It is the last few days of the year and time for a review of virtualization 2010. Although VMware was founded in 1998 it was not until 2001 that I first heard of VMware and played with the Workstation product to be able to run different flavors of Linux. So for me, 2010 closes out a great year in virtualization as a whole as well as a decade of virtualization… and what a ride it has been!
Staying focused on 2010 we have had a few things that have been worthy to note. This year we have moved past defining what a “cloud” is and really starting to discuss how we are going to “secure the cloud.” The term “cloud computing” still leads the way as one of the biggest buzz word with most all people and companies now having heard of it are planning one way or another on deployment options into their own environments. One thing for sure is the need for fully qualified individuals to maintain and designs the clouds moving forward.One of the biggest stories has been the enlistment strategies and building of Chad’s Army of vSpecialists over at EMC. Bloggers, Engineers and Analysts migrated in droves to become vSpecialists Monks and Warriors and with the help of vSpecialist Nick Weaver, the team created vSpecialist’s Delight: VMworld 2010 Rap.
The joint venture or coalition from EMC, Cisco and VMware (VCE) called Acadia was really starting to ramp up and looking to try to follow the great recruiting efforts of EMC to staff their own version of vArchitects.
Each week would bring a running joke of speculation as to whom would make the next announcement, on twitter, that they have joined the ranks at EMC and/or Acadia. One thing that I did notice was the silence coming from Cisco on their hiring attempts and recruiting efforts. Their needs are there but never were publicly as aggressive the other members of the coalition.
The bottom line on the recruiting is that 2011 will be another great year for virtualization specialists to grow and thrive as more and more opportunities present themselves. If you are wondering if you have missed the virtualization bandwagon, fear not because the bandwagon has just gotten started.
In the middle of the year VMware vSphere 4.1 was released and with it the last version of VMware ESX Server. Moving forward VMware will just be releasing and updating VMware ESXi Server. For a look at, what I would call, the final hurtles or pain points that VMware has addressed with the 4.1 version of ESXi you can take a look at my earlier post vSphere 4.1 and ESXi.
VMworld 2010 in San Francisco set a new attendance record even in the midst of one of the greatest recessions of our time. The self paced labs had to be one of the best things at the show this year. The labs were made up of three different clouds able to handle the creation and deletion of around 150,000 virtual machines during the four days of the conference. This was no small feat in itself and gave everyone a chance to play with the different VMware virtualization technologies which included the new VMware vCloud director.
At the show certain companies like HyTrust really shined and showed that they remain the leader in virtualization security as well as what I would call the rise of Veeam as a major player in the virtualization space by winning best of show at VMworld 2010. Both these companies will be the ones to watch in 2011 and it will be very interesting to see what they have in store.
Another company that was been around for a while and is worth mentioning is Stratus Technology. Stratus Technology takes fault tolerance to the hardware layer and is one of the only companies to address fault tolerance by lock stepping physical servers together. When one physical server crashes the mirrored or lock stepped secondary server takes over without the underlining systems ever missing a beat. Stratus Technology fault tolerance result is uninterrupted uptime that has been proven to meet or exceed 99.999% — less than 30 seconds per month. No matter how you look at it, this kind of uptime is what we all strive for in our day-to-day lives.
Over the years that I have been involved in virtualization, I have had the honor and pleasure of meeting some very smart and talented people that have been my peers and have become my friends. It is these people that have made the last ten years of my career the best of my career. There are far too many people that have influenced and inspired me, over this time, to acknowledge each by name but for each of you I wish continued happiness and success. It is because of these people and their desire to share what they know that has made the virtualization community one of the absolute best groups to be around and be part of.
Virtualization is a journey, not a project.