Following up on an earlier blog post about the new Box; the concept is essential to thinking about the case where an individual or an enterprise is buying capacity from a service provider. The new Box — the progression of instances being the VM, the vApp and the VDC — gives us a great way of providing the user with an abstraction to replace the “old Box” in the context of the cloud. This is what the user is buying from the service provider. “New Box” sounds good, but how do we manage and secure this new Box when we buy it from a service provider. Typically one buys this box as capacity to deploy one or more applications. The application comes with...
Ben Verghese
Management
Biography
Ben has been at VMware for 10 years and worked on and managed numerous products including ESX Server 1.0 and VirtualCenter 1.0. These days he is responsible for the technology and strategy for the management aspects of vSphere and the Private Cloud.He has previously worked at HP, Apollo Computers, Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Posts by Ben Verghese
Moving to the Private Cloud: Rethinking or Incrementalism
My colleague Javier had an interesting article in his blog about the Greenfield Enterprise where he looked at what one would build if one started building IT entirely from scratch. It’s an interesting article and you should read it if you have not. Keep in mind that Javier’s agenda is around SaaS and this article was a setup for answer, as he indicates at the end. I’ve been bothered by a smaller but related question, whether moving to the Private Cloud requires somewhat of a rethinking and re-architecture or whether it can be done with some level of tweaking and integration around existing tools and infrastructure. The catalyst for this question came from a customer visit from a few months back....
The Emperor’s New Box
I have a thesis that I would like to present to the community in general and hear what others think. For the longest time system management at the infrastructure level has been focused on the server. The server was the box at the center of things. The server ran applications, accessed storage and communicated over networks. So justifiably in the industry, managing infrastructure meant focusing on the physical server (and storage and networks) and the OS that ran on it. The physical server became more powerful, applications became distributed, but the focus remained on individual physical servers and their OS. Even today there are many companies selling the story of how their products discover these physical boxes, explore them, understand the OS, discover...
It’s getting cloudy out there. Did you pack your management umbrella?
Hello, my name is Ben Verghese and I am the Chief Mgmt Architect at Vmware. Been here over ten years and seen virtualization go from an interesting technology applied to x86 (a classically non-virtualizable architecture) to the basis for a complete rethink of how IT is done,; infrastructure to applications. Management is a core part of the journey from legacy physical infrastructure to fully virtualized datacenters to eventual Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud models. A streamlined management model in this final stage is essential to realize the full Opex savings to go along with the Capex savings seen with the advent of virtualization in the datacenter. This is an exciting time to be thinking of how mgmt will evolve with and...
