Ben's Blog

Well, live blogging at vmworld didn't work out as I expected. Either we were too busy preparing the demos and talking to attendees, or at night we were exhausted (plus my hotel charged $15/night for wi-fi, who does that anymore?). So, here I am waiting for my flight home, and now recapping the conference highlights after the fact. In no particular order...

New UI Comments

The new (redesigned for 2.0 compared to Ops Center 1.x) UI was very well received. It was very snappy and several attendees were surprised to know it was AJAX/JS/browser-based instead of a fat client. Several understood right away the benefit of being able to run the UI from any browser location, assuming connectivity with Ops Center or standalone xVM Server (say over VPN to work, etc). One asked me in depth questions about the UI subsystem, such as our usage of extjs, DOJO, Springs, DAO/Factory patterns, etc. Will save a writeup of that for another day, or have Jan do it for us.

Integration of other products/hypervisors

 Several attendees brought up the idea of integrating other hypervisors into Ops Center. We will be first (so I've heard) pursuing integration of Virtual Box, as this would be a more straightforward test since we are in the same division. As you may know, the conference had many booths from companies that are part of the vmware ecosystem of value-adds. Some of those were discussed as possible integrations as well.

Existing Sun customers and LDOM/Zone interest

We also had many Sun-friendly existing customers drop by. They were curious about LDOM and zone support in OC. The initial zone support is planned for 2.0, primarily discovery/display of zones. Management of zones and LDOMs are planned for follow-on releases. The UI should be able to display other "virtualization containers" and their guests.

Overall interest and vmware comparisons

Sun's hypervisor was new and surprising to many attendees. Last week's launch first piqued interest and it was good to follow-up with those wanting to know more. Several Sun customers using x86 HW were interested to download and play with the EA standalone xVM Server. Check kenai.com for availability. On the last day, a vmware developer came over for a deeper look. He was impressed and grasped many of the concepts and architecture quickly.

I am really behind on blogging, we've been too busy preparing the booth and installing the demo. We took several last minute enhancements from back home. The doors opened at 5PM on Monday night. Virtually all of the attendees then streamed in for food, beverages and free stuff from the booths. We were really backed up handing out OpenXVM  t-shirts, after the attendee signed up on kenai.com to get updates about the EA binary release of OpenXVM. We all decided to where the T-shirts instead of the Sun polo shirts. We had to breakout spare laptops to collect kenai registrations, and finally ran out of shirts (for that night's allocation).

Woohoo! first swag score, the nice AMD lady next door gave us a cool green shirt showing their Opteron x64 chip. In other apparel news, ScottL will have a bunch of Sun open source T-shirts talking about openxvm, and Beth has provided us 2 Sun polo shirts (for us booth workers). Will also try and sneak off to all the other booths for swag. Hey, can't beat free stuff.

Today, Sunday, we are busy preparing our Sun booth at VMWorld. Half of the battle is preparing the local network so we can get internet access and local access, for the hot patches to the demo. Here are a couple videos of our booth. The ballroom for the booths is a huge area in the Venetian. There are many companies represented here.

A sweep of the other side of the booth.

We've spent the last two weeks completing critical use cases and polishing the UI for VMWorld next week. Been a grueling schedule, repeated re-installs and dry runs, also meeting at night to hook up with our India Engineering Center (IEC) brothers for combined testing and feedback. We (US team) then hit the sack and leave the system for IEC, and later, our Israeli and Grenoble teams to work on. This has actually been helpful in forcing pressing issues to resolution quickly. Sometimes with a stock schedule different teams don't always integrate well until its almost too late.

 We have made great progress with virtual guest management from Ops Center (as opposed to on a standalone xVM Server). With Ops Center, you can manage multiple remote xVM Servers, each running multiple guests. Such as suspend/resume/shutdown lifecycle operations. You can also initiate creation of a guest remotely from OC. The big use case is live migration, where you take a running guest on one xvms and migrate it to another xvms (these 2 xvms are in the same virtualization pool, as we call it). Another cool feature is viewing the remote VNC console of the guests from a panel in the OC webapp (via a VNC applet).

I leave Sunday morning to fly to Las Vegas. I'll meet Leon and others that afternoon to unpack servers, get them running, etc. I'm sure we'll have recent updates to install as well. I haven't been to Vegas in years, I look forward to seeing all the new casinos and attractions.

alexandrov commented about our speaking/demo schedule. Below is what I have been told. I will be there as tech support working with marketing. We won't have any online demos next week but I expect to see videos posted after the conference. Drop by and check out our booth, we'd be glad to answer questions and show off our latest xVM Server and Ops Center code. Fresh from the repo :-)

60 minute speaking session—Thursday, September 18^th @ 9am in Titan Room #2305

The 60 minute breakout session will consist of four panel members discuss Sun's virtualization strategy and solutions in an interactive, interview style format. This breakout has been placed in the Planning and Operations in the Datacenter track.

30 minute demo on show floor—Wednesday, September 17^th @ 3:30PM-4:00PM

There will be a 30 minute presentation of Sun's technologies on the tradeshow floor. In addition to product demos, the planning team is investigating having a “special attraction” that will grab participants' attention, eg., a magic act.

Additional speaking session—Wednesday, September 17^th @ 10AM in Marcello Room #4502

Title: Providing a High Quality VDI Desktop Experience Over The Network
Track: Virtualizing the Desktop - VD
Presenter: Chris Kawalek

Sun Booth Number: 1108

Several of us are preparing for next weeks vmworld demos and presos. Here are some snapshots of Ops Center. The first shot is display of datacenter gear (OSes, servers, etc). The second shows xVM Servers that are attached to Ops Center. xVM Server can run in standalone mode, or as part of a larger Ops Center deployment.

When I first joined Sun I was working on NetConnect, on the infrastructure, the infamous MLMs. I and several others joined en-masse when a group all left. We knew the group from Channelpoint. For a couple years, we did various "Sun Connected" projects, some ended up being throw-away, others led to SWUP, aka Sun Connection, which eventually was EOLd when Aduva came on board. Then we tried the whole Sun Connection Readiness Kit, at the beginning of the recent emphasis on connecting customers and assets. That is still going on, but has migrated to Service Tags. Parts of SCRK, the Client Reg Service, still live on and are being used by both Service Tag clients and xVM Ops Center satellites, to establish the initial secure connection between the customer client and Sun's datacenter.

After a major layoff to our old CNS org (had to try and remember the name), we briefly became Sysnet but are now generally as part of the xVM group. Last year we focused on what we called Coso, or the 1.0 version of xVM Ops Center, which was an amalgamation of N1SM, SCRK, Update and Service Tags. This year we worked on updates to 1.0 as well as the xVM Server and 2.0 of Ops Center. We're working on the management/UI portion of xVM Server, which is a productization of the Xen-based hypervisor. xVM Server is in EA right now. 2.0 Ops Center will be able manage multiple xVM Servers (as well as other non-virtual assets like it did in 1.x). On Ops Center, my group works on infrastructure, working closely with the Cacao team in Grenoble, France. I work on several portions such as backend services and UI. This year we've moved the UI in exciting directions, using Ext JS and DOJO, as well as continued usage of the Zk toolkit from 1.0.

First entry, a little about myself. I've been at Sun for five years now (I'll post some history later). I live with my wife Kathy and two daughters, Grace and Lily, in Colorado Springs, CO. Both Kathy and I grew up in Austin, TX, and went to UT, and then moved to AZ for a stint, and now are in colorful Colorado. Here is a little video of the kids.

I work some at home, some in a small field office in COS, with my manager Bob and several others doing the same xVM work. We've known each all a long time from a prior startup that went down in flames, Channelpoint. We share the office with field techs and sales that support the southern Colorado area (a lot of govt contractors and military customers).

 Outside of work I love to road and mountain bike. There are tons of great trails around town and the nearby foothills of Pikes Peak. Bob and I and some other friends go to Moab yearly as well. Here is another silly video of me crashing at a nearby park. I'm teaching my daughter similar tricks. More soon.