VMworld Day 3 – Mendel Always Brings It

VMworld may be over, but on the last and final day of the show, VMware’s co-founder and Chief Scientist really brought things home as I expected. At last year’s conference, I really enjoyed Mendel’s discussion – especially the part about VMware’s recording feature used to capture the live execution stream of a virtual machine and then the ability to play it back later. This feature currently lives in VMware Workstation but it has so many future use case scenarios in the server virtualization world as well.

Mendel started off the keynote discussing virtualization at a very high-level. He explained what virtualization is and how it works. If I hadn’t heard Mendel speak before, I might have been a little nervous at this point – thinking that I just stepped into an introductory course on virtualization and VMware Infrastructure 3 functionality. Don’t get me wrong, those things are great, just not what I came to hear from someone like Mendel.

And as expected, he didn’t disappoint. Mendel introduced a new form of VMotion to the audience – Storage VMotion. With Storage VMotion, VMware is leaving the CPU executions on the same physical server, and instead, moving the virtual disks from one storage area to another. In essence, it’s the opposite of “regular” VMotion which keeps the virtual disks on the same storage location but moves the CPU and memory execution to a new physical host server. The demo worked well as they demonstrated this feature against an Oracle virtual machine.

The next topic covered virtual appliances. Most of us are familiar with the concept as well as the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace. This discussion and demonstration however took virtual appliances to another level by discussing the distribution method. Again, most of us have downloaded a virtual appliance at least one time or another. And no matter how small or large they are in size, it takes a while to download the entire machine. Instead, Mendel showcased a “streaming” distribution of the virtual appliance that allowed for an almost immediate power on of the machine in comparison to a lengthy download of the same machine on another client.

The idea here is to use a recording method to decide which blocks of a virtual machine are needed to be prefetched in order to properly boot the machine in a streaming fashion without downloading the entire appliance. The technology is really interesting and could be extremely important when working in a VDI environment. My question here is how does this compare to what others like Moka5 have been working on for a while now?

And finally, Mendel introduced the idea of high availability to the datacenter. Sure, VI3 already has an HA offering which allows its users to recover a virtual machine when its host fails, but what he demonstrated was a new concept of availability that showed where one virtual machine was being captured and redirected to a second virtual machine in real-time – creating two virtual machines in lockstep with one another. If the primary hardware fails, the secondary virtual machine instantaneously takes over. This was demonstrated with two machines running Exchange Server and LoadSim. Mendel literally “pulled the plug” on the primary server and the secondary VM took over gracefully and continued to operate its 50 simulated users.

Mendel closed by asking for ideas from those in attendance. What are your difficult problem areas?

Thanks to Mendel for showing and discussing the future. Always a pleasure to see what Mendel has to offer at these shows. I was lucky enough to meet with him and speak with him last year.

We’re only scratching the surface with what the virtualization layer has to offer. And that my friend is the best part of this!