…)
• For those preparing for their vSphere VCP exam and have VI3 knowledge, checkout the VMware vSphere: What’s New [V4] class.