Well as I finally recover from the six days of VMworld I can sit here and reflect on what the big announcements and new technologies from VMware. First of all, I would to thank all of the Customers, Partners and VMware Employees for attending all of Integrated Data Storage’s festivities on Tuesday and Wednesday evening—it’s always a good time (consumption of a few adult beverage along the way).

We saw the announcement of the release of VMware vCloud and View 4.5, and I have to say that I am not as jazzed about vCloud as I am about the release of View 4.5. While in San Francisco I was able to get a real understanding of why VMware delayed the release of this product. VMware wanted to make sure that the product was solid enough for release by VMware’s standards. Putting a product out there just because is not good enough, that is also the same reason why you do not see Persona Management or PCoiP through the Security Server in this release. They are out there in a “good” state, but not good enough to be part of this release and will be released in an additional release. We will see View 4.5 available for download September 9th from VMware’s site.

I wanted to highlight one of the biggest futures that I am able to talk about since I had this presentation during Partner Technical Advisory Board and there were sessions available at VMworld. The next major release of Site Recovery Manager will include Host Based Replication or HBR (everything needs an acronym). I believe that this feature will give Small Businesses the ability to build a Disaster Recovery plan at a relatively low price point. We will have to wait until the second half of 2011 for this product to drop, but I wanted to share my notes from my HBR session in the meantime.

Host Based Replication (HBR)

• Replication targets
  • local storage and a storage array
  • dissimilar arrays
  • local storage to local storage
• Turned on per Virtual Machine
• Disks are replicated in group consistent manner
• User selects destination location for remote target disks
• Initial seed can be manual via disk to save on bandwidth and time
• Changes are tracked on source disk and changed blocks will be sent to the remote location
• Automated Failback is not available in 1.0 product

One of the other cool sessions I attended was EMC’s super session where Chad and his team demonstrated vCloud Director and then also VPLEX Geo, a.k.a. vTeleportation. Chad demonstrated the following scenarios:

VPLEX vTeleporting a VM from

• Boston to Buffalo (14ms ~ 730km)
• Boston to Chicago (26ms ~1600km)
• Boston to Omaha (44ms ~ 2300km) in 14 minutes!!!

Well, that is all I have for now. If you were not able to make it this year, I would highly recommend getting it on the calendar for next year. VMware 2011 Las Vegas here we come!