This is cool. Someone has taken the SilverLining fling that we released a few weeks ago and implemented a data visualization UI on top of it to show you a map of your vCloud Director virtual network. It’s called LiquidDC, and you can download it now.
Category Archives: vCloud Director
free VMware videos
We’ve just released a website that has more than 50 videos about vSphere, vCloud Director, vFabric, Site Recovery Manager, and more. It’s a great introduction to VMware solutions to help you learn more about what we’ve got to offer.
I’ve been watching a few of them in my spare time to learn more about some of our products that I haven’t yet had a chance to touch, as well as to see how we’re talking about our products to our users. They’ve been pretty useful to me, I hope they are to you too.
virtual infrastructure architects and senior admins needed for user research
I’m conducting some user research in the coming months, and I need virtual infrastructure architects and senior admins to participate in it. At a high level, I’m looking for virtual infrastructure architects and senior admins who do tasks such as manage and monitor virtual infrastructure, plan capacity, create VMs, migrate VMs, or deal with virtual infrastructure help tickets. If you’re local to Palo Alto, then you can come to my usability lab and participate in person; if you’re outside of Palo Alto (including outside of the US), then we’ll conduct the studies remotely via WebEx.
This user research is a little different than usual: I’m going to be doing a lot of research on a related group of topics in the coming months, and so I’m putting together a small pool of people who will participate in multiple studies over that amount of time. Every 6-8 weeks, I’ll run another usability study, and I’ll pull from this small pool of participants for it. You don’t need to participate in each study, but you do need to commit to participating in at least one study. The first study begins on Monday, August 13. You will be compensated for participating in each study, and your level of compensation grows with each study you participate in.
If you’re interested in participating, then fill out this survey to tell me a bit more about what you do and what your virtual environment looks like. And if you’ve got any questions, feel free to ping me.
launch day! vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5, Cloud Infrastructure Suite
Today’s a big day on the VMware campus in Palo Alto. Our early-morning1 live webcast just ended, wherein we launched vSphere 5, vCloud Director 1.5, and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite. Full details are available at the post VMware unveils vSphere 5 and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite at the VMware Console blog, which is the blog of our executive team2.
Aside from the sheer awesomeness that is contained in these announcements, I learnt a few things this morning about this release that make me totally proud to be at this company. This is the largest coordinated launch of software that VMware has ever done, with more than 1 million engineering hours and 2 million QA hours going into this release alone.
There’s been a lot of effort put into getting workflows right. It’s not about automating steps, it’s about eliminating steps whenever possible. For example, in the new vCloud Director 1.5, using linked clones means that you can provision VMs in about 5 seconds.
I’m sure that there’s going to be a lot of articles about these new announcements today. @vmware is probably the best aggregator of them, although I’ll also point to Duncan’s 5 is the magic number post that lists five of his favorite topics around our announcements. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a VMware announcement if there weren’t an accompanying video. This one is a five-minute overview of what we announced today, all filmed on our campus:
vCloud Director admins needed for research
My team is conducting research on vCloud Director. I’m interested in talking to org admins who have deployed vCloud Director to their end-users. I’m especially interested in deployments of vCloud Director to end-users who aren’t necessarily very tech-savvy.
In short, my team would like to conduct on-site research with 3-4 people for a given vCloud Director deployment. We’d like to visit you in person, talk with the org admin to learn about the environment and how things are working, and then we’d like to interview some of the vCloud Director end-users at their desks (or whatever else their working environment might be). Each interview would be 60-90 minutes.
If you might be interested in participating and helping to shape the future of vCloud Director, email me for more details.