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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Virtualization

VMworld 2012 General Session Day 1

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Paul Martiz is about to take the stage this morning for his last time as CEO of VMware to address an eager audience of attendees for VMworld.  VMware is expected to announce changes to licensing models and possibly to product bundles as reported last week from CRN.  I’ll be live blogging updates beginning in about 10 minutes.

[liveblog]

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CloudVirtualization

On the ground at VMworld 2012

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I’m on the ground now in San Francisco for VMworld 2012.  This will be an extremely busy week packed with sessions, meetings, keynotes and social meet-ups.  This year seems a little different already than years past that I have attended.  There is a lot less official pre-event news but a lot more rumors and speculation.  That causes me to believe that VMware has some pretty big news to share early this week.  The Solutions Exchange is back in full force this year after a couple of years of very scaled back

The week has already started out well, with an unexpected meet-up on my first flight of the morning that offered a chance to catch up with another techie I hadn’t seen in several years.  And it didn’t take long once I arrived in the city to find more of the friends I’ve made during the past several years.  It is great to catch up and see what they are doing, congratulate them on promotions and job changes and of course, talk tech.

But, I am coming to the event with a couple specific agendas — one is to nail down a short list of patch management solutions as I’m searching for a replacement for VMware Update Manager for guest OS patching.  I’m also looking to see what’s new in management software for vSphere and any new enhancements for the upcoming vSphere 5.1 release.  And last, I’m looking for good vendors solutions tailored for a smaller service provider.

I was fortunate to even be attending this year but thanks to free pass to the conference from a local friend and HP’s continued support in the way of accommodations and flights, I’m able to attend.  And, I’m going to capitalize on that luck for as much as I possibly can.

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Virtualization

VMware introduces new Shavlik based patch management solution

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

VMware announced today vCenter Protect Essentials, based on the Shavlik NetChk Protect product that it acquired earlier this year.  The newly rebranded product is good news for companies who currently leverage the built-in Update Manager technology in vSphere 4 and earlier version for patch management.  Previously, these customers would be looking at the hefty-priced upgrade to vCenter Configuration Manager if they wanted to stick with VMware for their patch management or were stuck at version 4, which is the situation I found myself in at work.

I thought it worthy to post about this since I used patch management as my example of how VMware eroding value from the vSphere suite by removing functionality between the version 4 and version 5 product lines.  In many ways, this eases the pain, though patch management does still come at an additional cost for an additional product with vCenter Protect Essentials.

VMware is clearly positioning the product for the small to medium business (SMB) space.  Billed as ‘a complete on-premise management system’, vCenter Protect Essentials will handle patch management and previous Update Manager users will gain a good bit of functionality not previously available to them, such as the ability to stage patches to occur, scanning hosts organized by their Active Directory structure (and assuming still by their VMware hierarchy), and additional alerting capabilities to administrators and users.  In addition to VMware guest systems, vCenter Protect Essentials appears to be able to scan and remediate physical systems through the use of agents, just as NetChk Protect did before.  For NetChk Protect customers, it appears that more integration with vCenter is found in the new product along with a small list of other enhancements.

VMware has a second level of vCenter Protect Essentials, named the Plus version, which includes antivirus protection using SunBelt VIPRE Enterprise Antivirus and basic configuration management features.  The configuration management features include the ability to download templates for regulatory audit baselines like PCI, SOX and HIPPA which can be compared against systems and then remediated.  I assume that this version includes less features than vCenter Configuration Manager, but as I said before, it is a product being positioned for the SMB space.

What is unknown today is whether the vCenter Protect Essentials product will work as Update Manager did using the same network ports to scan hosts and VM’s which are behind a firewall or if it will have a new security implementation.  For users who are familiar with NetChk Protect, I would assume it would function the same, but having no prior experience with NetChk, I cannot say, but the at least there is now a solution for the SMB’s where Configuration Manager did not fit due to cost or complexity.

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CloudDatacenterStorageVirtualization

The future is all about (cloud) apps

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

After having a month to reflect on the organized chaos that was VMworld 2011, one message still stands out to me most of anything we heard during that week. VMware conveyed loud and clear that apps, and more specifically the frameworks and middleware to enable cloud apps, are the big area of innovation for the next era of computing.  In the VMware world, they are calling it all vFabric.  Cloud applications are going to take rethinking, rewriting and re-architecting to really make use of cloud.

VMware is positioning itself as the developers’ friend, much in the same way Microsoft did when the desktop era dawned.  The 2009 acquisition of SpringSource that left many, including myself, wondering what VMware was thinking, but the technology is now emerging as a critical part of the VMware ecosystem and vision for the future.  The middleware for developers is a critical third piece of the VMware vision of cloud which will bridge the two other primary foci of the company.

VMware has long been the king of the virtual infrastructure game.  Their vSphere suite and the type 1 ESX hypervisor are a mainstay in nearly all datacenters around the world.  VMware also got its beginnings with its type 2 Workstation and now VMware Fusion hypervisors.  But as enabling the cloud, a true run-anywhere architecture and bring your own hardware initiatives have emerged, the two disparate product areas left a gap the company has been working to fill.

Based around the virtual infrastructure VMware has developed, the cloud posed a new set of problems that could only be solved by rewriting traditional client/server applications into cloud apps with distributed data models, distributed processing and distributed display logic across multiple datacenters.  And when thinking of cloud, the first thing to come to mind are applications that Google and Facebook have written and how they are architected to be highly available and redundant.

What is vFabric?


The vFabric line up is a multi-product library of solutions to provide developers with the frameworks and middleware needed to build out products on cloud architecture.  The focus is clearly on web applications using customized or VMware-branded versions of the Apache Web Server and Apache Tomcat, known as vFabric Web Server and vFabric tc Server, to develop Java web applications which use the Spring framework.  In addition to the presentation and processing layers, there are also products to handle messaging, monitoring and data storage.  In particular, this year VMware announced innovation to add to the GemFire data models, including a new in-memory SQL solution called SQLFire.  GemFire and SQLFire both seek to upend competitors like Oracle and Microsoft’s traditional relational database products, which VMware is calling out as bottlenecks.  Even while the bottleneck may be true, the real idea is a distributed data model where the data does not exist in a single instance database but rather in a mesh of systems on a cloud architecture.  To me, that is the real difference and news with GemFire.

Looking back & moving forward

While I don’t claim to be a Java developer, I can certainly see a clearer picture of the vision VMware has for cloud.  I was not fortunate enough to attend VMware 2010, so perhaps things would have began to be clearer had I attended, but 2011 certainly provided the clarity I needed.

The unfortunate side to all of this is that VMware is now attempting to engage a new audience of developers, which are catered to in a very different way than the systems administrators and infrastructure staff they have traditionally engaged with.  Saying it in a different way – they have moved past me a bit, as one of the systems guys, and are working on things that excite me less.  I realize we must have applications, but I’m not the guy who writes them, so the thrill of announcements at VMworld 2011 was less for me, than at past conferences.

VMware certainly has a learning curve of how to engage developers, too, but the SpringSource acquisition provided them with a solid foundation and a good set of roots in the open-source community.  For now, I hear that the user communities will remain separate with VMUG’s and Spring User Groups existing beside one other, which is smart.  Hopefully, the same will hold true for the future with VMworld and other events as well.  What I most hope is that their message does not become muddled and muddy because they now have two different audiences to cater to.

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CloudDatacenterStorageVirtualization

The Political Challenge of Moving to the Cloud

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

The way that I see it, VMware is up for a political fight in many of its customers’ IT departments.  Two things have become evident to me this week at VMworld 2011 – first, moving to the cloud is going to involve rewriting a lot of our applications and two, this is going to to be as much a political shift in our companies as a technical shift.

I think that the political issue is easier to explain, so I’ll begin there.  Unlike virtualization or virtual infrastructure, the decision to move to the cloud is not going to come from the systems group in most companies.  The systems groups may be able to advocate the change and provide the reasons for it, but it is going to have to be a strategic move from higher management.  The tangible monetary benefits of cloud are less clear than with virtualization, whose primary motivators were increasing utilization of physical machines and reducing the number of physical machines required which saved money.  In other words, the IT systems group is not going to be the primary advocate or decision maker when moving to the cloud.  Cloud is going to need to meet some higher business need rather than a technical need, although there are technical benefits.

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DatacenterStorageVirtualization

The week ahead > VMworld 2011

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

The upcoming week is another exciting one with VMworld on the horizon.  I will be on site at VMworld thanks to Thomas Jones’ Bloggers Reality Contest, just one of the perks of participating in the competition.

VMworld 2011 will have a lot of new information to share about the newly released vSphere 5, which went live yesterday.  vSphere 5 has a slew of new features, including the introduction of Storage DRS, rearchitected high availblity (HA), port mirroring in vSwitches, VMFS5 and filesystem enhancements, and many more.  I hope to learn more and write about Storage DRS in more depth, as its one of the bigger feature sets added and it encompasses a lot of technology and capabilities.

The week is also one of the best networking (as in people, not wires) events of the year.  With over 17,000 attendees planned this year, it is by far the largest of events I have ever attended.  I’m looking forward to seeing some folks I met at HP Discover this year and hopefully meet some other folks I’ve run into on Twitter.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to next week.  I always come back to work with some grand ideas after VMworld, so I expect this year to be no different.

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