VM /ETC

Archive for May, 2010

The week of June 7 through June 11 is going to be five fun days for me spread across two events in the South East US. If any VM /ETC readers or VIRTUMANIA listeners will be attending either Microsoft TechEd 2010 or the Charlotte VMUG’s annual Carolina VMware Users Summit 2010 please stop by the Veeam booth and say "Hi".

Here’s a quick summary of what I’ll be doing at each event.

Managing VMware At TechEd?

No we are not advocating the first square off between VMware and Microsoft of the conference season. On the contrary, The Veeam nworks Management Pack helps those who use Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) better monitor, manage, and report on their VMware Infrastructure. We actually help VMware admins and Microsoft Operations teams get along!

I’ll be in the booth with @vmdoug, @dsiles, and others from @veeam. If you’ll be in New Orleans Monday June 7 through Weds June 9 so please stop by.

Charlotte VMUG Summit vExpert Panel

On Thursday that week I’ll be jetting back to Charlotte,NC for the VMUG Summit on Friday June 11. As a Gold Sponsor Veeam will obviously have a table / booth in the vendor area in which I’ll be working, but we will also be presenting in our own 1:30 pm “Image-Level Backups You Can Count On” session.

The high light for the VMUG Summit will definitely be the vExpert Panel at 2:30 pm. We are still ironing out the exact topics to cover, but the panel will feature Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac, Vaughn Stewart, Mike Laverick, and possibly others in a open discussion on virtualization and storage. I’m honored to be invited as a moderator for this discussion, and it’s sure to be an informative and entertaining session.

Register for the Carolina VMUG Summit here.

Here are links to other posts from the panel members on the Charlotte VMUG Summit

• Carolina VMware Users Summit 2010 (scottlowe.org)
• Charlotte VMUG – will be a doozy… (virtualgeek)
• Charlotte VMUG Annual Conference – a mini VMworld? (virtualstorageguy)

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing everyone in New Orleans and Charlotte in a few weeks!

There were a couple of virtualization related things that made me laugh this week, and since it’s Friday I thought I would pass them along for those that might have missed them.

You Might Be A vDiva If …

Jon Owings’ post on his 2 VCPs and A Truck Blog is definitely worth the quick read. You’ll be sure to get a long laugh. The comments are as good as the post itself, so be sure to scroll all the way down. I’m betting even Jeff Foxworthy will be proud of this effort if he ever stumbles across this one.

I added several of my own vDiva-isms in Jon’s post comments. Here’s just a few I created to give you an idea of the fun:

You might be a vDiva if …

• Your notebook is an iSCSI target
• You think SEX is a spelling error
• You’ve ever called your children linked clones
• You describe yourself at work as thin provisioned and over allocated

Put My Data Center In The Cloud

I found the video “A better way to cloud computing” posted on VMworld.com (and YouTube). Like a vDiva, this one needs no introduction either.

Enjoy the embedded copy below.

In the “lucky” thirteenth episode of VIRTUMANIA Rick, Marc, and I engage very special guest Chris Wolf in a interesting discussion about Citrix XenServer and the recent cloud announcements from the Synergy 2010 Conference. The following is the podcast summary:

VIRTUMANIA Podcast Episode 13 – Analyzing Citrix Cloud Synergy. Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) of VMETC and Marc Farley (@3parfarley) of 3Par and StorageRap.com with guests and Rick Vanover (@rickvanover) of RickVanover.com and Gartner Virtualization Analyst Chris Wolf (@cswolf) of chriswolf.com and blogs.gartner.com/chris-wolf. Citrix Synergy 2010 wasn’t just about the the virtual desktop, and Chris Wolf joins us to discuss the server virtualization content of the recent conference in San Francisco. Citrix is definitely making strides with XenServer and their Cloud offerings, but amid all of the exciting announcements there were arguably some conference disappointments as well. We get Chris to analyze the good, the bad, and the ugly! Thanks to Greg Knieriemen (@knieriemen) of Chi Corporation for this Infosmack Production.

Listen to the podcast with the embedded player or subscribe to get a weekly copy so you can listen when convenient.

Check out the VM /ETC VIRTUMANIA Page to listen to past episodes as well as episodes of Infosmack.

The following links offer more information on some of the topics mentioned in VIRTUMANIA Episode 13:

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I recently participated in an interesting roundtable discussion with the gang over at GestaltIT.com about the popular trend in the market today of vendors either providing or partnering to provide all in one hardware platform solutions. Stephen Foskett recorded the conversation and has published it as Episode 6 of his Tech Field Day Podcast series. Podcast 6: Stack Wars Roundtable 1 features an all-star roster of virtualization, storage, and networking bloggers and engineers. Interestingly enough, everyone offers different opinions and points of view on the what, where, when, why, and how of “the Stack Wars.” In the end the podcast actually helps clarify some strategy and positioning of a hardware stack in the market.

With me on the podcast is:

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If EMC World can be called the “Super Bowl of Storage” then Episode 12 of VIRTUMANIA is the post game analysis! Guests Scott Lowe, Stephen Foskett, and Rick Vanover help Marc and me get to the bottom of the virtualization game plan from EMC’s 2010 conference. The following is the podcast summary:

VIRTUMANIA Podcast Episode 12 – EMC World 2010 Post Game Analysis. Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) of VMETC and Marc Farley(@3parfarley Infosmack Podcast) and show regular Rick Vanover (@rickvanover rickvanover.com) host guests Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe blog.scottlowe.org) and Stephen Foskett (@sfoskett GestaltIT.com Pack Rat Blog). If Chris Berman, Linda Cohn, Hannah Storm, Erin Andrews and Bonnie Bernstein covered a virtualization conference the results would be nothing like this! You’ll probably never hear a conversation about the private cloud, VPLEX, deduplication, long distance vmotion, FAST, data tiering, vSphere, and more on ESPN that’s for sure. Thanks to Greg Knieriemen (@knieriemen) of Chi Corporation for this Infosmack Production.

Listen to the podcast with the embedded player or subscribe to get a weekly copy so you can listen when convenient.

Check out the VM /ETC VIRTUMANIA Page to listen to past episodes as well as episodes of Infosmack.

The following links offer more information on some of the topics discussed in episode 12 about the “Super Bowl of Storage” or EMC World 2010:

Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Howarth, VMware Communities Moderator and blogger at PlanetVM.net, posted this week how he was informed by a developer of a virtualization backup vendor about a scenario involving reverting to an ESX snapshot that results in corrupted incremental backups when using vSphere’s Change Block Tracking (CBT). Howarth’s post Major issue with Change Block Tracking recounts his conversation and exploration of the problem with the developer. In summary, Howarth reported “there is a major issue with the way VMware handles the indexing of the ChangeID.”

Almost a week later and after a flurry of comments from most of the vendors leveraging CBT for virtual machine backups, VMware has published a KB article on the subject.

VMware KB: Reverting to a pre-existing snapshot under specific conditions can cause incremental backups based on CBT (Changed Block Tracking) to become inconsistent

The KB Article describes the exact scenario that causes the problem:

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In contrast to their previously expected bare metal client hypervisor, is VMware now focused on enhancing the VMware View Client Local Mode? I’m basing this assumption on the blog post VMware View: Real BYOC and View Client which was published apparently in response to Citrix’s announcement of the XenClient availability earlier this week at the Synergy 2010 conference.

As I understand Local Mode, VMware View will be able to coordinate the offload of intensive desktops operations such as graphics to the hardware of a user’s notebook, thin client, or PC. Since the VMware View Client is installed as an application on the operating system of the end user’s system, this seems to be a better technical fit with VMware’s expertise in type 2 hypervisor products, or hosted virtualization, such as VMware Workstation, Server, Player, and Fusion. This focus in development also seems more aligned with the Teradici partnership enabling the software based PCoIP protocol.

Combined with the promise of offline synchronization, where changes to the local copy of the VM will be replicated to the master copy in the data center, VMware View Local Mode would definitely make VMware View instantly compatible with the widest selection of hardware possible. This in turn creates the least path of resistance for the VMware VDI solution to provide remote and mobile access to a corporate virtual machine even when users are abroad.

Developing a bare metal client hypervisor has obviously been a bigger than expected challenge for both Citrix and VMware judging by the delays in release experienced by both companies so far. As more and more corporations consider the concept of BYOC (allowing employees to bring your own computer), VMware now seems to be backing out of the hardware platform support arena and falling back to what they do best. Although I believe a smart decision has been made here, there will no doubt be some public “crow to eat” in Palo Alto.

Be sure to read the entire VMware View Blog post linked above, but the rest of this post is the VMware Desktop Team’s own words about View Client Local Mode:

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