What a week… For me personally of course the announcement of our upcoming book “vSphere Quickstart guide” was a highlight. But that wasn’t the only thing that happened this week, VMware acquiring Springsource was probably one of the most discussed topics and of course I added one of the best articles on this acquisition to the top 5. Have fun!

• Steve Kaplan – VMware’s got plenty of mojo
  Although Kennedy contends that VMware lacks “real innovation”, vSphere incorporates remarkable advances in compute, storage, network, security and management. But vSphere is much more than the sum of its 150+ new features – it fulfills the performance, reliability, management and security requirements to establish virtualization as the standard and the foundation of a 100% virtualized data center.
• Jason Boche –
  vSphere 4 Reference Card now available
  Forbes Guthrie has done it again! His wildly successful VI3 reference card is now available in vSphere format. Head over to his site, vReference, and download your copy today. Be sure to thank him for his hard work! I for one appreciate all that he does. Thanks Forbes and I look forward to meeting you in a few weeks.
• Bouke Groeneschij – Getting vmware-hostd memory usage
  Now we want to be in control and determine ourselves to restart the
  hostd process, but we do not run it against all server blindly. We
  needed a list first which tell us what servers are running high with
  hostd memory usage. Since vmware-hostd is a service console process,
  powershell wasn’t really an option. So I used plink and dos batch
  scripting instead, giving me a perfect .csv list with the current
  memory usage on each server.
• Chris Wolf- SpringSource: VMware’s well-timed Acquisition
  I see the move as astute because SpringSource gives VMware the right platform at the right time. Chris Haddad – with our Application and Platform Strategies Service – detailed how a combined VMware and SpringSource platform will impact application development. Virtualization (i.e., server, client, application, storage, I/O, and network) and cloud are fundamentally changing the way that both server and desktop applications are delivered. Last year I wrote about how this transformational period creates opportunity for Microsoft’s competitors such as Apple. Cloud-based application delivery (both internal and external) is equally disruptive to traditional server application delivery models. What this means is that the time to redefine application delivery and to unseat the incumbents is right now.
• Duncan Epping – HA and Slot sizes
  Of course we need to know what the slot size for memory and CPU is first. Then we divide the total available CPU resources of a host by the CPU slot size and the total available Memory Resources of a host by the memory slot size. This leaves us with a slot size for both memory and CPU. The most restrictive number is the amount of slots for this host. If you have 25 CPU slots but only 5 memory slots the amount of available slots for this host will be 5.

Self-paced labs are being offered on a drop-in basis at Moscone Center.

Monday, August 31: 7:30 am to 8:00 pm

Tuesday, Sept. 1: 10:00 am to 5:30 pm

Wednesday, Sept. 2: 9:30 am to 5:00 pm

Thursday, Sept. 3: 9:30 am to 5:00 pm

Instructor-led Labs are offered all conference days, and can be scheduled with Schedule Builder. All instructor-led labs take place at the Marriott Hotel.

Be sure to allow sufficient time to travel between your sessions, since any open seats will be filled 5 minutes prior to session start time, by those in the “standby” line.

Travel time walking from Moscone to the Marriott is 5-10 minutes, depending on your walking speed.

Yesterday two really valuable articles were released. Both articles relate to Site Recovery Manager(SRM) which happens to be one of my focus areas.

The first article is an official VMware Whitepaper “VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Performance and Best Practices“. This white-paper describes how to optimize your SRM environment to decrease your RTO. In the end that is what SRM is all about, decreasing your downtime if and when disaster strikes. I will quote one recommendation just to give you an idea of that this white-paper is all about. I highly recommend reading the full document for all the details.

If VMware DRS is not enabled on a cluster, then it is a good practice to manually distribute placeholder virtual machines evenly across hosts. This will help in distributing the load across hosts when recovered virtual machines are powered on and will in turn improve performance and recovery time. To do this, drag and drop the placeholder virtual machines across desired hosts.

Coincidentally at the same day I published a SRM FAQ. This FAQ was part of a reference guide written by VMware’s BCDR Specialist System Engineer Michael White. Michael was so kind to share it with me and the rest of the world via Yellow-Bricks.com. This FAQ will be updated on a regular base and if you have any questions or comments don’t hesitate to leave a comment on my blog.

While we are on the subject of SRM I would like to draw your attention to these excellent VMworld sessions you should definitely attend if BC-DR is one of your focus areas:

• BC2260

  Automated Disaster Recovery for Branch Offices using SRM and vSphere 4

• BC3301

  DR Architecture Design Workshop with SRM

• BC3421

  SRM Architecture & Features: The Road Ahead

• DV2181

  Leveraging SRM with VMware View – Lessons Learned

• SPL16

  VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Basic Install & Config

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D

Hi Everyone,

I’m
extremely excited to announce VMware’s intention to acquire SpringSource, a 5
year-old company rapidly becoming a leader in enterprise and web application
development and management. The goal of this blog is to explain the
complementary benefits of this merger to longtime VMware fans as well as to the
vibrant Spring community who may know less about us. First, a quick
introduction to SpringSource…

SpringSource
began as the commercial development team leading the innovative Spring
portfolio of open source projects, an effort focused on providing a simpler,
lighter-weight alternative to the Java EE (J2EE) standard. Led by Rod Johnson
(author, enterprise java authority, and SpringSource CEO), Spring has become
the de facto standard programming model for modern enterprise Java, rich web,
and enterprise integration applications. Over the last couple of years,
SpringSource has expanded their purview across an even broader range of
offerings, employing the thought leaders within the Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server, Hyperic, Groovy and Grails open source communities.

A Common Mission: Simplify IT

Since our
founding 11 years ago, VMware has focused on simplifying IT; removing the
rigidity baked into today’s desktop and datacenter infrastructure to save on
capital and operating expenses while simultaneously allowing enterprises to
move faster towards their business needs. Companies typically spend 70% of
their IT budgets just on keeping their datacenters going… replacing failed
components, troubleshooting outages, repelling security attacks, and doing
other tasks that are focused on keeping the lights on. Our mission (and in
fact, the promise of “Cloud Computing”) has been to shift the spending of this
70% budget towards activities that move the business forward… creating new
applications that generate revenue, make them more competitive, or just improve
the bottom line. The most recent deliverable on this mission is VMware vSphere 4. This is our datacenter offering that simplifies IT by
severing the tentacles that unnaturally tie software to hardware and reaping
the encapsulation, flexibility, and automation benefits that follow. [For those
of you new to vSphere and its goals, we have a (somewhat marketing-y) overview
video here.]

SpringSource
has also been a technology innovator with a very similar mission, but focused
on the application-centric areas of IT rather than on the hardware-infrastructure focus that VMware is associated with. SpringSource’s obsession
has been simplifying and automating the build-run-manage lifecycle that all
applications go through, and they have done so by attacking similar pockets of
complexity. They bring this complexity-busting focus to several areas…
high-productivity developer tools and frameworks, lightweight application
server runtimes, and application management and monitoring. The end goal is
very similar; attack the time and money spent on application complexity and
maintenance tasks, shifting the focus to new and more reliably deployed
applications. SpringSource summarizes this mission with the following picture:

This shared
mission is what brought us together in initial partnering efforts late last year. As a combined
entity, the existing efforts and missions will continue, but we’ll also work to
jointly sever a whole new collection of tentacles… the ones that unnaturally
tie an application to the rigid way it must be deployed and managed.

How do VMware and SpringSource
intersect?

VMware has traditionally
treated the applications and operating systems running within our virtual
machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they
were doing. However, whether it’s around speed of deployment, application
performance guarantees, or providing resiliency in the face of component
outages, we will be able to provide even more capabilities as we bring even
more knowledge of the application and infrastructure layers together. We will
do this by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and
other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our
management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions. A lot
of our early “vApp” thinking has been based on this separation of application
code from the requirements it has on the infrastructure on which it will be
running..

Developer
frameworks already separate out a lot of the hardware and software
infrastructure requirements from the application code itself, and we’ll focus
on building on and extending these capabilities. For example, as a developer packages
up their Java application for deployment, they can indicate at a higher-level
how this code will interact and communicate with other hardware and software components.
At deployment time, the virtualized infrastructure can automatically provision
the database and application server VMs required by this application, wire the
VMs’ network connections together, and program vShield Zones to open up only the appropriate network ports between them.

At runtime,
even more exciting things can happen. Information from the frameworks and tools
such as Hyperic can pinpoint slowness in the service, and we can remediate the problem
areas by altering settings of VMware DRS, cloning another instance of the web server VM, or even
interacting with the traffic managers of the datacenter to balance out the
load. And on the runtime availability front, backing all of this are
capabilities such as VMware Fault Tolerance and VMware HA, which can help the components survive hardware failures or
automatically restart as appropriate.

The above is
a fairly naïve and simplified example, but hopefully it gives you a flavor for
where these combined efforts can go. And we absolutely must
go on this journey with a continued emphasis on openness and in delivering
value in an evolutionary way.

Choice

VMware has always emphasized choice; choice in which
operating systems you leverage, which applications you run, and which hardware
you run VMware products on. We’ve also proactively pushed on industry standards
(such as OVF)
that make it easier to choose non-VMware virtualization solutions if so
desired. This openness is good on several fronts:

• customers will more aggressively pursue
  solutions that don’t restrict their future options,
• it enables and accelerates competition,
  which pushes vendors to
  continuously innovate and add value, and
• it enables a more evolutionary path to
  reaching end goals versus requiring complete infrastructure or application
  rebuilds.

As we bring application-related assets into VMware, we know
that we must double-down on our focus on openness and choice. We want to enable
all applications, both existing and new, to reap the full benefits of
running on vSphere, and we will make the same virtualization and management
layer interfaces available to other application frameworks and middleware components.
We have early efforts underway around .Net, PhP, Ruby, and J2EE, and will
continue to focus on expanding these as well as newcomers in the rapidly
evolving development world. This picture attempts to show how this all comes
together around vSphere:

Furthermore, we will continue our openness at the vSphere management
layer, making the interfaces to the applications and infrastructure easily
available for non-VMware management tools to access and interact with.

SpringSource also has a huge focus on openness and choice.
SpringSource employees are stewards of Spring, Tomcat, Hyperic, and their other
offerings, but their respective successes are the result of the vibrant
communities that have grown up around them. Furthermore, this space is
characterized by customers who wish to pick and choose which of these
components they want to use and easily blend them together with other IDEs,
programming methodologies, application servers, and management tools.

Let me be absolutely clear on this… our commitment to openness
will continue and even grow.  And In
particular, the Spring framework will continue to be as open and portable as
ever. We’ll continue to target it at non-SpringSource middleware and management
tools, and we will also continue to enable and support deployment on non-VMware
virtualization offerings and even (gasp!) physical hardware. Rod Johnson
himself will make the decisions as to where Spring goes and how it remains as
open as it is today.

On a personal note, I’m as excited about the community
aspects of SpringSource’s offerings as the opportunity to work with Rod Johnson
and the other smart people and cool technologies at SpringSource. I believe
many of the existing VMware products will benefit from the lessons of openness and
community-building that SpringSource has learned.

And what about the whole “cloud”
thing?

This
openness, and in fact the complementary nature of what our two companies are
doing, makes even more sense in the context of cloud computing. We have spent a
lot of time discussing our views of cloud computing and launched the vCloud Initiative to realize this vision (more
detailed videos and slide shows are available here and here). Our approach to the cloud is
threefold:

1. Deliver
   software to the enterprise that brings the salient traits of cloud computing to
   their on-premise datacenters. These traits include resource elasticity,
   simplicity at scale, self-service portals, and the option of charging internal
   customers based on their resource usage. Building the “internal cloud” has been
   the focus of our vSphere and vCenter product lines.

2. Offer
   software to hosters, service providers, telcos, outsourcers, and other owners
   of external datacenters that lets them offer computational capabilities to the
   enterprise. We base this software offering on vSphere and vCenter as well, and
   the beauty of this approach is that it is compatible with what companies are
   doing within their own datacenters. VMs are completely portable to these “external
   clouds”, and they’ll get the same levels of availability and performance
   guarantees when they run them here. This is the focus of our VMware Service Provider Partner Program.

3. Connect
   internal and external datacenters together to create what is increasingly
   referred to as the “private cloud”. We are working with our partners to connect
   the internal and external clouds on a number of fronts such as how to migrate
   applications to and from the datacenters and a common management view of
   application assets regardless of where they’re running. In this way, we hope to
   provide an evolutionary path for companies to leverage externally provided
   datacenters on their own terms and as they’re comfortable with compliance,
   security, SLAs, data placement, or other concerns facing their business.

This is the canonical picture we use to illustrate the vCloud
initiative:

So why did I
just babble on about this? The key is in how SpringSource and other application
frameworks enable and support this same view of the world as virtualization,
modern application frameworks, and cloud computing converge.

PaaS
with choice

Our common
goal is for developers to easily build their applications and move from coding
to production execution as seamlessly as possible… regardless of whether they
will be deployed to a small internal datacenter for limited use or to a
completely external cloud provider for much larger scale audiences (and the hopes
of achieving Facebook application stardom!). This end
state has a lot in common with what is today referred to as “platform as a
service” (abbreviated PaaS). Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google’s AppEngine are two of the best known examples of PaaS today.

PaaS
simplifies IT infrastructure and accelerates application development by
providing a self-service, self-managing utility for building, deploying, running,
and managing applications. As we see it, the key characteristics of PaaS are:

1. Elasticity:
   automatically scaling up and down the infrastructure to meet the needs of the
   application
2. Multi-tenancy:
   being able to isolate resources and applications from one another in a shared
   infrastructure
3. Simplified
   provisioning: Isolate the developer from worrying about how is code gets
   installed and deployed
4. Self-service:
   allowing developers to gain access to their development infrastructure at any
   time, in many cases to circumvent the processes and inefficiencies of their
   typical IT service request processes.
5. Rapid
   development: go from code to cloud in a matter of minutes, particularly during
   the development and test phases
6. Simplified (or invisible) management:
   PaaS offerings typically have built-in application availability and performance
   management

With
vSphere, we are providing the elasticity, multi-tenancy, and simplified
provisioning traits. On the self-service front, we are aggressively extending
our VMware Lab Manager product to be a more general
self-service portal for both internal and external clouds. And when we combine
vSphere with the Spring framework, Spring runtime components, and Hyperic management
capabilities, we add rapid development models and simplified management to the
mix.

One
key difference between our offerings and existing offerings will be centered on
choice. By severing the tentacles that today tie what you want to run to where you want to run it, VMware can
provide the benefits of PaaS, but with significantly more customer choices. Combined
SpringSource/VMware PaaS offering can be hosted at
customer datacenters or at external service providers. For example, customers can
achieve many of the efficiencies and developer productivity gains of PaaS
without requiring the applications to be run outside of their walls. Today’s
PaaS offerings often force you to simultaneously commit to both a programming
model and to a vendor who will host the applications written to this model. With VMware’s strategy, any vendor in
the vCloud ecosystem will be able to offer a SpringSource-based PaaS offering,
allowing customers to select the partner that best suits their changing needs.

And one last point on openness of relevance here.
SpringSource will continue to seek out and embrace other virtualization and
cloud offerings that suit their customers and development community. Likewise,
we will focus on extending the above goals and capabilities to non-SpringSource
development frameworks. It certainly makes engineering work trickier, but
maintaining choice is an absolute requirement these days as VMware continues
the quest to simplify IT.

So pull it all together and what do you have… a morphing of
our two canonical pictures .

In verbal form, our shared vision is smarter infrastructure in which the virtualization platform
collaborates with application framework, server and management software to
ensure optimal efficiency and resilience.
And we will do this regardless of whether you run these applications inside or
outside of your datacenter.

And what’s next?

Whew… I’ve well exceeded the amount one should
attempt to squeeze into a single blog entry. There’s a lot more to talk about,
and you’ll see the combined vision and deliverables further gel in the coming
weeks. I’ll close with a shameless plug for VMworld where we’ll share
additional details and show some demonstrations of how SpringSource and VMware
can work together to simplify IT.

Thanks for reading this, and here’s to an
exciting future!

Steve

A SpringSource
Timeline

November 2002:	Rod Johnson (SpringSource CEO) publishes “J2EE Design and Development” including 30,000 lines of code that are the starting point on the Spring framework.
February 2003:	Beginnings of the Spring Framework open source project.
July 2004:	SpringSource founded by the core Spring developers.
Jan 2008:	Acquires Covalent Technologies, which provides services for users of Apache Software Foundation projects. These include the Apache Tomcat and Geronimo application servers and the Apache Axis Web services framework.
April 1, 2008:	Microsoft buys SpringSource in an April Fools’ Day stunner .
November 2008:	Acquires G2One Inc., the company behind the popular Groovy and Grails technologies.
May 2009:	Acquires open source system monitoring vendor Hyperic to provide availability monitoring for hardware and operating systems, VMs, databases and application servers, and is targeted at web infrastructure.

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D

Hi Everyone,

I’m
extremely excited to announce VMware’s intention to acquire SpringSource, a 5
year-old company rapidly becoming a leader in enterprise and web application
development and management. The goal of this blog is to explain the
complementary benefits of this merger to longtime VMware fans as well as to the
vibrant Spring community who may know less about us. First, a quick
introduction to SpringSource…

SpringSource
began as the commercial development team leading the innovative Spring
portfolio of open source projects, an effort focused on providing a simpler,
lighter-weight alternative to the Java EE (J2EE) standard. Led by Rod Johnson
(author, enterprise java authority, and SpringSource CEO), Spring has become
the de facto standard programming model for modern enterprise Java, rich web,
and enterprise integration applications. Over the last couple of years,
SpringSource has expanded their purview across an even broader range of
offerings, employing the thought leaders within the Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server, Hyperic, Groovy and Grails open source communities.

A Common Mission: Simplify IT

Since our
founding 11 years ago, VMware has focused on simplifying IT; removing the
rigidity baked into today’s desktop and datacenter infrastructure to save on
capital and operating expenses while simultaneously allowing enterprises to
move faster towards their business needs. Companies typically spend 70% of
their IT budgets just on keeping their datacenters going… replacing failed
components, troubleshooting outages, repelling security attacks, and doing
other tasks that are focused on keeping the lights on. Our mission (and in
fact, the promise of “Cloud Computing”) has been to shift the spending of this
70% budget towards activities that move the business forward… creating new
applications that generate revenue, make them more competitive, or just improve
the bottom line. The most recent deliverable on this mission is VMware vSphere 4. This is our datacenter offering that simplifies IT by
severing the tentacles that unnaturally tie software to hardware and reaping
the encapsulation, flexibility, and automation benefits that follow. [For those
of you new to vSphere and its goals, we have a (somewhat marketing-y) overview
video here.]

SpringSource
has also been a technology innovator with a very similar mission, but focused
on the application-centric areas of IT rather than on the hardware-infrastructure focus that VMware is associated with. SpringSource’s obsession
has been simplifying and automating the build-run-manage lifecycle that all
applications go through, and they have done so by attacking similar pockets of
complexity. They bring this complexity-busting focus to several areas…
high-productivity developer tools and frameworks, lightweight application
server runtimes, and application management and monitoring. The end goal is
very similar; attack the time and money spent on application complexity and
maintenance tasks, shifting the focus to new and more reliably deployed
applications. SpringSource summarizes this mission with the following picture:

This shared
mission is what brought us together in initial partnering efforts late last year. As a combined
entity, the existing efforts and missions will continue, but we’ll also work to
jointly sever a whole new collection of tentacles… the ones that unnaturally
tie an application to the rigid way it must be deployed and managed.

How do VMware and SpringSource
intersect?

VMware has traditionally
treated the applications and operating systems running within our virtual
machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they
were doing. However, whether it’s around speed of deployment, application
performance guarantees, or providing resiliency in the face of component
outages, we will be able to provide even more capabilities as we bring even
more knowledge of the application and infrastructure layers together. We will
do this by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and
other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our
management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions. A lot
of our early “vApp” thinking has been based on this separation of application
code from the requirements it has on the infrastructure on which it will be
running..

Developer
frameworks already separate out a lot of the hardware and software
infrastructure requirements from the application code itself, and we’ll focus
on building on and extending these capabilities. For example, as a developer packages
up their Java application for deployment, they can indicate at a higher-level
how this code will interact and communicate with other hardware and software components.
At deployment time, the virtualized infrastructure can automatically provision
the database and application server VMs required by this application, wire the
VMs’ network connections together, and program vShield Zones to open up only the appropriate network ports between them.

At runtime,
even more exciting things can happen. Information from the frameworks and tools
such as Hyperic can pinpoint slowness in the service, and we can remediate the problem
areas by altering settings of VMware DRS, cloning another instance of the web server VM, or even
interacting with the traffic managers of the datacenter to balance out the
load. And on the runtime availability front, backing all of this are
capabilities such as VMware Fault Tolerance and VMware HA, which can help the components survive hardware failures or
automatically restart as appropriate.

The above is
a fairly naïve and simplified example, but hopefully it gives you a flavor for
where these combined efforts can go. And we absolutely must
go on this journey with a continued emphasis on openness and in delivering
value in an evolutionary way.

Choice

VMware has always emphasized choice; choice in which
operating systems you leverage, which applications you run, and which hardware
you run VMware products on. We’ve also proactively pushed on industry standards
(such as OVF)
that make it easier to choose non-VMware virtualization solutions if so
desired. This openness is good on several fronts:

• customers will more aggressively pursue
  solutions that don’t restrict their future options,
• it enables and accelerates competition,
  which pushes vendors to
  continuously innovate and add value, and
• it enables a more evolutionary path to
  reaching end goals versus requiring complete infrastructure or application
  rebuilds.

As we bring application-related assets into VMware, we know
that we must double-down on our focus on openness and choice. We want to enable
all applications, both existing and new, to reap the full benefits of
running on vSphere, and we will make the same virtualization and management
layer interfaces available to other application frameworks and middleware components.
We have early efforts underway around .Net, PhP, Ruby, and J2EE, and will
continue to focus on expanding these as well as newcomers in the rapidly
evolving development world. This picture attempts to show how this all comes
together around vSphere:

Furthermore, we will continue our openness at the vSphere management
layer, making the interfaces to the applications and infrastructure easily
available for non-VMware management tools to access and interact with.

SpringSource also has a huge focus on openness and choice.
SpringSource employees are stewards of Spring, Tomcat, Hyperic, and their other
offerings, but their respective successes are the result of the vibrant
communities that have grown up around them. Furthermore, this space is
characterized by customers who wish to pick and choose which of these
components they want to use and easily blend them together with other IDEs,
programming methodologies, application servers, and management tools.

Let me be absolutely clear on this… our commitment to openness
will continue and even grow.  And In
particular, the Spring framework will continue to be as open and portable as
ever. We’ll continue to target it at non-SpringSource middleware and management
tools, and we will also continue to enable and support deployment on non-VMware
virtualization offerings and even (gasp!) physical hardware. Rod Johnson
himself will make the decisions as to where Spring goes and how it remains as
open as it is today.

On a personal note, I’m as excited about the community
aspects of SpringSource’s offerings as the opportunity to work with Rod Johnson
and the other smart people and cool technologies at SpringSource. I believe
many of the existing VMware products will benefit from the lessons of openness and
community-building that SpringSource has learned.

And what about the whole “cloud”
thing?

This
openness, and in fact the complementary nature of what our two companies are
doing, makes even more sense in the context of cloud computing. We have spent a
lot of time discussing our views of cloud computing and launched the vCloud Initiative to realize this vision (more
detailed videos and slide shows are available here and here). Our approach to the cloud is
threefold:

1. Deliver
   software to the enterprise that brings the salient traits of cloud computing to
   their on-premise datacenters. These traits include resource elasticity,
   simplicity at scale, self-service portals, and the option of charging internal
   customers based on their resource usage. Building the “internal cloud” has been
   the focus of our vSphere and vCenter product lines.

2. Offer
   software to hosters, service providers, telcos, outsourcers, and other owners
   of external datacenters that lets them offer computational capabilities to the
   enterprise. We base this software offering on vSphere and vCenter as well, and
   the beauty of this approach is that it is compatible with what companies are
   doing within their own datacenters. VMs are completely portable to these “external
   clouds”, and they’ll get the same levels of availability and performance
   guarantees when they run them here. This is the focus of our VMware Service Provider Partner Program.

3. Connect
   internal and external datacenters together to create what is increasingly
   referred to as the “private cloud”. We are working with our partners to connect
   the internal and external clouds on a number of fronts such as how to migrate
   applications to and from the datacenters and a common management view of
   application assets regardless of where they’re running. In this way, we hope to
   provide an evolutionary path for companies to leverage externally provided
   datacenters on their own terms and as they’re comfortable with compliance,
   security, SLAs, data placement, or other concerns facing their business.

This is the canonical picture we use to illustrate the vCloud
initiative:

So why did I
just babble on about this? The key is in how SpringSource and other application
frameworks enable and support this same view of the world as virtualization,
modern application frameworks, and cloud computing converge.

PaaS
with choice

Our common
goal is for developers to easily build their applications and move from coding
to production execution as seamlessly as possible… regardless of whether they
will be deployed to a small internal datacenter for limited use or to a
completely external cloud provider for much larger scale audiences (and the hopes
of achieving Facebook application stardom!). This end
state has a lot in common with what is today referred to as “platform as a
service” (abbreviated PaaS). Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google’s AppEngine are two of the best known examples of PaaS today.

PaaS
simplifies IT infrastructure and accelerates application development by
providing a self-service, self-managing utility for building, deploying, running,
and managing applications. As we see it, the key characteristics of PaaS are:

1. Elasticity:
   automatically scaling up and down the infrastructure to meet the needs of the
   application
2. Multi-tenancy:
   being able to isolate resources and applications from one another in a shared
   infrastructure
3. Simplified
   provisioning: Isolate the developer from worrying about how is code gets
   installed and deployed
4. Self-service:
   allowing developers to gain access to their development infrastructure at any
   time, in many cases to circumvent the processes and inefficiencies of their
   typical IT service request processes.
5. Rapid
   development: go from code to cloud in a matter of minutes, particularly during
   the development and test phases
6. Simplified (or invisible) management:
   PaaS offerings typically have built-in application availability and performance
   management

With
vSphere, we are providing the elasticity, multi-tenancy, and simplified
provisioning traits. On the self-service front, we are aggressively extending
our VMware Lab Manager product to be a more general
self-service portal for both internal and external clouds. And when we combine
vSphere with the Spring framework, Spring runtime components, and Hyperic management
capabilities, we add rapid development models and simplified management to the
mix.

One
key difference between our offerings and existing offerings will be centered on
choice. By severing the tentacles that today tie what you want to run to where you want to run it, VMware can
provide the benefits of PaaS, but with significantly more customer choices. Combined
SpringSource/VMware PaaS offering can be hosted at
customer datacenters or at external service providers. For example, customers can
achieve many of the efficiencies and developer productivity gains of PaaS
without requiring the applications to be run outside of their walls. Today’s
PaaS offerings often force you to simultaneously commit to both a programming
model and to a vendor who will host the applications written to this model. With VMware’s strategy, any vendor in
the vCloud ecosystem will be able to offer a SpringSource-based PaaS offering,
allowing customers to select the partner that best suits their changing needs.

And one last point on openness of relevance here.
SpringSource will continue to seek out and embrace other virtualization and
cloud offerings that suit their customers and development community. Likewise,
we will focus on extending the above goals and capabilities to non-SpringSource
development frameworks. It certainly makes engineering work trickier, but
maintaining choice is an absolute requirement these days as VMware continues
the quest to simplify IT.

So pull it all together and what do you have… a morphing of
our two canonical pictures .

In verbal form, our shared vision is smarter infrastructure in which the virtualization platform
collaborates with application framework, server and management software to
ensure optimal efficiency and resilience.
And we will do this regardless of whether you run these applications inside or
outside of your datacenter.

And what’s next?

Whew… I’ve well exceeded the amount one should
attempt to squeeze into a single blog entry. There’s a lot more to talk about,
and you’ll see the combined vision and deliverables further gel in the coming
weeks. I’ll close with a shameless plug for VMworld where we’ll share
additional details and show some demonstrations of how SpringSource and VMware
can work together to simplify IT.

Thanks for reading this, and here’s to an
exciting future!

Steve

A SpringSource
Timeline

November 2002:	Rod Johnson (SpringSource CEO) publishes “J2EE Design and Development” including 30,000 lines of code that are the starting point on the Spring framework.
February 2003:	Beginnings of the Spring Framework open source project.
July 2004:	SpringSource founded by the core Spring developers.
Jan 2008:	Acquires Covalent Technologies, which provides services for users of Apache Software Foundation projects. These include the Apache Tomcat and Geronimo application servers and the Apache Axis Web services framework.
April 1, 2008:	Microsoft buys SpringSource in an April Fools’ Day stunner .
November 2008:	Acquires G2One Inc., the company behind the popular Groovy and Grails technologies.
May 2009:	Acquires open source system monitoring vendor Hyperic to provide availability monitoring for hardware and operating systems, VMs, databases and application servers, and is targeted at web infrastructure.

It seems to be cucumber time as we call it in the Netherlands, for those unfamiliar with the term check wikipedia. A lot of news posts but a lot of repetive info. I guess a lot of bloggers are on a holiday, especially the dutch bloggers have been awful quiet lately. I did however manage to find 5 great articles again. Read them and leave a comment at the source articles as this is fuel for new content.

• Scott Lowe – UCS Class Wrap-Up
  Last week’s partner boot camp for the Cisco Unified Computing System
  (UCS) was very helpful. It has really helped me gain a better
  understanding of the solution, how it works, and its advantages and
  disadvantages. I’d like to share some random bits of information I
  gathered during the class here in the hopes that it will serve as a
  useful add-on to the formal training.
• Simon Gallagher – VMware ESX 5
  As the VMware vendor and partner ecosystem grows will it stifle
  growth in the core product? – I see this happening with Microsoft –
  they don’t want to produce an all singing and dancing core product as
  there are literally thousands of ISV’s that they don’t necessarily want
  to put out of business; so Microsoft core products are “good-enough”
  but for more advanced features you turn to an ISV (think Terminal
  Services & Citrix)
  So, open question really – here’s my starter for 10 – What would you like to see in ESX 5?
• Duncan Epping – Primary and Secondary nodes, pick one!
  Now that makes you wonder what else is possible… Lets start with a
  warning. I don’t know if this is supported. Lets assume it is not. Also
  keep in mind that the supported limit of primaries is 5, I repeat 5.
  This is a soft limit, so you can manually add a 6th, but this is not supported. Now here’s the magic…
• Daniel Eason – Virtualisation within today’s IT Frameworks
  Virtualisation and the underlying technology that supports the virtual landscape is deployed as a point solution, this is also the case for the example technologies that are changing the shape of datacentres, you procure them and you can solve common datacentre problems. Virtualisation ecosystems as in the software and components that you can deploy however can reduce your process by default and with very little need to implement any fandangle add on or interfaces, however you still need to ensure that this potential is exploited correctly.
• Chris Wolf – Catalyst Server Virtualization Wrap-up Part I / 2
  After taking the weekend to catch my breath and get some much needed rest, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the highlights from last week’s Catalyst North America conference. I’d like to start with recaps of last week’s opening day cloud and virtualization sessions.

We are pleased to announce that VMworld Europe will be held in October 2010. The VMworld Europe conference will follow our Global VMworld conference, scheduled for San Francisco in September 2010, to ensure that we are able to roll out key initiatives to customers and partners more quickly and consistently worldwide. As the leading virtualization conference, VMworld will continue to offer its diverse global audience the latest information on how virtualization is revolutionizing the next generation of computing.

More information on the specific dates and location for VMworld Europe 2010 will be announced soon!

In the meantime, don’t miss your chance to register for VMworld 2009 taking place August 31-September 3 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Visit www.vmworld2009.com to register.

I wanted to write a huge article on why you should attend VMworld. Before I started writing I decided to do a search on PlanetV12n and the amount of articles that came up was so overwhelming that I decided to link them instead of writing yet another post on why to attend VMworld. If these guys can not convince you no one can:

• Theron Conrey – VMworld 2009 Sunday Night Extravaganza
• Eric Siebert – Sample letter for justifying VMworld to your manager
• Frank Denneman – VMworld 2009 Sessions
• Bob Plankers – VMworld 2009!
• Rick Scherer – VMworld 2009 Underground party on Sunday!
• Steve Beaver – VMware Developer Day and VMworld 2009
• Scott Lowe – VMworld 2009 Spouse Activities Update
• Rich Brambley – Get To VMworld 2009 Early – Sunday and Monday Stuff
• Rick Vanover – VMworld 2009 Right Around The Corner
• Chad Sakac – VMworld 2009 – the session I’m looking forward to the most!
• Chad Sakac – VMworld 2009 – the full EMC picture…
• Rodney Haywood – Attend VMworld 2009
• Sven Huisman – Why attend VMworld during financial crisis?
• Duncan Epping – VMworld, just be there!

What a week again. I guess besides the fact that my twitter account was suspended, I booked my flights to VMworld and a VCDX Panel is scheduled the week before VMworld in Palo Alto the most exciting thing for me personal was the debate between Scott Drummonds and Simon Crosby. I don’t know about you but for me it was obvious who won the debate. That’s not what this post is all about of course, it’s about the five top article this week. Here we go:

• Duncan Epping – High Availability Deepdive, the update
  A VMware HA Cluster consists of nodes, primary and secondary
  nodes. Primary nodes hold cluster settings and all “node states” which
  are synchronized between primaries. Node states hold for instance
  resource usage information. In case that vCenter is not available the
  primary nodes will have a rough estimate of the resource occupation and
  can take this into account when a fail-over needs to occur. Secondary
  nodes send their state info to the primary nodes.
• Arnim van Lieshout – How big is my VM?
  To make things more complicated, these files can be stored on
  different datastores. So if you want to know how much storage is
  occupied by your vm, you have to add up all these file’s sizes. I created a little Powershell function to help me out on this one.
  In its simplest form a vm consists of one or more directories. This
  script first creates an array with all directories occupied by the vm
  and then adds up all the file’s sizes in these directories. Just feed
  the function with a vm object and it will return the vm’s total size in
  bytes.
• Steve Chambers – Drummonds vs Crosby on virtualization performance
  This week, Scott delivered another great performance at the Burton
  Conference where he provides the hard data in contrast with Simon
  Crosby’s conjecture.  If you haven’t seen Scott present yet and
  your work involves virtualization, well that’s like being a blues fan
  and never seeing B.B. King live.
• Rich Brambley – Detailed P2V Analysis Flowchart for the “Fruit in the Canopy”
  Virtualization can be credited for popularizing the phrase “low hanging
  fruit” as a referral to the set of physical servers so underutilized
  they are easy virtualization candidates. Now, as virtual
  infrastructures (VI) mature and larger, more resource intensive
  applications are being considered for physical to virtual (p2V)
  migrations, administrators and application owners need to figure out
  how to adapt existing VI designs to accommodate the “fruit” still left
  in the “tree canopy”.
• Richard Garsthagen – vAudit 1.00
  Thanks to Jeff and Sudharsan for your feedback! I just made a new version available of vAudit with 3 new improvements:
  - vAudit now also checks for login failures, so you can detect if people are trying to hack into your system
  - You can now resize the username column, so you can actually read the username if you have long domain names
  - When you MouseOver a session, it will display the machine name and time information

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D

Hi Everyone,

I’m
extremely excited to announce VMware’s intention to acquire SpringSource, a 5
year-old company rapidly becoming a leader in enterprise and web application
development and management. The goal of this blog is to explain the
complementary benefits of this merger to longtime VMware fans as well as to the
vibrant Spring community who may know less about us. First, a quick
introduction to SpringSource…

SpringSource
began as the commercial development team leading the innovative Spring
portfolio of open source projects, an effort focused on providing a simpler,
lighter-weight alternative to the Java EE (J2EE) standard. Led by Rod Johnson
(author, enterprise java authority, and SpringSource CEO), Spring has become
the de facto standard programming model for modern enterprise Java, rich web,
and enterprise integration applications. Over the last couple of years,
SpringSource has expanded their purview across an even broader range of
offerings, employing the thought leaders within the Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server, Hyperic, Groovy and Grails open source communities.

A Common Mission: Simplify IT

Since our
founding 11 years ago, VMware has focused on simplifying IT; removing the
rigidity baked into today’s desktop and datacenter infrastructure to save on
capital and operating expenses while simultaneously allowing enterprises to
move faster towards their business needs. Companies typically spend 70% of
their IT budgets just on keeping their datacenters going… replacing failed
components, troubleshooting outages, repelling security attacks, and doing
other tasks that are focused on keeping the lights on. Our mission (and in
fact, the promise of “Cloud Computing”) has been to shift the spending of this
70% budget towards activities that move the business forward… creating new
applications that generate revenue, make them more competitive, or just improve
the bottom line. The most recent deliverable on this mission is VMware vSphere 4. This is our datacenter offering that simplifies IT by
severing the tentacles that unnaturally tie software to hardware and reaping
the encapsulation, flexibility, and automation benefits that follow. [For those
of you new to vSphere and its goals, we have a (somewhat marketing-y) overview
video here.]

SpringSource
has also been a technology innovator with a very similar mission, but focused
on the application-centric areas of IT rather than on the hardware-infrastructure focus that VMware is associated with. SpringSource’s obsession
has been simplifying and automating the build-run-manage lifecycle that all
applications go through, and they have done so by attacking similar pockets of
complexity. They bring this complexity-busting focus to several areas…
high-productivity developer tools and frameworks, lightweight application
server runtimes, and application management and monitoring. The end goal is
very similar; attack the time and money spent on application complexity and
maintenance tasks, shifting the focus to new and more reliably deployed
applications. SpringSource summarizes this mission with the following picture:

This shared
mission is what brought us together in initial partnering efforts late last year. As a combined
entity, the existing efforts and missions will continue, but we’ll also work to
jointly sever a whole new collection of tentacles… the ones that unnaturally
tie an application to the rigid way it must be deployed and managed.

How do VMware and SpringSource
intersect?

VMware has traditionally
treated the applications and operating systems running within our virtual
machines (VMs) as black boxes with relatively little knowledge about what they
were doing. However, whether it’s around speed of deployment, application
performance guarantees, or providing resiliency in the face of component
outages, we will be able to provide even more capabilities as we bring even
more knowledge of the application and infrastructure layers together. We will
do this by adding interfaces into vSphere that SpringSource offerings (and
other application frameworks) can take advantage of and by extending our
management and automation capabilities to be aware of these interactions. A lot
of our early “vApp” thinking has been based on this separation of application
code from the requirements it has on the infrastructure on which it will be
running..

Developer
frameworks already separate out a lot of the hardware and software
infrastructure requirements from the application code itself, and we’ll focus
on building on and extending these capabilities. For example, as a developer packages
up their Java application for deployment, they can indicate at a higher-level
how this code will interact and communicate with other hardware and software components.
At deployment time, the virtualized infrastructure can automatically provision
the database and application server VMs required by this application, wire the
VMs’ network connections together, and program vShield Zones to open up only the appropriate network ports between them.

At runtime,
even more exciting things can happen. Information from the frameworks and tools
such as Hyperic can pinpoint slowness in the service, and we can remediate the problem
areas by altering settings of VMware DRS, cloning another instance of the web server VM, or even
interacting with the traffic managers of the datacenter to balance out the
load. And on the runtime availability front, backing all of this are
capabilities such as VMware Fault Tolerance and VMware HA, which can help the components survive hardware failures or
automatically restart as appropriate.

The above is
a fairly naïve and simplified example, but hopefully it gives you a flavor for
where these combined efforts can go. And we absolutely must
go on this journey with a continued emphasis on openness and in delivering
value in an evolutionary way.

Choice

VMware has always emphasized choice; choice in which
operating systems you leverage, which applications you run, and which hardware
you run VMware products on. We’ve also proactively pushed on industry standards
(such as OVF)
that make it easier to choose non-VMware virtualization solutions if so
desired. This openness is good on several fronts:

• customers will more aggressively pursue
  solutions that don’t restrict their future options,
• it enables and accelerates competition,
  which pushes vendors to
  continuously innovate and add value, and
• it enables a more evolutionary path to
  reaching end goals versus requiring complete infrastructure or application
  rebuilds.

As we bring application-related assets into VMware, we know
that we must double-down on our focus on openness and choice. We want to enable
all applications, both existing and new, to reap the full benefits of
running on vSphere, and we will make the same virtualization and management
layer interfaces available to other application frameworks and middleware components.
We have early efforts underway around .Net, PhP, Ruby, and J2EE, and will
continue to focus on expanding these as well as newcomers in the rapidly
evolving development world. This picture attempts to show how this all comes
together around vSphere:

Furthermore, we will continue our openness at the vSphere management
layer, making the interfaces to the applications and infrastructure easily
available for non-VMware management tools to access and interact with.

SpringSource also has a huge focus on openness and choice.
SpringSource employees are stewards of Spring, Tomcat, Hyperic, and their other
offerings, but their respective successes are the result of the vibrant
communities that have grown up around them. Furthermore, this space is
characterized by customers who wish to pick and choose which of these
components they want to use and easily blend them together with other IDEs,
programming methodologies, application servers, and management tools.

Let me be absolutely clear on this… our commitment to openness
will continue and even grow.  And In
particular, the Spring framework will continue to be as open and portable as
ever. We’ll continue to target it at non-SpringSource middleware and management
tools, and we will also continue to enable and support deployment on non-VMware
virtualization offerings and even (gasp!) physical hardware. Rod Johnson
himself will make the decisions as to where Spring goes and how it remains as
open as it is today.

On a personal note, I’m as excited about the community
aspects of SpringSource’s offerings as the opportunity to work with Rod Johnson
and the other smart people and cool technologies at SpringSource. I believe
many of the existing VMware products will benefit from the lessons of openness and
community-building that SpringSource has learned.

And what about the whole “cloud”
thing?

This
openness, and in fact the complementary nature of what our two companies are
doing, makes even more sense in the context of cloud computing. We have spent a
lot of time discussing our views of cloud computing and launched the vCloud Initiative to realize this vision (more
detailed videos and slide shows are available here and here). Our approach to the cloud is
threefold:

1. Deliver
   software to the enterprise that brings the salient traits of cloud computing to
   their on-premise datacenters. These traits include resource elasticity,
   simplicity at scale, self-service portals, and the option of charging internal
   customers based on their resource usage. Building the “internal cloud” has been
   the focus of our vSphere and vCenter product lines.

2. Offer
   software to hosters, service providers, telcos, outsourcers, and other owners
   of external datacenters that lets them offer computational capabilities to the
   enterprise. We base this software offering on vSphere and vCenter as well, and
   the beauty of this approach is that it is compatible with what companies are
   doing within their own datacenters. VMs are completely portable to these “external
   clouds”, and they’ll get the same levels of availability and performance
   guarantees when they run them here. This is the focus of our VMware Service Provider Partner Program.

3. Connect
   internal and external datacenters together to create what is increasingly
   referred to as the “private cloud”. We are working with our partners to connect
   the internal and external clouds on a number of fronts such as how to migrate
   applications to and from the datacenters and a common management view of
   application assets regardless of where they’re running. In this way, we hope to
   provide an evolutionary path for companies to leverage externally provided
   datacenters on their own terms and as they’re comfortable with compliance,
   security, SLAs, data placement, or other concerns facing their business.

This is the canonical picture we use to illustrate the vCloud
initiative:

So why did I
just babble on about this? The key is in how SpringSource and other application
frameworks enable and support this same view of the world as virtualization,
modern application frameworks, and cloud computing converge.

PaaS
with choice

Our common
goal is for developers to easily build their applications and move from coding
to production execution as seamlessly as possible… regardless of whether they
will be deployed to a small internal datacenter for limited use or to a
completely external cloud provider for much larger scale audiences (and the hopes
of achieving Facebook application stardom!). This end
state has a lot in common with what is today referred to as “platform as a
service” (abbreviated PaaS). Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Google’s AppEngine are two of the best known examples of PaaS today.

PaaS
simplifies IT infrastructure and accelerates application development by
providing a self-service, self-managing utility for building, deploying, running,
and managing applications. As we see it, the key characteristics of PaaS are:

1. Elasticity:
   automatically scaling up and down the infrastructure to meet the needs of the
   application
2. Multi-tenancy:
   being able to isolate resources and applications from one another in a shared
   infrastructure
3. Simplified
   provisioning: Isolate the developer from worrying about how is code gets
   installed and deployed
4. Self-service:
   allowing developers to gain access to their development infrastructure at any
   time, in many cases to circumvent the processes and inefficiencies of their
   typical IT service request processes.
5. Rapid
   development: go from code to cloud in a matter of minutes, particularly during
   the development and test phases
6. Simplified (or invisible) management:
   PaaS offerings typically have built-in application availability and performance
   management

With
vSphere, we are providing the elasticity, multi-tenancy, and simplified
provisioning traits. On the self-service front, we are aggressively extending
our VMware Lab Manager product to be a more general
self-service portal for both internal and external clouds. And when we combine
vSphere with the Spring framework, Spring runtime components, and Hyperic management
capabilities, we add rapid development models and simplified management to the
mix.

One
key difference between our offerings and existing offerings will be centered on
choice. By severing the tentacles that today tie what you want to run to where you want to run it, VMware can
provide the benefits of PaaS, but with significantly more customer choices. Combined
SpringSource/VMware PaaS offering can be hosted at
customer datacenters or at external service providers. For example, customers can
achieve many of the efficiencies and developer productivity gains of PaaS
without requiring the applications to be run outside of their walls. Today’s
PaaS offerings often force you to simultaneously commit to both a programming
model and to a vendor who will host the applications written to this model. With VMware’s strategy, any vendor in
the vCloud ecosystem will be able to offer a SpringSource-based PaaS offering,
allowing customers to select the partner that best suits their changing needs.

And one last point on openness of relevance here.
SpringSource will continue to seek out and embrace other virtualization and
cloud offerings that suit their customers and development community. Likewise,
we will focus on extending the above goals and capabilities to non-SpringSource
development frameworks. It certainly makes engineering work trickier, but
maintaining choice is an absolute requirement these days as VMware continues
the quest to simplify IT.

So pull it all together and what do you have… a morphing of
our two canonical pictures .

In verbal form, our shared vision is smarter infrastructure in which the virtualization platform
collaborates with application framework, server and management software to
ensure optimal efficiency and resilience.
And we will do this regardless of whether you run these applications inside or
outside of your datacenter.

And what’s next?

Whew… I’ve well exceeded the amount one should
attempt to squeeze into a single blog entry. There’s a lot more to talk about,
and you’ll see the combined vision and deliverables further gel in the coming
weeks. I’ll close with a shameless plug for VMworld where we’ll share
additional details and show some demonstrations of how SpringSource and VMware
can work together to simplify IT.

Thanks for reading this, and here’s to an
exciting future!

Steve

A SpringSource
Timeline

November 2002:	Rod Johnson (SpringSource CEO) publishes “J2EE Design and Development” including 30,000 lines of code that are the starting point on the Spring framework.
February 2003:	Beginnings of the Spring Framework open source project.
July 2004:	SpringSource founded by the core Spring developers.
Jan 2008:	Acquires Covalent Technologies, which provides services for users of Apache Software Foundation projects. These include the Apache Tomcat and Geronimo application servers and the Apache Axis Web services framework.
April 1, 2008:	Microsoft buys SpringSource in an April Fools’ Day stunner .
November 2008:	Acquires G2One Inc., the company behind the popular Groovy and Grails technologies.
May 2009:	Acquires open source system monitoring vendor Hyperic to provide availability monitoring for hardware and operating systems, VMs, databases and application servers, and is targeted at web infrastructure.