When it comes to integration, EMC is at the top of the list. Thats not just according to me. Wikibon did an independent study, which you can read here. Or you can just look at this picture…. But this is a short post. That is all…
VMworld 2011 Session Info
August 23rd, 2011 by Joe Adams No comments »There is a HUGE session catalog from VMware this year. With so many great sessions to attend, you will want to make sure that you attend ones that pertain to your job or career. There are a few sessions that I would like to highlight that I will be attending, and may make sense for you as well.
Also, we have a complete guide to the best sessions that we think will be of benefit to you as a customer. They are not just EMC sessions, but just really good information that you can use in your life as a customer. Oh, and thanks for being one. You can find that here: VMworld 2011 Suggested Sessions
These are the sessions that I have signed up for. My schedule is packed for the whole week, so I am just hitting the highlights.
Monday 8:00am – vSphere Clustering Q&A VSP1982 - This session will be led by two of VMwares Architects and will include topics around HA, DRS, and Storage DRS. This is an opportunity to really hear how the experts recommend that you design your environment, and get your questions and concerns answered. I always love the sessions where there isn’t a power point, just straight tech talk.
Monday 8:30am – EMC IT: How we Accelerate our Journey to the cloud SPO3978 – Now I wont be in this session, because I have heard this presentation before and it is phenomenal. However, I would encourage you to attend to see how our internal folks at EMC take us to the cloud. You may have heard the vSpec organization talk about the JTPC, but its really good to see how we eat our own dogfood. We dont just talk about it, we really do it.
Monday 9:30am - Automated Infrastructure and Operations Management with vCenter Ops CIM2285 – I am looking forward to this session to give a better understanding of what will benefit my customers when it comes to automating some of the mundane everyday tasks of a VMware admin.
Monday 1:00pm – Modernize the Desktop for Better Patient Care EUC1656 – VDI in hospitals is becoming a very hot topic these days. I have tons of customers that are asking about VDI and how they can improve there experience when doctors and nurses roam from room to room. This session will give a customer perspective on how they did it, and what worked for them.
Tuesday 10:00am – Accelerate the Journey to Your Cloud SUP1006 – Our always colorful President and COO Pat Gelsinger will be talking about these disruptive technologies that are driving change in the organization. There will be some FACEMELTING information that you WILL NOT WANT TO MISS in this session. I cant go into more detail than it will most likely knock your socks off! I should stop now!!
Tuesday 11:00am — Come See me at the EMC Booth!! I will be talking to customers about Virtualizing there critical apps, because lets face it. There is NO reason why you shouldn’t. The only ever lasting reason is psychological! Tell your vendors that too!
Tuesday 12:00pm – Ask the expert vBloggers VSP1425 – This is a moderated session in where you can ask a bunch of smart folks questions about the direction of cloud computing, virtualization, and any other information that you really want to know from our industry leaders.
Tuesday 4:00pm – Transforming the Datacenter with Vblock – This converged infrastructure session will help you better understand why it just makes sense to deploy an all in one, pre-engineered solution from VCE. Dont you have enough things to do in your job besides worrying about what piece fits with what? Or if all the parts got to the datacenter that you need to deploy the next critical app? Get it done quickly and more accurately with a Vblock and start making your customers happier, quicker.
Wednesday 9:30am – Getting started with vSphere Design VSP1926 – Scott Lowes session. Need I say more?
Wednesday 1:00pm – Come See me at the EMC Booth!!
Wednesday 1:00pm – Understanding vSphere Stretched Clusters BCO2479 – Chad Sakac will be discussing DR solutions and stretching vSphere clusters. When we think DR, we think about getting the site up and running again after a disaster happens. However, what about just completely avoiding it to begin with? You know a hurricane is coming to your Datacenter, you have time to avoid it. How do you do that? Come to Chads session and find out!
Thursday 11:00am – Rethinking Storage for Virtual Desktops – Chad’s Back! Along with a whole host of industry experts. They will be talking about how different storage for desktops is compared to that of a regular infrastructure. Come check out how these experts recommend deploying storage for VDI.
If you miss a session, dont worry, it will be recorded, so you can go back and catch it later. Enjoy the conference, and hit me up! Thanks for being a customer!
vSphere 5 Licensing Changes….. Again..
August 4th, 2011 by Joe Adams No comments »VMware listened to their customers which shows the loyalty that they have toward the community. Having been part of the VMUG leadership for 4 years, I have seen the power of the VMware community. Here is a brief overview of what is changing.
Obvisouly, customers were worried about future use cases with the new hardware capabilities. There was a lot of FUD out there and a lot of joking about monster VM’s and how much it would cost to license them. This really made folks hesitate when thinking about virtualizing critical tier 1 apps. However, it really was FUD, and the whole vTax thing was, well, just dumb. Its all been put to rest today.
VMware is raising the vRAM entitlements to:
96 GB – Enterprise +
64 GB – Enterprise
32 GB – Standard Edition
32 GB – Essentials +
32 GB – Essential
They are also capping the amount of vRAM per VM, so any VM configured for over 96GB would only be counted as a 96 GB. Also, instead of using a high watermark to determine how much vRAM would be utilized. Instead, they are moving toward a 12 month average of the configured vRAM. This will remove spike problems in the test and dev environments.
The high water mark is being removed and moving toward a 12 month average of the configured vRAM. This will remove the spikes problems in the test and dev environments. There are some tools that will be availible shortly that will be able to analyze a VI3 and VS4 environment to determine vRAM Consumed.
VDI is staying the same. Unlimited vRAM entitlements with vSphere for Desktop. However, it can only be used for VDI, and it must have its own virtual center.
A couple of key terms:
Pooled vRAM Entitlement is the sum of all processor license entitlements.
Consumed vRAM is the sum of vRAM configured into all powered on VM’s
Compliance is the 12 month rolling average of Consumed vRAM
All and all, the licensing model is still a good thing and its perfect for the cloud. The community spoke, and VMware listened, and in the end, that’s what matters the most.
vSphere 5 – Whats new to you?
July 12th, 2011 by Joe Adams 1 comment »The much anticipated launch of vSphere 5 has happened, but now what? What are the new features that will help your company accelerate their adoption of the cloud.
First of all, the release date for this is targeted for August. That’s great timing considering there is a really cool conference that VMware puts on at the end of the month. VMware is aiming for more performance scaling and security from their product. Businesses are starting to deploy critical applications on virtualized platforms more and more these days, and VMware is accelerating that adoption in vSphere 5. Customers should feel confident when deploying these apps which will in turn give your Business Cloud Agility and respond to the needs of your customers much faster than ever before. Trust is also a huge deal in vSphere, and customers can feel confident moving in the cloud direction. There will be other releases surrounding vSphere 5 including SRM 5, vShield 5 and vCloud Director 1.5.
Here are some key points that vSphere 5 will offer:
Service Console – Gone. We all knew this was going to happen. Much more hardened security wise, smaller foot print, single package. Our company has removed all of the dependencies from our integrations, so no worries there.
vSphere Storage Appliance – Smaller customers can take advantage of using local disks in their servers as shared storage. It is a licensed feature available in Standard Edition or higher. Its really targeted for customers that have 2-3 servers in a remote office set up. Its only vSphere storage, nothing else. You buy a server, buy some disks, and you have shared storage. That simple.
More vCPU’s, more Memory – 32 per virtual machine with 1TB of RAM – WOW!! There isn’t anything out there you can’t virtualize! NO EXCUSES!! Business critical apps, go for IT! We are doing it, in some MAJOR deployments surrounding a major Database product!
Auto Deploy – Gives the ability to have stateless ESX Clusters. Much like UCS does for server deployments, vSphere 5 will do for deploying ESX hosts.
VASA -vStorage API for Storage Awareness – vSphere will know what the characteristics of the storage array. Very important for Storage DRS.
Storage DRS – Uses VASA information or administrative information to group datastores into datastore clusters, automating the initial placement of a VM, and then automatically redistributes them across the same grade of LUN’s /Filesystems dynamically to balance load. SIOC will be turned on by default with this. Other storage changes will include an expansion of VAAI, new virtual machine file system (VMFS-5), Storage I/O Control, storage vMotion enhancements, and NFS scale-out improvements.
VAAI – New hardware assists for Block and NAS. New Thin Provision stun and Space reclamation for Block storage. New NAS capabilities include Full cloning, extended statistics, and space reservation.
vCloud Director 1.5 will be getting some enhancements as well including broadened API’s and support for Linked Clones. Reduces the time to deploy virtual machines and takes up less space. vCD will also increase the ability to link instances together, allowing multitenant federated vCloud. There will also be a module for vCenter Orchestrator allowing automation of all vCD actions.
Site Recovery Manager 5 will include Automated Failback, and Workload Mobility workflows. This gives you the ability to move workloads between sites. Another major update is a Host Based Replication. They are introducing a Native VM level replication. You do have to use SRM 5 with this, however. It gives you about a 15-60 minute RPO. The UI is pretty simple to use. I can see a really good use case for customers who have older equipment they want to still utilize for DR. Take newly purchased servers and deploy at the production site, and move the old stuff down to DR.
VMware vShield 5 is getting some upgrades as well. Improved management of vShield 5 and the ability to scan VM’s for secure data and quarantine them in trust zones with vShield App 5.0. This was developed in conjunction with the RSA folks embedding RSA’s DLP & Envision products.
There are a lot of new features in vSphere 5 that extend capabilities to customers that have not had the opportunity before. Many of the vendors out there take these capabilities to the next level, including, and exceedingly more than most, my company. All of these new features can be used in a variety of different environments for multiple situations. I would encourage you to take a deeper look at some of these new features and engage myself or any of my team members and discuss how we can accelerate your business to the next level, and ultimately, move you further on your journey to the cloud.
The Next Level – Pt V – DON’T MISS OUT
July 11th, 2011 by Joe Adams No comments »If you haven’t already, please, please register for the VMware Webcast tomorrow July 12th. Learn how VMware is taking it to the next level, for the 5th time! Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod will be your hosts the event. Yep, you guessed it! Its all about the cloud, if your not doing it, your missing out, and so is your business.
Click here now!!
vExpert – 3 Years Running
July 1st, 2011 by Joe Adams No comments »I was honored and humbled to receive an email this morning from John Troyer at VMware about being selected for the 3rd year in a row for the vExpert program. I was a little worried at first due to Gmail putting his email into my spam folder, but all is well. My work in evangelizing VMware started more than 4 years ago with my leadership role in the Kansas City VMUG. There I worked in promoting the networking of folks who were interested in the best virtualization solution in the industry (& still is and always will be). It was always awesome to see people come together with common knowledge about VMware and most importantly sharing their expertise from their own environments. Today, regretfully, I am not a part of the VMUG in KC due to my role at EMC as a vSpecialist, but I will continue to show our customers the importance of a VMware virtualized environment. I hope I can join the ranks again next year in 2012. Looking forward to a great 2011!
A big thanks to my co-leaders at the KC VMUG – Ben Clayton, Jim Millard, Tony Lux, and back in the day Ryan Melton. You guys Rock!!
Teamwork
March 21st, 2011 by Joe Adams 1 comment »Last week was our final week as vSpecialists in training. When we started this process, we barely knew each other, let alone how we were going to work together. A wise man said at the beginning of this that we would see each other in a different light by the time it was over. His words could not be truer. It all came down to one week of pure awesomeness that we call “Geek Week”.
Team 05 as we are called had a mission that began on Monday morning with the task of delivering a final presentation at the end of the week to a “customer”. We spent a total of 1400 hours between 23 team members designing, building, and customizing a solution that could be delivered to the customer within a weeks time. When you have 23 of your closest friends in a conference room together for 5 days without much sleep, needless to say, you build some awesome relationships with each other.
However, what it boils down to is this. Teamwork is what gets things done in a group. Sure, there are differences of opinion on how things should get done, but this group was phenomenal about getting different ideas worked out in order to get the results we needed. The bonds that we formed here as a team will be everlasting throughout our careers.
For our presentation, we rocked it out. We had a good response from the “Customer” and had an awesome time doing it. Jase McCarty did a good write up about the week in detail, which you can read here. At the end of our presentation, I put together some stats on what it took to fuel Geek Week and its pure awesomeness. Jase also posted it here. However, out of all the consumables, TEAMWORK is what got the job done. It resulted in this:
It was a super awesome time, and I will never forget #TEAM05!!! You guys rock!!
Why Negativity is Bad.
March 10th, 2011 by Joe Adams No comments »There are a lot of companies and sales/marketing forces out there who “go negative” to compete against another product. Politicians do this too and it typically ends up bad for them. Just look at any past election and find out who went negative first, then compare that to the guy who won. When you go on a negative campaign to either sell yourself or a product all you are doing to your customers is making them interested in the other company you just bashed on. Smart customers (and all of them are) will go out and make sure what you just said was true.
As a customer whenever we had a sales or technical guy come in and start talking negatively about their competition I would tune out. I started to think about all of the reasons why they would be bashing their competition and I asked my self a couple of questions. First, why are you taking MY time to talk badly about other companies instead of highlighting the benefits of yours? Secondly, if you even think that I care why the competition is worse than your product, you have another thing coming. I am here to learn why YOUR product will benefit ME, not why the other guy’s wont. Finally, if your only option is to bash the competition, there must be a reason why you compete. Is it that they are better than you? Maybe, but why even bring it up? Highlight the strengths of your company while still being humble about your product. Its ok to say “we are not there yet” followed by “but let me show you what we are working on.” This peaks interest in the customer. It shows that you are willing to keep driving your product to new levels of satisfaction that they will benefit from. Customers are the reasons why products get rev’d. They are what makes your product better, not why the other guy’s don’t.
Competition is a good thing. It drives other folks to think of better ways to provide solutions. Think of how crappy the industry would be if there was no competition. There would be no incentive to make things work better and provide better value for the business. If we didn’t it would be like this all over again!!
Getting Involved in the Technology Community
September 21st, 2010 by Joe Adams No comments »More folks that work in the IT business need to get out and get involved in the technology community. There are so many organizations out there these days that specialize in topics that we as IT professionals can benefit from. Not only from a technological standpoint, but also from the networking and socialization aspect.
In attending the most recent VMworld conference, I was again amazed about how small the world really is. You talk to these folks from all over the world; we all tweet back and forth, post on the communities sites, and send email. WOW, email, does anyone do that anymore? Just kidding, but the point is, by getting together with the people in the field that actually do the work, we can put names and handles to faces. When you meet these folks; you realize that they are the same as you, and going through the same obstacles in their job functions as you do. There is a lot that can be learned from just hearing others talk about their experiences. You never know, it may help you out in the future to solve a problem in your company.
I’d like to call out a couple of organizations that I have had the pleasure of being a part of over the last few years.
Twitter – @MyVMUG
I have been a part of the VMware users group since 2005, and have been a part of the leadership in the Kansas City Market since 2007. This organization has come a long way in putting out of message of VMware Virtualization, and bringing together people from all different types of technology positions.
Twitter – @KCITP
This organization started as a LinkedIn group by Mike Gelphman, who has done a tremendous job in organizing and putting the word out about networking events with our peers. Mike has also done a wonderful job of cross-promoting another organization, the VMUG.
Social networking has made these types of groups explode in membership over the years. LinkedIn and Twitter have accelerated the growth of these organizations in order to reach many more customers and end users than ever before. I would encourage all IT professionals to become more involved in their technology community. If you are in an area that doesn’t have the type of group that you are looking for, start one. It’s as easy as creating a group on LinkedIn, and advertising it with Twitter, Facebook, etc. If you are looking to enhance your knowledge about a product, start by searching for groups on LinkedIn, and doing hash tag searches in Twitter.
By involving yourself in the IT Community, not only do you benefit your career knowledge, but your company as well. The wealth of knowledge is limitless in this realm.Good luck!
Day 1 – VMWORLD 2010
August 31st, 2010 by Joe Adams No comments »Day 1 at VMWorld 2010 went just as expected. Long lines and lots of people. However, the no pre-registration thing went over pretty well in my opinion. I think that even though the lines were long, people still got in.
My first session was TA9767, migration to ESXi. One of the biggest changes in ESXi is the lack of a console operating system (COS). This is good in several ways, from many standpoints. A few bullet points:
- The installable is less than ESX, about 300MB, so the overall footprint is smaller, which means a smaller target for attacks.
- Only authorized 3rd party apps are allowed to run in the vKernel, so no arbitrary code can be executed against the hypervisor.
- Better get to know powershell more if you don’t already. Exchange 2007/2010 admins should be pretty familiar with it already. Check out PowerGUI for helpful tools.
- Contrary to some, there still is a console. Limited, it may be, but there is still one. Must be enabled, either from vCenter, or from the console itself.
- Customized images of ESXi for Dell, HP, and IBM exist. Download at vmware.com
- New supported features include boot from SAN, scripted install, and AD integration. Also, PXE deployment is supported for those mass virtualization deployments.
The benefits of ESXi are far reaching. Less foot print, more secure, a single image update, and the ability to deploy dual images of versions, for testing. If you are thinking about doing it, I along with everyone else that is ridiculously anal will tell you to test, test, test, and test it again. You will also need to get more familiar with powershell. Do your migration to ESXi as part of an upgrade, and start doing it now. Even though Vmware will be supporting ESX for a long time, future versions will only be ESXi.
One of the best sessions that I have been to in the 5 previous vmworlds had to be the Top 10 free vSphere tools. This was session MA3889, put on by David Davis and Kendrick Coleman. Now, I am not going to steal their thunder, but a few of them that I have used are Xtravirts RDP plugin, SolarWinds vm monitor, and of course PowerGui. Very useful tools for day to day administration. These tools are a must have for any vmware admins. When this presentation comes out after VMWorld 2010, you must get it and watch. Perhaps David or Kendrick will put links up?
There were a couple of other sessions, but not a lot worth mentioning in those. Now, on to Day 2!
