Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

@DuncanYB’s recommended reads part 2

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The last edition was 2 weeks ago, in that article I pointed to the rumour of Pernix being acquired by Nutanix and since then it has gone silent. Well almost silent, Frank Denneman has announced he is no longer with Pernix (which was picked up by The Register) so I think it is safe to say there is a truth to the rumour. Sad moment as I really liked the company and really liked the technology, hope the product will live on. I guess time will tell and I am sure that by the time the next edition of recommended reads is published we will have seen an announcement.

  • Springpath to focus on Cisco OEM Development
    It is an interesting development if true. Springpath is one of the “newer” hyper-converged players and initially sold through various OEMs. Now they seem to solely focus on Cisco, which I guess makes sense as it will make it easier to work on deeper integration with Cisco tooling. Wouldn’t surprise me if Cisco picks these guys up at some point in time.
  • Build a Xeon D-1500 (Open) Home Lab with me? by Joep Piscaer
    I’ve had this Intel proc family and SuperMicro board on my list for the longest time for a homelab, never got around to ordering anything but I have to agree it is a great piece of kit with a lot of power combined with relative low power consumption and a great WAF (wife acceptance factor), read Joep’s post and his wiki entry on OpenHomeLab.org for more details
  • On the topic of homelabs: Supermicro SuperServer SYS-E300-8D and SYS-E200-8D close-up pictures by Paul Braren (another one by Paul here on the same subject)
    This is a nice piece of kit. It also holds the D-1500 CPU, is nice and small and has 10GbE on-board. Could be great for a VSAN lab, small but still packing a lot of power.
  • Thoughts on Pokemon G0
    Nothing to do directly with Infrastructure, but I had to list this as I think it is a brilliant concept. Especially the use of the camera is smart, and I bet it got many kids walking around the neighbourhood instead of sitting on the couch playing on their PS4. Another interesting aspect is that it seems to be bringing people together and have people talking whom normally probably wouldn’t be talking to each other. Plus of course create traffic chaos and dangerous situations as no one is paying attention anymore where they are walking / driving.
  • Disrupt Your Data Center with Transformative CI & HCI Technologies by Jason Nash
    Well not really a blog, but an awesome panel session with Jason Nash, Chad Sakac, Dheeraj Pandey, and Matt Smorto on the hyper-converged market today. Some great insights and good discussion. Always impressed with Chad, I just love the way he handles the discussion/situation during these types of conversations.

    • Media Headlines by Chad Sakac. Setting the record straight when it comes to the Dell/EMC strategy and hyper-converged offerings. This was a response to an article in The Register, not to the video by the way.
  • Samsung 850 EVO SSD 4Tb Review
    Not the most exciting article, but more important here is 4TB SSD which is relatively affordable. Prices are still dropping, can I have that 16TB SSD now? Please?!
  • How the queen of Silicon Valley is helping Google go after Amazon’s most profitable business
    Some interesting bits and pieces in here, especially how the organization is being transformed by Diane within Google.
  • NUMA Deep Dive Part 1: From UMA to NUMA by Frank Denneman
    Last one on the list, so it has to be something good. You like deepdives? Well this is going to be your cup of tea then. Frank is diving in to it deep immediately and even followed up with Part 2 in the same week. And this week part 3 and 4 also dropped. Those diagrams by the way are insane… Considering Frank is looking for a new challenge, I wouldn’t be surprised if Intel made him an offer.

Another major milestone, 5000 customers reached for VSAN!

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Yes, new quarterly results are out, and this is crazy, Yanbing (SVP/GM for Storage & Availability BU) dropped the news on twitter last night:

Yes that is correct, VSAN customer count grew with 1500 in just 1 quarter and the license bookings also grew > 200% Y0Y. Crazy numbers if you ask me, and some serious traction. Considering how well VxRail is doing I can only see this ramping up faster even. Just some quotes from last nights earnings call, you can find a transcript here and audio here if you are interested.

Pat Gelsinger:
Our hyper-converged license bookings, including VSAN and VxRail software, grew over 200% year-over-year. The new VxRail appliance we jointly developed with EMC was launched earlier this year and has enjoyed an impressive start, benefiting also from Dell’s decision to resell VxRail.

The rock stars of Q2 were NSX and VSAN and they were just fabulous

Yes, clearly the VxRail and the momentum that it is seeing was a piece of that. But a lot of the customer count was non-VxRail. So this product has now hit a point of inflection, as you suggest, that really was thrilling. And if I would call out one product in Q2 that just blew their numbers away, VSAN is it, and it was the rockstar of Q2 above all others. And what we’re seeing is that the product maturity, the channel momentum, I commented on the transactional channel before, and that really is well fit to VSAN. But also some of the enterprise use cases have clearly seen momentum, as well. And then we add to that the incremental benefits of VxRail that we jointly developed with EMC and Dell now reselling that VxRail product. It was also geographically balanced, as well. We saw VSAN growing across all of the geos, large customers, major wins, in healthcare, also mid market wins across different geos. So really, really excited about the VxRail, as well as the overall hyper-converged category for us and VSAN, the rockstar of Q2.

You know what, I will give away 5 “Essential Virtual SAN” books to 5 random people who leave a comment (and retweet / share this post on linkedin) to celebrate this great achievement. Please leave comment with your real name and correct email address so I can reply for your home address! I email winners Wednesday 19th of July end of day. [UPDATE: Winners have received an email from me, or will within the next 10 minutes]

My top 15 VMworld sessions for 2016

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Every year I post a list of my top VMworld sessions. It is always challenging to go through the list, I figured I would do it straight before the Schedule Builder goes online as that gives people at least the opportunity to register them. I am going to be strict again this year, 15 sessions and in random order. These are the sessions I would sign up for myself, unfortunately as a VMware employee you can’t pre-register for sessions, but I will to try to sneak in. Note that I selected these sessions because I expect them to have deep tech info and have great speakers. There will be many awesome sessions missing I am sure, but than again that is the result of trying to stick to 15. Here we go:

  • Evolving the vSphere API for the Modern Era [INF8255] by William Lam & Alan Renouf
    Alan and William are both great speakers and all sessions they present are a must see, what caught my attention in particular for this session was the following sentence in the description:”We will also provide a “Technical Preview” based showing of where we are headed and some of new tools and features that will be available to you to automate and develop against the next generation of the vSphere Platform.”
  • An Industry Roadmap: From storage to data management [STO7903] by Christos Karamanolis
    Christos is our CTO for Storage & Availability and his sessions are always great, excellent speaker with great insights of where the industry is heading towards. Seen many of his sessions and always worth attending.
  • The Edge is Still Bleeding: A face-melting technical smorgasbord of all things Converged, Hyper-Converged, Cloud Native & Software Defined [SDDC9462-SPO] by Chad Sakac
    The title by itself is enough to attend this. It is going to be 60 minutes of face melting awesomesauce Sakacness. Do I need to say more?
  • Advanced Network Services with NSX [NET7907] by Romain Decker
    I am not an expert on NSX, getting a better understanding of what it is / does is never a bad thing and it looks like this is the place.
  • Beyond the Marketing: Horizon Instant Clones Deep Dive [EUC8203] by Peter Björk & Jim Yanik
    I just love VMFork aka Instant Clones. If you want to know everything there is to know about Instant Clones for View, then this is the one to attend.
  • Cloud Native Buzzwords (Demystified) for Dummies [CTO7964] by Massimo Re Ferre
    This can’t be anything else than just great. Massimo going over Cloud Native and explaining all the buzzwords. Especially good for those who work with developers and hear terms flying around but have no clue what they are talking about, or those just interested in what is new in this space.
  • vSphere 6.x Host Resource Deep Dive [INF8430] by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort
    A deepdive in to host resource management going over things like NUMA etc. Apparently these two guys are authoring a book on this topic as well, considering the blog posts Frank recently knocked out I bet this one is going to be a hit.
  • vCloud Air Recovery as a Service (RaaS) Deep Dive [HBC8292] by David Hill
    All about data protection and data recovery in and to the cloud, more specifically vCloud Air. If you don’t want to invest in a second location, this is certainly a session worth attending to figure out what the options are for you.
  • Tech Preview: Enhanced VM Availability Leveraging vCenter and Partner Hardware Integration [INF8020] by Brian Graf & Maarten Wiggers
    I’ve seen some of this already, very cool what is being worked on and always useful to get a preview.
  • Revamped vSphere Storage DRS and SIOC for automating the Data Centers [STO7914] by Ben Meadowcroft & Naveen Nagaraj
    SDRS and SIOC have been revamped… want to find out more about how fight noisy neighbours through storage policy based management, then this is the session to attend. Ben is the PM for SDRS and SIOC and Naveen is the engineering Director, so you will be getting the details straight from the source.
  • The Future of VMware Fusion and Workstation [EUC8521] by Bo Fu & Michael Roy
    It says “future”, so hopefully they will be talking about cool upcoming features for these two great products.
  • SRM with vRA 7: Automating Disaster Recovery Operations [STO8344] by GS Khalsa & Stefan Tsonev
    I haven’t personally done much with SRM in the past year or two and that is why I have this listed. It is such a valuable product when you are in need of DR capabilities and orchestration. The combination of SRM and vRA is intriguing.
  • vCloud Air: Advanced Networking Concepts [HBC9092] by Serge Maskalik & Andy Steven
    Micro-segmentation, dynamic routing, and advanced architectures as part of vCloud Air offerings. Sounds very interesting, and both happen to be good speakers as well, so I am sure this is worth attending.
  • Extreme Performance Series [INF8959] & [INF8465] & [INF8108] & [INF8089]
    Yeah I know, I cheated… This is not 1 session, but this is actually 4 different session by different presenters. However they are all part of the same series, and these are all must attend sessions. Whether it is vCenter Server performance with Ravi and Priya or vSphere Compute and Memory by Seong Beom Kim. I promise you, these will go deep.
  • Architecting VSAN for Horizon the VCDX Way [EUC8648] by Ray Heffer & Simon Long
    Ray and Simon are both VCDX’s, nothing beats hearing the ins and out of Horizon design from two top experts.

I did not include any sessions of my own, if you are interested in my sessions, look at the below:

  • Enforcing a vSphere Cluster Design with PowerCLI Automation [INF8036] Chris Wahl & Duncan Epping
  • Software-Defined Storage at VMware Primer [STO7650] Lee Dilworth & Duncan Epping
  • A day in the life of a VSAN I/O [STO7875] John Nicholson & Duncan Epping

@DuncanYB’s recommended reads part 1

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It has been a while since I have done this. In the early days of the VMware VMTN Blog I would post a weekly update on which articles where my recommended reads for the week. I stopped doing that simply because I was just too busy with other things. But after the post of last week pointing to an old article and some new articles worth reading I figured I would pick up again where I left a couple of years ago. Note that this will not be a weekly thing, it may take 1 or 2 week or even longer before the new edition pops up. It just depends on how much happens and what I find interesting to share. This list is also pretty much in random order…

  • Introduction 2016 NUMA Deep Dive Series by Frank Denneman. It is just the introduction, but I want to point you to it so you know what is coming and knowing Frank this is going to be a great read. So bookmark it if you are interested in NUMA!
  • Infinio Accelerator 3.0 – now supercharged with VAIO by Eric Siebert. Great to see more vendors hopping on the VAIO bandwagon. Not a big fan of the name “VAIO” (vSphere APIs for IO Filtering), but basically it offers a framework that allows you to run certain dataservice (like caching and replication) inside the hypervisor, instead of as an appliance on top. Definitely a more efficient way of doing things. Welcome Infinio!
  • The Birth of Faster Storage by Tom Fenton, where NVMe and NVMe Fabrics are being discussed, interesting technology and something to keep your eye on the upcoming years.
  • Nutanix buying PernixData by Anthony Spiteri. Another report of “troubles” in startup land. The news broke out just before the weekend and all throughout the weekend it kept twitter and the blogosphere busy. I am not going to comment on it as it is just a rumour at the moment, nevertheless interesting to read, Enrico also has a good article on it.
  • Atlantis retreats to core VDI software and appliance market by The Register. Interesting to see how one of the startups in the storage/caching/HCI space is changing strategy and primarily focussing on end user computing from now on. I guess it represents a change in Silicon Valley where more and more startups not only need to show growth, but also profits in order to get additional funding.

Top vBlog results are out, thanks everyone!

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I don’t know what to say even, I was very surprised I won the Top vBlog voting this year. I do want to thank everyone who voted for me, it is very humbling that after 9 years of blogging I am still listed that high. 8 consecutive times right now, it is literally insane. Especially considering the enormous amount of quality blogs listed, people like Cormac Hogan, Frank Denneman, Chris Wahl, Scott Lowe and of course William Lam are folks I really respect for the unique quality content they constantly produce. Anyway, thanks everyone for voting, I truly appreciate it.

Go here for the full list. If you want to watch the Top vBlog show revealing the top 25, you can find it here on youtube.