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I’ve been digging more around VMware’s website, but today what caught my attention is they have changed their home page.
The folks at VMware must have figured out how big a deal a Green Data Center is for their customers.
VMware’s Green Page is here.
And, they have an energy efficient kit of content.
And, their T-shirts are 100% Organic Cotton.
VirtualGeek has a post about VMware used in a Sharepoint scenario with a 74% energy savings.
The results:
In terms of performance, (omitting the SQL backend - which has been virtualized in other tests showing EXCELLENT performance), across 3 baseline tests, on average:
- Our Virtualized SharePoint server infrastructure farm out-performed the physical SharePoint farm by 4%,
- But only used 26% of the electrical power (watts) required to power the physical server infrastructure - put another way, that’s a 74% power saving over physical, put yet another way, going physical means 380% more power.
- 1017 Watts versus 3952 Watts. 6 Power cords versus 22
As Microsoft gets ready for its Hyper-V launch, we’ll see how their #’s match up to VMware’s.
Here is one sharepoint on Hyper-V blog entry. It is a demo environment, but they show a 100% performance improvement for Hyper-V vs. Virtual Server 2005 R2.
EWeek provides details on VMware’s move to provide cloud computing virtualization tools.
New VMware CEO Paul Maritz is planning to bring the virtualization company deeper into the cloud by providing the tools to create a virtual, flexible IT infrastructure for the enterprise and for hosting providers.
VMware is positioning itself to provide a layer of virtualization technology needed to create a cloud computing infrastructure.
When newly minted CEO Paul Maritz spoke to analysts July 22 following the release of VMware's 2008 second-quarter financial results, he told the audience that the virtualization company is moving into a new stage of its development that would include a vigorous focus on creating virtual environments for cloud computing infrastructures.
The fact that VMware, which is still considered the leading vendor of x86 virtualization technology, is developing virtualization for the cloud should not come as a shock. Maritz himself oversaw EMC's cloud division before moving to VMware and former CEO Diane Greene had spoken of moving virtualization from a mere consolidation tool to a technology that would bring a new level of automation and systems management into the data center, which then leads to a cloud infrastructure.
Based on the following, we can look forward to VMware making announcements on cloud computing (like Amazon Web Services) hosters supporting VMware’s new tools.
Cloud computing holds the promise of allowing enterprises to save money and resources by offloading some or all of their IT infrastructure to vendors that provide applications or software infrastructures that are delivered through the Internet. What VMware and other vendors are trying to do now is build out the infrastructure and applications needed to create a cloud environment.
"The VMware infrastructure technology has a lot of relevance both in the cloud itself by helping people build and operate clouds, but also as an onramp to the cloud that allows existing customers to easily migrate their compute loads outside of their environments and into the cloud and back again," Maritz said during the July 22 earnings call.
While Maritz, a former Microsoft executive who became VMware's CEO earlier in July, did not specifically indicate when VMware's new cloud computing technology would hit the market, it seems clear that the company will detail its efforts at the VMworld conference in September.
As server utilization increases, we’ll see if Intel’s Server processor sales slow.
ComputerWorld covers VMware’s new president, Paul Maritz, conference call to financial analysts.
VMware's new CEO says he knows Microsoft and can defeat it
Paul Maritz, a former top MS exec, says he is ready to take the big dog on
July 22, 2008 (Computerworld) VMware Inc.'s new CEO and president, Paul Maritz, took aim at his chief rival today -- Microsoft Corp. -- and told financial analysts that he knows how to beat that company, and that includes giving products away.
"The key when it comes to Microsoft is to neither rest on your laurels, nor get mesmerized," Maritz said.
Another key strategy in beating Microsoft, apparently, is to play offense. And that's what Maritz did on Tuesday, announcing during a conference call with financial analysts his intention to start giving away VMware's ESXi server. That software is roughly equivalent to Microsoft's just released Hyper-V virtualization server, which lists for $28 per server.
VMware will "take the price on that product to zero" in its next update, said Maritz. ESXi had listed for $495 but is offered for much lower prices by third-party server vendors that include the product in their own wares. VMware officials said after the call that the new release would be out in about a week.
As I mentioned in my own post on July 8, Paul Maritz is a force Microsoft will reckon with and he knows how to compete.
Paul was one of the best Microsoft VPs I enjoyed working with, and I believe he'll be able to take VMware to a new possibility of cloud computing and virtualization.
The ComputerWorld article continues.
The contrast between Maritz and recently ousted VMware co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was interesting, and it quite possibly gives a sense of the company's strategy going forward.
Greene rarely said anything publicly that could be interpreted as confrontational with Microsoft, even though she knew that the software giant was taking direct aim at her company. VMware, particularly in its earlier years, wanted a strong relationship with Microsoft as it built its x86 virtualization platform, and so Greene would often position her company as a partner of sorts.
That era of niceness may be ending with Maritz.
Maritz today made a point of telling analysts on the call something they no doubt already knew -- that he is a former Microsoft employee. "I know that Microsoft is a formidable but not invincible competitor," he said.
And Maritz knows firsthand just how powerful Microsoft can be. Microsoft, thanks to its free browser and operating system market strength, crushed Netscape; Maritz was one of the leading Microsoft executives to testify for the company in that antitrust battle with the U.S. government 10 years ago. The question is whether that deep knowledge will give Maritz the competitive edge he will likely need to keep Microsoft from repeating history.
"I know that Microsoft can afford to play a long waiting game, but I also know from firsthand experience that where a competitor has a lead and that a competitor invests and innovates to stay ahead ... they can be very hard to catch, even for Microsoft," said Maritz.
One of the things that Microsoft made the biggest mistake was not coming up with the money to buy VMware. Microsoft went cheap and bought Connectix, the #2 player in virtualization, instead of VMware which was a lot more expensive. Microsoft has given the opportunity to EMC, and EMC’s management was smart pushing out co-founder Diane Greene.
I wonder if EMC bought Paul Maritz’s company with the full intention to put him in charge of VMware. What do you think?
Pat Helland put up his post about a week at Foo Camp.
What is Foo Camp? Pat gives an entertaining summary.
A Weekend at Foo Camp
Well... I was lucky enough to get invited to Foo Camp (which was last weekend) and I figure "What the heck! Let's do it!".
Foo Camp is held at the O'Reilly headquarters in Sebastopol, CA which is 1 to 2 hours (or more depending on traffic) north of San Francisco. It is an invitation only event whose name stands for "Friends Of O'Reilly" and involves about 300 diverse and interesting individuals from different walks of the computer industry (and related industries). Tim O'Reilly host it at their headquarters and supplies very nice buffet food, showers, rest rooms, and meeting rooms. I was informed that the best way to enjoy the event is to camp there which means either pitching a tent on their lawn or finding an available space in a meeting room or hallway to throw a sleeping bag. It was an option to get a hotel room in town. Now... I haven't camped in about 20 years so this required some thinking...
I concluded I had two options:
- Stay in a hotel room and ensure I remained sober enough to drive at the end of the evening, OR
- Buy a tent at REI in Santa Rosa and then hit the high-end liquor store in Santa Rosa to buy enough whiskey to lubricate a serious subset of the 300 attendees.
Naturally, I chose the second option and bought six bottles (some of my favorites and others I hadn't tried).
It turns out James Hamilton and Pat Helland are friends and are putting their heads together on Energy Efficiency software. James is left, Pat is center, and Jesse Robbins is right.
But, back to the Energy Efficiency software. Here are Pat's comments.
Sometimes, it was hard to select between the various cool sessions. I remember the following ones:
- Data center power -- James Hamilton (my friend from Microsoft) and Jeff Hammerbacher who leads the Facebook data team (but will be leaving soon). Both James and Jeff were filled with information about running large and dynamic data centers. The power issues for data centers have been on my mind the last few years and I find that James is a wonderful font of knowledge. I most definitely love that he is at Microsoft and my friend... I plan to come pepper him with additional questions in the months to com. Jeff, also, has tons of knowledge from supporting the data needs of Facebook as it has undergone its explosive growth. This was a fun and invigorating discussion in which I met an attendee, Roger Magoulas who is a research director at O'Reilly. I have a feeling that there will be opportunities for me to work with Roger, too.
- Parallel Programming -- Kerry Hammil of Microsoft Research. We had a fun discussion of the difficulties of getting applications (and, indeed, their libraries and OSes) to be parallel. There were about 25 great and interesting people participating in this group and, not surprisingly, I participated, too. This was such a lively discussion for me that it ended up in the hallway and we skipped the next session.
Here is an application architect who cares about data center power and parallel (multicore) programming. I hope we see more people like Pat show up.
Jesse Robbins in the above picture has an interesting background.
- Technical Program Manager at Amazon.com
- Manager - IT Operations at Amazon.com
- Task Force Leader at World Shelters Task Force 1
- Systems Engineer at Amazon.com
- Firefighter/EMT (Intern) at Palo Alto Fire Department