Mike D’s Blog

As many of you know I’m an aviation nut. I know I haven’t been blogging lately here and it’s not for lack of trying. It’s also not because I’ve just been busy flying (although I would love for that to be the case). Cloud has just really taken off more than I ever thought it would and I’ve been extremely busy with customers all over the world. That’s not why I’m writing today. I’m going off topic to honor a real hero and to blast the media nuts for not picking this up. Instead we’re stuck with 24×7 for 25 days of Michael Jackson’s death. I’d like to honor someone else instead. Someone I’m not related to but I wish I was – Ed Freeman. Here’s Ed’s story…

You’re a 19-year-old kid. You’re critically wounded and dying in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley , 11-14-1965, LZ X-ray, Vietnam . Your infantry unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 or 200 yards away, that your own Infantry Commander has ordered the MediVac helicopters to stop coming in.

You’re lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns, and you know you’re not getting out. Your family is half way around the world, 12,000 miles away and you’ll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.

Then, over the machine gun noise, you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter and you look up to see an unarmed Huey, but it doesn’t seem real because no Medi-Vac markings are on it.

Ed Freeman is coming for you. He’s not Medi-Vac, so it’s not his job, but he’s flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire, after the Medi-Vacs were ordered not to come.

He’s coming anyway.

And he drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire as they load 2 or 3 of you on board.

Then he flies you up and out, through the gunfire to the doctors and nurses.

And he kept coming back, 13 more times, and took about 30 of you and your buddies out, who would never have gotten out.

Medal of Honor Recipient Ed Freeman died on Wednesday, June 25th, 2009, at the age of 80, in Boise , ID. May God rest his soul.

Thanks to the media for not picking this up. Someday I wish you all would report on something other than gossip or whatever got you ratings.

In 2008, VMware launched the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP). This program allows service providers to pay for VMware licenses on a per VM per month usage basis. This aligns better with the monthly charges that service providers give to their customers and reduces the upfront Capex spend for service providers.

Today VSPP has over 700 service providers in the program. That’s a pretty large presence. What’s more is that nearly all of these service providers are in the middle of adding VMware-powered cloud service to their existing managed hosting environments. That is the power of the VMware vCloud initiative – choice of several hundred different providers to get you exactly what you need and compatibility between all of those various cloud providers.

For more information on the new milestone of VSPP read this press release. For more information on VSPP go here.

Previously I have talked a bit about OVF and how great it is for the industry. VMware’s implementation of OVF is called vApp and it’s fully OVF 1.0 compliant. The tool used for creating vApps is called VMware Studio and it can be found here.

The new version of VMware Studio (2.0) is now in beta. One of my favorite features of VMware Studio 2.0 is the Eclipse plug-in. Now developers can develop their apps, test them out locally with VMware Workstation, and then build them into a vApp and inject that vApp directly to a VMware Virtual Infrastructure or vSphere environment or even a VMware powered cloud. The ability to go straight from the development environment through to the cloud from within your IDE is pretty powerful – especially with how popular the cloud is for a development platform. Just another way that VMware is showing its leadership in the cloud space.

Here are some more highlights of VMware Studio 2.0 beta:

• Build vApps and virtual appliances (with in-guest OS and application components) compatible with VMware Infrastructure, VMware vSphere 4.0 and vCloud.
• Use an Eclipse plug-in version in addition to the stand-alone form factor. A Web Console and Command Line Interface are also furnished.
• Ability to accept existing Studio-created VM builds as input
• Support for Windows 2003 and 2008 Server as guest operating systems in addition to major linux distros.

ISV partners:

• Author and build virtual appliances optimized for VMware Infrastructure and VMware vSphere 4.0: Support for OVF 1.0 and 0.9
• Publish patches to update deployed virtual appliances
• Extensible in-guest management framework
• Automatic Dependency resolution (static)
• Support for 32 bit and 64 bit versions of SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 and 5.3, CentOS 5.2 and 5.3, Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 as guest operating systems

Studio 2.0 also provides general purpose features enhancements in provisioning and user experience

• VMware ESX Server, VMware ESXi, VMware Server 2.0, 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.0.6 and VMware Workstation 6.5.1 enabled as provisioning engines
• Infrastructure enhancements in the GUI and builds

The public Beta is accessible now from http://www.vmware.com/appliances/learn/vmware_studio.html.