I flew to Vegas this week for Microsoft Management Summit 2013, which happens to be in the same hotel (Mandalay Bay) as VMware Partner Exchange one and half months ago. The organizations and activities of both conferences are pretty similar – keynotes, breakout sessions, hands on labs (HOL). It’s pretty exciting to learn new technologies and meet new people.
Hands On Labs Read more... (756 words, estimated 3:01 mins reading time)
I went to the VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas last week. It’s always nice to see old friends and colleagues in the conference that I’ve been attending consecutively since I first joined VMware in 2007.
I spent quite some of my time in the hands on labs (codenamed Project NEE), which turned out to be a great experience. I took 7 labs covering the Nexus 1000V with VXLAN, vCenter Orchestrator(vCO), DynamicOps (now has a fancier name called vCloud Automation Center), etc. With the bundling and deep integration of the vCO into vCenter Web Client, I think the prime time for vCO as the automation tool for vSphere has finally come. Read more... (448 words, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)
During the past weekend, I upgraded the vijava API project to the new Allura platform provided by Sourceforge.net. That’s really a button click and then waited for incoming emails for status updates. It went smoothly and didn’t take long before it finished.
Note that the upgrade is limited to the project hosting, not the Web site (http://vijava.sf.net) which remains the same and continues to work as before. Read more... (534 words, estimated 2:08 mins reading time)
The vRAM was the license model VMware used in vSphere 5.0. It basically limits the usage of virtual memory, which is different from physical memory, per license. When first announced last year, it created a lot of angry customers overnight even though VMware estimated that the license scheme wouldn’t affect most of the existing customers. Later on, VMware doubled the amount of virtual memory and implemented a cap per license, and insisted to roll out the modified license model despite strong objections from customers. Read more... (979 words, estimated 3:55 mins reading time)
VMware’s acquisition of Nicira posted a big risk on Cisco’s future control of networking market. The risk was in fact there from day one of VMware ESX with virtual switches and then distributed virtual switches, which reduces the need for customers to buy physical geeks from Cisco because virtual machines use “free” virtual ports. For the inter-physical server communication, customers still need Cisco and other vendors even though the volume is not as high as otherwise. That is why Cisco quickly came up with its own distributed virtual switch Nexus 1000v to stay relevant in the virtualization market. Read more... (840 words, estimated 3:22 mins reading time)
On this past Monday VMware announced to buy Nicira for $1.26 billion. Congratulations to many of my former VMware colleagues who joined Nicira and will return back to VMware soon.
Overall this deal aligns well with VMware’s newly found vision on software defined data center. You must have read many of similar explanations and comments from various sources including this one from VMware CTO Steve Herrod, and this one by Nicira cofounder and CTO Martin Casado. Read more... (534 words, estimated 2:08 mins reading time)
After the Churchill event on Hadoop for enterprises, I attended the Hadoop Summit in San Jose convention center. It’s one of the benefits living in Silicon Valley that I can attend various tech events without flying away from family for days. Read more... (1511 words, estimated 6:03 mins reading time)
I just did an interview with Ricky Ribeiro, who is online content manager of BizTech Magazine. It was published last week as part of the Q&A series of Must Read IT blogs. In response to Ricky’s great questions, I shared thoughts on a broad range of topics, including blogging, cloud computing, and technical innovation in general.
The following is part of the article. For full coverage, please check out here, where you can also find links to interviews with other top IT bloggers. Read more... (1107 words, estimated 4:26 mins reading time)
Today is the last day of VMware Partner Exchange 2012. There’s no keynote, therefore I went directly to breakout sessions.
The first one I attended was “SRM 5.0 and vSphere Replication – Understanding the Use Cases and Implementation Options.” The SRM used to manage the storage array that actually replicate LUNs to pair arrays in remote sites. This results in a restriction that the storage arrays must be compatible, which means they must come from same vendor and probably same model. When I was at VMware, I helped several partners with their storage array adapters for SRM. With vSphere replication, the replication happens at higher level thus the restriction goes away. Coming with the flexibility is slightly slower performance. Like anything else, you simply cannot have all the best but you can apply right technology for certain use case, for example, use vSphere replication for ROBO (remote office, branch office) use case. Read more... (508 words, estimated 2:02 mins reading time)
Same as yesterday, the conference started with keynotes. The first one was by Carl Eschenbach, VMware Co-President of Customer Operations, followed by a motivational keynote by Bill Taylor, founding editor of Fast Company Magazine. As a technical professional, I always try my best to get more business insights and perspectives therefore I attend business related keynotes whenever possible. Read more... (675 words, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)
Today is the first day of VMware Partner Exchange 2012 in Las Vegas. As usual, it started with keynotes, presented by Scott Aronson (Senior Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances), Paul Maritz (CEO), and Steve Herrod (CTO & SVP, R&D) consecutively. I personally didn’t find a lot new but mostly rehashed from previous keynotes. Nevertheless, there were several interesting numbers from the three keynotes: Read more... (259 words, estimated 1:02 mins reading time)
- $41.5 billion: private cloud opportunity by 2015.
- 350,000: VMware customer base.
This month Eclipse turns 10 years old. Ten years ago, IBM donated the initial Eclipse Java IDE, which was then estimated $40M, to Eclipse Foundation. It has since grown to 273 open source projects and $800M portfolio today. Quite an achievement by any standard!
This news release summarizes some of the key accomplishments: Read more... (551 words, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)
Yesterday I went to Microsoft Azure DevCamp in its Silicon Valley office. Like other developer events organized by Microsoft, it featured awesome presentations with nice overviews and demos by top evangelists like James Conard, Wade Wegner, Nick Harris, etc.
As you’ve probably known, Microsoft has been betting heavily on cloud computing. Anyone who is interested in cloud computing simply cannot ignore its Windows Azure, which is a comprehensive platform for developing cloud applications. Note that, the focus is applications, not virtual machines as offered by Amazon and other IaaS providers. Read more... (330 words, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)
After leaving VMware and taking a short break at home last week, I am excited to be part of VCE solution engineering team as an architect at its Santa Clara office. For those who are not familiar VCE, it’s a joint venture of EMC, Cisco, VMware and Intel. My formal title is consultant software engineer which, according to my recruiter, is the top engineer rank in the company. Read more... (409 words, estimated 1:38 mins reading time)
Today is my last day at VMware.
Looking back, it’s been almost four and half years since I joined VMware in June 2007. At that time, VMware was still part of EMC, and two months later it went IPO (to be exact, spin off). Together with many of my colleagues I watched the historical moment for the company on a very early summer morning. I still remember there were quite a few sleeping tents inside the new offices. Read more... (457 words, estimated 1:50 mins reading time)
Today is day two of VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas. VMware CTO Steve Herrod got on stage with his technology deep dives into various products and new projects around the cloud story – “your cloud, own it.” Again this is based on my note and memory, and has not reviewed by anyone. Mistakes are all mine. Read more... (574 words, estimated 2:18 mins reading time)
Today is day one of VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas. The most important part is of course the keynotes by CEO Paul Maritz and Co-President Carl Eschenbach. The following is based on my personal note and has not reviewed by anyone. All the mistakes and errors are mine and only mine. Read more... (661 words, estimated 2:39 mins reading time)
As part of the VMworld #vMeetups in the Community Lounge, this developer/administrator (a.k.a. devops) meet up will take place on August 30th from 12PM to 1PM at VMworld Community Louge, located just outside the entrance to the solution exchange. Because it’s lunch hour, please feel free to bring your lunch.
This event offers you a unique opportunity to meet and network with other professionals who create or use VMware APIs and CLIs for integration and automation. Read more... (197 words, estimated 47 secs reading time)
Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts, and strictly mine.
I missed the big launch of vSphere 5 on July 12 because I was having my vacation. When I came back, I found so many discussions around the vSphere 5 licensing change. It’s understandable that people don’t like changes, especially if the changes may have financial impacts.
Technically, the vRAM pooling simplifies the licensing model, as pointed out by Carter Shanklin. Money wise, Read more... (405 words, estimated 1:37 mins reading time)
Today I got an email from Louis Jia who is a Sr. Development manager at Cisco. He told me that the product his team has been working on had been rebranded as Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) and is formally released. Congratulations to Louis and team!
I don’t normally cover products from vendors, be it an established company or a startup. But this one is different Read more... (197 words, 1 image, estimated 47 secs reading time)
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