Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
Here are some breif notes from VMware Partner Exchange. I will also post about some of the technical sessions. I am not going to regurgitate the keynotes. The content will be available soon on Partner Central and there are several blogs that have plenty of information from the keynotes. I will however provide some highlights:
Partner Central and Partner University will soon be revamped. The accreditations will be changing and will require a certain number of accredited VCPs before the company can get an accreditation. The categories will be similar to our practices, such as infrastructure virtualization, desktop virtualization and BCDR. If you go to partner central now and click on the partner university link, you will see a little bit of what the changes will be. There is also plenty of web-based, self-paced training. On line tests are available so you can receive accreditations for many different products, most are jumpstarts and plan and design related.
VMware’s obvious desire is “100% virtualized.” Their primary focus will center around cloud computing with an initial push for the internal cloud as many see challenges with getting acceptance for the external cloud. Private clouds will eventually bridge the gaps between the internal and external clouds. Much of this information is already available on VMware’s main site.
The software surrounding VI4 took around 3 million engineering hours to develop. It includes great improvements on resources that will be available to the VMs. The resources will be increased to 8 vCPUs per VM, 256GB RAM per VM, 40 Gbps network throughput per VM, and 200,000 storage IOPS per VM. vCenter maximums will increase to 3000 VMs / 300 Hosts. There will also be a capability for linking up to 10 vCenter servers with a centralized search function.
A new function centers around host profiles, which works similarly to VUM. It establishes configuration baselines for an ESX / ESXi host that includes such things as network, security, storage and NTP settings. A host can be scanned for compliance and remediated with the baseline. The BIG “however” is that it will require “Enterprise Plus” to enable host configuration controls and distributed switches. This will carry a $600 price tag and is not ala carte.
Using ESX4 allowed for 85% native performance on 8-way RHEL/Oracle servers in spec performance tests. The amount of transactions (I forget how many) was 8x the number of Visa’s current transactions.
Out of the gate, vSphere will offer optional components surrounding security, BCDR and networking. Additional vSpere components will become available “over the summer.”