As Rosenblum unplugged the first server, VMware's management software, Virtual Infrastructure 3, detected a failure and shifted handling the users to the secondary server. Since the secondary server was already receiving a stream of log events, it could pick up at the precise point where the other had left off. The pause between one virtual machine stopping and the secondary server's virtual machine starting appeared to be about a second.
"This approach works not for a few select applications, but for anything that runs in a VMware virtual machine," Rosenblum said. The demonstration was greeted with a wave of applause.
In another example, Rosenblum demonstrated how end-user applications can be virtualized without strictly adhering to running them remotely in a software-as-a-service mode, like Salesforce, or adopting the alternative of a full download to the client. Virtualized end-user applications take several minutes to download.
Rosenblum said virtualization enables a "hybrid" approach that combines some elements of both. If a client machine is sent a small "stream manager," then that manager can examine a target application, detect priority settings already established on its files, and "prefetch" the files needed to start its operation before a full download is completed.
By adopting an approach in between streaming and software-as-a-service, the application starts to run after about 10% of the download occurs, making virtualized applications more palatable to end users, Rosenblum noted. No timeframe was set, but Rosenblum indicated such an approach will be made a feature of VMware's Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
"What we're effectively doing is taking things that were statically assigned in the past and turning them over to virtual machine management software," he said. Virtual machines will enable a much higher degree of automation in the data center and make hardware a drop-in commodity that gets added as needed.
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