VMware vCloud demos and beta signup

March 3rd, 2009  |  Published in good news!

This past week VMworld Europe took place in Cannes, France.  While I didn’t get to attend, it was still pretty exciting to see the product I’ve been working on for the last year and a half featured in both Paul Maritz’s (video) and Steve Herrod’s (video) keynotes.  Much of my time in February was spent assisting the two ISVs that demonstrated their use of the vCloud API – IT Structures and EngineYard.

Joe Arnold, the director of engineering for EY, has posted a blog entry about what went into making the demo bulletproof, and both he and Andy Delcambre (also of EY) have posted a couple of sets on Flickr (1, 2).

I had quite a bit of fun helping both partners as they exercised our API, and now you too can sign up to get access to the vCloud API beta when it becomes available (additional info from Mike D).

Update (3/3): As Ophir mentioned in the comments, he’s got some pictures from Cannes on his blog as well.

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From the stone age to the future in 6 weeks

November 17th, 2007  |  Published in virtualization

The day I walked into VMware it started. It didn’t hit me right away, but by the end of the day I was surrounded by it: virtualization. It ran on my development server (ESX 3), it ran on my laptop (Workstation 6). Everybody in the company seems to run one of our products on some machine of theirs, whether it’s ESX, Workstation, or our Fusion product (which I look forward to trying very soon).

Virtualization isn’t new to me. I’ve been using it for 4 years, but mostly on IBM mainframes. What is new is being surrounded by it. All of my work has been in virtual machines and you quickly come to recognize the power of taking an entire system and transferring it from your workstation to your laptop, or letting your teammates capitalize on your labor and get copies of a VM you spent days setting up and tweaking.

Yesterday I found myself wanting to use Drupal for a new project, because someone is always talking about it (and happened to coauthor a series of articles on using it). But Ubuntu doesn’t have the latest release and I was reluctant to install Apache, MySQL, and Drupal on my desktop PC.

What did I do? I downloaded the VMware Player, snagged a minimal Ubuntu server appliance from the Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and installed it all there. Problem solved. In about 15 minutes even.

I’m now wishing that I had a beefier PC at home to run additional VMs. And no, I have not had any Kool-Aid or taken any blue pills. It’s easy to win someone over when the product is good.

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