VMworld set up a lab this year that ran a hybrid cloud.
The VMware team set up a data center at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco that connected to public clouds provided by Terremark in Miami, Florida and Verizon in Ashburn, Virginia.
The hybrid cloud was redundant so if it went down, the load could be picked up elsewhere.
This was the first year that VMworld used a hybrid cloud environment. They called it Lab Cloud. The numbers demonstrate the difference in what can be accomplished in a multi-tenant environment.
Last year, there were 4,500 labs completed at VMword. This year there were more than 15,000 labs.
Lab Cloud deployed and destroyed about 4,000 virtual machines on a per hour basis. In total, Lab Cloud deployed a total of 145,097 virtual machines. Private cloud environments cannot usually handle this kind of load, showing again the capabilities of what can be done when data centers and public cloud environments are connected.
To be fair, it is important to remember that this is a lab environment. The Lab Cloud was built from scratch. Any enterprise environment will face a number of obstacles in setting up a hybrid environment.
One thing it does show is the volume of virtual machines that are being spun into the cloud. The Lab Cloud demonstrated how much more extended a cloud environment can be compared to a traditional data center operation or a private cloud.
It also shows how VMware plans to do training at future VMworld events. VMware set up 480 seats for doing labs. Each lab took about an hour to do. A few people complete all of the labs. But more so, it helped give attendees hands-on experience in how to manage thousands of virtual machines that are being deployed and destroyed throughout a work day.
Source: Yellow Bricks
The enterprise needs this kind of training for a few reasons. Hybrid cloud computing is still very new to most people. The labs give people a chance to learn new skills that will be needed as enterprise operations evolve toward a hybrid cloud computing environment.
And perhaps just as much, it shows the IT knowledge worker the possibilities that the cloud brings to their work.
