Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

cloud

VMworld 2010: Labs are the place to be!

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As some of you might now I am not only doing a session at VMworld 2010 but I am also a Lab Captain. We have been working really hard over the last couple of months to get the labs up and running for you guys.

Over the last three days it has been chaos here at VMworld. Setting up, testing and stress testing labs and of course some last minute changes to make sure all of you guys have a great experience.

I must say, looking at the lab environment it has been worth it. We are not talking about a couple of labs here. No we are talking 480 seats and about 30 different labs ranging from “VMware ESXi Remote Management Utilities” to “Intro to Zimbra Colloaboration Suite” and even products which will be formally announced tomorrow.

I took a couple of pictures this morning of the labs just to get you guys as excited as we are:

We all hope you will enjoy the Labs at VMworld 2010, but looking at the content and the set-up I am confident you will! Enjoy,

VMware vCloud wants your opinion. Take our online survey!

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I was asked if I could ask my readers to fill out the following survey. Hopefully all of you will be so kind to fill it out and help VMware taking the next logical step, which ever that might be.

Cloud computing gets a lot of buzz today. But when people talk about cloud, do they mean IaaS, PaaS or SaaS? Who knows? Here at the vCloud group at VMware, we’re curious to hear what you think and why you use (or don’t use) a public cloud service. We’re also interested in hearing what applications and workloads you’re running in a public cloud.

To gather your feedback, we’ve created a quick public cloud survey: http://bit.ly/publiccloudsurvey. Our survey asks why you chose your provider, the type of workloads you’re running, if you use intermediaries with your cloud solution, and what you perceive as the biggest benefits or concerns when it comes to cloud.

The survey only takes about 10-15 minutes to complete, and the first 100 participants receive a $5 Starbucks gift card in the mail. Please note, this survey is open to ALL public cloud users, not just VMware customers.

Resizing your IDE virtual harddisk?

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** Revised blog post about Resizing your IDE virtual disk can be found here **

I am working on a “top secret” upcoming product (around Cloud of course) and because of that I am testing various things. I had never noticed this before but today I wanted to change the size of a disk within vCenter as part of the test procedure. For some weird reason this option was greyed out:

I checked if there was a snapshot on the disk but that wasn’t the case. I tried the same thing on a different VM and it actually wasn’t greyed out. Then I noticed the difference between the VMs… The VM on which it was greyed out had an “IDE” disk and the other VM had a “SCSI” disk. It appears that it is currently not possible to change the size of an IDE virtual harddisk within vCenter.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs… we are still growing

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We just keep expanding… the amount of work is insane and we need help.

I guess the list never ends. Before we can fill this positions I bet more will be opened up.

About VMware’s TS Cloud Services Team:
As part of VMware’s strategic vCloud initiative, VMware is developing a new Cloud Services team that is 100% focused on deploying VMware-based “clouds” for our large customers. The Cloud Services team is organized centrally within the WW Technical Services Organization and brings specialized consulting expertise to support the worldwide VMware field PSO team as they help customers implement VMware-based clouds.

May the Force be with you

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Over the last couple of days a lot of info has been floating around about VMforce. VMforce is a coalition between Salesforce.com and VMware.  Combine VMware virtualization and cloud technology with Springsource TCServer and managed /hosted by one of the industryleaders in SaaS Salesforce.com and you will have one powerful enterprise ready cloud. To prevent any misunderstandings: Springsource is the framework that enables the Java apps to be uploaded directly to the Cloud and run the app.

VMforce will be the first enterprise cloud for Java developers . With VMforce, Java developers can build apps that are instantly social and available on mobile devices in real time. And it’s all in the cloud, so there’s no hardware to manage and no software stack to install, patch, tune, or upgrade. Building Java apps on VMforce is easy!

  • Use the standard Spring Eclipse-based IDE
  • Code your app with standard Java, including POJOs, JSPs, and Servlets
  • Deploy your app to VMforce with 1 click

With VMforce, every Java developer is now a cloud developer.

I received the following links to several videos on youtube which are worth watching if you want to get familiar with what VMforce has to offer”

  1. What is VMforce?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpO6whOCAmQ
  2. VMforce Customer testimonials
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7haezCV9mc
  3. Paul Maritz (VMware)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnFZFbwGoT4
  4. Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw8nLx1CPRA
  5. Parker Harris(Salesforce.com) and Rod Johnson(VMware)
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWe6Zdvz4Q4
  6. Dave Smoley CIO of Flextronics
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wex5bChEsAc