RoudyBob.NET

I’m sitting here in LAX waiting on my flight home. It’s been an interesting week and it’s always fun to meet fellow technology folks. Both of my presentations were well-attended and (at least I hope!) people seemed to enjoy themselves and learn some new ways at looking at disaster recovery and virtualization.

There was definitely a lot of buzz and plenty of other blogs covering the sessions and announcements – the VMware folks have been aggregating the more interesting posts on the VMTN blog – http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/. Here are some thoughts from me on some of the topics I found especially interesting:

VMware Lab Manager
Steve Kishi (PM) and his team have done a good job of taking the Akimibi Slingshot product and integrating it into the VMware Virtual Infrastructure platform. I can see how developers and testers would really need the kind of capabilities the product provides like self-service provisioning, VM collections, sharing of VMs and their state, etc. Especially interesting: Multiple remote control sessions through the browser interface and the network fencing functionality which keeps test machines from creating conflicts with one another and other machines on the production environment. The sooner the team is able to add VMware Server support in addition to the ESX 3.0 in the current release, the better.

Some hints were dropped about future VMware Workstation integration where you might be able to easily create VMs with Workstation and then upload them to VMware Lab Manager. In addition, you could “checkout” virtual machines from Vmware Lab Manager to your local desktop or laptop and use them offline for testing or demonstrations.

Virtual Appliances
There was lots of buzz about virtual appliances. I think VMware sees this as an important area to push for adoption of virtualization. Microsoft’s announcement of their VHD Test Drive Program was no-doubt strategically timed. But in all, it’s very derivative. VMware has had VMTN appliances available for months for free download and already have other ISVs delivering solutions in this way. Microsoft’s solution also requires customers to install and configure a server-class application, Virtual Server, to take advantage of the trial VHDs. A more sensible approach would have been to make them available for Virtual PC users as well. And, though I understand the politics behind it, it’s a shame that there isn’t a way to distribute software based on Windows easily as appliances on other virtualization platforms. The Windows licensing schemes make this nearly impossible as it’s not legal to redistribute their software…

VMware Workstation 6 Sneak Peek
I don’t want to come across sounding like a VMware fanboy, but there really is nothing else to do but gush over the progress the development teams have made on this product. While products like Virtual PC have sat stagnate for years, VMW 6 has a list of new functionality that is literally two pages long. There were a dozen other ones as well, but here’s what I found interesting:

Major Host/Guest Additions – Vista and Solaris as well as VMI-based paravirtualized guests.

Guest Interaction – Improved copy/paste and cross-platform drag and drop.

Headless Virtual Machines – the ability to run VMs in the background combined with the ability to leverage built-in VNC access to any VM running under Workstation.

Platform Enhancements – multi-display support, vmware tools auto-upgrade, interrupt record replay.

IDE Debugger Integration –
This integrates VMW with Visual Studio or Eclipse and provides the ability to build an application in the IDE, automate the installation of that app into a VM, launch the application and debug it without ever leaving the development environment. You can even do things like control processes running in the VM and create breakpoints for troubleshooting.

How does MSFT miss this one? I’ve posted about this before, but no one is better positioned to be able to innovate around the usage of virtualization in development than Microsoft. They make the most widely-used IDE (Visual Studio) and have 90% of the desktop OS market where applications run.

The Microsoft ISV ecosystem is also arguably the largest one in the industry – there are more ISVs developing solutions for the Microsoft platform (using Microsoft’s development tools) than any other platform. I saw a demo this week where a developer was able to seemlessly build an application, compile it and install it into a running VM and then debug that application in the VM directly from Visual Studio. And the demo wasn’t done by a Microsoft employee. I never would have thought that the first time I’d ever see this would be at a VMware event. Combine this with the ability to then be able to share this VM (with the running application and debug state) via VMware Lab Manager and you have a pretty slick solution for development and testing of applications. As the presenter in the session said, “VMware Workstation + Visual Studio or Eclipse = Happy Developer”.

Vmware on the Mac Platform
Just a really neat session. VMware will finally have a Mac solution and it’s done in a very “Mac” way in terms of its implementation. Though Parallels might be ahead in terms of functionality/technical implementation, VMware is going to catch up very fast. And, they’ll have the opportunity to leverage the entire virtualization platform as a selling point. Want to move a VM from Mac to Windows? No problem. Want to download a virtual appliance from VMTN running RedHat Linux and run it on a Mac? No problem.

Overall, it was a great event. I learned a few things and got to meet some interesting people. Special greetings to the bloggers I met on Monday night thanks to VMTN. Looking forward to VMworld 2007 in San Francisco.