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VMworld keynote thoughts

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I have just finished watching the VMworld keynote online.  Here are some of my rough thoughts:

  • There was a moment when Paul was talking about VMware “providing a set of management products targeted to specific scenarios”.  When he said this the display on the screen went from a picture of two boxes, to a picture of close to a dozen boxes.  I have heard complaints about the fact the VMware have too many different products here – but the visual on the screen really highlighted this.

  • There was a fair discussion around power efficiency and cost.  There was a really nice demo where they showed power monitoring that reflected power usage per virtual machine.  I would like to see us do this in the future.

    That said – with Hyper-V R2 we have spent a lot of time working on making Hyper-V a power efficient virtualization platform (I will be speaking about this at length at Tech-Ed Australia and Tech-Ed New Zealand).  The result is that Hyper-V R2 virtual machines now use significantly less power.  I will try to get a blog post written about this after I get back from my tradeshow run.

  • There was a discussion of addressing small / medium business customers.  VMware is offering vSphere Essentials “starting at $166 per processor”.  Now, for this space we are offering SCVMM 2008 workgroup edition for $505 that allows you to manage up to 5 computers (no limits on number of processors).  At first glance – you might think (like I did) - “Well, if I have more than four processors, SCVMM workgroup edition is the better deal”.  But digging deeper, I think SCVMM 2008 workgroup edition is the better deal, period.  Why do I think this?  vSphere Essentials does not provide support for high availability or live migration, both of which are supported out of the box with the R2 releases of Hyper-V and SCVMM.

  • VMware Go has been announced.  This is all about providing a better experience for small environments when deploying ESXi.  I will be following this with great interest.  I believe that Microsoft, VMware and Citrix / Xen all have a lot of work to do around the user experience of our “free” offerings.  With all of these companies it seems like you need to pay for usability – and I hope this trend gets turned around in the future.

There was a fair amount of discussion around cloud and VDI.  But I need more time to formulate my posts on those topics – so stay tuned over the next couple of days to hear about that

There was also a discussion about the SpringSource, but to be honest – I am a core virtualization guy, not a management guy.  So I largely tuned out for this part.

My final thought at the moment: No love for VMware Workstation?

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 01, 2009
    Agreed on their product range.  Even when I was using ESX 3.X I only knew it and Virtual Center.  Now I'm not dealing with their product I haven't a clue of their offerings.  If you asked me to pick a product for a small or medium sized enterprise from them I'd have to ask for some time to get back to you. I think they have a bit of an edge on the power side with the ability to leverage RAM oversubscription.  That allows them to VMotion VM's to fewer hosts when demand is down and then power down idle hosts.  Working for a company whose biggest IT cost is electricity, that is sweet.

  • Anonymous
    September 01, 2009
    "The result is that Hyper-V R2 virtual machines now use significantly less power.  I will try to get a blog post written about this after I get back from my tradeshow run." Please do, this is very useful info IMHO. Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2009
    I've read and re read a lot of your notes but not being a guru, I got lost on step 1.  Microsoft has the worst support route of any I've used and doesn't bother to respond more than half the time. I assume that the Win 7 capability is still geared to the business with Corel/Photoshop and the larage software programs.  They will not answer those of us who have good monies tied up in 32 bit programs.  We simply need the truth about how this 32 to 64 bit conversion and why it's such a mess.  Why can't ALL 32 bit programs run on the capability mode?