VMware CTO gives glimpse of vSphere future in VMUG videos

If you thought that VMworld was the only place to find out information about what VMware is doing, you thought wrong. VMworld is definitely the place to be to learn about “anything and everything” VMware in one fell swoop, but local and regional VMware user group meetings (VMUGs) can provide interesting tidbits of information as well.

Case in point, at a recent VMUG meeting in Italy, guest speaker Steve Herrod, VMware’s chief technology officer, came prepared to educate, entertain, and inform the company’s base. Kicking off his VMUG presentation, Herrod told the audience (tongue in cheek) that he’d be sharing some things with them that weren’t yet public, so they should keep it quiet. I say “tongue in cheek,” because as a VMUG member myself, I know full well that saying anything to a room full of VMUG members is a surefire way of spreading virtualization information on the Internet faster than you can finish a sentence. Herrod knows that all too well.

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One of the mantras during the meeting was to automate everything. Over the last two years, I’ve heard customers express a big need for more automation and integration among VMware’s various product lines. Customers should be happy to learn that VMware understands that pain and is working on this problem, according to what was said at this particular VMUG meeting.

In an hour-long, seven-part video series filmed during the Italy VMUG meeting, Herrod gave audience members a lot of information to digest. It should come as no surprise that this video series popped up on the radar of Dave Northey, one of Microsoft’s TechNet bloggers and a staff member at Microsoft Ireland.

Northey has done his part in continuing the FUD campaign going back and forth between Microsoft and VMware, perhaps the most recent (and entertaining) being the “hidden bummers of going too far beyond virtualization” series Microsoft has been putting out and made famous by the retro cloud salesman named Tad.

Northey’s recent blog post, titled, “VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite is really more of a marketing term — did he just say that?,” called attention to one section of the seven-part video series, pulling out and publishing the following quote from Herrod:

VMware Cloud Infrastructure Suite is really more of a marketing term. Those of you know our products deeply know that they don’t fit this well together as they need to. Some of them have multiple databases, some don’t look the same, some install differently, and what I can’t stand that is Site Recovery Manager doesn’t currently work with vCloud Director. So, what we are basically able to say is that we created and acquired companies that led to a lot of individual products that don’t work well enough together yet.

After listening to the video clips myself, that quote isn’t exactly 100 percent accurate. Even worse, it’s a bit disingenuous because it is taken partly out of context (thus my FUD comment). More to the point, the quote ends prematurely — Herrod continues by saying, “So a huge focus for the company is really how we make it become a suite.” In other words, VMware is aware of the shortcomings and plans to address the problem.

To answer Northey’s question, yes, he really did say that (or something like that). But Herrod isn’t saying anything that everyone, including VMware’s most trusted fans, aren’t already thinking and saying. Like many other large software companies, VMware is growing its product line by in-house development and through acquisition. When you acquire technology from multiple vendors, it’s often difficult to bring them all together in a cohesive manner. It takes time to sync databases, combine UIs, and make them interoperate with one another. Is that frustrating for end-users? Absolutely! Is VMware aware of it? Evidently so. The challenge becomes, will the company address that problem; if so, when? Users can’t and won’t wait forever if there are alternative solutions on the market.

To prove that VMware is actively working toward putting these various pieces together, Herrod shared with the Italian VMUG audience the company’s top priorities for R&D over the next couple of years.

Herrod said VMware has a big release coming out the middle of the year and is working on three releases at any given time. In addition to being almost done with the release that ships later this year, VMware is also far along on the next version and have already started on the release after that.

“You will see in the next releases and heading forward that the products really do tie very nicely together,” said Herrod. “They will be sold together. They will have the same installation process. But the idea will be that every one of the products has to work much better together.”

I’m sure we’ll hear more about this at VMworld 2012, but automation has become a key focus for the virtualization giant. According to Herrod, VMware is trying to only have humans involved when they need to be. He stated, “Humans are not very good at repetitive tasks, and you shouldn’t be. You should only get involved when you have to be. I can’t announce some specific things just yet, but know that pretty much anything that requires you to go to a spreadsheet right now, or that requires email going back and forth, we’re trying to automate that aggressively.”

VMware vCenter Operations (vCOPS) is also becoming very important to VMware. It is rapidly becoming VMware’s most adopted new technology. The point of the tool is to help you manage a very complex, fast-moving virtualized environment. It does so by taking a different approach because the traditional approach to management in a virtualized environment doesn’t work very well.

What’s interesting is that VMware will be building a lot of their existing tools right into the same framework as vCOPS. Things like billing and capacity management will plug directly into this exact same model. If this sounds a lot like what VMware’s ecosystem partners are already doing (folks like SolarWinds, Veeam, VKernel, and VMTurbo), you’re absolutely right. That lends itself to the notion of co-opetition that many people never quite get a handle on — for good reason.

VMware is also very excited about high availability (HA) and fault tolerance (FT). During last year’s VMworld, they demonstrated how they figured out how to do SMP FT. Unfortunately, today VMware can only do fault tolerance with a single processor, which for many isn’t that useful. A lot of people don’t use it because their applications require multiple processors. But according to Herrod, VMware will be announce very soon how it will solve the problem for SMP.

At the same time, VMware is also spending a lot of time with partners on taking the HA functionality and moving it to know about the software running within the virtual machines themselves. It’s nice to know that if your hardware dies you can automatically restart a virtual machine elsewhere, but what happens if your application dies? A lot of what they are looking at is heartbeats for applications and automatically restarting them within a virtual machine when need be.

One other trend you may be hearing about is software-defined networking. VMware is tired of hearing about other companies becoming the “VMware of networking.” VMware wants to be the VMware of networking, and it is working on the VXLAN standard.

VXLAN was created to allow network packets to flow easily across multiple segments. It encapsulates Layer 2 packets within Layer 3, allowing them to be routed. “This is a way to create kind of VLANs as they were supposed to be, without the scale limits and without some of the restrictions,” said Herrod.

“As we roll out VXLAN, and in the upcoming versions of some of our products, you’ll see the ability to have a large, flat network that is logical and works across different environments, including across data centers. That’s going to be a very big focus for us,” he continued.

I can already predict that the VMworld 2012 keynotes are shaping up to have quite a few “aha” moments.

This article, “VMware CTO gives glimpse of vSphere future in VMUG videos,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.