When the vCloud Hybrid Service architecture team began designing the service we followed two core tenets; simplify the physical aspects of the design and use VMware software wherever possible and practical. The goal was to deliver a high-quality cloud service that fully embraced the concepts of the software-defined data center.

vCloud Suite 5.1 was in development while we were designing the vCloud Hybrid Service architecture, and fortunately for us many of the new features in the vCloud Suite were directly applicable to our design tenets. For example, we saw an opportunity to use the vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) software capabilities to radically change our networking design.

The resulting network design is simple from a physical perspective. Basic switching and routing capabilities are provided by hardware while more complicated functions are provided by the vCNS Edge appliance in combination with VXLAN. Throughout the course of our development period, we worked closely with the vCNS engineering team to refine our design and deploy it in production.

The vCNS software suite is a feature-rich-networking platform, and here are some of the numerous capabilities we used from vCNS Edge:

• Load Balancing – Used to provide Internet facing services to customers
• SNAT – Used to provide outbound access where required
• SSL and IPSec VPN – Remote access capabilities
• Routing – Routing between internal networks as well as to the Internet
• VXLAN – Isolate customer networks allowing for bring-your-own address space
• APIs – Manage and deploy virtual network infrastructure through automation

In combination, these capabilities provide resilient, high performance core networking services for our customers. Most of these features are also available for customers to employ directly in their vCloud Hybrid Service cloud environment, and all of the vCNS networking technology we are using is available today for on-premise deployments.

The end result is that we now have an agile, programmable network infrastructure that will provide an easy road to upgrade as we continue to expand the capabilities of vCloud Hybrid Service. I’ll cover other parts of our vCloud Hybrid Service architecture in future posts – but in the meantime, feel free to comment below around what’s important to you in a cloud service’s networking infrastructure.

VMware Horizon Mobile Overview

Perhaps even more profound than the BYOD trend is the change in how employees use their devices. Irrespective of who actually buys or owns the device, the corporation or the user, most employees tend to download personal apps onto these devices – Facebook, Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc. coexist with work email/PIM. It is fair to assume then that most devices will have both personal and corporate content (apps, data and services).

Given that the usage paradigms have changed, IT needs to rethink security and manageability of mobile devices. The old BlackBerry model of locking and wiping the device is no longer in line with how employees use their devices. IT administrators can now leverage VMware Horizon Mobile to isolate personal content from corporate content and only manage the corporate content on the device. The corporate content resides in a “workspace” whose lifecycle and usage is managed by IT. IT can customize what apps are in the workspace and what policies are applied to the workspace, provision the workspace to the user’s device over the air (OTA) and then manage its lifecycle remotely.

If you look at the latest mobile OS market share information, Android is way ahead of other mobile operating systems but if you consider the enterprise subset of that market share, iOS is the dominant platform. One of the reasons for Android not being dominant is its fragmentation, which makes it very difficult for IT to wrap their hands and heads around a comprehensive security and manageability story for Android devices. VMware Horizon Mobile leverages device virtualization to normalize that fragmentation and allows IT to deploy and manage its own Android workspace that looks and behaves the same on any Android device. However, in order to run this solution, you must have a VMware Ready device and hence, the importance of today’s announcement.

You can see the product in action here.

VMware Ready Program

VMware Ready designates VMware’s highest level of endorsement for products and solutions created by our established partners – and on the mobile side, a VMware Ready device is required to experience our dual persona solution. In the US, VMware is partnering with Verizon to enable a broad set of new and existing devices to become VMware Ready and it’s important to note is that existing in-market devices can be updated over-the-air (OTA) to become VMware Ready devices.

Indeed this is the case with LG Intuition and Razr M by Motorola. Both of these devices have been in the market for several months and recently received a software update. The update pushed out by Verizon included the right VMware technologies to enable them to run a second instance of Android and thereby, our Horizon Mobile solution.

Our customers should expect popular in-market devices will receive similar software updates resulting in a broad set of VMware Ready devices in the market. In fact, we anticipate many new devices will also launch as VMware Ready devices.

We’re looking forward to seeing many more VMware Ready devices in the market and if you’re an Android OEM interested in getting involved with the VMware Ready program, please contact us at mvp-oem-public @ vmware.com for more information.

On a more personal note… Over the weekend, I had some time to review some of the strategy documents and initial business plans that I put together when we first started on the mobile initiative. It is personally gratifying to see first hand how all this has come together and reflect on the journey that got us here.

It’s been a great experience getting to this point and we’re proud to walk hand in hand with LG to deliver the first VMware Ready device on Verizon Wireless. My sincere thanks to all the wonderful folks at LG who partnered with us and worked tirelessly through the various stages of our product development and betas to enable the LG Intuition as the first VMware Ready device on our partner’s network.

So what do you think of our approach to managing enterprise mobile users? Do you like the idea of managing just the corporate workspace and not the entire device? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

The most basic question customers ask about hybrid cloud is whether it makes sense for their organization to adopt or not. As you can imagine, there are tradeoffs in security, performance, SLA guarantees, cost, and much more between private, hybrid, and public clouds. Each organization will have different constraints and priorities. Thus the decision of whether to move to hybrid or public cloud – or more specifically what apps, data, and services to move – will be different for each organization.

In my session, I talk about how to architect your datacenter to provide the flexibility to make changes over time. The right architecture will enable you to move between private, hybrid, and public cloud seamlessly, without impact to services and be completely transparent to users. And this is exactly the point of hybrid cloud: it’s about flexibility and choice. But in order to avoid lock-in, you need the right architecture.

But what does the right architecture look like? We’ve found that the answer is a self-service architecture. While it may seem a bit of a leap from hybrid cloud to self-service, the point is that the cloud that you use to run your infrastructure should be considered an implementation decision, not an architectural decision. And in order to achieve that, you need the right abstraction layer between your users and services and the backend infrastructure they utilize.

Ok, so how does self-service achieve this? It’s instructive to look at non-technical, real-life examples for inspiration. In my talk at CloudConnect Silicon Valley last month, I used the example of FedEx. As a customer, FedEx gives me a very simple interface with three input variables: where my package is going, how much it weighs, and when I want it to get there.

Assuming the price is right, I print my shipping label, put it on my box, and drop it at a drop location. This is all I see as a customer. However, on the backend, there is an amazing amount of complicated logistics to get my package to its destination on-time. But really, as a customer, do I care if FedEx uses a truck versus a plane to get my package to its destination? Do I care that they optimize to avoid making left turns? No – so long as my SLA is met, I don’t. Thus exactly how FedEx gets my package to its destination is an implementation detail that I as the customer don’t see or care about. More importantly, they can change this implementation detail as frequently as they’d like without affecting me (so long as my SLA is met!).

The question before us is how we can architect a datacenter such that we have the same clean separation between the customer (user) and the backend implementation chosen by IT. We believe that self-service is the answer our customers are looking for.

So what should you be thinking about if you want to build a self-service datacenter? The first piece of the puzzle is a self-service portal. This is a place where users can provision new services and manage their existing services. Like FedEx, each service would have an associated cost and users would need to decide if their business needs justify the cost of the service. If they do, then the user can start the process for provisioning that service. Whether that service is provisioned into the private cloud or the public cloud is of little concern to the user so long as the SLA they specified is met. And that’s exactly the point: all the user sees is the self-service portal, they’re unaware of exactly where this service has been provisioned.

It’s important to note the importance of this self-service interface. Typically in today’s IT environment, all requests for new services are made through a ticketing system. Within this system, the user requesting the service must provide very detailed specs for every aspect of their service, sometimes including the physical hardware or virtualization solution their service will run on. Because the user is deeply involved in specifying the backend infrastructure for running their service, it means IT has little wiggle room in case it decides to change vendors or technologies. This significantly ties IT’s hands and results in “silos” being created – different technology stacks for different applications (e.g. the Windows stack is different top-to-bottom from the Linux stack is different from the Tier 1 apps stack).

In the end, users are good at creating and running their services, not managing the underlying infrastructure their services run on. In the self-service model, IT handles the infrastructure choices and users can focus on their services. This gives IT the freedom to change technologies, move from the private cloud to the public cloud or vice-versa, test out new ideas on a small percentage of the services before rolling the change out to all of them, etc. And there are many benefits with having a clean separation between service and infrastructure implementation!

So what else should you be thinking about in build a self-service datacenter? Well, questions like “how can I automate the provisioning of services?” or “how can I prevent this self-service datacenter from turning into total chaos?” or “how do I operate a self-service datacenter?” should be top of mind. The answer in two words to all of these questions is: management tools. In particular, you’re looking for two types of management tools: cloud automation and cloud operations.

Cloud automation tools take care of wiring up and connecting all the disparate services you have in your datacenter. To provision a service, you need to contact vCenter Server to deploy the VM from a template, talk to the networking gear to set up a vLAN, portgroups, and configure network settings for the service, connect with the storage backend to provision a new LUN or NAS mount, talk to vShield or some other security service to configure firewalls and anti-virus, and much more. Previously, all of these were tasks manually performed by IT admins, which could take days. Cloud automation allows you to automate all of this so that it can be done in seconds. At the same time, to prevent the “total chaos” scenarios so many IT admins worry about in self-service scenarios, you need to be able to specify and apply policies to different services and workflows.

VMware’s vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) solves the cloud automation problem. It is designed specifically for hybrid cloud scenarios, where a company’s datacenter spans private cloud, public cloud, and even (gasp!) physical servers. There are three primary components to it: a fully-configurable self-service portal, automated workflows, and policy-based governance. The self-service portal is straightforward enough – this is the web page where users go to provision and manage services and you have very granular control over the look and functionality of it. In terms of automated workflows and policy-based governance, vCAC allows you to create “blueprints” that specify the steps that are taken after a user selects a service in the self-service portal. Sometimes that service request will need approval, say from the user’s manager or the LOB’s VP. Other times the request is small enough that no approval is needed. This is completely configurable by IT, and this is just one example of how the right cloud automation tool can allow you to avoid the theoretical chaos associated with self-service architectures by inserting the right control points. Assuming the request is approved, vCAC then provisions the service. As mentioned in the preceding paragraph, this involves connecting to APIs for many different infrastructure components, including virtualization, network, storage, and security. Again, this is all automatic based on the blueprint specification.

vCAC and other cloud automation tools are the glue that hold the system together. Moreover, they abstract away the specifics of the infrastructure from the user. All the user sees is the self-service portal. Behind the scenes, vCAC orchestrates a lot of components and potential complexity, but due to the data-driven nature of the blueprint, it makes it very easy for IT to manage it all. You can simply specify what components are involved and what you want to happen, and vCAC takes care of it for you. This is where the benefits of the architecture start to show themselves. While a blueprint might call for deployment in a private cloud, the admin could easily change it to a public cloud without any users knowing. The user would only see the service name and some of its characteristics, but would not know where it was being provisioned. Thus vCAC provides that separation layer that gives IT flexibility in moving between private cloud and public cloud (and back!).

Once services are provisioned, you then need to think about how you’ll manage their ongoing operations. This is where cloud operations tools come in. vCenter Operations Management Suite (vC Ops) is VMware’s solution in this space. Like vCAC, it was designed from the ground up for hybrid cloud scenarios – both private and public cloud (and yes – even physical servers too!). vC Ops covers a wide range of functionality, including performance, capacity, configuration, compliance, log analysis, in-guest monitoring, and much more. For this discussion, the most important items to think about are performance, capacity, and compliance. Performance issues are certainly top of mind in hybrid cloud scenarios. Public clouds often give you an SLA, but how do you know the provider is meeting that SLA? Or if there is a problem, is it on the provider’s side or yours? vC Ops has powerful analytics to help answer these questions.

With regard to capacity management, a self-service model necessitates you think differently. Typically, capacity management is done by IT on a per-request basis. A new request comes in, IT works with the user to understand infrastructure requirements, and then new hardware is bought and provisioned for that service. And this can take months. If we want to provision new services in seconds, we need to have the physical hardware ready before the request comes in. But how can we do that? Well, FedEx does it. I mean, have you ever gone to a FedEx drop location and found that all their trucks were full and they couldn’t take any more packages? Of course not! FedEx analyzes historical trends to understand customer demand and ensures that enough trucks are ready as the packages come, even for busy times like the winter holidays. Similarly, IT should start doing capacity trending – analyzing usage to understand when and where capacity shortfalls will occur. vC Ops provides these capabilities and will accurately forecast future capacity availability.

Compliance is another big issue for the hybrid cloud. IT needs to ensure that its datacenters are in compliance, irrespective of whether they’re in a private or public cloud. vC Ops provides automated configuration information collection and compliance assessment against that configuration. It will automatically flag items out of compliance and can automatically remediate them if IT so desires. This way admins can be assured that no matter where a workload is running, it will be in compliance.

You also no longer need different management tools for different environments. vCAC and vC Ops work across all your environments – private, hybrid, and public clouds – so you can create blueprints or check compliance in the same way and from the same screen regardless of the underlying infrastructure. This means that your admins can quickly get up-to-speed on new environments.

Together vCloud Automation Center and vCenter Operations Management Suite are crucial for enabling a self-service datacenter and with it, offer greater flexibility in your hybrid cloud strategy. Have you given them a try?

It’s great to see the public launch of Pivotal today. The mission — to build a new platform for a new era — is bold but appropriately targeted at some of the biggest fundamental changes in application technologies.

Pivotal is now a separate entity, bringing several teams and technologies from both VMware and EMC — including Greenplum’s Hadoop (now Pivotal HD), Greenplum Database (fused with Hadoop as a new database known as HAWQ), CETAS, Pivotal Labs, Gemfire in-memory database, the Spring Application Framework and the Cloud Foundry PaaS platform.

The goal of the platform is to enable the new wave of predictive big data applications — those which pull in vast quantities and sources of data — including high rate real time sources, and can make decisions in real time based on incoming data and learned historical behavior. Combine these technologies with the ease of application development and delivery through platform as a service for  and you have a powerful platform.

Is also great to see GE’s endorsement and investment.  While the application of these technologies to the web giants with huge user bases is clearer, GE is a good example of where traditional businesses will leverage real time analytics to fundamentally change their business. In their case, putting sensors on every product from jet engines through consumer appliances will give a full connected customer experience.

I’m often asked how the Pivotal initiative interacts with VMware’s big data efforts. VMware continues its focus on building the best infrastructure for big-data, enabling our partners’s big data products on a virtualized platform. This allows mixed workloads and multi-tennancy of Hadoop and key big-data applications on a  common infrastructure platform. Project Serengeti continues to be developed at VMware, and is our reference implementation and glue to allow Hadoop to be deployed rapidly on vSphere with key integration capabilities to allow elastic grow/shrink, integrated high availability. We continue to work with the Hadoop community and key partners on the integration of big data solutions with project Serengeti and vSphere.

Congratulations on the launch and I look forward to continue working with the team at Pivotal.

You can see today’s webcast here, and find information on the accompanying blog.

Read the full paper for detailed results and to learn about performance best practices for deploying Hadoop on vSphere.

I recently had the pleasure of attending Venture Beat’s Mobile Summit and co-chairing two sessions on mobile’s effect on the enterprise with Gaurav Tewari, Director at SAP Ventures, and moderated by Dylan Tweney, Venture Beat Executive Editor. The sessions were roundtable discussions and focused on surfacing how mobile is impacting the enterprise and what issues and concerns are on executives’ minds. These were very engaging conversations that resonated strongly with me and I wanted to share some of the highlights and perspectives with a wider audience.

Security in a BYOD world was certainly a hot topic with varying perspectives. There was a surprisingly heated debate on the level of threat and vulnerability with mobile platforms. It was commonly agreed that the bulk of publicized attacks have been on corporate and cloud infrastructures, as well as Windows PCs. It was also agreed that newer platforms have better built-in hardening. The actual mobile platform threat was a hot topic of discussion. Some folks felt the risk was overblown and others touted imminent disaster due to out-of-date firmware and unpatched vulnerabilities, particularly calling out Android platforms. However, it was certainly agreed that as we move to mobile devices connected over Wi-Fi/the public internet and connecting to public cloud-based services, traditional corporate LANs become much less of a safeguard and end to end protection over an uncontrolled and potentially insecure communication path is becoming the norm.

The growing sophistication of attacks was also brought up. There was a clear consensus that security needs to be designed in by experts and applied at a fine granularity (app or data level) while still delivering a great native user experience. With a varied and heterogeneous mix of devices, diverse application frameworks and more insidious attacks, an overarching security framework for applications was a key agreed upon and as yet unmet need.

BYOD is considered table stakes today, although several folks expressed that the pendulum may swing back to corporate-owned devices. With BYOD plans, the perception is that it doesn’t really save money, but it does provide flexibility, enhance productivity and user satisfaction. 80% of companies are doing it, but only 10% actually have well thought out policies. Of particular interesting concern were MDM style device management ramifications coming as unwelcome surprises for users and the impact on their personal device and content. Here is an interesting viewpoint from Cesare Garlati, who spoke about a personal experience where his child was trying to unlock and play a game on his tablet without supervision. He tried the wrong password too many times and triggered a full remote wipe via IT policy, deleting family photos and music. It was a clear point of consensus that for BYOD use cases, fine grained policy and controls that are limited to business applications and content is required.

It was very clear that mobile is here to stay and is at the forefront of enterprise thinking. A comment was made and corroborated that the best IT departments, spur and enable mobile applications and encourage rapid innovation/iteration for business ROI. It’s not a hyperbole – mobile really enables us to not just automate physical world processes, but to create new and improved valuable workflows and operations. Enterprises are starting to use the full range of capabilities available – cameras for augmented reality, GPS location awareness as integral parts of advancing enterprise processes and backed by powerful cloud services. Attendees cited examples – looking at units of various types in the field by cameras and pulling up maintenance records. Another example was tablets used for factory inventory on forklifts. In this case, expensive hardened PCs being replaced by iPads – disposable, more functional, stateless devices.

It was also brought up that IT in many companies has a history of providing cumbersome user interfaces for applications resulting in lack of use and lower productivity. Mobile gives a fresh start and can and should be used to really improve employee lives and foster use. One company was cited as having turned this cycle around by providing a “loss leader” mobile application to pre-order lunch from the cafeteria and placing it in an enterprise apps store alongside other business apps. The use exploded and encouraged use of the new business apps as well. This example illustrates a common tenant – good mobile reduces friction in the system and saves time.

There was also an interesting discussion around the role of the CIO and how some companies are experiencing a move towards CMO/BU driven IT budgets because business is moving faster than ever. We have seen a similar phenomenon play out before during the transition to the PC era. CIOs need to encourage and enable mobile applications and innovations or get rolled over. The business health requires it!

These observations all resonated strongly with me and are very well aligned with where VMware is headed with Horizon Workspace. To recap, it’s becoming a mobile world and mobile solutions are transforming the enterprise landscape. IT needs to embrace these trends and it is rapidly becoming a prerogative to manage users’ business identities, their business applications and data, not their physical devices. This content must be delivered with native user experience to the device(s) of choice safely, securely and in a compliant manner while not precluding independent personal use. Security needs to be driven end to end – applications to cloud services over insecure public infrastructure and this is ideally a platform feature.

At any conference like this, a number of attendees live and breathe mobile and are at the forefront of enthusiasm for their chosen technologies. Some memorable phrases I heard were “it’s not mobile first, it’s mobile only” and “HTML 5, nice thought, not reality”. And lastly, I can’t finish without introducing you to my new friend Romo, a great use for your old iPhones and iPods – turn them into robots!

But if it is so obvious, why is IT still run using central planning?

All IT projects still go through a central planning model.  Anyone wanting to make changes must fill out a long change request and all changes must be centrally approved.  New hardware and resources are planned months in advance and provisioned after much discussion and planning.  When you start thinking about it like this, is it any wonder that IT can’t keep up with business demands?  The reality is that we need to start thinking differently about how we run IT, and cloud offers us a tremendous opportunity to accomplish this.

So what is cloud, anyway?  It’s all about self-service.  Cloud allows users to get the resources they need at the push of a button.  Indeed, that’s really what makes a market economy work so well.  People figure out what they need and they go and get it. They don’t ask anyone and they don’t wait for something to happen.  They go to a store to buy what they want and may even pay a premium to get it faster.

How is self-service realized in a cloud?  The first key ingredient is virtualization. Not only do you need compute virtualization, but you must also have storage and network virtualization.  Virtualization abstracts software from the hardware it’s running on, and as all of these resources are virtualized, it enables full control of everything through software.  Then you need to automate.  You leverage the control in software to effectively script everything.  This gives you the “press of a button” functionality. A single button can now do an amazing amount of work that would take forever if done manually.  But due to automation and abstraction in software, it can be done automatically in a moment’s time.  The next step is to create a “portal” where users can come to self-service.  This portal allows them to provision resources, manage the lifecycle of existing resources, and much more – it gives them all the options at a push of a button.

It’s not just a technology issue; it’s also a mindset issue. Up until this point, the flow for IT has been to receive a request, then after much planning, provision resources for that request. So it’s “receive request, then provision.” In the new self-service world, requests will come in whenever they do, and IT must be prepared for them. Thus the mentality must be “provision, then receive request.” This is the fundamental change in mindset that must occur.

Now, I know what most IT admins reading this are thinking: “wouldn’t this lead to total chaos?”  Well, let’s look back at Paris.  We know that it does not have a central planning economy, nor does any Western, industrialized city.  This means that the government has no direct say or knowledge of most of the activities that occur in the city.  But is there total chaos?  Of course not.  It’s just the opposite.  We have some of the most advanced cities in human history.  And why is this?  Well, it’s because the city government has control in the right places.  If you want to create a restaurant, then you need to get approval.  If you want to do major exterior work to a building, you need approval.  But small things like changing the menu at your restaurant or updating the interior of a building don’t need approval.  So the government strives to achieve the right balance between adding control points and letting people do what they want without oversight. (And, sure, we all can argue as to whether these city governments get it right!)

We can do exactly the same thing in IT, and that’s where management comes in.  Enterprise management tools can give you exactly the type of governance you’re looking for.  They will allow you to create policies up front that will be checked each time a self-service request is made.  For example, small requests for a couple of VMs do not need approval, but for three to eight VMs you need the employee’s manager’s approval.  And for 10+ VMs, you need a VP to sign off.  These are just examples, but you get the idea.  The right management tools give you the right level of control.

In addition to governance, management tools also give you operational control.  No longer will IT be getting specific requests for resources up front.  Instead, employees will just grab them through self-service.  This means that IT has to rethink issues like capacity planning.  Typically capacity planning is done based on planned, upcoming projects, ensuring that additional capacity is ready by the time the project kicks off.  Instead, in the new cloud model, IT will have to look at the aggregate growth of the overall enterprise cloud, and provision additional capacity based on that trend.  Again, this aligns closely with real city governments.  They don’t special case every family moving in and out of the city.  They look at aggregate trends to ensure there’s adequate housing stock growth in the upcoming years.

In my view, while cloud certainly involves technology changes, probably the biggest change is that of culture and mindset.  A central planning model for IT is simply no longer tenable.  IT has to start thinking of itself as a government overseeing a free market.  When you make this mindset shift, you realize that a government should no longer focus on dictating what’s on the menu of each restaurant, but instead focus on ensuring the roads are in good shape and that the electricity and plumbing work.  In IT terms, this means ensuring that the virtual infrastructure is up and running, that it’s meeting the SLAs as negotiated with users, and that there is a robust self-service user portal.  If you can build this virtual city for your users, you will allow them to move as fast as they can and to unleash innovation – and we, at VMware, are excited and ready to help you build and manage your own virtual city. To hear more, you can watch the replay of my keynote here.

So, who feeds Paris?  The right answer is to let Paris feed itself.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, most big-data environments consist of a mix of workloads. Serengeti’s mission is to enable as many of the big-data family of workloads into the same theme park, all running on a common shared platform.

Supporting mixed workloads is a key capability for big-data. In my customer discussions I see a mix of Map-Reduce, HBase, Solr, numerical analysis (R and SAS), and increasingly more of the Big SQL engines such as Impala, ParAccel, and Pivotal Hawq.

Support for HBase in Serengeti

By definition, we can deploy a whole range of workloads on the virtualized cluster. For example, we can deploy SAS on the same physical nodes as Hadoop, using the same resources at different times for each purpose. To deploy and configure HBase as a holistic distributed system we included HBase specific cluster configurations in this release.

Highlights of this new support include:

• The ability to deploy an HBase instance, with full integration to map-reduce, exposing the Thrift and REST APIs
• HMaster HA, in an active and hot standby configuration using VMware HA
• Elastic scaling allowing the cluster to expand with a single command

Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America or Asia?

We continue to work with our key Hadoop parters to strengthen support for Hadoop and Big-Data applications in a virtual environment. In addition to Apache Hadoop 1.0. Hortonworks HDP-1.0, Cloudera CDH3, Greenplum GPHD-1.2, we have added support for MapR Hadoop distributions, and Cloudera CDH4 .

New Support for Cloudera:

• We now support the ability to deploy a CDH4 cluster, using either HDFS1 or HDFS2. 
• Name node federation: support for the new federation capabilities in HDFS2
• Configuration of the new Namenode HA in active/hot standby mode
• Dynamic support for core Hadoop configurations, allowing updates to the config after the cluster is deployed

New Support for MAPR:

• We can now deploy a full MapR cluster, with the MAPR CLDB, FileServer, JobTracker and Tasktracker
• We can deploy the MapR control system for monitoring and control of the cluster
• Support for elastic growth by adding more File Server and task-tracker nodes

Special support for Temporary Data

One of the key things we’ve learned about Hadoop is that it has significant ephemeral data use. This is typically used for stages like map output, reducer input, and sort spills. I covered this in some detail in this post.

In Serengeti 0.8.0 we can now provision a shared file system service specifically for the shared data. This makes it easier to separate out the compute VMs from the datanodes, making them stateless – with the compute job input/output going into either HDFS, MAPR or Isilon distributed file systems, and the temporary data going to local disks.

How to Learn More

We published the new release of Serengeti on our main project site, including more detail on these key areas. Feel free to follow-up with comments or questions on this new release.

Outside of VMware activities, I spent three full days at the conference visiting other booths, talking to partners, customers and listening to sessions. Since there was so much to take in at the show, I’ve highlighted the top three observations that stood out the most to me during my time there. One was to be expected, the second was refreshing and the third was truly innovative.

Observation #1 – Enterprise Focus

In all the years I’ve been going to MWC, I’ve never seen as much focus on the enterprise opportunity as I have this year. The conference started off with the big attention-grabbing news that AirWatch raised a $200m funding round. Whoa, $200m?!!? That announcement and AirWatch’s booth were definitely “the talk of the town” amongst the enterprise mobility vendors at the show.

The other big enterprise-centric news was from Samsung with their Knox announcement. Knox is Samsung’s dual persona solution, similar to our Horizon Mobile solution, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the months ahead. If you are a Samsung shop, this solution promises all the benefits of our Horizon Mobile solution.

I also noticed there were more enterprise mobility vendors with booths at MWC this year than before. Air Watch, Soti, Fiberlink, Citrix and Red Bend were all well represented in the halls – and many other vendors chose to just get meeting rooms for customer discussions and demonstrations.

It certainly felt like the year of enterprise mobility at MWC 2013.

Observation #2 – Third OS ecosystem

iOS and Android are currently the premier mobile operating systems which leaves a lot of others vying for the third spot, including Microsoft, BlackBerry and numerous others. In the “others” category, the two that I was eager to see were Firefox and Ubuntu. The Firefox guys seem to be a bit ahead with about 18 committed carriers and LG, ZTE, Alcatel and Huawei as committed OEMs in their corner. However, the Ubuntu demos were solid. Their touch UI was very well thought through, and you can watch Mark Shuttleworth demo it here. I was especially impressed with their design aesthetics.

As many of us in the industry know, it’s a huge effort to create an ecosystem so I wish all these guys the best! I’m glad to see competition because at the end of the day, more competition means more innovation, which is always better for consumers.

Observation #3 – Yota phone

The device that really caught my attention was from Yota. It has two screens – one is your normal phone screen with Android apps and on the back they have a low-power electronic paper display that is ideal for reading websites, etc. without draining the battery. It’s super innovative compared to much of the competition, and I think this will get a lot of pickup. Very cool stuff!

In all, I really enjoyed checking out the latest phones and technologies at MWC and watching the mobile space grow. Our industry has come a long way and 2013 will be another fun ride. If you were at MWC, what were some of your favorite highlights and what do you hope to see change in the mobile space this year?

Side note: Probably the best experience of the visit – I was able to get tickets to see FC Barcelona play Real Madrid on the Tuesday of the show. I encourage you all to watch a soccer game in Barcelona if you have the opportunity. It was an unbelievable experience with 100,000 fans!

The tone of today’s discussions with healthcare CIOs is serious and business focused. Providers want to understand how they can better leverage IT and their staff to meet meaningful use deadlines, build new partnerships, and differentiate their brand through the services and care they provide—all while keeping their hospital’s name off the violations listed on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website. What has been most striking in my recent conversations has been how eager healthcare IT executives are—now that they have a seat at the decision-making table—to show what IT can do to help reinvent the healthcare industry. And as their technology partners, we can help drive this incredible transformation.

Last week, I wrote about how healthcare IT executives and their colleagues need to know technology companies are working to build reliable IT bridges to the future—paths based on proven technology and paved to support whatever the future of patient care brings. Today, I’m pleased to introduce a way to futureproof healthcare IT investments.

VMware vCloud® for Healthcare is an end-to-end care cloud computing platform for exchanging information and delivering products and services that can help lead to better outcomes. It is our new solution for helping healthcare IT organizations define and build the right cloud models for their organizations, and it includes a proven roadmap for how to fully realize the benefits of cloud computing.

Built specifically for healthcare, the vCloud for Healthcare framework of solutions and services leverages and builds on existing investments in VMware skills and platforms. It incorporates the most commonly requested and fundamental services a healthcare private cloud should deliver, including the following:

• Integrated industry security and compliance
• Point of care virtual desktops and workspaces
• Self-service end-user application provisioning
• Secure mobility and management for mobile devices
• Virtual and physical systems and application analytics
• Care systems and application automation
• Care systems and application disaster recovery and continuity

And when healthcare IT is ready, it includes a hybrid cloud connector to safely and securely connect a private healthcare cloud to one or more public clouds.

vCloud for Healthcare brings all of the products in our VMware vCloud Suite and our new VMware Horizon Suite^TM together with our rich ecosystem of partners, including those that specialize in healthcare, and the more than 200 certified vCloud Datacenter Providers that support hybrid cloud computing. The integrated solution is built on our industry-leading VMware vSphere® platform, which is KLAS rated and supported by the world’s leading healthcare application vendors. When customers and partners choose vCloud for Healthcare, they can leverage validated architectures and services to deploy point of care systems such as VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care.

With vCloud for Healthcare, we are helping to remove uncertainty by providing both a vision and a roadmap that address the unique needs of a healthcare provider. We are connecting critical technologies and services to help organizations efficiently and cost-effectively meet real business goals and mandates—from meaningful use and compliance audits to establishing new business models and services, like accountable care organizations, to even becoming providers of IT services to other hospitals.

I’ve seen healthcare and IT change dramatically over the past several years. As the rate of change continues—and even accelerates—VMware and our healthcare team are dedicated to making sure that our new bridge to the future of healthcare IT remains strong during this historic industry transformation.

www.vmware.com/go/healthcare