NOTE: The first couple of minutes of this weeks vendorwag suffers from a bit of Skype latency, where the odd word is lost here and there. However, the call quality does improve massively after the first 2 or 3 minutes. Stick with us!

This weeks vendorwag is with Gil Levonai of Zerto. In case you don’t know Zerto are company that provides replication of VMs for DR purposes – and they use a virtual appliance model to add a replication layer to virtualization – as well as automating the failover and failback for both test and real DR events. In case you haven’t figured it out yet the company name is a pun on the phrase “Zero RTO”…

Here’s Gil’s bio:
Gil Levonai is vice president of products for Zerto. He spearheads marketing and product management, supporting the corporate vision by leading the go-to-market strategy. With more than 20 years of experience in various technology management disciplines including marketing, product management, sales, business development and R&D, Gil most recently served as principal at Gil Levonai Strategic Marketing, a consulting firm specializing in high-tech marketing. He previously served as vice president of marketing and strategy at NextNine, a company providing service automation solutions to global enterprises.

Here’s my list of questions…

Q. I was quite struck by some “unique” features in Zerto that haven’t seen elsewhere. The one that really made me smile was the CDP/Journal rollback. Can you explain how this works and give us a quick demo???

Q. Replication in Zerto is “Async” but you also talk about it consistently replicating. I’m confused… I thought asynch meant every N minutes, so how can it be constantly replicating???

Q. There will be some who say that replication is now a commodity – given that many storage vendors now roll that into their products. How would react to such an assertion? Isn’t it really about automation, not replication???

Q. What controls are there if on bandwidth, latency – what happens if a link goes down or WAN link becomes unexpected saturated???

Q. I’m thinking of new future of storage – Cheap, commodity based storage for capacity with no fancy features – with a VA’s on top doing fancy things like backup, DR… Is that the future you see too???

Q. What improvements, enhancements are planned for Zerto? What are customers really asking to be improved or added?

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.

Was surprised to hear that the date for this years VMworld Europe event has changed. Back in San Francisco the boards were saying October 16-18th. The location remains the same – Barcelona – but the event is now due to happen the week before from the 9-11th October. So time to update your calender..

I first found this out from http://www.vmguru.nl – and I’m rather liking his photo!

OK. Its perhaps a bit early for the presidential elections – but it’s never too early to vote in Eric Siebert’s every popular popularity contest. If you vote for me, I promise to cry and thank my mom & dad…

Eric  has once again started a poll to ask people to vote for their favorite VMware & Virtualization blogs. On his vSphere-Land page you can see the results of the previous voting. This year Eric has added some extra categories for which you can vote.

This year the voting is sponsored by TrainSignal and you have chance to win copies of their vSphere5 and View training videos.

You can vote here: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/786135/Top-VMware-virtualization-blogs-2012

Eric suggest you use this criteria in your voting:
Longevity – Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
Length – It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
Frequency – Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
Quality – It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

At the moment I’m working through the typo corrections for the second pressing of the SRM 5.0 book. In the main these are little corrections in the text. But occasionally, I come across something a little bit more major. You would not believe how much work goes into the review process – but even the most rigorous process – its still possible for something to slip through the net. I guess its testament to how reading something on screen is never the same as reading in the printed hard-copy format.

There will be an official errata but in the interest in turning these around rapidly I wanted to blog about them here.

I intend to main this page as find errors or mistakes. If you spot any technical errors or mistakes like this – let me know and if I think they warrant it I will include them on this page…

iSCSI Chapters and Static Discovery
There’s a couple of chapters where I cover iSCSI in EMC Celerra, Dell Equallogic and HP P4000 – where I state that the iSCSI Software Initiator does not support “static discovery” of target. Actually, if you look into the static discovery tab after using a iSCSI SRA you will see entries populated there.

page 91 – At the Protected Site – (With thanks to Michael Armstrong)
This typo was found my Michael Armstrong. In it I refer to carrying at task out on a EMC Clarrion at the Protected Site. Step 1 however, erroneously says that “in my case, this called “New_Jersey_Cluster1″. That should, of course read “New_York_Cluster1″. As a consequence the graphic (Figure 4.22) is incorrect as it shows me selecting the “New Jersey” storage group in UniSphere, when it should have the “New York” storage group selected instead.

page 209 – vSphere Replication and IP Pools
In the beta programme the set-up of VR required the use of IP Pools. This was subsequently dropped in the release candidate and the GA. This reference slipped through the net. To be clear, VR does NOT require IP Pools.

page 218 – NFS and iSCSI
In the VR chapter I have a screen grab where a VM on local storage in the Protected Site being replicated to local storage in the Recovery Site. However in the text I say that one VM is on NFS storage, and the other is on iSCSI storage. That isn’t the case. It’s not a showstopper – if you remember VR does not care what the datastore type is…

page 228 – SRM Communication on port 80
My explanation of why the SRM installer uses Port 80 in the book isn’t a bad one. But after publication I found a better explanation which I blogged about recently. It’s largely of acedemic interest this one, but in the interests of being as technically accurate this better…

page 237 – Invalid Site name mentioned
This is a cosmetic error. Throughout the book I make reference to site of New York, New Jersey and later still Washington DC. For some bizarre reason I name check “Chicago” here. That should really read “New Jersey”.

One of my readers recently contacted me about how SRM communicates to vCenter both during an install, and then afterwards once the service is up and running. The odd thing is this… During the install the communication to vCenter appears to be non-secured on TCP port 80, but after the install is on the secured port of TCP 443… In the book I conjecture that some redirection takes place, its actually a little bit more sophisticated than that…

Here’s what the offical guide says: 

Port 80 is provided as the default to use for the initial connection to the remote site. After the initial HTTP connection is made, the two sites establish an SSL connection over port 80 to use for subsequent connections.

Duncan Epping on his Yellow Bricks site has this more revealing statement:

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/08/11/srm-faq/

Why is Port 80 used in the install but port 443 later? During install of SRM port 80 is specified and you cannot type in 443, but after the install is complete than SRM talks to VC on 443, so why is 80 specified in the install? Even though SRM uses SSL when it communicates to VC, it does not use port 443. SRM establishes a TCP connection to port 80, than uses an HTTP CONNECT request to establish a tunnel to the VC servers, then does an SSL handshake with the VC over that tunneled connection. The SRM installation enforces these semantics.

Thanks to Bas Vinken for bring these two bits of information to my attention. Quite why the communcation is this done this way isn’t really explained. But I guess it is a reminder that port numbers are some what arbitary, and they follow a convention of being associated with certain services – I guess you would calll them the “well-known ports”. But at the end of the day, there’s nothing hard coded about these ports and how they are used..

If first meet Ed Czerwin in the flesh last year at the Boston TechField Day. We bumped into each other again in VMworld, and I’ve been planning to have him on my show for a while. Ed is prolific blogger and is co-host of virtualization podcast vSoup.

If you want to follow Ed on Twitter then you can locate him here

We chat around a number of topics including:

• Is a multi hypervisor datacenter a real future option
• What is virtualization adoption in Asia pacific like? Where are they on their journey?
• Is vSphere5 is proving as popular as vSphere4?
• What’s your opinion on the whole VMTN Subscription Movement?

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

You might not know this but in VMware View 5.0 the screws have been tightened light bit more with regards to View Client and SSL certificates. Up until this point you could get away with using the bulti-in certificates generated by the installer. That’s no longer the case, because just as with web-browsers – the new clients all check to see if the certificate matches the name that your connecting with and whether or not the certificate is trusted.

Users can find these sort of pop-ups alarming, and you can guarantee a certain proportion of them will find up at the feet of the help desk people. In this article on techtarget’s site I take you though the process of requesting, importing and configuring SSL certificates for View 5.0.

Good news! The Toronto VMUG has its announced its date for its User Conferrence – it’s on the 7th Feb to be held at:

8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Hyatt Regency Toronto
370 King Street West,
Toronto, Ontario M5V 1J9

Map & Directions are here…

Agenda has yet to be set but I will be speaking – mostly a key note… Click at the big image above to register and keep an eye on the event as the agenda is worked on…

Today I received my first hard copy of the new SRM 5.0 book. Certainly nice to see it in the flesh, compared to having it on my IPAD on via the Kindle App. Along side the final book was stack of F&Gs… What’s F&Gs you ask? It standard for “Folded & Gathered Sheets”.

These are like little “pamplets” each one went put together as whole becomes a completed book during the binding process.

Publishers use F&Gs to allow the author to record any corrections wanted in the second printing of the book. The author (that’s me) marks his or her changes directly on the F&Gs and then sends them back to the publisher. I’ve got to return my F&Gs by the 14th Feb at the latest. [Yes, it seems odd to have chosen Valentine's Day as the cut off point] Of course this could be all done digitally but the publishers have found this hard-copy method is the most precise way of relaying corrections.

Anyway, if you spot any errors or typos in the book please feel free to send me them to me, and I will endeavor to include those in the F&Gs. You can send me your corrections by email to mikelaverickATrtfm-edDOTcoDOTuk or tweet them to me at @mike_laverick. Just give me a sample and page number and I will take a look.

One of my favourite musos is Jools Holland. He has a regular “New Years” show called the “Hootenanny” [Incidentally, its not live but recorded before New Year, and its become a thing a fun to spot continuity errors - such as people wishing each other happy new year... before 12 O'Clock has struck].

I was catching up on the show some days after the show. Everyone was great – he has the best guests. But this lady from the Netherlands really struck out. I think she has a very classy voice, and of course Jools Holland’s Big Band is a great accompaniment.

Sadly, the video won’t play embedded on my site – but it will take you to youtube to view it…

Another great track by her is “That Man” – which apparently is played a lot on Radio 2 – I should listen to that station more!

This song has kind 20s/30s retro feel about it which I really like… Makes a change from the X-Factor approach to music!