Software application development
This blog is intended to provoke discussion and exchange between like minded software application developers, engineers, architects, project managers - and keen hobbyists too.
Friday 29 February 2008, 11:54 AM
Software behind the scenes
Despite a white-knuckle taxi ride to Nice airport yesterday that left me fairly green (my Sicilian taxi driver “Amadeo” clearly thought he was auditioning for the next Italian job remake) I left my trip to Cannes for VMworld Europe a happy chap.
So as I was settling into BA’s in-flight sarnie and G&T service, I thought that talk of software would be over for the day. As it happened, I found myself plonked next to an affable Aussie named Aaron who worked for the sound and light gurus that had made the whole stage experience happen for the keynotes this week.
We talked about “gobos” (that’s logo lights that go) and “varilights” (if you’re old enough to be a Genesis fan you’ll know what these are) and the software system controls that he used to pull the flawless presentations off. Aaron works for a company called Creative Technology (no not that one! – apparently these guys had the name first anyway) and travels the world doing this stuff.
I guess the interesting thing was that some things had gone wrong with various elements of the presentations and, as he put it, he had never seen someone type so physically fast as the techie that was called upon to hand code an operation during Diane Greene’s keynote when her demo failed.
So software runs the world – even at 33,000 feet it seems. Top marks also to cabin crew members Tim & Rory for the free champagne which was apparently provided as I had been polite when getting seated and situated.
“We thought you might like a glass of bubbly as you were so pleasant upon boarding,” said Tim.
Well, I’ve never heard it called that before! Outrageous.
Wednesday 27 February 2008, 5:14 PM
VMworld Europe: Conference Blog Day 2 (part 3) – The Virtual Road Ahead
Looking at the virtual road ahead as the main section of this VMworld Europe 2008 conference closes, we can perhaps draw a few concluding thoughts from the exhibitors and attendees.
VMware CEO Diane Green herself said that she didn’t want the focus of the event to come across as virtualisation only for big scale corporates. “That’s my mistake if that has come across,” she said. “We’re focused on the SMB sector and I think that virtualisation growth at the individual’s computing level will be one of our greatest areas for growth in the coming years.”
In an informal meeting I had with VMware VP of R&D Steve Herrod we talked about the potential for home users to plug in to a virtual desktop download delivered in much the same way as they use their broadband for web connection and/or movies and international phone calls. For Herrod, the road ahead is about breaking rules and, as he put it, “Delivering requirements that the no customer has even asked for yet.”
Herrod also stressed that this, the first VMworld in Europe, is a virtualisation industry event – not a VMware user conference.
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Things have certainly changed, in meetings I had with Sun Microsystems, Vijay Sarathy, senior director for Sun xVM happily stated that, “The dynamics of the market have shifted.”
One of several colourful Russian technology pros in attendance, Neterion founder and VP of software engineering Leonid Grossman told me that, “The state of virtualisation up until now has been rather like a Catch-22 scenario because network intensive applications typically sit on 10 Gb Ethernet connections, but high-speed networking will never support virtualisation very well as these high-performance applications tend to sit on dedicated servers. But all that changed when multiple enablers such as ESX3.5, better 10Gb hardware and server platforms with support for 4-core CPUs came on board. These developments (for ESX 3.5 just at the end of last year) mean that virtualisation can now potentially grow faster than ever.”
Scott Herold from Quest software and Jane Rimmer from Vizioncore suggested that we look to enabling technologies such as converters (to take us from physical to virtual environments) as key determining factors. We also discussed the potential for ‘cloud’ or ‘liquid’ (please excuse the marketing-speak until I get hold of a better term) computing for resources to move to compute as and where they are needed to reduce wastage as a key factor.
One keynote speaker (sorry, I forget which now) even suggested that we could eventually see taxation levied on computing power consumption if cloud computing means that resources are moved around to the degree suggested.
In the same style as the London congestion charge, if compute power can be isolated in one area, it could be easier to target it and tax it. This could be taking the “road” ahead for virtualisation one step to far - or is it?
Wednesday 27 February 2008, 10:43 AM
VMworld Europe: Conference Blog Day 2 (part 2)
As much of the discussion so far has focused on server virtualisation, this conference has logically moved on to discuss the potential benefits of virtualisation on the desktop. The argument is that by extending the VMware platform to the desktop, IT administrators can deploy virtual machines on every PC in a company and handle the whole manage, update and deploy process faster and more securely.
If you want a radical sound bite to get thinking about this, check out this quote from Gartner’s Brian Gammage & George Shiffler III (Aug 8 2007).
“By the end of 2010 all new PC deployments will be virtualised.”
VMware CEO Diane Greene told an audience of journalists that she recognises this claim is “aggressive”. But the company is behind the idea and its Link Clone technology allows one PC to be updated before ‘clones’ are pushed out through the system – even though every individual’s desktop is in fact ‘unique’.
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“VMware virtual desktops enable a one-to-many deployment model, making it easy to update to a new version of an application, rollout entirely new applications, or deploy the most current operating system. VMware is also making it possible for workers to take their virtual desktops with them as they travel or work from home,” said Jeff Jennings, vice president of desktop products and solutions at VMware.
Analyst firm IDC predicts the total market for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure products and services will exceed US$1 billion by 2011.
In the product announcement area to back up these arguments there’s VMware Virtual Image technology – this is designed to deploy, update and publish desktop images to thousands of virtual machines. VMware claims this technology reduces storage requirements by up to 90 per cent for virtual desktop infrastructure environments.
There’s also VMware’s Offline Virtual Desktop Infrastructure – this enables end users to “check out” personalised virtual desktops running on VMware virtual desktop infrastructure to a notebook computer for use offline and then “check back in” to the same desktop running in their virtual desktop infrastructure environment.
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Want a cheesy quote to end on from VMware chief scientist Dr Mendel Rosenblum? “We want to make virtual a whole lot better than real.” Jeeeez…
Wednesday 27 February 2008, 10:06 AM
VMworld Europe: Conference Blog Day 2 (part 1)
After a heavily partner-focused first day, a good many of us here were keen to hear more from VMware itself – and with many of the key announcements saved up for today, it was chief scientist and founder Dr Mendel Rosenblum who took the stage for day two of this European virtualisation software symposium.
Rosenblum started with a nod to IBM saying that Big Blue did indeed “invent” virtualisation back in the fifties for work on its mainframe systems. He then gave us another ‘history of virtualisation’ overview – interesting that even the attendees for this event (as familiar with virtualisation as they are) can drink this in two days on the run – albeit from a different and more technical perspective than CEO Diane Greene’s overview yesterday.
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Looking ahead at “phase 2.0” of virtualisation, Rosemblum pointed to virtual services saying that under this model there is a virtual infrastructure that builds to configure itself to the services needed within a particular computing model. “This is where we view the future,” said Rosemblum – and he was certainly painting a rosy picture of “perfect” delivery of service level agreements and perfect system performance - perhaps a suggestion that virtualisation does still exhibit some immaturities and we’re not quite there yet.
Blowing the dust off the product announcements, we hear that VMware has four new virtual machine management products for automation and business continuity to announce.
VMware wants to prevent virtual machine sprawl with these management products: VMware Lifecycle Manager – for infrastructure administrators to automate requesting, approving, deploying, updating and retiring virtual machines. VMware Lab Manager – for QA engineers to provision multi-tier virtual machine based environments with control over policies. VMware Stage Manager – to roll new and updated IT services into production, enabling streamlined and accelerated transition of applications through the pre-production stages – including integration, testing, staging, user acceptance testing – and into production.
There’s also a business continuity product announcement this week in the form of VMware Site Recovery Manager. Are disaster recovery products like this better in a virtualised environment? VMware says they are as they use hardware- and operating system–independent mobile virtual machines.
VMware also announced agreements to embed the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor in servers from Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP (already reported yesterday on ZDNET) and IBM. Partners are expected to begin shipping servers embedded with the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor within the next 60 days.
In light of recent security concerns in the virtualisation space (and a reluctance to answer any questions on the subject until Rosenblum arrived) the chief scientist spent some time weighing up the difference between host based versus network based security theories. He then went on to talk about the new VMsafe product which is a set of APIs they have added to their offering to give security pros the ability to see any packet of information that goes in and out of the virtual machine. Rosenblum did not make reference to specific security risks (but then you’d hardly expect this at a keynote) but a senior McAfee ‘partner’ was then asked to take the stage to echo the “this stuff is safe message”.
Twenty security vendors have “embraced” VMsafe technology and are building products that will further enhance the security of virtual machines. VMsafe technology provides transparency into the memory, CPU, disk and I/O systems of the virtual machine, and monitors every aspect of the execution of the system.
Tuesday 26 February 2008, 5:32 PM
Virtualisation growing pains
This blog continues feedback and experiences from VMworld Europe 2008 in Cannes, France.
While some industry pundits are keen to talk about immaturity in the European virtualisation market, VMware CEO Diane Greene herself – in a Q&A session with the press – said that Europe is an established IT market with its own proven model for delivery that works well.
I spoke to Nimsoft VP EMEA Tim Bisley on this subject and this is what he told me, “Whilst European companies may lack experience in virtualisation, this does not necessarily translate into immaturity. They recognise the dangers of replacing server sprawl with virtualisation sprawl. As such, they are more likely to adopt a more considered approach when developing their virtualisation strategies. Indeed, this sort of thinking is second nature to European organisations, many of whom have pioneered best practices, such as ITIL and other methodologies. They may even learn from the mistakes made by US companies and incorporate these valuable lessons into their own virtualisation strategies.”
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Other exhibitors did seem to echo the feeling that the market is still experiencing growing pains. “We’re building a distribution network for our VMware systems intelligence product here in Europe from scratch,” said Nicola (Nick) Sanna, President and CEO of Netuitive. “This doesn’t mean that it’s all necessarily immature here though, large corporations like banks that are accustomed to operating on a global basis are certainly ready. But the rest of the market us possibly more focused on virtualisation for testing and development at this stage – in a sense they are still playing with this technology.”
The story continues tomorrow...
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