Management Strategy & Solutions - Ramin Sayar Tuesday 12:30

Ramin Sayar, VP, Management Products

Evolution of Management in a New Era
- traditional management tools are built around static resources and ITIL processes which is potentially constraining agility
- requirements - integrated, simplier approach to performance, capacity and health of the virtual environment; need to measure and demonstrate effectiveness and efficiency; audit and config reporting; standardising images and ensuring patch compliance; improve time to provision new VMs and grow / shrink capacity
- CapEx savings are being realised, OpEx is now the target
- Strategy is to build automation into all of the VMware product set
- Performance is being delivered by the acquisition of Integrien (comment - looks similar to Netuitive?).  Uses existing collectors such as Tivoli, vCenter, HP etc.  Detecting normal and abnormal behaviour and alerting on that rather than on fixed thresholds.  Allows for dynamic behaviours in the infrastructure.  Will hook into DRS algorithms - first part of 2011 before we see a VMware version of the product.  Heatmap gallery by cluster.  Works equally well with physical servers.
- CapacityIQ - 1.5 adds storage analysis including the forecast and what if analysis. Scheduled reporting of oversized / undersized VMs
- Configuration & Compliance - vCenter Configuration Manager - patch, config and compliance management for host, Windows and Linux - scans and can report or remediate from a library of patches
- Application Management - VMware will add a packaging tool that wrappers applications into business services which can then be moved around between service providers (comment - for Spring only or will PHP, Ruby on Rails etc. be added?  Not convinced that this will work in a change scenario as it will complicate a change as it will hit the complete stack)
IT Business Management - VMware Service Manager - service desk etc. vCloud Director allows creation of VDCs and allows consumers to call off resources available to them.  Concept of element managers in the infrastructure, vSphere admin to build VDCs then Cloud Architect & Architect as a consume.  vCloud Request Manager adds a portal, workflow, approvals, licensing and blueprints. Essentially its a type of service catalogue (looks like there might be some Lab Manager in there).

Bella Hall A Tuesday 09:00

Wireless goes down when the hall is about two thirds full.  Not sure if this is due to swamping or becuase you're encouraged to concentrate on the content.

Kind of humourous video about the meaning of cloud - Oracle building with its head in the clouds and reference to "azure skies". Parallels drawn with ordering a pizza, apparently. Matrix spoof "where is the Matrix"?
Humans are dumb terminals!

Intro from Maurizio Carlo
over 6,000 attendees (compares to 17,000 in the US in San Fran)
"forward looking" disclaimers about some content is not necessarily going to be delivered

Verizon, Terremark, Colt have collaborated to run the lab sessions in a private cloud.  2,000 VMs per hour created / destroyed - expecting to support over 5000 lab sessions

Virtualization maturity:
- get the most out of your infrastructure - virtualize your internal kit
- business production- achieve unprecedented reliability- virtualise critical services to improve service
- IT as a service - evolve to IT as a service via cloud (internal, external or hybrid) to provide agility