Archive for April, 2009

At the beginning of the year my royalites from both the Vi3book and SRM book started to roll in. I set up a US Dollar Account with HSBC with view to buying some shares in some tech stocks I personally felt were undervalued by the Bear Market that we were are living in. My intention was in the grand tradition of the speculator was the buy cheap, and sell high. After all there’s no way shares could fall any futher… OR could they…?

I remember back last year VMware shares were at the $30 dollar mark, and me and my students (amateur stockbrokers the lot of us) discussed whether this was a good time to buy shares in VMware. In the end the next pinch of credit crunch kicked which saw shares plumet once again.

Well, since then I’ve been watching the shares of Microsoft, Citrix and VMware. The big 3 virtualization vendors. I have no intention of buying MSFT or CTXS stock – but I put them on my google share watch list – so each morning I could compare them. I set up the widget by pretending I bought the shares at the LOWEST price – so I can see how much they have recovered or even lost – by miscalculating when if the market had really hit rock bottom.

VMware’s share prices has recovered quite a bit from its lowest at the $18-19 mark. And through the Nov/Dec/Jan/Feb mark is bobbled up and down from anywhere between $21-24. With one weeks gains, being wiped out by some other totally related bad announcement. However, things have changed again – and significantly. If you look at the google chart form 5 year perspective you wouldn’t really see this rise, as VMware stock tumbled (along with everyone else for that matter) form their height at the $118-120 mark:

 If you look at those shares over the last 3 months – there’s been a significant increase – of almost $11 dollars on in a matter of a couple of months.

So what about me? Did  I buy those shares? Well, I didn’t for fear of them falling further. Which says something confidence has been really undermined in people – and its going to take a lot more good news that what is trickling out at the moment for that to happen. Secondly, my training work went very quiet, very quickly in March & April – May is looking better. That scared the bejesus out of me – considering its 90% of RTFM Education Ltd revenue. Things are looking better – I’m putting this lull down to fact that VMware have a huge product release waiting in the wings. I’m hoping this is a the calm before the storm. But do I still have the confidence to buy those shares.

What would you do?

My pal Chad is has an interesting video about the relationship between EMC/Cisco/VMware – you can download the presentation here

The video of the keynote is on Chad’s website too!

There’s some info about vSphere, Nexus, the Cisco Unified Computing System, 

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/04/vmware-partner-exchange-ciscoemc-keynote.html

This ones from the register.co.uk

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/15/mckinsey_cloud_report/

The full report – is available here

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16384

Executive Summary:

• Costs can double
• Numbers based on Amazon’s cloud
• Cloud costs 366 a month per unit of computing output compared with $150 a month for the conventional data center
• McKinsey Recommendation: Keep stuff in house, and virtualize as much as you can

I don’t know if folks have seen this yet. It spoof of one the Hitler movies with a different translation. Instead of Hitler and his Generals discussing their failed miltary tatics – its as if Hitler is the head of EMC disparing over their market strategy. It’s come VERY quickly off the back of EMC V-MAX announcement the other day. In fact its so slickly done – its probably been put together by some rival as a spoiler – deliberately hoping people like me will pick it up and promote it – in true viral anti-marketing style. So I guess their fiendish plot has worked. In fairness to EMC, they guys who produced this could have made the video about any big vendor. The only trouble is, that is funny. 

Although I’m not sure if I would (if I was EMC) be happy being compared to a bunch of people who killed 6 million. I guess you have to have a particular sense of humor…

My favorite bit – is when he says something about  - how you can put the word “Virtualization” in anything – and it will sell. I think there’s some truth in that – there seems to be a whole raft of products out there that pre-date VMware, and now they bang on about virtualization. I guess next year these vendors will putting the word cloud in their marketing.

Veeam have a video contest – the prize is to win a free ticket to attend VMworld US in San Francisco this year – that includes the conferrence pass, flight, and hotel. The whole thing is by community vote, so the video regarded as best by public vote wins. 

Deadline to submit videos is June 15, 2009.

Runners up in each of the three catagories win a camera.

I think I might enter if I have time and inspiration. I’m thinking perhaps a song would be fun. Good job Veeam “rimes” with Teeam!

http://www.veeam.com/go/video/

One of the less common questions I get asked centers around management – and again it hides secret VMware Vs Microsoft Vs Another Vendor debate. If you accept that ESX currently is the best platform for running VMs, does that neccessarily mean that vCenter is the best management platform?

Is there room for a vendor neutral management platform?
Are there other management tools for ESX other than vCenter?

Of course, the grand-daddy of all these questions is usually – when will VMware manage HyperV and Xen? And will Microsoft SCVMM replace vCenter? The answer is as ever – possibly to first one, and quite possibly never to the second. Anyway, lets take each of these questions in turn and answer them.

Is there room for a vendor neutral management platform?

Yes, there already is it’s called Kodiak from Bluebear - http://www.bluebear.org/kodiak/

Additionally, for some years both IBM and HP had the own management tools. So given the cost of vCenter why didn’t they take off?  Well, because in the main these OEM were pretty much useless, and you had to buy vCenter to configure advanced features like VMotion. These OEM management tools are pretty much useless because you couldn’t do any of the “high-level” stuff that I do on a daily basis. They were only useful if you day-to-day existence was made up of powering off and on virtual machines…

Are there other management tools for ESX other than vCenter?

Yes, there are – they mentioned above. But in the main you have to buy vCenter to use them. So affectively all your doing is putting another layer (a 5th layer – do you get the joke) between you and the VM. 

Will VMware manage HyperV and Xen?

Possibly. It can’t be too difficult. Wierdly, pure-ESX only customers ask this a lot. Despite the fact they have no commitment to HyperV or Xen! I don’t really know what that is about. vCenter is OK, but as a management tool it occasionally annoys me. But I can report vCenter 4 is MUCH improved against Vi3. So in the main take this question as vote of confidence in VMware & vCenter. I don’t think it would cost VMware that much to do, but whether it makes sense to spend valuable QA resources on supporting your COMPETITORS product remains debatable. I think HyperV and Xen would have a much bigger market share to make those calculations add up. Of course, growth of HyperV and Xen’s market share isn’t really part of VMware’s master plan is it? 

Could Microsoft SCVMM replace vCenter?

No (OK, not in its current guise). And if you not prepared to take my word for it – read this post which inspired me to write this post here

http://digg.com/d1oe5a

It’s record of using SCVMM with ESX. And just like the other tools mentioned you need vCenter license to get the deeply piss-poor “integration” (note the Stephen Fry speech marks) that SCVVM offers.

Conclusion:

In my experience so called vendor neutral management – invariable means compromises along way:

• Its not vendor neutral, you just bought some other vendors – vendor neutral management system
• You nearly always need the underlying vendors management system anyway…
• It’s never as good as the vendors native tools – because tries to be all things to all people. It ends up pleasing only some of the people some of the time…
• NT4 Domain tools like Dameware & Hyena were once popular – but as Microsoft improved its management tools – they became nice-to-have addons, rather than must have…

What’s the threat to VMware? The thing I care customers about are the services that run inside the Guest Operating System – for most people this means Windows 90% of the time. If we change the question from “What’s the best management system to manage ESX and VMs?” to “What’s the best way to manage and monitor Windows Services?” – I imagine many wouldn’t be saying vCenter. In short vCenter its my personal belief that vCenter is going to have to evolve into not just telling me more about my ESX, VMs, vNetwork, vStorage – it’s going to have to give me window onto my Windows.

Of course I’m describing some Holy Grail which has been touted many times – and never, ever delivered. A single pane of glass into all of my infrastructure. I remain sceptical that this will ever be delivered. There’s just too much propriety vendor stuff going on and not enough commerical drive to create standards which allow a foot-in-the-door to the competition. What could change the paradigm greatly is if this vCenter-on-Linux takes off and vCenter just becomes a free virtual appliance you can download… Now, I’m really snorting the fairy dust.

I’m not big into these talent shows developed Mr Simon Cowell. Occasionally, me and my partern Carmel tune into them. She’s a singer herself (semi-pro operatic soprano). Of course, the dirty pleasure of the early episodes is laughing at the nutters who turn up and think they are next Michael Jackson. Then someone comes along who suprises you. The UK people who read this blog will probably come across this woman in the papers or the news in the next couple of days. But if you not in the UK, this will probably disappear under radar. I darn you NOT to be moved by this. I’ll say no more!

On of the greatest loves of my life is music. Listening and playing. I guess this blog kinda of askews my personal interests, and in main is just about my journey’s in virtualization. But there’s another journey I’m on – and this is sound track. So once a week, I’ll have a blog post and video on some piece of music which I believe is outstanding – and want to share with the rest of the world. 

One of my favourite programmes is on BBC Television called Jools Holland’s “Later”. It’s quite an unusual show in that promotes live music (in a studio). Just the artists and no bullshit. The part I like about it is normally where its just one person and their instrument. I shows how you don’t need fancy affects and band. Just voice and guitar. It one such example.

If you want to capture this video to stick on your iPOD. Find it on youtube.com, and use http://keepvid.com/ to download directly.

This is a little white paper from the viops website – about the issue of re-IP-ing a VM and handling name resolution issues when using SRM. If you do virtualized-DR or use SRM especially – this will be of interest to you.

http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1449

I love EMC. I really really do. Here’s why. When I was in VMworld: Las Vegas last year I was on the cusp of releasing my book on Site Recovery Manager. I met up with a lot of the SRM Team there, and they helped me introduce me to many of the storage folks responsible for developing the SRAs (Site Recovery Adapters – there the glue that allows SRM to speak to the storage). I already knew some of those guys. Like Adam Carter of Lefthand Networks, and I also met Vaughn Stewart of NetApp. Anyway, the SRM Team introduce me to this fella I’d never heard of before (shows how much I know!) by the name of Chad Sakac. Chad Sakac and Alex Tanner are now my best buddies, because what came out of that is access to some top notch storage equipment. You might know Chad through his blog, and I have it on my RSS Feeds – which keeps me up to date with what EMC are doing in partnership with VMware.

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/

You know how these things are sometimes, lots of promises are made over a few beers at conferrences – where something is promised – and then well, nothing happens (hey, guys you know who you are!). You feel a bit of a heel coming back to them week after week hoping they will come good. Not so with EMC – they came to me, and they made it happen. You see being a freelance instructor/blogger/author hardware resources are so hard to come by, plus you know if you sink your own cash into a lab environment – it’s like buying a brand new car. As soon as you drive it off the parking lot, its devalued… 

So that’s the preamble. Wot did I get? Well, Chad & Alex have kindly “given” me on a “long term loan”. Two EMC Celerras and Clarrion system. Yes, two. With the MirrorView links & licenses such that I can replicate between them.  This is what they look like

I’ve got two of these bad-guys to the right in my rack at the colocation. I would like to thank Alex Tanner (you might know Alex, he’s quite active on the SRM forums – his handle is bladeraptor) very much indeed for his help in getting the kit in, racked up and working. I’m afraid he wasn’t very ably assisted by me – asking him a load of really dumb/ignorant questions. I’ve learnt so much from the process (like the fact that my coloction sucks, they are amateurs and I really should have done site visit before going there a last year!) and from Alex about they way zoning should be done. I’m hoping to pick Alex’s brains a bit more in the coming weeks – but I’m just cautious about taking the micky – there’s generousity – and then there’s taking advantage after all!

So what am I gonna do with this storage. Well, firstly I need to get all my files of my old piece of Jurassic Park era Sun SAN, which I bought of VMware employee a few years ago. There’s no RAID, so I have to use extents – and of course, I run the daily risk of a disk failure. In fairness the old girl has served me well – I wrote the first vi3book from her – but she just wasn’t up to the job for the SRM book. I had to resort to using virtual appliances – which shows how much you can achieve with modest hardware resources. I won’t get rid of the old girl – she will do well as backup location.

Next I’m gonna carve up the SAN – and use it immediately to totally overhaul the Chapter 5: Storage on my new book about vSphere4. It’s in pretty good shape as it is…. but I thought before releasing the book I would have to use some contacts to do work on the multipathing side of things – but now I don’t have to go with out with my begging bowl because EMC came to the rescue.

The other good thing is now my environment is that much more closer to a production environment – what I write about is gonna be that much real than it was before. I’ll also be able to look at the plug-ins that have been coming out from EMC that fit into either vi3 or vSphere4. 

The big project after that is my return to SRM work full-time. Since October, 2008 I’ve been working on my vSphere4 book (that’s nearly 700 pages and 21 chapters of juicy material). In fact I went right of the back of completing and publishing the SRM book, into writing a vSphere4 book. What can I say?  I must be either over-ethusaistic or a glutten for punishment. Anyway, I always wanted the SRM book to be more vendor neutral – in the end it got dominated by Lefthand Networks VSA. My plan is to revist some of the material – and document how to get SRM working with Celerra and Clarrion. Not sure when that will be – because my kit is more or less dedicated to vSphere at the moment. Anyway, I’m quickly getting to the end of writing the vSphere book – but of course, I will have work to do on it post-GA. So perhaps the SRM piece is gonna be pushed back to Q3/Q4. Maybe by then we will have a new version of SRM that’s compatiable with vSphere4. That would really encourage me to re-visit SRM big time! My other option is a book on VMware View3 – and looking out how EMC’s new VDI deployment plug-in fits into the equation.

Lastly, getting this kit has really inspired me. I was discussing with my partner (Carmel) my plan to do some formal training around the Clarrion & Celerra. I’ve always been a bit embarassed that my storage knowledge isn’t as good as I think it should be. Of course, there was little point in doing much about this – if I don’t have access to the kit. Now there’s no excuse!

So. That’s why I love EMC! What I’m hoping is that someone from Dell or HP is reading this – so in a few weeks I can say how much I love them!  My problem is I have 4xHP DL 385 G1s. They don’t have vLockstep/Virtualization Hardware Assist – and therefore I can’t do any VMware Fault Tolerence work. I’ve just got of the phone from Richard Garsthagen (here’s VMware’s Senior Evangelist for EMEA by the way). The VMware guys down in Frimely, UK are gonna help me out with remote access to some of their kit so I can write that chapter (I LOVE VMWARE TOO!). BUT, it would be SOOOOOOOOO nice to have that in my own rack on another “long term” lease. HINT HINT.

Below is me with my camcorder – its a 30 second video of 42 rack down at the colocation with the bright and shiny EMC boxes down at the bottom!

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