VM /ETC

I’ve already mentioned (and posted) about the vSphere Blog Contest current topic of thin provisioning, but I’ve been thinking about another “product” that has always functioned thin provisioned – The VI administrator. That’s right, I’m talking about the guys and gals that manage all the hypervisor hosts, the server and desktop virtual machines, the networking, and the storage.

Have you thought about the systems to administrator ratios we work under these days? Sure, server consolidation to virtual infrastructure has enabled doing more with less, but is there a better way to explain thin provisioning and over allocation than by looking at the small teams responsible for the virtualized data center? I say not!!

This is my small VM /ETC tribute to the ones who truly are “thin provisioned and over allocated”.

Do me a favor, leave a comment letting everyone know how many administrators are on your team and how many VMs you are responsible for. I expect the numbers to be staggering!

The GestaltIT Tech Field Day is one week away. This time next week I will be just arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area and getting ready for 2 full days of storage and virtualization product sessions about which I will be reporting here on VM /ETC in the form of tweets and posts. Stephen Foskett, the event coordinator, has already hinted about special announcements and sessions during the event planning, but he’s not even letting the attendees know what’s exactly in store. Although we know the presenters, we haven’t received and agenda. All I know is I had to change my return home flight times so that I wouldn’t miss something important. I am looking forward to the experience that is for sure!

As a warm up to Tech Field Day, GestaltIT.com has announced the Do You Know Contest. Multiple “Do You Know” posts per day are appearing on www.gestaltit.com. In each post is a short quiz to complete in order to receive an entry in a drawing for a prize package including an iPod Nano with video. The winner will be drawn randomly from the list of entries on November 10th. For each quiz you take you get another contest entry up to a maximum of 7. You don’t even need to answer the questions correctly, so just take the quizs to increase your chance to win. All VM /ETC readers are invited to participate.

Hurry up an take the first 2 quizs released today.

• Do You Know MDS Micro?
• Do You Know Xsigo?

Look for more quizs over the next few days on GestaltIT.com.

You didn’t get to participate in School Field Days if you didn’t complete your testing first, right?

Follow the links above for the contest page, but here’s the general contest information: Read the rest of this entry »

HP is announcing it’s own Converged Infrastructure Architecture with associated services and partner offerings later today which will “integrate existing silos of compute, storage, network, and facility resources with unified management to deliver a virtualized, highly automated technology environment ..”. The timing of this announcement obviously serves as a “us too” response to the VMware, Cisco, and EMC (VCE) vBlock architecture announcement, but more importantly positions HP as the provider of the only private cloud infrastructure solution under a single company logo combining HP servers, storage, and networking.

HP is also announcing availability of new storage virtualization products based on storage pooling features first introduced to me at the HP Tech Days in Colorado Springs, CO, which ultimately become pillars of the Converged Infrastructure Architecture. With HP’s new products, virtual storage pools can be created across multiple storage devices enabling high availability and dynamic adjustment for any workload.

Finally, hidden among the infrastructure product announcements is a high level indication of EVA integration with Hyper-V Live Migration. As of this writing it is not clear to me what this technically means and I am waiting for more information. It was made clear to me that HP is not establishing a competitive stance to the VCE partnership, and HP remains as an active VMware OEM partner.

Look for the official announcements from HP and the links in this post to go live around 9:00 a.m. EST today (Wed 11/4/09). HP lifted the embargo for press, analysts and bloggers as of Thursday 11/04 at 12:01 a.m. EST so I am publishing quick information from an embargoed call I attended Tues (11/3) afternoon with Lee Johns, HP Director of Marketing – Unified Storage, and links found in draft copies of the official press releases.

HP’s Converged Infrastructure Architecture is made up of 4 technology innovations: Read the rest of this entry »

So, we should all know what VCE stands for by now, right? Let’s say it together: “VMware, Cisco, EMC.” Using a bad analogy of Adam Lambert, a contestant on American Idol last season, the three companies “came out of the data center” today and publicly announced what we already knew; they’ve been working together to build the most integrated cross technology cloud infrastructure solution known to mankind. They are so integrated they’ve cross trained each other’s support staff so that anyone of the three partners can be a single “choke point” for those customers that implement vBlock Architecture. They call their union a “Computing Environment Coalition.” At the same time, EMC is promising that VMware can continue to “play the field” with technology partners that want to hook up. Hey, if you love somebody let them go. if they come back then it was meant to be!

Confused? Me too. Time will clear the fog and, as promised, reveal the vBlock based Cloud.

VCE vBlock is big, bad, and designed for scale like VMworld 2009 Infrastructure (without being told as much, my bet is that what we saw at the bottom of the stairs in the Moscone Center was a vBlock test drive). Apparently, VMworld’s spotlight on vCloud Express provider Terremark was another hidden VCE vBlock showcase from Vmworld. It all was happening in plain sight. If we only knew then what we know now. 

My thoughts (or this rant) can best be described as “now what!?”. I’ve spent the last 5 years figuring out how to design customized, application specific, performance optimized, and product feature specific virtual infrastructure designs for the enterprise data center. This is because I’ve listened to everybody explain that a “cookie cutter” infrastructure is not adequate for their solutions. Change this setting for feature A, provision these LUNs for feature B, add these VLANs for feature C, etc., etc. Now, VMware, Cisco, and EMC have figured out all the tough stuff and come up with a “connect the dots” data center reference architecture to make it easy to move to the Cloud? Really? I mean, I know we’ve been told this had to happen in order for the Cloud to work, but REALLY?!! Oh well, the only constant is change.

Ok, I feel a little better. Anybody else care to vent?

Here’s some more random links and quoted information to help others with similar change anxiety issues as me. Read the rest of this entry »

VMware has been running a blogging contest in order to promote the new vSphere Blog. The current contest topic is vSphere Thin Provisioning. A lot has been written on this topic already, but I thought I would point out a storage design conclusion I’ve come up with based mostly from the explanations and recommendations of others about handling what happens when an over allocated, thin provisioned LUN runs out of space.

This post first walks through an basic explanation of the administrative concern caused by thin provisioning and how built in vSphere monitoring and alerting can be used to proactively handle an over allocation issue. I’m using quotes from a few bloggers to help describe the potential for problem and offer ways to handle it. At the end I make a simple LUN provisioning suggestion based on combining the vSphere feature with storage device’s thin provisioning capabilities.  Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike it’s big brother VMware Workstation 7, nowhere is it published that ESX/ESXi 4 is a supported guest OS of VMware Player 3.0. In fact, ESX 4 is not even among the listed choices in the Version drop down box when building a new virtual machine (VM), nor is it mentioned in the VMware Player Release Notes or Getting Started Guide. I was surprised when I was able to perform an Easy Install of ESXi 4, and just like ESXi 4 VMs running on Workstation 7, VMware Player nested ESXi successfully hosted guests. Best of all, ESXi 4 in VMware Player 3.0 can be run without any additional manual (ESX in a box) configurations (just like VMware Workstation 7).

Interestingly enough, the full Console ESX 4 install DVD is not recognized by VMware Player 3.0 for an Easy Install. However, performing a full ESX 4 Easy Install is possible with a last minute switch of the install media. That is, first browse to the ESXi 4 .ISO, complete the new VM Easy Install wizard, but modify the hardware before booting and change to the ESX 4 DVD .ISO. Watch the video at the end of this post for a demonstration on getting full ESX4 to work.

The rest of this post highlights the important parts of the Easy Install of ESXi 4 on VMware Player 3.0 with screen shots. To get an idea of more of the Easy Install screens check out my post about installing Windows 7 as a VM in Workstation earlier this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Social networking continues to prove to be a valuable communication and marketing channel for vendors. Large technical conferences have been the shining example so far, but the recent HP Storage Tech Day event in Colorado Springs was a small event with a big reaction. HP sponsored a handful of bloggers who were able to engage IT professionals world-wide with real time commentary. It was a simple but effective format: 2 days of interactive presentations, demonstrations, and hand on labs without non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The bloggers were free to tweet, podcast and post about the experience.

The event proved to be so successful in it’s reach that other vendors immediately expressed interest in doing the same. GestaltIT founder Stephen Foskett contacted me shortly afterwards with the news that because there was enough sponsor interest he would be organizing a new series of multi-vendor events called GestaltIT Field Days. The first one has already been scheduled and will be held in Silicon Valley on November 12 and 13, 2009.

Stephen describes the event on the GesatltIT Field Day web page:

“This is not a trade show, a junket, or an analyst day. Rather, the participating sponsors will be engaging the attendees, inviting feedback, and fostering open communication. We were inspired by HP’s series of Tech Days and wanted to broaden the concept, bringing in more products and a broader range of technologies. We also liked the idea of creating and managing a similar event as an independent third party.”

Read the rest of this entry »