Virtu-al has put together an agenda for an unoffical online VMware User Group. Come and join us. I’ve signed up to attend – although it might be tricky in reality as I will be in cabin in the mountains of North Carolina at the time!
http://www.virtu-al.net/2009/05/13/unofficial-online-vmware-user-group/
One of my sponsors, Rove is hosting a webinar to demo the our VMware plug-in with support for the Virtual Infrastructure. As you know, Mobile Admin allows IT administrators to manage their IT infrastructures, including the VM Center from a smartphone. Judging by the reviews of many of there customers, and the timeliness of the topic, I think this webinar would be of interest to many VMware Admin
Well, I’m in Oslo this week in Norway. My first time here – but I have been to Scandanavian countries before. The journey was utter nightmare. So I thought I would use my blog to blow off some steam. It all went Pete Tong (slang for wrong…) when my flight was delayed leaving Birmingham to Brussels. I missed my connection. After some discussion with the landing staff. I ended up on a flight to Hamburg, Germany. However, that flight was delayed also… I nearly missed the connecting flight to Oslo.
At Brussels the staff tried to convince me that my luggage would be in Oslo when I arrived. That’s odd I said, if my luggage arrives before me – perhaps I should have bought a bigger bag and just gone in with it to the hold. So it came it as no suprise to find that my luggage wasn’t there. It arrives at at the airport at 10pm (its 8pm now). I decided I had enough and while it was still light I thought I’d get on the bus and find my hotel. Unfortunately, Brussels Airline refused to send my luggage on at 10pm. They don’t do night deliveries apparently – so it will be with me tommorow morning at 9am. Too late for me unfortunately. Anyway, the nice lady kindly gave me a “survival bag” which they hand to individuals in my predicament. It contains:
1. One White T
2. One razor blade
3. Small tube of foam
4. Toothbrush and mini-toothpaste
5. Hairbrush
6. Comb
7. Body lotion and Shower Gel
Anyway, I’m trying to not to let this experience tarnish my view of Norway. It looks very clean and green. I especially appreciated the crinkley bits by Slartybartfarst. 
Map blow was taken with multi-map and my postal code. The red circle is where I live, Birmingham is where I flew from. I left my house at 8am and arrived at my hotel about 8.30….
Well, its been a while since I gave you juicy bit of music to tune into. I first came across Imelda May and her band on Jools Holland’s “Later”. I was so impressed that the next day I bought the album on iToons. Yes, I mean I bought a legit piece of music, how crazy is that? [Please don't send the police round...]
Anyway, this year I spotted they were playing live in Nottingham which about 40 mins from where I now live so me and Carmel (my partner) decided to check them out. They didn’t disappoint. Jools Holland plays on a couple of tracks, and he’s on the studio record to.
Oh, I should say they have a kinda rockabilly sound to them – but coolness like some of the female singers of the 60′s. Oh, and she’s Irish hence the Irish drum… If you want a recommendation. Jeff Beck the legendary guitarist says he’s there to here them play!
Well, I’m having a quick look thru my RSS feeds whilst my partner gets ready to go out and sync up my iPOD to test a new video.
I notice the Microsoft blog had new post here:
Claiming that VMware creates FUD. Mmm… The MS virtualization blog says other organization like VMware are creating FUD. Mmm, sounds like the pot calling the kettle black to me.
You know when people are NOT winning the argument. They go negative. That’s something I learned in the last couple of days. So for what’s worth. Hyper-V is wonderful product – for what it does. It has it place, but sadly not in my rack. But I am geniunely pleased that MS has adopted virtualization as that will only accelarate wide-spread adoption and acceptance.
So here’s what I liked to see. For VMware and MS to bury the hatchet (hopefully not in each other heads). For neither company to use youtube.com to spread a negative message – but a positive message about their respective products that educate people rather using youtube a viral marketing platform - and leave the debate to people who are independent. Having seen Gordon Brown (our Prime Minister) gurning like an idiot really youtube.com should be left to teenagers spreading the musical prowess…
THis week I was done in Brentwood, London at EMC location there. I rather cheekily invited myself along by approaching Chad Sakac. It’s an internal event which is meant to be purely for EMC employees, but I managed to “gate crash” the party and sit in.
Anyway, it was a great two days and super-intensive – and I learn a truck load of really interesting stuff – so of which is in the realms of NDA and competitively sensitive. So for me to continue I’m going to have to be very careful to make sure I stay on the right side of Chad & Co. Firstly, I had no idea of the breadth of EMC integration with EMC, and with EMC being such a big company that no suprise that I was so ignorant. In fact it such a big company that I imagine even employees have a challenges in keeping up to date with everything the organization is doing. To be honest I had EMC tagged as a “storage” company, specifically fibre-channel. That’s a wildly held perception that’s held by most folks in IT as well I guess, so I feel comfortable admitting my ignorance. I was particular impressed by the Replication Manager (RM) and backup technologies (Avarmar). I was also impressed with how pro-NAS and pro-ISCSI EMC are with the Celerra technologies. In fact I recently was given access to both Clarrion/Celerra system in my labs – and of course, I was totally fixated by the fact I had a decent fibre-channel infrastructure (because for YEARS, I’ve lusted after one). Now I’m beginning to realise how important having access to product quality NAS/iSCSI is going to be to me. It because very few vendors are serious about supporting any protocol and any access mechnecism – and there are cases were NAS outshines block storage (such as in VDI environment) and there cases were block storage will outshine NAS when its coupled with VMware VMFS file system.
I got a lot of tips and tricks from Chad over the two days as well. Generally, Chad has got much better access to the developers behind VMware vSphere4 product than I do (or it least it feels that way sometimes!). So he can go directly to people who code stuff, and ask how does this work and why did you do it that way. So he did some really excellent myth busting. The biggest one for me is that VMFS extents are GOOD. That improve performance in most cases, and the Community should completely reconsider their position on them. I include myself on this. It was understanding that VMFS extents were filled serially. That is to say if you had 10 LUNs in VMFS extent – vmkernel would fill LUN1 first, then LUN2 and so on – that lost of any LUN would result in loss of the extent and as consequence data. NONE OF THAT IS TRUE. Here’s the annoying thing – to some degree VMware’s own documentation and courseware has been restating these myths for sometime. It case of where the technology has changed but the documentation has lagged behind. Folks like me have read the offical docs, and repeat this warning as gospel when in fact its been wrong. I’m quite embarrased by that personally – in way I’ve been part of the process of promoting and dessiminating incorrect information. Anyway, it was all done in good faith. Blah Blah Blah…. Anyway, he’s what happens. In 10 LUN extent files are created randomly. Totally randomly. Therefore the I/O of these VMs is distributed across the LUNs. That would the smart thing to do wouldn’t it? I should have really questioned the offical docs because I’m used to VMware doing smart things, not dumb ones.
The other thing I learn this week about was all the new plug-ins to VirtualCenter from EMC. To tell you the truth I already knew these were about I just hand got round to blogging about them. Been way to busy on this book on vSphere4. There plug-ins for vCenter which allows for Celerra to automate the failback process (something I did blog about in March). There’s also a plug-in for Celerra to automate the mass deployment of VMs for a VDI project. There’s also a new Storage View plug-in which nits all the VMFS, LUNs, Paths and so on into one handy location in VC. If you an EMC customer you should be looking at these plug-ins today.
AND Finally, I think I understand why vSphere4 has this tag of the “Virtual DataCenter Operating System” tag. And, (gasp) beginning to understand the whole cloud thing. This came from having the advantages of the VCE (VMware,Cisco,EMC) alliance explained, and also the Cisco Unified Computing system explained. As you should know already, Cisco have entered the Blade and HBA market. The blades have the lastest intel processors, truck loads of memory and either 2x10G or 4x10G ports on them. These ports can be used for either storage or conventional network traffic. I will say that again. That’s one NETWORK for both storage and conventional network traffic – with a fraction of the cabling you would normally require. Say goodbye to the jungle of cables you have the back of a typical rack at the moment. They massive reduce and simplify the cabling required at the back of the system – and rather than being managed on an enclosure-by-enclosure basis – you can manage the blade, the network and storage from one management UI.
Now where does VMware fit into this? Well, firstly it’s really on VMware that can utilize this quantity of hardware properly because they work so closely with Cisco and EMC (no suprise there I guess!). We now have a new generation of hardware which is ultradense – squeezing VERY large amounts of CPU/Memory/Connectivity into a very small space. It’s really only ESX that can then make this hardware usable in a meaningful way to the average guy in a server room. People achieved this consolidation with software so far (VMware), now the hardware vendors have caught up – by consolidating and simplifying the hardware.
STOP!
I know what you thinking. Mike, this all marketing guff – and they are just putting the word “virtualization” in there to make you think something old is new.
WRONG!
I pride myself on being on being a total cycnic and skeptic when it comes to all that stuff. I think the problem for us, is this. ALL the vendors are going to say our hardware is designed for virtualization. The claim is easier to make than it is too prove unfortunately.
Secondly, if all this change scares the bejesus out of you then fine. It does me. The good thing is that its going to take some time for this new paradigm to get of the ground. Time means you will have plenty of time to learn about it. VCE represents a huge investment by the 3 companies in real “blue sky” thinking – so they ploughing the R&D money into the datacenter of the future. Now, that doesn’t mean its so faraway you don’t have to think about it – just need to be aware its coming, and not to be scared of it. That fast, better and more importantly hardware that ingrates tightly to VMware ESX and vCenter is GOOD THING…
Thirdly, the cloud. Right I get it. This is what the cloud is about. Have you noticed that in this blog post I’ve mentioned the word “Microsoft” one little bit. Where does MS fit in to this model above – because it does. It’s this wee tiny thing called the “Guest Operating System” that runs inside a VM inside this MUCH BIGGER system called VMware running on hardware which is either Cisco UCS or whatever systems you have selected as a competitor. The storage backend could be EMC or could be someone else. The important thing for me – is while the network/blade vendor could change (Cisco, HP, IBM) and the storage vendors could change (EMC/HP/NetApp). What remains is VMware. And without VMware in place this new hardware architecture doesn’t nit together. Forgot about the great and good trying to define standards (rather like a bunch of “Central Committee” in some communist planned economy) which are outmode before they are even delivered. What will drive standards (as ever) are companies like Intel, Cisco, EMC and VMware (filthy capitalist innovators and entrprenuers) working together to make sure their R&D is recognised as a standard. In other words the priopriety becomes an industry standard, and becomes a vendor neutral standard.
So why call this a cloud. Here’s why – Microsoft doesn’t know what to do with a cloud. It doesn’t really know what one is (because no-one really, really does at the moment) and Microsoft doesn’t have the depth of integration and co-operatating that VMware has with Intel, Cisco, EMC and the other big players. Because you see Windows is just a guest operating system which wasn’t designed for these macro-econmonies of scale workloads. OR, put more cycnically. If VMware talks clouds, that wrong foots Microsoft. Microsoft wants to talks about hypervisors and management tools (that’s so circa 2000′s) what VMware wants to do is talk about clouds (that’s so 2010-2020).
Do you see? Clouds is strategy designed to wrong foot Microsoft. You can see this just like virtualization in this decade. It took Microsoft YEARS to catch-up with virtualization which they first initially poo-poo’d – and then came out which such utter bollocks like “you don’t need VMotion” (whilst they now fumble clumsy to promote live migrate in R2 of HyperV). By the time Microsoft wakes up and smells the bacon – VMware will be the defacto standard in very very large high-density datacenters (aka the cloud).
So if you like dismiss the cloud as “marketing”. But remember this – without a good marketing strategy Microsoft WOULD WIN. In other words with out good marketing stretgey the best product (VMware) would be destroyed by sub-standard products and technologies (Microsoft) simply by marketing alone. We all know we have seen this before with other market leaders.
So what’s the future of MS if this happens. Much reduced. A significant player in the market just like IBM are now. Because the app that runs in the guest operating system inside the VM is still what the end-user connects to. But that such a smaller piece of the big pictures, a much smaller piece of the pie.
Now I undestand why the CEO of VMware is an ex-Microsoft guy who ran a cloud computing start-up. Only someone like would understand how to beat Microsoft at the OWN game. Get Microsoft on ground where there marketing and sales reps feel uncomfortable on, and they will squirm.
Would you like the SRM book on Kindle. Well, if you do you can vote here:
I was suprised to discover today that my SRM book is listed on Amazon. I never asked them too, and I never applied for an ISBN number so that LULU could list it on Amazon.
Anyway, I’m not complaining – especially for making no effort!
José María González y Mike Laverick, experto en Virtualización y co-autor de otros libros como VMware Infrastructure 3: Guía avanzada de diseño técnico y Guía de operaciones de avanzada, se enorgullecen en presentar el primer libro en español sobre VMware Site Recovery Manager.
Esta es una traducción y actualización a la versión 1.0.1 de la publicación de Mike; Administrating Site Recovery Manager 1.0, y dará paso a la publicación de José María de su próximo libro sobre virtualización. (Para registrar su interés en el próximo libro sobre Virtualización de Jose Maria Gonzalez, por favor envíe sus datos a José María González en info@JmGVirtualConsulting.com)
Para ver más detalles sobre el primer libro en español de VMware Site Recovery Manager,por favor haga clic aquí
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