Ben's Blog

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.