Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for August 2011

VMworld – Day 2

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VMworld Day 2 started off with a great keynote by no one less than Dr Steve Herrod. Steve spoke about all the changes we introduced with the launch of the Cloud Infrastructure Suite and all the change which are coming up… including sneak peeks of not release products. I live blogged the session and I don’t want to blog just to blog, so for more details read it here. There are a couple of things though I want to stress which in my opinion stood out:

  • VMware Appblast –> New project which allows you to start any app in a HTML5 compatible browser on any device.
  • VXLAN –> Provides a Layer 2 abstraction to virtual machines, independent of where they are located. (quote from Steve’s article)
  • VMware Octopus –> Probably best described as an enterprise level “Dropbox” service

After the keynote I headed over to the VMware Storage Booth and introduced many attendees to the cool new storage features which are part of vSphere 5. There were a couple of things which stood out for me, everyone loved Storage DRS! Profile-Driven Storage is hot and the changes in VMFS-5 were very very welcome.

Next stop was the infamous #VSP1425 aka “Ask the Expert vBloggers”. We had roughly 200 attendees. The panel was formed as follows: Scott Lowe, Frank Denneman, Chad Sakac and I. It was moderated by Rick Scherer (Thanks for buzzing out Chad :-)) and as we had an empty seat we decided to pull up a person from the audience… I forgot the name of this person (please identify yourself), but once again thanks for joining this session and thanks for your great contribution, much appreciated! This session did extremely well in my opinion. We had great questions from the audience but especially the interaction between the panel members worked great. Definitely something we will do again next year. (We scored 4.8 out of 5 on the survey.)

Next up was a meeting with Tintri. We met up with Kieran Harty and Pratik Wadher and got a demo of the current platform and discussed futures. I already discussed their product in-depth on my blog so I will not repeat our whole discussion or my thoughts. I just want to add that I was impressed by their UI now that we got to play around with it and I expect them to do really well in Europe due to the simplicity of the set up.

After having random chats with other vendors we (when I say we I mean Frank and I) headed over to my Group Discussion (#GD43). Now this was the first Group Discussion I ever hosted… I LOVED IT! This is the best format for a session and can I say thanks to Richard Garsthagen who came up with this excellent concept! I had prepared a couple of slides with questions around VMware Clustering solutions. These questions formed the basis of the discussion. The participation of the audience was excellent. Frank helped driving this session and one of our lead HA engineers, Keith Farkas, joined as well… Believe me when I say that Keith was happy with all the excellent feedback we received from the audience during this session. Next year, and in Copenhagen, I want to do more sessions like these… This is what VMworld should be like, small discussion sessions with lots of interaction with the audience!

Before I head out to breakfast there are a couple of things I would like to mention… Did everyone see PowerCLI-Man? I don’t know who he is or where he all of a sudden came from, but he is my new favorite super hero! What an amazing guy, dropping in on a session hosted by Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf while you know he is fighting operational wars on a day to day basis… amazing. (He even has Facebook?!)

I also forgot to mention VMworld TV in my “Day 1” report… Sorry Richard here you go. In all seriousness check the VMworld TV youtube channel and watch the great interviews and summaries that Richard and his team produced. It is a great way of getting an impression of what is going on at VMworld. Believe me, it is a madhouse.

Another day at VMworld about to start… hopefully I will have bit more time to watch some sessions myself today. If you are attending I would ask all of you to please fill out the session surveys. Keep in mind that all speakers, and the VMworld organizational, love to feedback on what worked well and what can be improved. Please provide constructive feedback, keep in mind that many of the people presenting at VMworld are just technical people like you and me and not professional “marketing” type speakers! My respect to each and everyone of you who does not do this on a day-to-day basis and presented a session at VMworld. I know it is a huge step and I know it is not easy to get up in front of literally hundreds of people!

General Session – Steve Herrod

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General session is about to start…. Going to try to keep you up to date…

Dr Steve Herrod just started. Today is about the technology behind all the changes around cloud computing. The world is changing, we are moving from individual servers to service. We want to be thinking about people and not about devices. It is about getting Universal Access to our environment, this is what we expect from our IT environment.

It is not just about Windows applications… Enterprise apps and SaaS need to be accessible. There are three pillars which enable this:

Simplify: Extract from Silos.

Manage: Secure Apps, data, access.

Connect: My app, my data, my colleagues

How do we make this happen? View will simplify desktop services and Thinapp will make using your applications easier by exposing apps in a catalog. Data delivered as a service. A Unified Service Broker should connect these services based on policies and which should connect users and devices.

A demo is now shown where a pool of desktop is offered to new employees. ThinApp Factory is a new project. All applications part of the ThinApp Factory will be exposed through Horizon which also includes SaaS apps. ThinApp Factory scans the local device and allows you to ThinApp the applications and are candidates to be part of Horizon.

Project Octopus is a brand new initiative… I guess judging by Steve’s question Octopus will be a new offering that provides “dropbox” services to the enterprise. A solution that can be offered through the Public Cloud and the Private Cloud. During the demo Project Octopus is used to surface documents to the View Desktop and to his Android based phone.

Strategic partnership with LG and Samsung to bring Horizon Mobile to their devices.

Showing Project Octopus and Horizon on the iPad. A new product/project shown called VMware Appblast. Appblast allows you to start a Windows App on your iPad! Using standard HTML5 any app can be delivered to any HTML 5 client!

Next topic, the robust infrastructure required to enable end-user computing. Accessible Innovation. VMware go allows you to scan a network and reach out to a machine and install vSphere.

vSphere Storage Appliance is designed to get all the benefits of enterprise level virtualization features without the need for an expensive array. Using local storage as shared storage though a virtual appliance. If anything happens to a server the datastore will be remain available.

vSphere 5 adds the capability of running ESXi out of memory being booted over the network. Auto deploy is about compliant deployments of vSphere.

Talking performance right now…. *** how cool are these flashbacks! *** 32 vCPUs, 1TB of memory and 1,000,000. Mr Monster VM just came up on stage aka Melvin. :-). Performance is not about peaks, but about guarantees… satisfying the SLA/Contact using policies! Set and Forget! It is up to the intelligent infrastructure to guarantee this.

Performance guarantees can be realized using Storage DRS by pooling storage in to logical containers aka tiers. Using Profile-Driven Storage you can select where a VM should be place based on a policy instead of “guessing”. We are getting rid of the “storage administration” spreadsheets and providing policy driven storage solutions. Storage DRS will manage the environment and migrate virtual machines and disks when required.

Networking up next…. Separating identity from location. VXLAN! Encapsulationg Layer 2 in Layer 3 packets. Designed to remove limitations L2. Enabling to failover between datacenters without the need to re-ip! VXLAN has been developed by VMware, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Emulex and Intel and has been submitted to IETF!

Availability! Performance is great but availability is key! vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5. vSphere Replication enables you to replicate data between different types of arrays or offers replication to arrays which don’t offer this functionality. SRM 5 also offers automated failback. It allows you to fully test your DR process.

Security! Nosy Neighbor effect. We don’t want virtual machines peeking at data of other virtual machines. vShield helps preventing this. Endpoint protects what’s inside of the virtual machine. vShield App protects the outside of the VM. Allowing to create boundaries. vShield Edge is your border control device in your virtual datacenter.

Automation! What if your infrastructure can respond before you know there is a problem?! Monitoring is key in every environment. Sneak peek of where we are going with our management solutions. VMware vCenter Management. With new navigator technology we can discover which service are running in your virtual machines. These are discovered without the need to change the OS, no agents! We can also check how the virtual machines are related to each other. We can use this information to setup specific vShield rules if and when required. We can even see if all components are protected by SRM or not. This will allow you to quickly check compliancy. vCenter Operations sneak peak. New version will also show business metrics. More and more details than ever before.

Wrapping up:

It is about offering service to people! It is about your cloud!

 

VMworld – Day 1

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I am dead tired so it will be a brief overview of my first day at VMworld. I had two sessions planned today and attended another 2 sessions. (Besides other meetings of course)

We started the day with #VSP1682 aka “vSphere Clustering Q&A. The room was packed to our surprise, you never know what you are up against at 08:00 on a Monday morning… It took off slowly but after the first two questions the questions keep on coming. There were some excellent questions. No need for me to write all of them down as Scott Lowe attended and man can he type fast judging by his session transcript! Thanks Scott for attending and for writing this great summary. Everyone else who attend thanks, much appreciated that you took the time to visit this session on a Monday morning at 08:00 in Las Vegas. If you have the time provide feedback, I just checked our feedback and it is looking excellent right now… although someone had a complain about our accents, but hey Frank and I are Dutch not much we can change about that :-). Hopefully it wasn’t too bad.

The second session of the day was on I attended, #VSP3116 by Frank Denneman and Valentin Hamburger. This session was titled “vSphere Resource Management Deepdive” and I thought it was good. Frank and Valentin explain all the caveats around Resource Pools, Limits, Reservations and DPM and there was a good interaction between them. Andrew Miller from Think Meta blogged most of the slide content, if you want to get an impression of what was discussed in more depth, check it here! Yes I agree with his summary, Frank is a Rock Star and Valentin really knows his stuff!

Next up was #vsp1956 aka the ESXi Quiz Show… I was one of the people who organized this and to be honest we didn’t know what to expect, it was something completely different and new and I thought it was cool for a first time. Yes I realize we had some difficulties and my apologies for the poor audio quality. Anyway, it seemed to me that many people enjoyed themselves and that was our goal for this session… entertainment, nothing less / nothing more. The vPredators managed to beat the vRaging Bulls in the pre-qualifying rounds and in the finals they beat VMware’s own vRaminators… Great job guys and once again thanks everyone for attending.

The last session I attended today was the General  Session. What can I say about it that you haven’t already read on twitter or all the other blogs. First of all was that intro great or what? I don’t know who’s responsible for creating these but they manage to surprise me every single year. The graphics were amazing once again, and especially on those big screens really impressive. Rick Jackson was up first and there were two things that stood out for me…. the VMUG leaders that were recognized and the fact that VMworld 2012 will be in San Francisco again next year August 27th until the 30th. Paul Maritz than came up spoke about the strategic direction of VMware for the upcoming years and how recent acquisitions fit in. I always enjoy listening to him. Especially the story around how the applications will evolve and how the world will look like 3 – 5 years from now. I guess what was exciting was vFabric Data Director, there’s a press release to be found here. vFabric Data Director is a self service database provisioning and operations solution which in the first release supports a virtualization optimized version of PostgreSQL. The cool thing about the vFabric Postgres is the fact that it is optimized for memory and snapshot management in a virtual environment.

After that we walked around at the solutions exchange… it is huge this year. I bumped in to the folks of HyTrust, Tintri, Veeam, Mozy and more… Definitely worth checking out!

Now it is time to get some sleep to wake up on time for the General Session by Steve Herrod. After that I will be manning the VMware Storage Booth for a couple of hours (until 11:30) so if you feel like it stop by and say hi.

PS: I spoke with the people at the VMworld Bookstore and our book is the number 1 selling book this year! How cool is that?!

Experts 1:1? Want to sit down with me for 15 minutes this week?

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Well this is your chance, schedule it and we can discuss anything (if you own one of my books bring it and I’ll sign it, if you don’t pick it up at the VMworld Bookstore). Not only can you sit down with me, but there’s a whole bunch of top VMware employees available to talk to you at the Experts 1:1 sessions. Keep in mind that you can pre-register right now and I expect that they will fill up quickly.

I have 2 “sessions” booked, each limited 4 slots:

Wednesday: EXPERTS-08 Knowledge Experts One-on-One – 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Thursday: EXPERTS-12 Knowledge Experts One-on-One – 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM

If you have some time left, schedule it. We can discuss anything you want to discuss. It’s not just me, there’s a whole team of experts available like Lee Dilworth (SRM/BC-DR), Chris Colotti (vCloud Director), Kit Colbert (VC Ops), Charu Chaubal (Security), Massimo Re Ferre (vCloud) Cormac Hogan and many more.

Schedule it now and see you Wednesday or Thursday!

(Where? If you see the solutions exchange on the right go through the doors on the left!)

Performance Whitepapers

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I always enjoy reading the performance whitepapers. They are usually fairly technical and give you a better understanding of how the products work! All of these are most definitely worth downloading and reading! They been released a couple of days back. Check it out: