Very Brief Thoughts on the Keynote

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 in Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

Now that the keynote has wrapped up, I just wanted to post a few very brief thoughts, perhaps questions, about the keynote and the technologies and initiatives discussed.

First off, as I have seen others point out on the VMworld Twitter broadcast channel, I wonder how well AppSpeed’s remediation functionality would work with applications other than web-based applications. Not all applications can scale using additional VMs. Sure, you can generally scale web-based applications by throwing on more web server VMs, but what about Microsoft Exchange 2007? Or SQL Server 2008? Or some other database server? I speculated in the keynote liveblog that perhaps the hot-add functionality that VMware is supposed to be adding to future versions of ESX/ESXi will help, but there’s been absolutely no discussion of that. At least, not that I’ve seen.

I also briefly mentioned in the keynote liveblog that I wonder how well some of these technologies would work in the offline VDI scenario.

Finally, there seems to be some feature/functionality conflicts between stuff like vStorage Thin Provisioning and VMware FT that have yet to be resolved. Granted, this is all prototype/pre-beta stuff so VMware has time to resolve this.

What about you? What kinds of things like this have you spotted?

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  1. Lode’s avatar

    Lode on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 12:37 pm

    In one of the presentations on partner day on monday they discussed that indeed cpu/memory hot-add will be supported by AppSpeed.

  2. hphuhtin’s avatar

    hphuhtin on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    Not everything can be scaled, of course. But perhaps you could migrate a slow disk to a faster LUN? Or remove other load from that disk group? Migrate to a newer generation host (in the future generations this will be more compatible)? Hot-adding memory would definetly be a possibility.

    Think of the limits but don’t forget the of the possibilities!

  3. Clue’s avatar

    Clue on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 2:19 pm

    AppSpeed is only as good as the applications it understands from a transactions point of view. Which means that its only good for a subset of applications (at this time) which are SQL/DB and Web. If they expand its ability to discover and track transactions for other applications like Exchange, then it could.. For now I think there is NO support outside of the narrow scope of what the acquired BeeHive application provided.

  4. David Strebel’s avatar

    David Strebel on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 2:43 pm

    In a session yesterday Leena Joshi noted that the hot add CPU, Memory, and device feature will not let you hot remove these components. She also wasn’t able to state what OS’s would support this hot add feature.