Home Author
Author

Philip Sellers

Phil is a Solutions Architect at XenTegra, based in Charlotte, NC, with over 20 years of industry experience. He loves solving complex, technology problems by breaking down the impossible into tangible achievements - and by thinking two or three steps ahead of where we are today. He has spent most of my career as an infrastructure technologist in hands-on roles, even while serving as a leader. His perspective is one of servant leadership, working with his team to build something greater collectively. Having been lucky to have many opportunities and doorways opened during his career - Phil has a diverse background as a programmer, a writer, an analyst all while staying grounded in infrastructure technology.

Trends

SysAdmins Revealed! Who are we?

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Behind the dark curtain, tucked far away in the back of the building – they’re lurking. People see them, they say hi to them, they know their name (mostly from the emails they receive), but they really don’t know what these people do.  Bloodshot eyes from long nights of coding – for work and for fun.  They’re the infamous SysAdmins.  Generally a little quirky & offbeat, they — I mean we — march to a different drum.

Solarwinds, the network management software company, released results of a survey in November showing that SysAdmins, although tasked with increasing workloads are consistently satisfied with their job and confident in the company they work for.

As far as job dislikes, SysAdmins were disappointed with increasing workloads and too little budget (or too few new toys and learning opportunities). The findings make a lot of sense to me, as a SysAdmin.  Much of what makes our species tick is discovering and figure out challenges we experience in our job.  At our core, we problem solvers.  We want to learn new things.  We thrive on new technology.

But, the study also showed that SysAdmins generally feel that outsiders lack appreciation for the work and complexities we deal with on a daily basis.  We feel misunderstood.  I know many times, people see SysAdmins as naysayers or as pessimists because we approach things from the worst case scenario (because we’re tasked with disaster planning) and from a very logical “how does this work” methodology.  We’re the detail people.

More interestingly, the study echoes our geek personalities – through our choice in technology, tv shows and movies, video games and how we relax (like programming for fun — guilty).

SysAdmins Revealed!click the graphic to enlarge

The full press release of Solarwind’s findings below:

SolarWinds Survey Reveals Optimism and Confidence Among Systems Administrators in the U.S. Despite Increasing Workloads and Complexity

Expansive study also measures personal preferences of IT workers such as favorite video game (Call of Duty), mobile platform (Android) and TV show (Star Trek)

AUSTIN, TX – November 5, 2012 – SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today released the results of a survey revealing that despite being saddled with increasing hours, responsibility and system complexity, systems administrators express surprisingly strong job satisfaction and high confidence for 2013.

These results are part of a wide-ranging survey of more than 400 U.S.-based systems administrators, which was conducted last month in an effort to measure the evolving nature of this critical IT role. The survey results capture systems administrators’ attitudes and preferences on both a personal and professional level, from their enjoyment and frustrations of their jobs to their favorite after-work hobbies and pop culture heroes.

A sample of some of the key findings includes:

  • Rising job demands:  Most systems administrators are feeling some level of increased pressure in their jobs, as reported by 85 percent of respondents. Contributing factors include more responsibility and demand on their time (reported by 90 percent of respondents), doing more with less (88 percent) and increased system complexity (88 percent).  A wide majority are spending more time at work (88 percent), with nearly half (44 percent) indicating they spend a significant amount of their free time completing work tasks.
  • Steady career satisfaction: But the increasing demands don’t appear to be dampening the enthusiasm for their jobs. Seventy-one percent express some level of satisfaction with their careers, and only three percent do not enjoy their work. Moreover, they envisionadditional career path opportunities (75 percent) and are getting consistent training to gain new skills (58 percent).
  • High company confidence: Sysadmins – as they are affectionately called – are fiercely loyal to their employers. While they see IT budgets staying flat, most feel 2013 will be a growth year to some degree for their companies (76 percent). Trust runs high in their IT department leadership (82 percent), and their senior/executive leadership (82 percent).  As a result, sysadmins rarely switch jobs, with 50 percent reporting either 10-plus years with the same company (32 percent) or having never switched jobs at all in their careers (18 percent).
  • Lacking broader appreciation: Outside of the IT department, sysadmins feel a bit misunderstood.  A majority of sysadmins agree on some level that most of their company’s employees don’t understand what they do and the value they bring (71 percent). Fifty-six percent say they feel appreciated or highly appreciated, while 34 percent feel only somewhat appreciated and nine percent not at all appreciated.
  • Job likes and dislikes: Sysadmins just want to be part of the solution. They get the most enjoyment out of solving problems (75 percent), helping users (62 percent) and thinking on their feet (52 percent). Notably fewer overall respondents expressed job frustrations, but two of the top three issues cited were money related, including too little pay (22 percent), increasing workloads and responsibilities (16 percent) and not enough budget (13 percent).

The complete survey results can be found on SlideShare, and an infographic on the data can be found on SolarWinds’ Whiteboard blog. SolarWinds will be releasing additional survey data in the coming weeks on systems administrators in the UK and Australia.

“It’s encouraging to see the job satisfaction that systems administrators expressed in our survey, particularly in the face of mounting pressures to do more with less. That collective resiliency is critical for a group doing some of the most important and demanding work in their companies,” said Kevin Thompson, President and CEO, SolarWinds. “Though they are often misunderstood, we make it our business to truly get them. In my book,sysadmins are the unsung IT leaders of the present and the future.”

The survey also revealed several interesting tidbits about how systems administrators view themselves and what they enjoy in their free time, including:

  • Who they are:  Sysadmins see themselves as friendly (94 percent), fun-loving (92 percent) and funny (91 percent). They are also a bit frugal with their money (79 percent), which might explain the compact car (26 percent) being their top vehicle of choice.
  • What technology they use: A slim majority of sysadmins prefer Android phones (39 percent) over iPhones (32 percent) while 12 percent stick with the Blackberry. An overwhelming majority are PC users (84 percent) over Mac users (13 percent).
  • What they watch:  Star Trek (23 percent) rules the galaxy of all-time geek/sci-fi TV shows for sysadmins, followed by The Big Bang Theory (19 percent) and The X-Files (11 percent). But on the big screen, light sabers beat phasers as Star Wars (22 percent) ranked No. 1 in sci-fi movie franchises, with Star Trek (17 percent) and Lord of the Rings (17 percent) just behind .
  • What video games they play:  Their top all-time video game is Call of Duty (28 percent) played on an Xbox (23 percent), though nearly 20 percent don’t consider themselves gamers at all.
  • How they relax: Even away from work, 72 percent like to spend time surfing the web, and 29 percent even program for fun. Another 57 percent also love the great outdoors, and 32 percent like to participate in competitive sports. But the most popular free-time activity:  just unwinding at home (72 percent).

About SolarWinds

SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses. In all of our market areas, our approach is consistent. We focus exclusively on IT Pros and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. SolarWinds delivers on this commitment with unexpected simplicity through products that are easy to find, buy, use and maintain while providing the power to address any IT management problem on any scale. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our online community, thwack, to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process. Learn more today at http://www.solarwinds.com/.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
General

Dropcam celebrating its 4th birthday with a giveaway

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

clickDropcam, the maker of the awesome IP camera and DVR service, is celebrating its 4th birthday and to celebrate, they’re giving away a free Dropcam or a year of Dropcam DVR service each day for the next 7 days.  Get all the details on how to enter the contest over at Dropcam’s Facebook page or at this email newsletter I received.

I had been eyeing a Dropcam for a long time and finally purchased one on Cyber Monday.  I LOVE my Dropcam.  My wife and I just had a baby and so the Dropcam is setup so that I can visit with mom and baby during the day when I go back to work later this week.  It is perfect because I can see high definition video of our newborn and mom and peek in on them from work.  We have also used it to keep and eye on him from our iPhone next to the bed – our baby monitor for now.  Its been great to watch him while he sleeps and we do chores around the house.

After we finish using it as a baby cam, we are going to permanently mount it in our living room to be a security camera.  Two times last year while we were away on a trip, our security system has gone off and we were two time zones away with no way to know what was going on in our home.  With Dropcam, that won’t be the case anymore.  We will be able quickly pull up live video of our home and even get motion alerts from inside our home when we are away.  Best of all, the app and setup of the camera was extremely simple – you could tell it was designed for real people, not just geeks.  Even though I’m technical, I appreciated the simplicity.  But simplicity doesn’t mean lack of functionality  either.  The Dropcam is full featured and includes the ability to digitally zoom the camera, the ability to enable or disable the microphone, the ability to talk back through the camera and the ability to enable or disable infrared, night vision (or set it to auto and let the cam decide).

The Dropcam website is dead simple to use just like the iPhone/Android app.  You can visit and see heads up of multiple Dropcams if you have more than one registered in your account.  Anyways, this is a product I love.

Dropcam GiveawayDropcam did not request and is in no way sponsoring this post – these impressions are my own.  Dropcam did not send me a free cam – I bought the one that I’m gushing about and I genuinely think its a fantastic IP camera and service.  (I won’t turn away anything Dropcam may send my way, though!)

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
Home Tech

Review: Redbox Instant & why I canceled my trial

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

A few weeks ago, I was excited to receive the “You’re In” email from Redbox for their new Redbox Instant streaming service.  I was excited to see a competitor to Amazon and Netflix for lots of new movies.  But today, I closed my account.  I’m still optimistic to revisit Redbox Instant in the future, even though I closed it.  In the end, convenience won out of some of the Redbox service’s very compelling features.

An Enticing Bundle…

One of the things that I found really enticing about Redbox Instant is the way that Redbox is bundling the streaming service along with video rentals at the kiosk.  My family loves Redbox from the kiosk and we generally get one or two movies a month.  So, a combination streaming subscription with kiosk credits from the ‘box’ is a really nice proposition.

Continue Reading
13 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
DatacenterSoftware

Resolving errors running SharePoint 2013 App Store behind a proxy

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

First Impressions

SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013 Modern User Interface

I have been playing with the final release copy of SharePoint 2013 to get my feet wet and learn the new environment.  The default style for 2013 is the Metro/Modern user interface layered onto a web application.  It’s approachable and welcoming, as opposed to earlier version of SharePoint which felt foreign and different from every other web application or CMS I had ever used.  The ribbon is still there in 2013, though its muted in many ways and only appears when needed.

One of the more interesting things added in SharePoint 2013 is the App Store or Marketplace.  Microsoft has built a streamlined way to add plugin-style functionality to SharePoint while hosting them in a separate namespace either locally or in the cloud.  This addition helps to fill in functionality needs for customers while providing a clean and easy way to add the functionality to a vanilla SharePoint installation.

After installing a demo copy of SharePoint 2013 at home, I was able to see the Microsoft hosted App Store at office.com from this install, but I wasn’t able to fully configure it for my demo without my own DNS running.  So, I proceeded with a lab install at work and found the office.com pages would not render behind my corporate proxy like they did at home.

Proxy Server Causes Issues with the App Store & the Solution

Users who are installing SharePoint 2013 behind a proxy server are going to see out of the box issues with the App Store functionality issues until they resolve proxy configuration.  The solution is actually quite simple, though not documented anywhere that I could find.

General Troubleshooting

The first step is to get an idea of why the app store was failing to display data.  To get a better idea, I turned on diagnostic logging as detailed in the Microsoft TechNet article, Configure diagnostic logging in SharePoint 2013.  I found the PowerShell commands the easiest way to set this up.  Once you have setup a logging location, restart IIS, open the App Store location and attempt to add an online web app from the Office Online Store.  After you see the failure, open the log file and trace the errors surrounding the call to the App Store URL.  Searching for office.microsoft.com was an easy to to find it in my testing.

Fixing the Problem

To set the proxy configuration for each of your web application, you will need to make changes in the web.config in the root of each IIS website.  In the web.config, you will need to change:

[code]<system.net>
 <defaultProxy />
</system.net>[/code]

to

[code]<system.net>
<defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="false">
<proxy usesystemdefault="True" proxyaddress="http://proxyserver:8080"  bypassonlocal="True" />
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>[/code]

SharePoint Store

SharePoint Store

or something similar based on your settings.  This will enable the web application to be directed out the proxy server when trying to retrieve your web content to display.

I tried setting proxy settings for the IIS service account, the system default and other methods, but it wasn’t until defining it in web.config that I was able to resolve the issues.

Once these settings were in place, we got a happy SharePoint Store to browse and add from.

1 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
CloudDatacenterStorageVirtualization

Virtual Storage Appliances may fundamentally change virtualization landscape

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

One of the biggest hurdles for virtualization adoption in the small business area has been the need for expensive, shared storage.  The Virtual Storage Appliance is looking to change that.  By utilizing the relatively cheap, attached storage in host systems and pooling those into a storage array, vendors are looking to extend the goodness of virtualization to the final frontier – the small business.  But its not just applicable there – I think that VSA may also have a strong play for virtual desktops and eventually for primary storage in many environments.

A reporter asked me end of 2011 for my predictions in 2012.  Mine was around the VMware VSA and the promise of cheap, shared storage for the masses.  VMworld’s Solutions Exchange was full of vendors with VSA or purpose-built storage solutions looking to address the storage play in virtualization.  Many are looking at SSD, either hybrid or pure SSD, to achieve a large amount of IOPS for virtualization.  In my mind, its possible that a VSA could replace all of these purpose-built solutions by utilizing the local RAID adapters and local storage already within our ESX hosts.

HP has rebranded the LeftHand VSA under the new StoreVirtual VSA moniker.  The StoreVirtual also introduces a reduced cost licensing model which bundles 3 years of service and support along with the virtual appliance.  StoreVirtual VSA allows for active/active clusters using the tried and true Lefthand technology.  StoreVirtual uses iSCSI as its primary transport of storage to the ESX hosts.  The local storage is pulled into the StoreVirtual VSA, then it is carved into LUNs and presented to particular iSCSI initiators.  All of the advanced features of Lefthand are available to customers of the VSA.   The StoreVirtual VSA is the only VSA that is certified as a VMware Metro Storage Cluster, capable of spanning storage over datacenters.

I remember when Lefthand was first demoed for me, before the HP acquisition.  One of their value propositions at the time was repurposing existing hardware into storage nodes within the Lefthand SAN.  The same principle applies in the case of the new StoreVirtual VSA.  Adding disks to existing, very capable ESX hosts may make a lot of sense to companies.  It may also reduce the data center footprint and cooling needs by collapsing storage into running host servers.

VMware also offers a licensable VSA.  It uses NFS to mount a datastore and make it accessible to all nodes in a cluster.  It also allows for replication of data from the datastore to another datastore, but it is a single node active model.  In the event the primary host running the NFS share goes down, the secondary node has to activate the NFS and make it available.   It may not be quite up to par with offering seamless or instant failover, but it is probably good enough for many applications.

Nexenta also had a VSA for View demoed in the Solutions Exchange at VMworld.  It was a very low cost option, licensed per user, to convert local storage into VDI storage.

VSA’s do not come without some challenges.  Customers will need to architect high-availability into any design.  They will need to ensure that advanced features like snapshots and backups are capable, although there are new considerations which come into play.  HP and VMware partner Veeam has introduced a version of its backup software that fully understand the StoreVirtual VSA and the challenges of backup that may be introduced with a VSA. One of these challenges is how exactly to restore a data snapshot onto a storage array running on the same virtual infrastructure.  The VSA creates a circular reference, to some degree.

I stand by my prediction, and I have to admit, its fun to see my thoughts coming true on this front.  Small business is ripe to benefit from virtualization and may be the last, large, untapped area of growth.  And VSA’s may make it possible.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
DatacenterStorageVirtualization

I’ll remember VMworld 2012 for the community

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

VMware is a lucky technology company.  Few companies, short of Apple, seem to have as fierce and vibrant a community as the one that surrounds VMware.  VMworld 2012 was a remarkable time to spend with members of that community, in the realm of influencers and evangelists.  No question, I was around a lot of very smart people.  And it is fun to pick their brain and listen to their opinions about trends and directions of our industry. There is a fertile growth of tech bloggers and Twitterazzi that follow VMware and the virtualization community.  I realize that many of these folks don’t exclusively focus on VMware, but on the trends of technology in general, but virtualization has become extremely large part of that community and a bulk of the talk.

One of my highlights of the week was attending the VMware User Group (VMUG) leaders lunch on Tuesday.  This was another exceptional cross-section of the community, all of whom have rallied behind local user groups, learning opportunities, and devoted themselves to evangelizing the platform.  But it was a fairly small group of people, around 100 or so.  The highlight was hearing directly from CEO Paul Martiz, incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger and CTO Steve Herrod during the luncheon.  All three took an opportunity to talk with the relatively small group about where we’ve come, where we’re going and then all three fielded questions from the leaders.  Unscripted and completely off-the-cuff, these guys are impressive.  Each one is a technologist in their own right and they challenged the group to continue to call them out if their business decisions don’t make sense in the community.

I attended my first VMworld in 2009, I believe, and I was largely oblivious to the community, although it was already growing.  And it has exploded since that year. Not only are there formal events hosted by large, corporate sponsors during the week, the same blogging and Twitter community organizes their own unofficial events – like the VMunderground, #vodgeball tournament and others that even benefit charities with any proceeds raised.

And speaking of growth – the VMworld conference itself has grown to over 20,000 attendees.  VMUG reported over 3,000 new members in the past year and I cannot count the number of new people who I follow both their blog and Twitter for news and tips about VMware.  And its that community that I find myself a part of now – as a tech blogger.  I still consider my contribution relatively small, but I’m inspired by what I see others doing for the benefit of the whole group.

In formal recognition of the contribution of many of these people, VMware introduced a designation a few years back – the vExpert – meant to honor those who have made a signifiant contribution to the community either evangelizing or contributing knowledge, time and wisdom to others in their circle of influence.  I have met many of the vExperts and these are individuals who are passionate about technology, but down-to-earth enough to have a conversation with.  Many of them ask me where we are in the virtualization story and what my stories are from the trenches.  Some of these folks have helped significantly through the blog posts they have written with advice or best practices or with the gotchas they found before me.  Its really quite remarkable to meet and get to talk to them.

But what would this post be without highlighting some of the most influential in these circles.  These are the guys to follow in Twitter, the blogs to bookmark or subscribe and the influencers to listen to.  I was lucky enough to meet many of these guys last week, either in passing or to talk with.  Look them up.  (The list is in no particular order…)

And, I have to have an honorable mention for Crystal Lowe and the Spousetivities program.  My wife attended VMworld 2009 with me and met Crystal for the first round of Spousetivities.  From there, Spousetitives grew into a much larger and corporately sponsored program for tech spouses who come with their signifiant other to conferences like VMworld.  Crystal coordinates activities, tours and social events for spouses to do while their techie is away geeking it up.  If you attend tech conferences, you need to look up @Spousetivies and visit the website at http://www.spousetivities.com for your spouse.

For those I missed on this list – VERY sorry.  There are too many people in this community and I’m sure I’ve missed a few.  Comment or tweet me and I’ll add you to the list.  And most of all, thanks to all of these folks for their contributions to our community!

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
CloudDatacenterStorage

HP extending Data Protector backups to vCloud Director

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Many backup vendors support vSphere, VMware’s flagship virtualization platform.  But now, HP’s Data Protector platform supports the extended vCloud layer directly with integration against VMware’s vCloud Director.  Workloads in highly virtualized datacenter are much more dynamic than traditional IT and the addition of vCloud Director to an environment only accellerates the ebb and flow of virtual machines. The new integration in Data Protector offers the ability to setup dynamic backups which can encompass changing workloads by integrating that the top level, vCloud layer.

Data Protector can be pointed directly at a particular vCloud organzation and will be able to backup anything under that organization with a single checkbox.  Regardless of how much or how often the systems under that organization changes, Data Protector will still protect it completely.  The integration fully supports the vCloud vStorage API’s which allows for full, application consistent backups by utilizing VMware’s snapshot capabilities.  The snapshots will call into the VM’s tools and will even coordinate a consistent snapshot with the OS running inside of the VM.  This ensures the most reliable data recoveries possible.

The new vCloud Director integration joins a slew of additional new capabilities within the Data Protector 7 release, including support for the StoreOnce deduplication technology at any level within the backup process.  StoreOnce deduplication has been fully baked into the software in Data Protector 7 allowing for deduplication at the end-point, in transit or at rest on the StoreOnce deduplication device.  It also allows for portability of thin backups without the need for rehydration, saving both bandwidth and time.

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Below is a video demo of the vCloud Director integration into HP Data Protector.  You can get a good idea of how simple the interface for the vCloud integration is within the backup console.  To an existing customer, the interface looks almost identical to the vSphere integration that has existed for several years.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
DatacenterTrends

Solarwinds hosting a ‘demo challenge’ worth $10K in prizes

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Starting today and for the next 20 days, Solarwinds is giving away a ton of prizes in their SolarWinds Network Performance Manager Demo Challenge.  The contest is pretty simple.  You go to SolarWind’s contest site, you register with your information, answer 5 questions by looking at a demo install of Network Performance Monitoring, and you’re entered to win prizes.  There is nothing to download or install – Solarwinds is using their demo Orion install to provide all the answers.

Each day, SolarWinds will be selecting one lucky entry to win their daily prize and all together, the prizes total more than $10,000.  SolarWinds hasn’t let us in on all the prizes they are giving away, but they did provide a sampling of the prizes that will be given away:

  • Find your happy place while gaming for hours on your new Dell Alienware™ M14x laptop
  • Destroy friends at foosball using your new Tornado Sport Foosball Table (train for a few months before inviting anyone over,  just to be safe)
  • Impress mom with how clean your carpet looks without lifting a finger – let the top of the line iRobot Roomba® do the work for you
  • Feel less bad about your football team sucking again while watching the games on your new LG 42LM6200 42-Inch Cinema 3D 1080p HDTV
  • Give people the “I’m cooler than you” look while using your new 11.6” Apple® MacBook® Air

You can also win a bonus prize – Bose® QuietComfort® 15 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones – just for helping us spread the word on Twitter, mentioning @solarwinds and using the hashtag #prizeaday.

Disclosure:  I was notified of the contest by press release and I have entered myself and I really hope to win something.  Solarwinds is not paying for this post or promotion.  I’m a participant – just like you. 

0 comments
1 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
CloudVirtualization

VMware introduces new vCloud Suite

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

This morning, incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger introduced a new bundled product offering – the vCloud Suite.  The solution marries vSphere with vCloud Director, networking and security  to create a fully automated, software-defined datacenter.  The announcement is directly related to needing to change how existing infrastructure is managed to allow it become more agile and save time to free up IT staff to focus on the greater change to achieve an overall cloud vision.  The announcement also included the release of version 5.1 for vSphere, vCloud Director and Site Recovery Manager.

The suite has three different levels ranging from Standard to Advanced to Enterprise Plus.  The Enterprise Plus offers almost the entire VMware portfolio of software to the customer, including Site Recovery Manager, Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and the vFabric Application Director.

The vCloud Suite Standard level is also being offered as a free upgrade to customers with vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses and up-to-date Software and Service (SnS).  Customers with vSphere Enterprise may also take advantage of a discounted upgrade program.  This is a considerable new feature grant to existing customers who have loyally paid their annual service and support.  It also represents a switch back towards building in new enablement features in the existing licenses that customers own after VMware arguably removed some functionality with the vSphere 5.0 release, like guest OS patching.  The free upgrade will allow customers vCloud Director and other additional features without the need to purchase new licenses.

Primarily, the new bundles is intended to simplify the purchasing process for customers hoping to adopt VMware solutions. The suite moves everything to a per CPU (socket) licensing model across all the products and bundles many of the necessary tools together to allow customers to build a cloud.  Any products that have been traditional licensed on a per VM basis are now per CPU, as well, including VMware’s Site Recovery Manager.

In addition to the per CPU licensing, the restrictions on number of cores is also absent.  vSphere 4.1 had limits on the number of cores per socket that a customer could run.  These restrictions were lifted with vSphere 5.0 last year, but VMware introduced the controversial vRAM entitlements at that time.

The new bundles accompanied the news that the poorly received vRAM entitlements would no longer be used for vSphere licenses.  Introduced last year, the vRAM  entitlements (the vTax, as it was referred to) initially set off a backlash from customers who thought the entitlements were too low and would mean spending a lot of additional money to continue running vSphere.  VMware quickly increased the entitlements, but it didn’t do much to help sales staff trying to educate users of the new licensing model.  Sales people said that the vRAM entitlements were difficult to explain to customers.  The transition back to a per socket model will make things simpler to understand for everyone.

In general, it seems that VMware is working hard to battle increased competition by making customer’s existing licenses provide more value and capabilities.

Note: This post went up a little early without the final details.  I apologize.

0 comments
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
DatacenterStorageVirtualization

VMware announces version 5.1 of infrastructure products

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Today at VMworld, VMware announced the availability of version 5.1 of its infrastructure products.  New CEO Pat Gelsinger likened the release schedule of VMware’s infrastructure product to the Intel tick-tock release of a major every two years and minor revision on the year in between each major, but for a minor (tock) release, version 5.1 of vSphere includes a number of major enhancements.

Among the features in this release, virtual machines will have a new virtual machine format – version 9 – that will allow for larger virtual machines, performance counters and shared graphics acceleration.  That’s not the only upgrade to VM’s in the release – a new version of VMware Tools will accompany the release, but this version of tools will mark the end of reboots for subsequent VMware Tool upgrades.  That is welcome news for all administrators.

In addition to these VM enhancements, overall compute capabilities within virtual machines has been enhanced.  The MonsterVM, introduced last year with vSphere 5.0, seems to have been working out over the past year.  He’s back and bigger (see the photo to the right).  VMs can scale to 64 vCPU’s per and can handle over 1 million IOPS per VM.

In the networking space, VMware has made a number of enhancements to the vSphere Distributed Switch.  VMware has added network health check, configuration backup and restore, rollback and Link Aggregation Control Protocol support.  Chris Wahl of the Wahl Network has posted a deep dive of the new features in vSphere Distributed Switch for version 5.1.

In terms of storage, one of the stand-out new features is shared-nothing Storage vMotion – meaning that you can move VM’s between clusters that don’t share common storage with zero downtime.  This extends vMotion to direct attached storage and clusters with different SAN attached storage.

Another major new feature is the vSphere Web Client, enabling cross-browser administration of vSphere deployments in a capable web interface.  Not only is it full-featured and impressive-looking from demonstration, but it is extensible and will allow third-party plug-ins from partner companies to enable direct hardware and software management from within the vSphere (and vCloud Director) web interface.  CTO Steve Herrod said that the lines between vCloud Director and vCenter have begun to blur and this is a towards unification of those two management interfaces.  Single Sign-On has also been added to allow users to sign into the web client once and not be required to sign in, again, to additional components.  Orchestrator has also been integrated and can be launched directly from the web client.

For all the details of What’s New, see this guide from VMware.

1 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinRedditEmail
@2019 - All Right Reserved. Designed and Developed by PenciDesign