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Posts Tagged ‘cloud’

I’ve had the luxury of staying away from the math of the new vSphere 5 licensing. Honestly, I haven’t read the new guide, and I’ve only skimmed through posts that explore the pros and cons of different upgrade costs and future growth impact scenarios from virtualization admins, consultants, and architects of  various size VMware virtual infrastructures. My opinion to date – VMware’s goal is to be a total Cloud solution, and this change in licensing reflects and fosters that plan. If you are able to correctly size you infrastructure, or if you can oversubscribe it so that you can offset the costs, then the hypervisor with the most features, the best performance, and the best partner ecosystem (in terms of available third party products leveraging vSphere APIs) is still a no-brainer. That would be vSphere 5.

Storm Clouds

I’ve also read the virtualization pundits’ predictions year after year. They usually go something like “this year is the year of VDI”, “sixty something percent of all servers can still be virtualized”, and “VMware’s market share will shrink to the advances of Microsoft and Citrix”. Is the record skipping? (does anyone know what a skipping record is anymore?). Personally, I’ve always felt a balanced market of hypervisor vendors would be the most likely prophecy for the datacenter, but VMware has always managed to innovate and stay ahead of the competition. Feature-wise, they continue to do so. But, the recent announcement of licensing changes may have changed things.

Whether right, wrong, misunderstood, reluctant to change, or just emotional, many VMware shops initially viewed the new licensing announcement like dark, thunder clouds approaching. Some reactions were as hot as a flash of lightning. Virtual warning sirens sounded across the community, but after a few days and some damage control from VMware, eventually calmer heads prevailed. But, like in the aftermath of any large storm, people began to build for the future. More so than ever before, public discussion of future plans seem to include a new possibility of alternative vendor virtual datacenters.

An Opening In The Clouds

My hunch is that current VMware shops will  Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I was in New York, NY for the vPower Tour as a guest speaker. My Northeast teeamates (we spell it that way at Veeam) asked me to present as a blogger, so I put together “Seeding The Cloud. The Conversation.” The actual presentation is embedded later in this post, but I wanted to provide a few notes about some of the slides first.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Special Thanks to Yung Chou for not only helping me understand the Cloud Conversation better with his 5-3-2 Cloud Principle, but for also letting me use 3 of his slides. I also want to thank Mark Minasi for his recent speech at the Techstravaganza Event in Atlanta and his great article “Avoid Being Plowed By The Cloud”. Mark’s economist views of the Cloud were very inspirational and informative to me and for my presentation. I love his “numerological proctology” expression!

I used the Cloud

I used Google Docs to build the preso, and I streamed it live from the Cloud when I delivered it. I guess I owe thanks to Sprint for 3G being up that day too! Thanks to VMware and Intel for the YouTube video. That still cracks me up every time I watch it.

Did You Know

Real Cloud Seeding examples slides:

1. Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics – before both opening and closing ceremonies
2. Woodstock 1969 – several reports from witnesses
3. Project Stormfury – 1960s experiment to seed hurricanes in the Atlantic
4. Chernobyl – Russian pilots seeded radioactive clouds before they reached Moscow

The Points

• You (and your company) are already using the Cloud.
• Define YOUR Cloud Conversation.
• Understand your IT Department’s value and services before you try to determine if The Cloud is a good alternative.
• Be a Numerological Proctologist yourself!
• Consider DR as a “low hanging fruit” reason to use The Cloud.

The rest should be self explanatory.

Who knows. Maybe I’ll get to deliver it again sometime!

This coming Thursday (June 16, 2011) I will be in New York, NY for the “Feel the Power in vPower” Veeam Tour. Although I am a Veeam employee and this is a Veeam sponsored event, I am not there to deliver the Veeam Backup and Replication presentation. That will be handled by my Northeast U.S. peer, Gaylord Friend. (Worth your time all by itself and a you get a free meal!) Instead, I’ll be there to do a vendor neutral presentation called “Seed The Cloud’.  The presentation is my own and will not reflect the opinions or thoughts, or represent current or future products of my employer.

Register for the New York event and the other East Coast Veeam Tour events here:

http://go.veeam.com/tour-feel-power-vpower-east.html 

A Blog Post Delivered With Slides

With “Seed The Cloud” I am attempting to present a new VMETC.com blog post in slides. So, just like with my usual writing style, this presentation will offer a light-hearted, (hopefully) entertaining agenda of my thoughts and opinions on “The Cloud conversation”. As always, I will be referencing other bloggers and analysts who are Cloud experts, but adding my own “2 cents” to the mix. The (still subject to last minute changes) outline is currently:

• Real Cloud Seeding
• Virtual Cloud Seeding
• Virtual Cloud Confusion 
• Why Seed The Virtual Cloud
• Virtual Cloud Seeding Options
• Have a Seeding Plan
• Have a UnSeeding Plan

I will post the slides here on VMETC.com after the event.

Be sure to be at the Atlanta Event June 23 too!

In 2 weeks my Southeast team will host our Veeam Tour event. If you’ll be in the Atlanta area on June 23 and would like to attend register at the same links above!

Start your Cinco de Mayo 2011 celebration with one of the largest VMUGs in the Southeast US! The 2011 Carolina Summit is at the Charlotte Convention Center (in Charlotte, NC) on Thursday May 5 from 7:30 am until 4:30 pm. If you are a VMware admin or architect within driving distance be sure to plan to attend. You can register here. I’m particularly excited about the 2:30 pm Panel Discussion on the state of cloud computing, but more on that session later in this post.

Everyone will be there!

Why should you attend? Check out the following samples of featured speakers, sessions, and labs:

Panel Discussion on Cloud Computing
(Rich Brambley, Mike Laverick, Jason Nash, Scott Lowe, Mike Dipetrillo)

Pros & Cons of Stretched Cluster Designs
(Scott Lowe, Industry Speaker)

Cloud in the Real World
(Mike Dipetrillo, VMware)

vCloud Director and VMware View
(Varrow Lab)

Automating vSphere with PowerCLI a Primer
(Aaron Miller, VMware)

VMware View Reference Architecture
(Mac Binesh, VMware)

Of course there will be various VMware and sponsor keynotes and presentations mixed throughout the day. Be sure to catch our Veeam Software session at 10:00 am. The event’s full agenda can be reviewed here.

Panel Discussion – The Sequel

I’m once again honored to get the invite to moderate the Carolina Summit’s featured Panel Discussion at 2:30 pm. I’ll be participating in an open and unscripted “state of the union” conversation about real world cloud computing with Mike Dipetrillo, Scott Lowe, Jason Nash, and Mike Laverick. Like last year, I view my role in this session to be like a co host of a live podcast. The entire VMUG audience, however, is real discussion driver. So, bring your questions for this expert panel!

Can’t make it in person?

Train Signal has partnered with the VMUG organizers and will be interviewing speakers and videoing sessions for those that can’t make it. They will also be live streaming the Keynotes at 8:45 am and 12:45 pm (EST). Find out more be checking out this post:  2011 Charlotte VMUG: Coming to You May 5th. Hopefully Train Signal will decide to live stream the Panel Discussion at 2:00pm as well! I assume vExpert David Davis will be in attendance? Help me reach out to him to include the Panel in Train Signal’s coverage!

Other Coverage

For more great coverage of the 2011 Carolina Summit VMUG also check out:

2011 Carolina VMware User Summit Coming Up – Scott Lowe

On the Road Again: Charlotte, North Carolina Summit – Mike Laverick

VMUG Carolina Summit: Be There or Don’t…See if I Care. No Really. Do Be There – Dustin Pike

VMware Regional Summit in Charlotte, NC! – Jason Nash

Let me know if you can make it!

VMware is purchasing Zimbra, a messaging and collaboration software company, from Yahoo!. Already one of the most popular virtual appliances available for download in VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace, Zimbra will now be optimized for VMware vSphere and probably be offered as a standard service in VMware hosted cloud offerings such as vCloud Express. Eventually I would expect to see Zimbra imported and exported as a vApp for the federated, private vSphere cloud environment. As for now, Zimbra is running more than 55 million mailboxes for both SMB customers as well as in hosted environments that arguably have instantly become VMware customers.

There is no doubt that VMware will provide support, enable high availability, ensure live backup and DR site fail over, as well as  develop scale, automation, monitoring and management capabilities for virtualized Zimbra. The fact that VMware is acquiring a large percentage of SMB mail accounts could mean that virtualizing those servers (if they are not already) will provide the first shining, every day business application in the cloud examples.

VMware CTO Steve Herod explains on his personal blog that purchasing Zimbra is part of VMware’s strategy to simplify IT:

“VMware’s mission is to simplify IT, and every VMware product focuses on attacking the complexity and rigidity that has crept into this world. In many ways we see the excitement over cloud computing to be a longing for a simpler, more flexible way of doing computing. The VMware strategy is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and operational improvements across the major IT infrastructure investment areas.”

Other reports I’ve read seem to suggest that Read the rest of this entry »

Shortly after VMworld  I posted about my experience using vCloud Express. One of the things that I expected to see but found missing from the solution was the ability to perform virtual machine (VM) uploads and downloads between my own vSphere infrastructure and the hosted VMware environment. To be able to move my workloads (running on VMware VMs) from my private data center to the cloud or visa versa was an expectation I had based on the federated and private cloud discussions I’ve listened to over the past year. I expected to be able to at least manually export or import an OVF, but unfortunately did not find that capability while testing.

Before continuing allow me the liberty to reference a common expression - Can’t see the forest for the trees:

“An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole”

VMware has created the opposite scenario described in this expression with their concept of the Cloud. That is, VMware has allowed us to visualize what the forest will be before we have the trees. Of course, they had to. Was anyone besides Amazon talking Cloud before that, and if they were, was anyone even considering allowing companies to create their own internal clouds? I’d have to say VMware put the concept in my head. All I can say for sure is that I know I wasn’t listening to Cloud discussions before VMworld 2008.

Getting back to my vCloud Express testing and expectations, I was finally looking at the trees instead of the forest. I have since found some interesting information about how these trees are growing (if you will). To complete my reference, some of the details about VM transfer between private and public clouds are revealed by a VMware project has been privately referred to as Project Redwood. 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 »