General Session – Steve Herrod

General session is about to start…. Going to try to keep you up to date…

Dr Steve Herrod just started. Today is about the technology behind all the changes around cloud computing. The world is changing, we are moving from individual servers to service. We want to be thinking about people and not about devices. It is about getting Universal Access to our environment, this is what we expect from our IT environment.

It is not just about Windows applications… Enterprise apps and SaaS need to be accessible. There are three pillars which enable this:

Simplify: Extract from Silos.

Manage: Secure Apps, data, access.

Connect: My app, my data, my colleagues

How do we make this happen? View will simplify desktop services and Thinapp will make using your applications easier by exposing apps in a catalog. Data delivered as a service. A Unified Service Broker should connect these services based on policies and which should connect users and devices.

A demo is now shown where a pool of desktop is offered to new employees. ThinApp Factory is a new project. All applications part of the ThinApp Factory will be exposed through Horizon which also includes SaaS apps. ThinApp Factory scans the local device and allows you to ThinApp the applications and are candidates to be part of Horizon.

Project Octopus is a brand new initiative… I guess judging by Steve’s question Octopus will be a new offering that provides “dropbox” services to the enterprise. A solution that can be offered through the Public Cloud and the Private Cloud. During the demo Project Octopus is used to surface documents to the View Desktop and to his Android based phone.

Strategic partnership with LG and Samsung to bring Horizon Mobile to their devices.

Showing Project Octopus and Horizon on the iPad. A new product/project shown called VMware Appblast. Appblast allows you to start a Windows App on your iPad! Using standard HTML5 any app can be delivered to any HTML 5 client!

Next topic, the robust infrastructure required to enable end-user computing. Accessible Innovation. VMware go allows you to scan a network and reach out to a machine and install vSphere.

vSphere Storage Appliance is designed to get all the benefits of enterprise level virtualization features without the need for an expensive array. Using local storage as shared storage though a virtual appliance. If anything happens to a server the datastore will be remain available.

vSphere 5 adds the capability of running ESXi out of memory being booted over the network. Auto deploy is about compliant deployments of vSphere.

Talking performance right now…. *** how cool are these flashbacks! *** 32 vCPUs, 1TB of memory and 1,000,000. Mr Monster VM just came up on stage aka Melvin. :-). Performance is not about peaks, but about guarantees… satisfying the SLA/Contact using policies! Set and Forget! It is up to the intelligent infrastructure to guarantee this.

Performance guarantees can be realized using Storage DRS by pooling storage in to logical containers aka tiers. Using Profile-Driven Storage you can select where a VM should be place based on a policy instead of “guessing”. We are getting rid of the “storage administration” spreadsheets and providing policy driven storage solutions. Storage DRS will manage the environment and migrate virtual machines and disks when required.

Networking up next…. Separating identity from location. VXLAN! Encapsulationg Layer 2 in Layer 3 packets. Designed to remove limitations L2. Enabling to failover between datacenters without the need to re-ip! VXLAN has been developed by VMware, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Emulex and Intel and has been submitted to IETF!

Availability! Performance is great but availability is key! vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5. vSphere Replication enables you to replicate data between different types of arrays or offers replication to arrays which don’t offer this functionality. SRM 5 also offers automated failback. It allows you to fully test your DR process.

Security! Nosy Neighbor effect. We don’t want virtual machines peeking at data of other virtual machines. vShield helps preventing this. Endpoint protects what’s inside of the virtual machine. vShield App protects the outside of the VM. Allowing to create boundaries. vShield Edge is your border control device in your virtual datacenter.

Automation! What if your infrastructure can respond before you know there is a problem?! Monitoring is key in every environment. Sneak peek of where we are going with our management solutions. VMware vCenter Management. With new navigator technology we can discover which service are running in your virtual machines. These are discovered without the need to change the OS, no agents! We can also check how the virtual machines are related to each other. We can use this information to setup specific vShield rules if and when required. We can even see if all components are protected by SRM or not. This will allow you to quickly check compliancy. vCenter Operations sneak peak. New version will also show business metrics. More and more details than ever before.

Wrapping up:

It is about offering service to people! It is about your cloud!