“In the trenches” product management - Jo De Baer’s blog

Great show! Period. Let’s do it again next year…

We successfully kicked off the field enablement for Novell Cloud Manager in EMEA, with two pre-event training sessions on Monday and Tuesday for Technology Sales Specialists and System Engineers. We had opened these trainings up for a select set of partners, who participated enthusiastically - thanks guys!

The Cloud Manager booth, although kinda tucked away in a corner, got plenty of traction - a good mix of Service Providers and Enterprise customers. A common request seems to be: “give us Cloud Manager as an appliance, built via SUSE Studio”. If you think of it, it would be kinda nice: assemble what you need over the web, download your virtual appliance, fire it up on your hypervisor of choice, and get going. Certainly something to consider.

Had a chance to interact with some press - although Ben Grubin did most of the talking. That’s ok though, no one really delivers the vision like he does. Superbly.

Oh - the “Get Started with Novell Cloud Manager” session was packed. There actually was a waiting list to get in. Never really had that before - impressive. Thanks everyone for attending, hope you found it informative and entertaining, that’s what I usually aim for.

And then… the grand finale: the keynote demo. Thanks again to Chris and rest of the Novell Demo Team. This was my first big-stage gig, so I was pretty nervous - but things went very smoothly. We demonstrated the core Cloud Manager use cases without a single glitch. Not bad for what is actually not even beta code.

Speaking of beta - my next big assignment in EMEA is getting some customers on board for the Novell Cloud Manager Early Adoption Program: a select set of customers can get the product in their lab as of the end of June. We got a solid prospect list from BrainShare, but feel free to contact me if this interests you. We’re looking for large to very large Enterprise customers. There are certain conditions and requirements - but also a nice reward package.

Below a shot from the keynote rehearsal, with John Stetic (Director of Product Management) and myself in it.

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Sold out! Not a single spot left! I’ll be there, as well as my manager, John Stetic. Come talk to us about Novell Cloud Manager, a brand new product, set to be released later this year. Turns your heterogeneous virtual infrastructure into a true IaaS platform. Self-service, provisioning workflows, multi-tenancy, it’s all there. I’m doing two sessions :

VWM104 - Get started with Novell Cloud Manager - Thursday at 14.30h

VWM300 - Adaptive Computing Using PlateSpin Orchestrate - Friday 13.30h

When I’m not doing sessions you can find me in IT Central (the product demo lab) every day between 11h and 14h.

Will be great to catch up with you guys!

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Nice success story about how Pernod Ricard Pacific uses PlateSpin Orchestrate.

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Looks like I’m in. See you all in Salt Lake City and Amsterdam.

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As of right now, an evaluation version of PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.0.2 can be downloaded via download.novell.com. This includes a trial license key. You can use the search engine, or click here.

New in this release :

Provisioning Adapters:

• Usability improvements for connecting to Virtual Center

• Improved automatic configuration of SLES VM hosts

VM management UI (PlateSpin Orchestrate VM Client)

• New UI themes

• Improved list navigation through a “locator pop-up” and a filter field

• Improved tooltips related to VM life cycle operations

• Improved event logging (content and format)

• Visibility into history of VM life cycle operations

• Improved VM remote connection setup

• Optional manual VM placement in addition to default automated placement

• Support for PXE-based installation of virtual machines

PlateSpin Orchestrate Server

• Audit database now includes support for historical tracking of VM life cycle operations

• New events based on RRD-based averaging of monitored metrics

New platform support

• PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.0.2 agents are supported on SLES 11 (32-bit and 64-bit)

• PlateSpin Orchestrate 2.0.2 VM Client and Development Client are supported on SLED 11 (32-bit and 64-bit)

• PlateSpin Orchestrate can manage the life cycle of SLES 11 virtual machines (32-bit and 64-bit)

• Metrics gathering form 32-bit and 64-bit Windows virtual machines (disk I/O, network I/O, CPU, and RAM)

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As a colleague of mine (Mike R.) just pointed out : “you can know the content of a release, or the release date, but not both”.

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Introduction to PlateSpin Orchestrate
PlateSpin Orchestrate installation and configuration
Introduction to PlateSpin Orchestrate VM Client
Building VMs with the PlateSpin VM Client
Performing general VM related management tasks
Working with VM repositories, templates and clones
Advanced infrastructure debugging with the PlateSpin Orchestrate Development Client

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Full story here. Enjoy.

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Latest product presentation is here, trial version can be downloaded here and here is the documentation. Enjoy …

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Well I think the most important thing to say about “ski 2009″ is that it will actually happen as it looks now, as opposed to, say, “ski 2008″, “ski 2007″, and I can go on for a while here. Apartment, ski resort parking reservation, SUV winter servicing, snow chains, all “check”.

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