FalconStor Blog
VMworld 2010 USA (21)
It was on the last day of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco where it happened. I was sitting at a Lab Station at the Moscone West building, learning a few things myself on vCloud Director. Suddenly, one of the VMware Lab Staff member announced: "We have just reached a new milestone just moments ago, we have served our 145th THOUSAND (145K) virtual machine being deployed and destroyed)! We all clapped our hands, we all enjoyed this moment of glory for the world of virtualization!
There were several labs available, and each lab required an average of 9 VM's to be deployed. All in all, 15,300 complete labs were served out to attendees of the event, during those 4 days, at a rate of 4000 VM's per hour (created then destroyed). The vCloud Director was a very popular lab, being a new product focused on the ever popular "Cloud Computing," as well as the VMware View lab for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
Site Recovery Manager was also more popular than ever. Did you know that for every SRM lab served out, 2 Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) were deployed, one at the "Protected Site", and one at the "Recovery Site?" We are talking about thousands of FalconStor NSS-VA's, the VSA technology adopted by VMware as the storage and replication technology of choice to power the SRM lab! Yes, which means, if you took the SRM Lab, you actually used and managed FalconStor Storage, with FalconStor's Storage Replication Adapter for SRM. So did thousands of other attendees.
vSphere is the platform which can host a self-sufficient Virtual Data Center, complete with Backup and Recovery, and DR... Maybe it is not quite there yet, but that is probably what VMware would like to achieve. And in my opinion, it is certainly heading towards the right direction, more so than other Server Virtualization solutions. To that end, VMware has done a very good job with their partner ecosystem, and 3rd party vendors are now constantly designing and developing solutions to complement vSphere's own built-in features.
The world, it seems, has gone virtual.
The boon in virtualization in the data center in recent years has been huge, and the reasons are clear. Virtualization not only saves resources, it creates them. IT staff, able to provision virtual machines quickly and to more easily manage them, are freed up for other tasks, and enterprises gain a straight path to cloud computing.
But as businesses raced forward with their virtualization strategies, one critical element often went overlooked: storage. Today, there is a glaring gap in many data centers where virtual storage should exist, and the proliferation of unstructured data and cloud computing is only enlarging the problem. Until businesses fill this chasm, they will never fully realize the true potential of the virtualized data center.
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