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VMware Reveals New Offerings At VMWorld 2006
Nirav Mehta writes to mention a Techworld article about this past week's virtualization announcements at VMWorld 2006. VMWare had several new offerings in the event's third year. From the article: "VMware has released details of ACE 2.0, which is due for release towards the middle of 2007. The product, which was demonstrated in alpha at VMworld this week, allows administrators to distribute pre-packaged virtual machines to users in a secure manner. This means, for instance, that contractors can be allowed to attach to the enterprise network using their own laptops but only via the ACE VM. The new version was created, according to VMware, because users asked for greater control over the VMs, especially when, for instance, large numbers of remote users need to attach to the enterprise network. Other areas due for improvement include security and integration with enterprise management tools. "
ESX server.
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do you mean phoenix?!
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
was WMWorld itself a tradeshow or was it a tradeshow virtualized within another one?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
He said "affordable".
(It depends on your perspective; enterprisey customers probably think ESX is cheap, while whiteboxers think "OMG it costs more than the server".)
I'm pretty sure his "ESX server" comment was aimed at the grandparent's second sentence - you know, the sophomoric comment about host-based virtualization being dead.
In the enterprise, host-based virtualization is pretty much the whole market.
#DeleteChrome
Its a lot tricker than it seems... You need to get the images to the user either pre-customized for them, or you have to have a way to take a generic VM and provision it for that end user automatically, including getting it joined as a unique machine into the enterprise domain. Add to that keeping that up to date, secure and making the virtualization experience end-user-friendly and a slew of other issues, its far easier to use a product that manages that for you than to DIY, unless you're doing it for a small number of fairly technical end users.
Its like anything related to desktop management -- you can of course do it on your own, but a tool can make it a lot easier and save a lot of time and money in the long run.
Disclaimer: I work for one of the companies building the competing products I think the AC was refering to.
Also unless they have finally updated it, which I fully admit they may have at this point, the Server version doesn't have the same flexibility with snapshots that workstation does, where you can have multiple snapshots.
- Allow me to use my laptop on their network and allow me to connect to my company's network through their corporate network or through a dedicated network they've set up on the side, using a VPN client.
- Allow me to use my laptop on their network, but do not provide me with a network for reaching my company's network.
- Do not allow me to use my laptop on the corporate network, but instead provide a "standard laptop", same as the rest of the workforce is using or a desktop to use.
In the first case, I'm always more productive and cheaper per unit of delivery than the other options, because I've got all my tools setup and on average all software (except perhaps one or two apps) I need to perform my work already licensed. I'm also able to harvest the information, knowledge and assets available through my company's network. Some clients realize the benefit of this and instead regulate which tools I may use and what I may do while connected to their network by making me sign an agreement (along with the standard NDA).In the second and third scenario, clients still require me to sign the same "usage agreement" and NDA, so there really is no benefit for them from a liability standpoint. The risk is the same for all three cases and mitigated the same way (through agreements). On the downside, each unit I deliver costs more because I don't have my toolbox and don't have the software configured for optimal productivity. However I still deliver reasonable value per dollar spent because I am still able to leverage resources from my company by using my own laptop on the side (either through a client provided network or a 3G card).
There is really no benefit that I've witnessed from a client perspective in not allowing me to use my own machine and tools.
Now, the quoted statement of having me use my own machine coupled with the limitation of not having my tools available and also not being able to use the resources available through my company's network for the client's benefit seems like a worse situation for a client than any of the previous ones.
No matter from which angle I try comparing the three typical scenarios with using ACE for the suggested purpose, I fail to see the bottom-line benefits for a company relying on consultants / contractors.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
Well... I like to be extremely hyperbolic in my statements as it gets a rise out of people. And Slashdot is admittedly a little too boring these days. No more massive flamewars, or death threats going around. So yeah, host-based virtualization is here to stay for a couple more years. But, I speak of hypervisor because I'm already using it with Xen. I ditched VMWare for QEMU because of cost concerns. (Remember when you're dealing with me, you're dealing with a guy who does this stuff at home) I could no longer afford VMWare and QEMU, while not anywhere near as good performance wise, still did the trick for me to have access to Windows as needed. ie. Almost never. But, when I found Xen, I moved all my home servers to it because you can do some damn incredible things with it even if you don't have hardware virtualization support. I have an old P II era Celeron 400 with 384 megs of RAM running three VMs and doing everything it did before + more. It handles DHCP, Internal DNS, External DNS, DBMail for the IMAP portion of things, Postfix for SMTP (Internal and External instances), NTP, NFS, etc... So, that's more what I'm talking about.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
My company is doing driver development for IEEE 1394, i.e. Firewire, devices. Not having 1394 support in VMware is a show stopper for us. Unless and until they get around to including it we'll be sitting here experiencing BSOD crashes several times per day, and sometimes per hour. We've heard the reasons VMware has not virtualized Firewire and, quite frankly, they don't hold water.
I have to VPN in to work from home. I built myslef a virgin, pristine, virtual VM under Parallels with exactly what I need to get in to work, and nothing more. More secure for everybody. Sweet.
I just left LA today (Friday), the conference ended yesterday (Thursday) and now I'm freaking stuck at O'Hare overnight because they cancelled outgoing flights due to weather...so I'll write up some of the interesting stuff I saw.
Most interesting comment - During Partner Day, Karthik Rau (the Vice President of Product Management) during his presention made a comment that 'Windows Vista may be the last OS of it's type', which drew a gasp from partners around me. Hyperbole? Well, we'll see.
Market Penetration - had some discussions with partners and pretty much everyone agreed that VMware will saturate the enterprise market in just a few years (5? 7?). The benefits are just too compelling esp for DR. Sure, not every workload is suitable for virtualization (maybe 20% of workloads out there are better left running physical) but that means that 80% of servers ARE suitable for virtualization. Anyone in an IT position should at least be looking a good look at this stuff if you don't know it already.
VMware ESX 3.0 - bigger and better. Lots of places with more info about ESX 3.0, but the HA and DRS are probably the key improvements (basically, machine automated VMotion). I guess the 4-way vSMP is cool too. And the support for NAS and iSCSI. And the improved snapshots. And so on...
Vmware Lab Manager - this is SLICK for dev/test/QA. Formerly known as Akimbi Slingshot before they were bought out by VMware, Lab Manager lets you suspend a set of machine states and store them all in a library, and you can pull them all out at the same time right on your network and the don't interfere with anything because they have a 'network fence' option which lets you keep all the network settings. All set up for self-service - no admin required (a developer can web-browse to the Lab Manager and grab machine sets themselves). Will probably use a ton of storage, but very neat.
VMware and Hardware Assist (Intel VT/AMD Pacifica) - the first generation of HW assist from either vendor doesn't help VMware much - VMware's Binary Translation (BT) method of capturing kernel calls is so heavily optimized that doing the same thing with VT/Pacifica will actually be slower. So VMware won't actually use VT/Pacifica much. (Hardware assist IS useful for Xen though)
However, the next round of hardware assist, which concentrates on optimizing virtualized memory performance, WILL be of benefit to VMware. Don't know when those chips will be out.
Oh, for the big night out (Wednesday) they closed off a big section of Universal Studio's Theme park for us. No lineups for rides! (Well, really short ones). Not every ride was available but heck it was fun esp. with all the alcohol.
Met lots of cool guys from all around the world there (Germany, Ireland, Sweden, and of course Americans and Canadians)...but sure wish there were more hot chicks (in my dreams!)
Not having been in LA before, the weather there is AWESOME. I wanna live there! Shame about the housing prices...
Now, if only my flight would finally come at 7 am.... Oh my aching back...