Archive for November, 2010

MINOR ANNOUNCEMENT:

Before I introduce the vendorwag – just a quick note. For reasons beyond my control, I have a LOT more “vendorwags” than I have “chinwags”. Things are getting a bit silly because in some cases a recording is done with a vendor, and then it can take up 8 weeks before they get aired – simply because I have THAT many in the can. So for the next couple of weeks I’m going to be doing TWO vendorwags a week – and no chinwags – until I clear this backlog…

This weeks first vendorwag is with Andrew Barnes of Neverfail. I’ve been working with Neverfail in the shape of VMware’s vCenter Heartbeat for sometime, and went to so far to write a extended series of articles on the product. Of course, Neverfail as an availability and DR technology are about a lot more than just protecting VMware’s management service. And so my interest in them as company was spawned by a much general interest in the whole issue of availability. Wonderful though, VMware’s HA is – it only goes so far – and doesn’t (yet) go up the stack to protect services in the GoS.

Here’s a bit of background on Andrew:

Andrew is a technology evangelist and industry watcher who is old enough to remember most IT initiatives from the first time around! With close to 30 years in the industry he has seen many aspects of IT adoption and has a particular interest in how IT Infrastructures aid (or prevent) delivery of real world business value. He is currently Senior Vice President for Neverfail with responsibilities covering strategic direction, product marketing and messaging. He joined Neverfail in early 2007 and during that time has seen Neverfail grow by over 400%. Prior to that Andrew was Director of Marketing the KVS, the email archiving company which grew 10 fold ahead of its acquisition by Veritas (now Symantec).

Previous roles include various pre-sales, product marketing and product management with companies such as Sun, Platinum Technology and Ingres. Back in the mists of time he developed and deployed Oracle based applications delivering financial and customer management systems.

These are the questions we discussed:

Q. On our recent web-ex you said that “replication is a commodity”.  I was interested to know what was meant by that?

Q. I’ve worked a lot with vCHB recently – Can you explain how that relationship between Neverfail and VMware came about?

Q. How does that relationship work from QA perspective – Does Neverfail do the core development and testing against the latest version of vCenter – which is then validated by VMware?

Q. In vCHB, the “VMware Channel” is used for replication and heartbeat signals, and the Principal Public Network is used for inbound requests – does Neverfail plan to allow administrators to allow the Principal Public Network to take over the functions of the VMware Channel should it become unavailable?

Q. What are the challenges are there when compare a LAN based install of Neverfail compared to a WAN based configuration?

Q. You have a technology called Neverfail vAppHA which integrates with vSphere – many people might be unaware what this technology is and what it does – and how does it work?

Q. Can you tell me more about the P2V extender? Is it just another P2V tool?

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

Podcast Video Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week I received by email the results from the survey’s completed after my four (repeated) SRM sessions at this years VMworld San Francisco and Copenhagen events. As former instructor I’m used to being rated (and hated!) by students on a weekly basis. As instructor its the comments that really matter to you – rather than some kind of weighted numbering scheme. Comments say so much more than 4.9.

Also as instructor you learn to take criticism constructively, and also you learn how true it is -  that you can please some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time some of the people all of the time – but you can never please all of the people all of the time

[Note: As interesting side note. Lincoln never actually said the above, or even used the word "please". What he actually said was "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." I think that's very interesting that a politician would talk about fooling people!!!]

Anyway, in the spirit of openess I thought it would be interesting to make these publically available. They have been “depersonalized” by the VMworld organizers – so there’s no privacy issue here because what I see is all anonymous. The format of the email is difficult to reproduce here. So I took the comments and copied & pasted them – and also reproduced the stats as PDF to preserve the formatting.

I’m pretty pleased with the results, but being hyper-critical of myself – I did focus on the less flattering comments as well. Some are justified I feel, others less so. It might suprise you that all though I stood in front of folks for the better part of 17 years delivering presentations – these have been to relatively small groups of 10-12 who I build a rapport with over a number of days. Presenting to 250+ folks in a large conference venue is a whole other matter – and something I’ve only done 10-15 times in my entire career. So there’s lots to learn about connecting with a much bigger group. The other thing I have been thinking about doing is “presenter” training for my chinwag/vendorwag series. It’s occured to me that having a video podcast is not unlikely having your own TV show, and perhaps there’s something I could learn. I promise not to morph into Glenn Beck.

If you want the full stats here are the PDFs for San Francisco and Copenhagen.

If you have a VMworld Subscription you can watch my presentation here…

Here are the comments…

(more…)

TechTarget has recently published my very personal view of the VMworld event in Copenhagen. In the article I talk about the differences I saw between the San Francisco event, and Copenhagen. The rumour is that VMworld Europe will be in Copenhagen next year too. If it is then I will be really pleased. With luck I will get to Elsinore Castle, and deliver some of my favourite snipets from Shakespeare’s Hamlet [If you think I'm joking your in a for a surprise in 2011!]

Anyway, the article takes in a review of the event from both an speaker, attendee and exhibitor perspective. But rapidly moves on to cover VMworld from own very personal perspective. For me these events are so much more than the breakouts and labs – valuable those are… The real value for me is the people I meet either for the first time or in reenforcing good relationships that have been there for some years. VMworld gives me the chance to meet those folks in the flesh twice year. Despite our ever connected world, there’s something about being there face-to-face with people that cannot be matched.

Read on McDuff…

MINOR ANNOUNCEMENT:

Before I introduce the vendorwag – just a quick note. For reasons beyond my control, I have a LOT more “vendorwags” than I have “chinwags”. Things are getting a bit silly because in some cases a recording is done with a vendor, and then it can take up 8 weeks before they get aired – simply because I have THAT many in the can. So for the next couple of weeks I’m going to be doing TWO vendorwags a week – and no chinwags – until I clear this backlog…

In this weeks second vendorwag I interview Karl Robinson of StratoGen. StratoGen are UK based hosting provider – and I wanted to talk to them about providing VMs as a service. It’s part of my wider project this quarter to get my inside this whole “cloud” thing… This is Karl’s bio below…

Karl is an experienced sales professional who has spent over 10 years in the IT & Internet Industry, specialising in hosting and hosted services. Prior to founding StratoGen Karl co-founded Cloud Data, another provider of hosted services, at the same time as heading up the sales operation of UK based SAAS provider In-Tuition Networks. As Managing Director of Mistral Internet Group Limited, a UK business Internet Service Provider he lead the growth of the business from £2m to £21m in a 7 year period. This growth was recognised in the Sunday Times Techtrack 100 where Mistral was listed as one of the UK’s fastest growing technology companies for 4 out of 5 consecutive years. Karl was responsible for driving the organic growth of the business through over 20 sales staff, plus he was instrumental in the acquisition and integration of 9 other businesses before ultimately being involved in the disposal of Mistral to Kingston Communications. Mistral was sold to Kingston Communications in January 2007 and Karl stayed on as Sales Director of the newly formed Internet and Hosting Services division.

When not working, Karl can usually be found riding, racing or tinkering with motorbikes, and spending time with his wife & children.

This recording was made a couple of weeks ago – prior to the GA of vCloud Director – so you might hear us talking about when it get released! The questions I asked Karl were:

Q. Would you consider what StratoGen does as “cloud” offering, or merely an extension of conventional hosting?

Q. Your organization use Resource Pools as unit of consumption – what made you select this model?

Q. Who would say is the main customer, and what do they get from the offering

Q. Do you customers come and do site visits – to confirm your infrastructure is fit for use?

Q. Have you considered offering your service as DR solution, perhaps including SRM?

Q. What do you make of VMware recent move to per-VM licensing for customers?

Q. Currently, you give folks direct access to vCenter – do you think you might move to vCSD when it become available…

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

Podcast Video Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

MINOR ANNOUNCEMENT:

Before I introduce the vendorwag – just a quick note. For reasons beyond my control, I have a LOT more “vendorwags” than I have “chinwags”. Things are getting a bit silly because in some cases a recording is done with a vendor, and then it can take up 8 weeks before they get aired – simply because I have THAT many in the can. So for the next couple of weeks I’m going to be doing TWO vendorwags a week – and no chinwags – until I clear this backlog…

This was a funny one. When I first approached Unidesk, the lady there said to me – I know who should speak to – let me introduce your to Ron Oglesby. Well, as you probably know me and Ron go back a bit. To the days when he, Scott Herold and Co were one of the most active folks on the VMware VMTN Forums. I partnered with Scott & Ron for the Vi3 book, and knew I could have confidence in them as team – because they had more than delivered on the ESX 2 Advanced Technical Design Guide.

Of course time and tide wait for no man, and we have all moved about in that time – with Scott now at Quest Software, and Ron at Unidesk. As you probably have gathered I’m a somewhat of a polymath. And along side all my other interests I have a strong passion for VDI, mainly because it takes me back to a time when I was a “Citrix Guy” before I became a “VMware Guy”. You’d be surprised how many people like Ron & me there are – former Citrix folks who crossed over to virtualization around 2003/4. We know a good thing when we see it.

Of course, you should be familiar with Ronno. But if you not here’s a bit of his back story:

Ron Oglesby educates enterprise IT organizations and solution providers on how to reduce the costs of desktop management and accelerate application delivery through successful virtualization deployments. His years of desktop experience as a Citrix Technology Professional (CTP), extensive knowledge of Microsoft and VMware virtualization technologies, and strong rapport with IT professionals equip him to shape implementation strategies for Unidesk customers and the Unidesk product roadmap.

Before joining Unidesk, Ron was the Practice Executive for Virtualization Services at Dell where he developed methodologies that helped Dell’s strategic customers implement their virtualization and consolidation initiatives. Prior to Dell, Ron was the Director of x86 and Virtualization Services at GlassHouse Technologies, one of the world’s largest independent data center consulting and services companies, where he oversaw North American consulting operations and directed a large team of engineers on numerous enterprise virtualization projects. Ron joined GlassHouse through its acquisition of RapidApp, where, as CTO and Senior Architect, he managed the professional services business and developed unique intellectual property for managing virtualization implementations.

Ron’s industry credentials also include:

• Best-selling author of advanced technical design guides for VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware ESX Server, and Terminal Services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
• Frequent speaker at industry events, including BriForum, Citrix Synergy, iForum, VMworld, and VMware User Groups (VMUGs).
• Recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award, given to inspiring individuals for representing the voice of thousands in the community through independent feedback, and for helping customers maximize the potential of their software.

Q. Briefly explain in a nutshell what is Unidesk and how it works

Q. Unidesk is able to create distinct “layers” of OS/Apps/Personalization. How are those layers actually created?

Q. How well does Unidesk scale? What’s the largest installation you have running in production currently – can you share the specs… (Opportunity to state how you scale out over scale up, How you sit in the I/O stack so will benefit from any improvements in ESX/Array such as VAAI, and to say how you want to do more scale-up testing)

Q. Given a choice between using your own “layer or container” for applications – or using ThinApp or App-V – why would recommend your own method other these application packagers – when would it better to use ThinApp or App-V…?

Q. Unidesk seems very much focused on persistent desktops both from a software and licensing perspective – where users return each day to the same desktop – where are you with non-persistent desktop which offer a more “concurrency model”?

Q. It seems you have the whole desktop stack stitched up – Windows/App/Personalization – the only thing you lack is broker. Much of the work done say by VMware Linked Clones – becomes irrelevant once I have Unidesk – so the only missing piece of the puzzle is the actually SSL connection. Do you have any plans to develop a broker of your own – say based on native RDP with enhancements for graphics along the lines of Wyse TSX and Quest EOP?

Q. How does the pricing work out comparatively between using View+View Composer Vs View+Unidesk?

Q. Where are the single-points of failure in Unidesk? Are they serious? What can I do to mitigate against them?

Q. What is the future direction of the Unidesk Product (Bridgehead servers for Branch/Remote Offices)

As ever if you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the MP3 podcast via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. Alternatively, if you would prefer the videos on your iPAD/iPOD/iPhone – you subscribe to the video version of the Chinwags there (beware they are big!). If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link

Podcast Video Play Now | Play in Popup | Download