I want to take sometime out from book writing, to share my observations about VCE. The book I’m (re)writing is the SRM 1.0 book, it’s been updated to the new version SRM 4.0 which is compatible with vSphere4. So you know this time I’m doing more work to make the book more “storage neutral” friendly – by including the configuation and use of EMC Clariion “MirrorView” & Celerra “ReplicationV2″, NetApp’s “SnapMirror” as well as HP Lefthand Networks “Scheduled Remote Copy”. On top of that I’ve got third parties agreeing to write stuff on Dell Equillogics and HP EVA/XP.

After writing this blog-post I realised I’d been doing a lot of summarising and reporting. If like me you keep an eye on this stuff already, you might find the stuff below a bit tedious. If that’s the case skip to heading called “My Take on it all”… It’s there where I compare VMware to Justin Timberlake. But in nutshell. I think VCE is GOOD thing for the three companies and GOOD thing for customers too…

A couple of days ago there was a formal annoucement about the VCE Coalition. VCE stands for Virtual Compute Environment, and also by good grace to also include the letters of each member of the coalition – VMware, Cisco, EMC. Did you see what they did there? Clever that isn’t it?

It was interesting use of words “coalition”. It made me think of President Bush’s “Coalition of the Willing” which he used to describe the loose association of various countries who signed up for the war on terror! Anyway, despite those negative connotations there I do feel the word “coalition” is an interesting one. VCE is not a new company but collection of partners who are entering into an alliance for the great good… The question your probably ask is, yes – who is the great good?

Their customers?
Their shareholders?

Anyway, the announcement has stimulated some debate – some of it negative – and I would like to take this opportunity to the Angels Advocate in favour of VCE. If you interested in reading what other bloggers have said, there’s thing called google and RSS Feeds – but for the severely lazy here’s a round up of links:

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/11/03/a-few-quick-thoughts-on-the-vce-coalition-announcement/

http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/virtual-tech/my-thoughts-on-the-vce-announcement

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Cisco-NASDAQ-CSCO-1069957.html

[On this last link there are videos with John Cambers and Co telling you all about the idea of VCE…)

Of course by far the most complete round-up of the announcement comes for Chad Sakac of virtualgeek who is VP for EMC. He has 5 (yes 5!) blog posts – covering each of the major themes from the announcement:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/11/virtual-compute-environment-technology-innovations.html

In case all of this VCE stuff has you in a spin – here’s what they are saying in a nutshell (which I am shamelessly dumbing-down from the Chadmasters blog – in fact some of this is straight cut & paste job – like the best painters or musicians, the best bloggers just steal other people content!)

• Technology Innovations – Vblock Infrastructure Packages.  Tightly integrated standardized “building blocks”. These are pre-configure rack of UCS blades, Cisco Switches and EMC Storage – together with the VMware Software ready to go. Essentially, the package is another one of these “datacenter in a shipping container” concepts. There is three types (0,1,2) of vBlocks each progressive allowing for a great densities of VMs. The Type0 vBlock is for “small” customers to scale up to 800 VMs.

• Integrated Pre-Sales, Services and Support – Vblock Unified Customer Engagement.   Engage like we’re one company, get services like we’re one company, support that is exactly like we are one company.
• Solutions Venture and Investment – Acadia. A Cisco-EMC (and Intel) joint venture to build, operate, and transfer Vblock infrastructure to organizations. The alliance insists this isn’t a venture into becoming Cloud provider in the vCloud Express model. VCE appears to be pitched as a private cloud infrastructure. As Manjula Talreja, Cisco vice president of business development said,  Acadia’s mission, instead, is to “accelerate customers’ journey to the private cloud,”. In fact most of VMware’s vCloud Express partners, are already VCE customers. It sound like Acadia might run the vBlocks for customers – but also facilitate their transfer from being a managed service back to the customer – and possibly back to Acadia. Acadia’s remit can be summarised as BUILD; OPERATE; TRANSFER…..

  Acadia is new. Doesn’t many employees (130 initially according to Uncle Joe) and looking for someone to head up. So contact Chad if you looking for a new job.

• Partner Ecosystem Leverage – Vblock Partner Ecosystem. This will allow partners to re-sell vBlock solutions. Acadia won’t compete with partners (allegedly) but instead Acadia will offer services directly as well as through VCE partners. Some people might say, that’s already a conflict of interest – but if Acadia remains tight & small, then it won’t have the capacity to do much delivery on its own, and will have to enrol the capacity offered in the VCE channel…

So that’s VCE in nutshell. Now to where I really want to be – which is discussing the offering and quick assessment of its impact. Other peoples reaction tend to fall into the mix of the following:

• This IS revolution
• This is NOT a revolution – they have always been closely integrated
• Integration like this is only news if you NOT HP or IBM – who already are integrated…
• Could VMware be damaged by being “too closely” aligned to EMC/Cisco in this way?
• Is this away that all three companies can increase prices?
• It’s ok for greenfield locations that are new, but no good for existing customers…
• It it will great if the internal cloud really takes off…
• It’s back to an IBM view the world, one organization where you buy everything – like being a HP “House” or IBM “House” or a VCE “House”
• It’s all about vendor lock in?

My Take on it All

One thing I have noticed is my peers on the blogsphere appear to able to state some of the above even though logically its mutually exclusive. Wonky-logic is the staple diet of hastily written blog delivered minutes or hours after a web-ex session or webcast vendor annoucement. So you can’t in one breath question the negative impact of the announcement, and then next dismiss the announcement as “nothing new”.  Generally, reaction has been largely negative, raising more questions and anxieties than anything else. Of course, nothing sells news like a bit of negativity – and often the glass-half-empty view as regarded as an antidote to the glass-half-full world that vendors and their marketing wonks drown us in on daily basis. Occasionally, I would like to see some sensible non-polemic stuff that’s couched in the real world, rather than ill-thought venting?

So here’s my attempt. It seems the case that whether you like or not – we are creeping steadily away from a best-of-breeds approach to building out datacenters. Everyone yaks endless about the commoditization of IT – and it’s happening right before our eyes. Each of the major OEMs – HP, IBM, Dell have been for sometime junking their valued partner relationships in effort to seal their customers into a one-stop solution. Of course, IBM are probably the company that’s most famous/notorious for this approach. In recent years, HP have been steadily improving their HP ProCurve stuff to the degree that they no longer feel the need to promote/resell Cisco switching gear. To me the VCE announcement amounts to 4th OEM provider coming along to this party. So in short while you will be able to CHOOSE which OEM to shackle yourself too. This choice will be limited to the “Gang of Four”. Of course, if you want to cobble your own solution together you will still be able to by storage from NetApp, a switch from Cisco and a server from HP. Many people complain about this existing model because of vendor run-around. The whole point of the one-stop-shop approach is get round this situation.

Whether you like this isn’t really important – you don’t have a choice. As my friend Stu Radridge might say from vInternal’s “Tough Shit”. If you accept the rationale that our industry exist to make profits for their shareholders, and not as charity dedicated to customer service. So the only real consumer choice is that selecting one of these OEMs does allow you to potential move your VMs from an external to internal datacenter/cloud – and if you layer on top of this hardware, a virtualization layer like VMware’s – you should be able to move from one “block” provider to another.

It’s for this reason I don’t really buy the “vendor lock in” argument – there’s always been some kind of lock in. But I see it as GOOD thing that we have another OEM partnership that together with a virtualization layer – can help mitigate against that lock in worry. What would you prefer just three “block” providers or four?

Additionally, I also think that together CE (Cisco & EMC) have increasingly seen that the other OEMs are less inclined to deliver their technologies when the other OEMs have an equivalent system they could be touting instead. So if HP sold Catalyst AND ProCure – or if DELL sell both Clariion AND Equallogics – could you depend on HP or Dell to recommend the right solution, or the one that gets the sales rep the better commission…?  I imagine when Cisco and EMC saw this happen they thought it was now time to have new coalition or partnership – not with another OEM – but with each other. It seems to me that when companies such as Cisco and EMC enter into coalition with each other, it must be because they see more value in that relationship – than in previous coalition’s that have served their purpose.

Of course there will be some that will say that if the best-of-breed model hasn’t been buried once and for all. All that’s happened is the best of breeds (Cisco, EMC and VMware) have buddied up together. Recognising their SUM is greater than their collective parts….

Finally, VMware’s much vaunted independence – is it under threat? I don’t think so. I remember when EMC bought the majority of VMW stock in 2005. Many people said at the time that VMware would become a “creature” of Joe Tucci. There was much sackcloth wearing and ashes… But it didn’t seem to work out that way. For sometime VMware’s relationship with NetApp has been an equally good one, especially in the realm of VDI.

At the end of the day VMware’s job is to sell software licenses – and like good little ISV it will do ANYTHING to sell more licenses. Personally, I think VMware’s job is to be the Justin Timberlake of the IT industry. The new kid on the block (or should that be N’ Sync!?!?) who everyone wants to be seen with it latest video. So for some years VMware has been building partner relationship with everyone who counts (Intel, AMD, HP, IBM and so on) both on a technology front and channel-partner front. Those partners know how the game works – they want to be equally close to VMware because they know 9/10 that’s what the customer will be installing to their tin. It’s in the economic interest to show they “integrate” with VMware too!

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