Archive for February, 2011

This weeks chinwag is with Thomas Bryant. Thomas has been around in the virtualization space for quite sometime, and we first met in those early days on the VMTN Communities. You might know Thomas from his handle Kix1979 – which he used on the forums. Thomas works for Quest – but prior to that he was at VizionCore (which was acquired by Quest sometime ago), and before that with the Chicago based consultancy firm RapidApp (formerly Glasshouse). Anyway, in our chat we talk about the cloud – because that’s an arena that Thomas is increasingly focused upon.

Sadly, Skype wasn’t up to doing voice & video on the day we recorded – so we had turn the cams off – to free up bandwidth to make the voice said reliable. So this week’s chinwag is audio only…

If you want to follow Thomas he’s on Twitter

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Well, I think the blogpost title kind of says it all. As of today my View 4.5 Guide is now completely free to download.

Why I have a decided to this. Well, for a couple of reasons.

1. View 4.6 was released today – introducing new functionality. In particular the Security Server is now compatible with PCoIP. It’s always been my policy that as new version comes out. I either write an update – or I make the previous edition free – this was the case with the SRM 1.0 and 4.0 books. If you want to learn about 4.6 new functionality watch this video below its great!

VMware View 4.6 PCoIP Remote Access from Mark Benson on Vimeo.

2. It unlikely I will have time to finish the View 4.5 book, or indeed update it so it covers the new features of View 4.6. I wasn’t made privy to the new features of the 4.6 release or indeed have early access to the code. My focus for the next couple of quarters is in writing 3rd edition of my SRM book. The bottom-line is I haven’t the hours in the day to write for TechTarget and write two books at the same time – and do the chinwag, vendorwags, speak at UGs… The list goes on…

3. This week I discovered the PDF version of my book had gone on to a dubious website. As you might know – the $10 I was collecting for the View 4.5 Guide was going to UNICEF. Now the book has leaked out in this way, it seems likely that people will get hold of copy of the View 4.5 guide without that charitable donation being made. So as away of heading those people off at the pass, I thought I would release it for free today.

Erm… and that’s about the size of it. If someone out there feels they would like to take up the baton, and take my content – and complete and update it to View 4.6 I would be interested. We would then re-release the guide for free on RTFM, and I would happily share the credit with the individual concerned. Of course my name would be in super-huge letters, and your name would appear in Font size 8. [JOKE]

The guide is still available to buy in hard-copy format with no royalties attached, and PDF version up there is free download as well. You can of course download the guide directly from my site as of today. If you a blogger – please point to this page – as it all counts against my hits.

Click at the pic to download:

Look this is a VERY lengthy article. At nearly 8K words, its not really a blogpost. As such I thought folks might also want this in a PDF format offline so they can read it at their leisure.

A couple of weeks ago it was my good fortune to attend a new class on Microsoft Desktop and Application virtualization. If you’re interested the course is 10324A – Implementing and Managing Desktop Virtualization, and covers some of technologies in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack or MDOP. The MDOP is available to those who have a Volume License agreement and who have purchased a Software Assurance (SA) with Microsoft. The MDOP is really bundling of related technologies into a single SKU and includes the following tools

• Application Virtualization (App-V)
• Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V)
• Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM)
• Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT)
• Desktop Error Monitoring (DEM)
• Asset Inventory Service (AIS)

Whilst the course mentioned all the of the tools its fair to say that main emphasis was on MED-V and App-V from the MDOP, but also adds modules about “User State Virtualization” (aka Profiles and Group Policies) and also covers how to setup and configure Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Services (RDS) to allow end-users to access a shared desktop on what we once called “Terminal Services” as well as accessing a virtual desktop (VDI) environment. It was with some irony that I found the hosted-VDI approach put to the end of the course. It would be tempting to interpret this as Microsoft “downgrading” the significance of virtual desktops running on a datacenter hypervisor. The reality is that its position in the course owed more to its dependencies on the RDS components that must be configured first. It’s also not unusual for vendors to spend more time on their strongest technologies rather than their weakest – in an effort to show their best side to the customer.

The course did involve quite a bit of installing stuff only to use snapshots on HyperV to revert those VMs back into a clean state. I understand the reason for this is to allow each part of the course stand independently from each other – to allow it to be customized to the customers needs. Personally, as a former instructor I prefer the style of course where over the week you build up a solution piece by piece until you are left with all the puzzles in place. So to some degree the course was a missed opportunity to see AppV, RDS, VDI, HyperV all working in harmony to produce a desktop environment.

With that said, as an overview of what Microsoft is doing in this space it was an excellent course, and it was much quicker to spend time on a training course – than it would be sat in my lab environment with no instructor to interrogate. The course has a very wide view of VDI – so took in the use of running virtual machine on end-users desktop PCs in the form of XP Mode and MED-V, as well as looking at more the “hosted” environment where end-users get their desktop from a centralized bank of servers. So what I want to do is take each technology in turn, and give you my personal take on the product starting with virtual PC and XP Mode.

It’s not my intention to do any detailed “competitive analysis” between Microsoft and the other vendors. That’s the subject for a different article. I want to assess the technologies on their own merits, whilst at the same time remembering that there is more than one ISV in the world. If you are looking for a more competitive analysis approach I would heartily recommend reading the virtualfuture.info “smack down” papers which stop short of “bake offs” from one vendor to another, but do have a handy matrix which allows you to compare and contrast the features in a matrix – its particularly strong on application virtualization.

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Just a few short weeks ago Dell launch their Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. I was fortunate recently to be given a guided tour of it’s capabilities, and to discuss with Dell their future plans. I was even lucky enough to be offered remote access to pre-configured environment – that was handy because I don’t run Dell servers in my lab environment, although I recently took on loan two Dell Equallogic’s arrays as part of my ramping up ready to write the next thrilling installment on VMware’s Site Recovery Manager. For now it’s a bit make do and mend with a couple of antiquated HP Proliants that went out of warranty some years ago!  So it certainly was very useful to have one-to-one session with the guys from Dell – because there’s nothing like seeing the technology in action as opposed to steam of endless PowerPoints!

Before I get into features and functionality, lets talk about price and terminology. That’s usually the last thing on my agenda – but I feel there might be chance to clear up a misconception. When in the VMware community we use the word “plug-in” we very often think of some teeny-tiny piece of software that extends the functionality of vCenter by adding a little option here and there. Often these teeny-tiny bits of software are free, and written by enthusiasts trying to make a name for them selves in the vCommunity.  When vendors write these sort of plug-ins often times they are treated like “Easter Eggs” compared to the main course, and a way of ticking the box that says “We integrate with VMware”.

When tweeted I was just about go on the call with Dell, one of my followers tweeted back “Ask them why it isn’t free!” So I was forewarned to raise this on the call, but as the session went on I began to realize how the term “plug-in” is somewhat out of place in this case. The Dell Management Plug-in is so much more than just some teeny-tiny plug-in, and so long as Dell remain committed to it as strategy then I can see how in the long-term vCenter will be the central point from which you manage your VMware, and your Dell assets. It’s precisely this direction that Dell are espousing, so there’s more to this management lark then adding a “connect via RDP” to the VM menu in vCenter.

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This week’s vendorwag is with Rodrigo Flores, founder of newScale. You can follow Rodrigo on Twitter from here.

newScale are in the cloud automation space, which has been an on-off theme for some months here on RTFM. It’s part of the process of self-education I’m going through – while I think about the cloud and what it may or may not be. I must say I had a bit of epiphany whilst talking with Rodrigo, especially when Rodrigo started to talk about the role of a self-service portal and service catalog in the cloud.

Here’s a bit about Rodrigo’s background:
Rodrigo Flores is the founder and chief technology officer of newScale, Inc. At newScale he founded the service catalog industry by introducing the first software products to design, model, catalog and order IT services. newScale is today recognized as the leader and pioneer in the self-service, service catalog, and lifecycle management market for enterprise IT and private / hybrid cloud computing. Rodrigo brings 21 years of experience in software and product development to newScale. Rodrigo co-authored the book “Defining IT Success through the Service Catalog”. Last fall, newScale won “Best of VMworld” in the category of private cloud computing.

I asked Rodrigo a number of questions – some of them just about cloud generally, and others about newScale technology specifically. Here’s the list of my questions:

Q. Do you think the days of people running their own dev / test lab environments is dead, when folks can spin up development VMs on a public cloud like Amazon?

Q. Self-service can be scary for some organizations – they are afraid that once they expose resources through self-service, IT will lose control. Self-service is a key tenant for newScale and cloud computing in general, so how does your system account for this?

Q. Some cloud providers built their own self-service portal from scratch, using their own engineers and existing tools. Do you see this trend continuing for cloud service providers? Will this work for internal IT shops?

Q. Would you say newScale competes or complements with VMware’s vCloud Director – how does it complement?

Q. Will cloud sprawl become a problem just like VM sprawl and server sprawl has been?  How can you keep this in check?

Q. How do we put a price on a VM within the newScale system? How does newScale support chargeback and billing users by their usage?

Q. Tell me more about the new portal that newScale recently announced – what’s new about this? What future product functionality do you see the product having?

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

If you want to see the video in hi-resolution and full density – you can open it here.

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I’ve done two articles for TechTarget that talk about VMware licensing. I think its a urban myth that VMware is an expensive option for SMB/SMEs. There’s been a lot of work in recent years by VMware to make it easier to consume the vSphere4 product, and last year they even altered the feature matrix of the Essentials Plus to allow SMB/SME customers to access features like vMotion and HA…

Read on McDuff – Part One is out now, as is Part Two

I’m pleased to help promote the next Scottish VMUG event which is Edinburgh. Their sponsor this time around is Dell who will be presenting. VMware will be their showing their vShield’s technology (tip: ask them about VMotion of the vShield appliance…]  – and then there’s going to be two break-out sessions… one on “Virtualise Tier1 SQL” (Rod Hope) and the other on Dell AIM / vCenter Plugin (Rodger McArthur).

To register your interest click here!

This weeks chinwag is my buddy across the pond, Raymond Overman. I first met Ray at the Charlotte, North Carolina User Summit – where he cornered me on some questions about vSphere4 (just before it was released) and what it was going to do for the smaller SMB/SME environments. I found myself back in North Carolina the year later and we hooked up again – and discovered a shared interest in music and blues. Turns out Raymond is handy with wood as he is with IT, and in his spare time he makes these beautiful bowls, and also an instrument he calls the “Blues Bowl”. Anyway, this year Raymond was in the UK and we managed to hook up on my side of the pond – so I could pick up my blues bowls, have a beer, and good old chinwag about life, IT and the pursuit of happiness generally.

Raymond has a blog where he documents he’s travels in virtualization and IT generally called – http://www.resynthesis.com/

Anyway, Raymond took a whole series of questions from me – each on the SMB take on virtualization – and we discussed some the challenges of implementing VMware in small environment.

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

BriForum Europe, taking place 10-11 May at the home stadium of the Chelsea Football Club in London, is the most advanced, technical, hands-on desktop and application virtualisation event. Top-notch industry experts led by Brian Madden, as well as leading solution providers, and hundreds of your peers from across the globe will converge to share the latest tips, tricks and verified techniques around this constantly evolving technology. Walk away being able to do your job better through improved management, lower costs, and ensuring all desktops/laptops are secure and compliant.

Register by this Friday, 4 February and save 200 GBP off your admission fee!
http://briforum.com/Europe/index.html?Offer=BFErtfmpromo