Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Desktop

Startup News Flash part 17

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Number 17 already… A short one, I expect more news next week when we have “Storage Field Day”, hence I figured I would release this one already. Make sure to watch the live feed if you are interested in getting the details on new releases from companies like Diablo, SanDisk, PernixData etc.

Last week Tintri announced support for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform. Kind of surprising to see them selecting a specific linux vendor to be honest, but then again it probably also is the more popular option for people who want full support etc. What is nice in my opinion is that Tintri offers the exact same “VM Aware” experience for both platforms. Although I don’t see too many customers using both VMware and RHEV in production, it is nice to have the option.

CloudVolumes, no not a storage company, announced support for View 6.0. CloudVolumes developed a solution which helps you manage applications. They provude a central management solution, and the option to distribute and elimate the need for streaming / packaging. I have looked at it briefly and it is an interesting approach they take. I like how they solved the “layering” problem by isolating the app in its own disk container. It does make me wonder how this scales when you have dozens of apps per desktop, never the less an interesting approach worth looking in to.

VC Ops included in the VMware Horizon Suite 5.3

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I was reading up on the announcements published today during VMworld. When talking about VDI/EUC with customers, and I am not an EUC guy so try to avoid this when I can, a couple of things always stood… First one was storage problems and the second one was monitoring. I think the announcements done today are a game-changer in that space, and I am sure that you will appreciate this:

New VMware Virtual SAN for Horizon View beta will deliver significantly lower upfront capital expense (CAPEX) and total cost of ownership (TCO) for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). The bundling of VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View in Horizon Suite, available at no additional cost, offers advanced VDI performance and operations management for large-scale virtual desktop production monitoring, advanced problem warning, faster time to resolution and complete infrastructure coverage.

How about that? I definitely think this a great step forward, and am happy to see that especially VC Ops is being included with the Horizon Suite. I can definitely recommend implementing it to those who own the Horizon Suite, and those who do not own the Suite yet, it might be time to invest. Please note that VSAN is still in Beta and is not been included from a licensing perspective but has been tested with the Horizon Suite. Use it in your test environments – play with it etc… but do not run your production workloads on it yet.  (Read Andre’s article for more details on the Horizon Suite.)

** EDIT, there was a lot of confusion yesterday about VSAN being bundled or not. Apparently the press release was only supposed to say that you can use VSAN with the Horizon Suite. There is no support, no bundling, no technology preview. **

Startup Intro: AetherStore

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AetherStore Every once in a while you see a solution by a startup and you get all excited. AetherStore is one of those type of solutions. The funny thing is that AetherStore is not directly related to my day-to-day job, but I can fully relate to their pitch. So what is AetherStore and who are the folks behind it?

AetherStore was founded by three graduates from Scotland’s University of St Andrews. This by itself is worth mentioning in my opinion as especially in this space I don’t typically see an enormous amount of innovation coming out of Europe. (Although since then they moved to the US.) With experience in distributed systems, fault tolerance, databases and storage it is not surprising to see what problems they are trying to solve and how they are intending to solve it.

AetherStore is indeed a storage solution as you probably had already guessed. AetherStore is all about using spare resources, and in this case storage resources. Essentially what AetherStore is aiming to do for your company is leveraging the available local disk space of your desktops (and servers for that matter) and offer that up as a “data store”. In other words; if you have 20 desktops with a 1 TB disk but only 100GB is used then 900GB of that disk can be used for other purposes. Now reality of course is that it isn’t possible to use the full 900GB for other purposes but you get my point.

AetherStore essentially is a distributed data store solution. This distributed data store is served up to users as a regular network file share and all the magic AetherStore does is hidden from the user. I guess the big question that pops-up immediately is what about availability, security and performance? All three of those are typically what either keeps the user, or the administrator busy. AetherStore solves those problems in various ways:

  • Performance: a local cache is used to optimize the end-user experience
  • Availability: Data is replicated to multiple “nodes” meaning that if a “node” fails than data can be reconstructred. On top of that AetherStore offers the ability to backup (and restore) data to the “cloud” (Mozy, Amazon etc)
  • Security: Data is encrypted

That is not all, on top of that AetherStore offers versioning of files and ensure efficiency by offering deduplication. I guess it all sounds very promising right? In my opinion it does, and it is one of those solutions that I have on my “watch lists”.

I do wonder what the requirements are when it comes down to availability of data when people move around different desktops; and desktops are also powered-off or restarted by users at random. I also would like to point out here that I have not played with AetherStore, neither is this article sponsored or am I affiliated with AetherStore in any way. This is simply and introduction to a cool startup which managed to intrigue / interest me with their technology.

If you want to find out more about AetherStore, make sure to sign up on http://www.aetherstore.com/ for early access if you are interested, and/or follow them on twitter. If you want to know more, I can recommend this white paper about AetherStore as it reveals some more of details of the implementation.

VMware View Infrastructure Resiliency whitepaper published

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One of the white papers I worked on in 2012 when I was part of Technical Marketing was just published. This white paper is about VMware View infrastructure resiliency. It is a common question from customers, and now with this white paper you can explore the different options and understand the impact of these options. Below is a link to the paper and the description is has on the VMware website.

VMware View Infrastructure Resiliency: VMware View 5 and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
“This case study provides insight and information on how to increase availability and recoverability of a VMware View infrastructure using VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM), common disaster recovery (DR) tools and methodologies, and vSphere High Availability.”

I want to thank Simon Richardson, Kris Boyd, Matt Coppinger and John Dodge for working with me on this paper. Glad it is finally available!

VMware ThinApp 4.7 Essentials by Peter Björk!

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About a year ago one of my colleagues reached out with some questions around book publishing. Many people ask me questions around what it takes, hours involved etc etc, and unfortunately many decide it is not the right time. I guess Peter Björk decided it was the right time as he managed to crank out this awesome book within a year. Congrats Peter, awesome work and major achievement!

The book is titled “VMware ThinApp 4.7 Essentials” and contains everything you need to know about ThinApp, or as the website states:

“VMware ThinApp 4.7 Essentials” shows you how to deploy ThinApp packages in order to improve the portability, manageability and compatibility of applications by encapsulating them from the underlying operating system on which they are executed.

In this book you will learn about how application virtualization works and how to deploy ThinApp packages. You will learn how to update and tweak ThinApp Projects before distribution. This book will then cover design and implementation considerations for future ThinApp projects.

You can find it on Amazon here: Kindle ($ 23.25) – Paper (54.99). Pick it up!