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Photos from VMware vSphere Launch

April 29, 2009 3 Comments

During last week’s vSphere launch event at VMware corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, a few VMware employees with a passion for photography were allowed full access to photograph the event. Employees, Guests, freedom of movement during the launch presentations…full access. I was one of those photographers. (Personally many thanks out to VMware Marketing to to allow us to do this!)

These photos are just a sampling of the full set from the vSphere launch that are available on my photography website. The event took place on in the VMware fitness facility with employees packing the open area between the buildings and on the stairs of nearby buildings.

There was a slight delay in getting these photos up online as I had some personal commitments right after the launch event (my sister was in town visiting…family comes first) followed by this week on the road visiting customers. There are a few more images that I will post later this week as well as a few videos that I shot during the launch (though the audio is not the best).

My favorite photo from the event is the front row of technology industry leaders who were present for the launch:

Left to right: Pat Gelsinger (Intel), Frank Hauck (EMC), Joe Tucci (EMC), Chad Sakac (EMC…guess he’s not just a virtualgeek but also a bit of a photo geek), Christopher Rence (FICO), Steve Harrod (VMware), John Chambers (Cisco), unknown, James Mouton (HP), Michael Dell (Dell).

(For those who are interested: I was using a Canon 5D mark II with a 70-200mm F2.8 L or 24-70mm F2.8 L lenses. For the pixel peepers: yes the original images are 21 megapixels and the videos were shot in full 1080p HD.)

VMware Announces vSphere 4 Cloud OS

April 20, 2009 5 Comments

Tonight VMware has done their online announcement of vSphere 4. While some may consider the branding of vSphere 4 as a Cloud Operating System just trendy technology marketing, there are enough new features, enhancements to existing capabilities, API hooks to enable new product add-ons, and partnership activity to have justified the re-branding away from technology to provide enterprises with Virtual Infrastructure to a solution that enables enterprises to operate their own cloud computing enrionment…a Cloud OS.

In case you haven’t read the disclosure like over on the right, I am currently employed by VMware as a Global Solutions Consultant. This means that I have been talking to global customers about vSphere 4 for quite a while now. And when it takes two hours to give a product road map that just touches on all the capabilities that a release includes, it’s big enough to be worth the re-branding.

Here is my launch day link roundup to VMware vSphere 4 for Enterprises:

First Off, the Simulcast of the official launch by VMware Executives and Partner Community (9am PDT on April 21st) [Look for me snapping photos during the event, probably from behind a big white lens…stay tuend for more on that tomorrow]
vSphere list of Key Features (PDF)
Summary of VMware product name changes
vSphere is organized into two main sets of services
- Application Services
  - Availability
  - Security
  - Scalability
- Infrastructure Services
  - vCompute (ESX and ESXi are still there as the rock solid foundation)
  - vStorage: What’s New Whitepaper (PDF)
  - vNetwork: What’s New Whitepaper (PDF)
vSphere editions for Enterprises
vSphere Pricing, Packaging, and Licensing Whitepaper (PDF)
vSphere Upgrade Center is now also live…start planning your migration from VI3 to vS4!

For non official teaser screen shots of various parts of vSphere 4, check out Jason Boche’s A random collection of what’s new vSphere eye candy. I’m sure that there will be dozens of other blog posts in the near future talking about the various new or enhanced aspects of vSphere in wonderful technical glory. I’ll try to share the best ones that I come across and that my customers post via my Twitter feed.

While vSphere contains enough things to keep every member of an IT staff talking for days, my focus over the next few days (besides discussing various parts of vSphere to my clients) will be to talk about the key aspects of vSphere that I think can help an enterprise continue to drive cost savings while enabling agile service delivery to the business, items like:

Distributed Resource Scheduling and Distributed Power Management as they relate to an internal cloud
Distributed Virtual Switching and it’s hooks into Application Services like vShield Zones and VMsafe
Storage savings features of Thin Provisioning
Fault Tolerance and the hidden revolution this provides
Easing the Management burden using vCenter Orchestrator and vCenter Server Linked Mode and new licensing model

Enjoy the launch day festivities…

Countdown to Launch

April 19, 2009 Leave a Comment

One of the great things about my job at VMware is the new technology and initiatives that I’m aware of and can participate in. The downside is that you can’t talk about them until they are officially announced. On Tuesday VMware will be making a large announcement that includes vSphere and vCloud, I’ll finally be able to start sharing my thoughts and experiences on everything that we have been working on. You can join in to the online simulcast of the announcement from VMware corporate headquarters in Palo Alto. I’ll also be posting photos (and maybe a video?) from the day…timing of which will be determined by my busy schedule this week.

Tuesday’s announcement completes the triad of announcements over the past month. First was Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), their foray into the X86 based blade server computing market but designed around the virtualization and cloud computing needs of the enterprise data center. Next came EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max (Virtual Matrix Architecture), the storage solution designed to power the virtual data center with scalable inter-connected storage that can even span multiple data centers. Chad Sakac has posted a great virtualization specific overview on his blog. Finally comes Tuesday…stay tuned.

(In preperation for tomorrow’s big event, check out hte Informationweek article on Why ‘Private Cloud’ Computing is Real — And Worth Considering. I found this article to be a good overview on private cloud computing and has a few VMware teasers in it.)