INF-STO2192 – Tech Preview of VMware Distributed Storage

4 September, 2012 By 13 Comments

I could visit just one session on Tuesday so I decided I would attend a session which is on a topic that I love “Software Defined Storage”, aka vCloud Distributed Storage. This session was hosted by Christos Karamanolis and Kiran Madnani. Christos is one of the lead engineers on the project and Kiran is the product manager, both VMware employees.

Before I lay down what their session was about, note that this was a technology preview. No commitments have been made when or even IF this will ever be released… but as the demo looked so promising I figured it was worth sharing.

[Edit: Cormac Hogan published the demo, worth watching!]

Kiran started out with explaining the journey to Software Defined Storage. Awesome features he mentioned were Storage vMotion, Storage DRS, SIOC, Profile Driven Storage, vSphere Replication and more. Kieran made a statement which I can only agree with….

The world is changing, compute resource keep growing, data keeps on growing!

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Server, Storage Tagged With: , , , , ,

MyVMworld report

4 September, 2012 By 3 Comments

VMworld has always been the craziest week of the year for me personally and 2012 was no exception. Being closely involved with the vCloud Suite launch I had an idea around what to expect, but I would not have expected the week to be this intense.

It is going to take me a couple of weeks to properly recover, but it was worth it. This report gives an idea of all that was going on in “my world” at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco.

Day 0

My VMworld started on Sunday at TAM day with the Birds of a Feather (BoF) lunch. These lunches are particularly interesting as you get to talk to customers in an informal setting. I was part of the BC/DR table and most of the discussions were around stretched VLANs, application discovery and re-ip’ing. I guess common operational and architectural problems people face…

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Server Tagged With: , ,

VMworld Barcelona, start scheduling now…

3 September, 2012 By 3 Comments

VMworld San Francisco just ended and now we are already prepping for Barcelona. I was just checking the Schedule Builder and noticed my sessions are up there. Make sure you schedule asap as I expect these to fill up quickly again just like the US.

Filed Under: Server Tagged With: , ,

Virtualization Changes Everything: Storage Strategies for VMware vSphere & Cloud Computing

3 September, 2012 By 6 Comments

A long long time ago Vaughn Stewart reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to write a foreword for his book. When Vaughn told me the topic I knew this was going to be a hit! For several reasons it took a while for the book to be released but now it finally is available. Vaughn and Michael Slisinger did an excellent job and I would recommend everyone who is interested in storage / virtualization / cloud to pick it up. I love the fact they went the self-publishing route and decided to make it available for $ 19.95 (print) and just $ 9.99 (location dependent pricing, so may vary) for the ebook! I would recommend everyone to pick up the ebook though, GO VIRTUAL!

I want to thank Mike and Vaughn for the opportunity to write the foreword, and congrats on the release… I hope you will sell millions.

Storage is a foundational component in the support of virtualization and cloud computing – and it is dynamically evolving. It is an aspect of the datacenter that is all-too-often overlooked, but without storage, there is no data, and without data, there is no cloud. Virtualization Changes Everything, by Vaughn Stewart and Mike Slisinger, examines the evolutionary influence of host virtualization and cloud computing in breaking storage deployment out of outdated silo models and into a dynamic, flexible hosting environment. Virtualization Changes Everything reviews common goals and challenges associated with providing storage service with cloud computing, and addresses each through the application of advanced storage technologies designed to scale in order to support the ever-expanding storage needs of the future. The examples within the book are pulled from real-world experience, and often involve the integration of multiple innovative technologies. If you are looking for measured guidance on high availability, efficiency, integration and performance for the storage in your cloud, then this book is for you!

 

Filed Under: Server Tagged With: , , ,

VMworld 2012 San Francisco… what a week

2 September, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It was a crazy week last week, VMworld 2012 SFO kept us all very very busy. I have a bunch of blog articles to finalize, so more will follow this week. Just a couple of keywords that summarize the craziness of this week for me:

  • New book release, vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive
  • 5 speaking slots, 1 group discussion slot and 2 “expert” slots
  • Meetings, meetings and more meetings
  • Receptions and parties, triple booked every evening
  • 1200+ copies of the 5.1 book handed out / sold at VMworld!

Just some random pics to give an impression of the week… Thanks everyone for taking these pictures. If you have full res pictures please email them to me (duncan @ yellow-…com).

And a VMworld TV video to top it off. (Nice to see the infamous Eric Sloof presenting / interviewing for VMworld TV along side Jeremy van Doorn!) Make sure to follow VMworldTV on twitter for updates!

I want to thank everyone who took the time to say hi, provide feedback, have open discussions or just wanted to shake hands / get books signed. I really appreciate it and it was great meeting all of you!

See you again in Barcelona,

Filed Under: cloud, Server Tagged With:

Demo time – vCloud Director 5.1 disaster recovery demo

30 August, 2012 By 7 Comments

When I was playing with the new vCloud Director 5.1 and Site Recovery Manager 5.1 I figured I would record a demo of the DR solution that Chris Colotti and I developed. The demo is fairly straight forward and hopefully helps you in the process of building a resilient cloud infrastructure. In this demo I have included:

  • vSphere 5.1
    • vSphere Replication
  • vCloud Director 5.1
  • Site Recovery Manager 5.1

Filed Under: BC-DR, cloud Tagged With: , , , , ,

Demo time – Consuming vCloud Director 5.1 resources in 10 minutes…

29 August, 2012 By 1 Comment

We all know how difficult it can be to implement and configure a new infrastructure. Racking, cabling, configuring VLANs, setting policies / permissions, firewalling etc. It is a lot of work… Well in a physical world it is a lot of work, in a vCloud Director environment that is slightly different. In this demo that I recorded I am going to show you:

  • Login as a vCloud Admin
    • How to create an organization
    • How to create an organization virtual datacenter
      • Selecting a specific compute tier
      • Selecting all storage tiers
      • Selecting a specific networking tier
    • How to create an Edge Gateway
    • How to create add a vApp to a Catalog
  • Login as the tenant:
    • Deploy a 3-tier vApp with each VM on a different storage tier
    • Snapshot the full vApp

All of that in under 10 minutes, I could do it faster… but I guess it would be difficult to watch then :) . Anyway, I hope this demo shows how easy it is to provide access and resources to a tenant in a vCloud environment .

Filed Under: cloud Tagged With: , , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »