VM /ETC

Archive for November, 2009

Disclosure: The GestaltIT Tech Field Day is an independent event being held in Sillicon Valley on Thursday 11/12 and Friday 11/13.  The event brings together a unique group of bloggers for sponsored technical presentations, demos, and hands on excercises. Tech Field Day bloggers are free to disclose all information presented on their respective sites and using social media. Although all bloggers attending have had their travel expenses covered by the event sponsors, none of the attendees are being compensated for posts or comments, and all are free to express opinions whether positive or negative in nature. For complete information about the event, the attendees, and the sponsors check out the Tech Field Day web page.

Day 0 – Travel & Tweetgrids

I’m putting in 2/3 of a work day today before my flight to SFO. Even so, I expect the twitter chatter to ramp up as the day advances, so I’ve started an embedded Tweetgrid filtered for just my tweets and the event hashtag , #techfieldday, after the break in this post. For a full web browser experience with all of the attendees check out my TechFieldDay Tweetgrid here. If you already have a Twitter account you can also quickly follow all Tech Field Day attendees and sponsors with a single click by following these Twitter lists:

• gestaltit/authors
• techfieldday/attendees
• techfieldday/sponsors

Did You Know Contest Winner

The winner of the pre event “Did You Know Contest” was selected and announced yesterday via this tweet:

“Congratulations to @DavidFix of Mr. X! He is the winner of our #TechFieldDay “Do You Know” contest!”

Look for more information about Tech Field Day Day 0 and the rest of the event here on VM /ETC over the next few days!

Read the rest of this entry »

Although VMware announced VMware View 4 earlier this week, the latest release of VMware’s VDI platform will not be available for download until November 19. Described as a “marketing announcement” on the pre release call I attended, this weeks news coincides with the availability of new documentation, videos, and information for those preparing to implement/upgrade as soon as the bits are generally available. This information can be obtained from the new VMware View 4 web site now.

Here is a gallery of View 4 screen shots for those that can’t wait until the 19th. These images were forwarded to bloggers by VMware after last week’s call. A few of the images show the configuration options for choosing the new PCoIP (PC over IP)  protocol when connecting with virtual desktops.
Read the rest of this entry »

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 »