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Featured, IaaS, Miscellaneous IT, Networking, Saas, SDDC, Storage, Virtualization

The 2013 Tech Industry – A Year in Review

By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne

As 2013 comes to a close and we begin to look forward to what 2014 will bring, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect back on the past year.  We’ve been talking a lot about that evil word ‘cloud’ for the past 3 to 4 years, but this year put a couple of other terms up in lights including Software Defined X (Datacenter, Networking, Storage, etc.) and Big Data.  Like ‘cloud,’ these two newer terms can easily mean different things to different people, but put in simple terms, in my opinion, there are some generic definitions which apply in almost all cases.  Software Defined X is essentially the concept of taking any ties to specific vendor hardware out of the equation and providing a central point for configuration, again vendor agnostic, except of course for the vendor providing the Software Defined solution :) .  I define Big Data simply as the ability to find a very specific and small needle of data in an incredibly large haystack within a reasonably short amount of time. I see both of these technologies becoming more widely adopted in short order with Big Data technologies already well on the way. 

As for our friend ‘the cloud,’ 2013 did see a good amount of growth in consumption of cloud services, specifically in the areas of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  IT has adopted a ‘virtualization first’ strategy over the past 3 to 4 years when it comes to bringing any new workloads into the datacenter.  I anticipate we’ll begin to see a ‘SaaS first’ approach being adopted in short order if it is not out there already.  However, I can’t necessarily say the same on the IaaS side so far as ‘IaaS first’ goes.  While IaaS is a great solution for elastic computing, I still see most usage confined to the application development or super large scale out application (Netflix) type use cases.  The mass adoption of IaaS for simply forklifting existing workloads out of the private datacenter and into the public cloud simply hasn’t happened.  Why?? My opinion is for traditional applications neither the cost nor operational model make sense, yet. 

In relation to ‘cloud,’ I did see a lot of adoption of advanced automation, orchestration, and management tools and thus an uptick in ‘private clouds.’  There are some fantastic tools now available both commercially and open source, and I absolutely expect to see this adoption trend to continue, especially in the Enterprise space.  Datacenters, which have a vast amount of change occurring whether in production or test/dev, can greatly benefit from these solutions. However, this comes with a word of caution – just because you can doesn’t mean you should.  I say this because I have seen several instances where customers have wanted to automate literally everything in their environments. While that may sound good on the surface, I don’t believe it’s always the right thing to do.  There are times still where a human touch remains the best way to go. 

As always, there were some big time announcements from major players in the industry. Here are some posts we did with news and updates summaries from VMworld, VMware Partner Exchange, EMC World, Cisco Live and Citrix Synergy. Here’s an additional video from September where Lou Rossi, our VP, Technical Services, explains some new Cisco product announcements. We also hosted a webinar (which you can download here) about VMware’s Horizon Suite as well as a webinar on our own Cloud Management as a Service Offering

The past few years have seen various predictions relating to the unsustainability of Moore’s Law which states that processors will double in computing power every 18-24 months and 2013 was no exception.  The latest prediction is that by 2020 we’ll reach the 7nm mark and Moore’s Law will no longer be a logarithmic function.  The interesting part is that this prediction is not based on technical limitations but rather economic ones in that getting below that 7nm mark will be extremely expensive from a manufacturing perspective and, hey, 64k of RAM is all anyone will ever need right?  :)

Probably the biggest news of 2013 was the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) had undertaken a massive program and seemed to be capturing every packet of data coming in or out of the US across the Internet.   I won’t get into any political discussion here, but suffice it to say this is probably the largest example of ‘big data’ that exists currently.  This also has large potential ramifications for public cloud adoption as security and data integrity have been 2 of the major roadblocks to adoption so it certainly doesn’t help that customers may now be concerned about the NSA eavesdropping on everything going on within the public datacenters.  It is estimated that public cloud providers may lose as much as $22-35B over the next 3 years as a result of customers slowing adoption due to this.  The only good news in this, at least for now, is it’s very doubtful that the NSA or anyone else on the planet has the means to actual mine anywhere close to 100% of the data they are capturing.  However, like anything else, it’s probably only a matter of time.

What do you think the biggest news/advancements of 2013 were?  I would be interested in your thoughts as well.

Register for our upcoming webinar on December 19th to learn how you can free up your IT team to be working on more strategic projects (while cutting costs!).

 

 

CMaaS, CTO, End-User Computing, Featured, IT Management, Journey to the Cloud, Miscellaneous IT, Network Infrastructure, SDN, Virtualization

Trick or Treat: Top 5 Fears of a CTO

By Chris Ward, CTO

Journey to the Cloud’s Ben Stephenson recently sat down with Chris Ward, CTO of GreenPages-LogicsOne, to get his take on what the top 5 fears of a CTO are.

Ben: Chief Technology Officer is obviously an extremely strategic, important, and difficult role within an organization. Since it’s almost Halloween, and since you’re an active (and successful) CTO yourself, I thought we would talk about your Top 5 Fears of a CTO. You also have the unique perspective of seeing how GreenPages uses technology internally, as well as how GreenPages advises clients to utilize different technologies.

Chris: Sounds good. I think a major fear is “Falling Behind the Trends.” In this case, it’s not necessarily that you couldn’t see what was coming down the path. You can see it there and know it’s coming, but can you get there with velocity? Can you get there before the competition does?

Ben: Do you have any examples of when you have avoided falling behind the trends?

Chris: At GreenPages, we were fortunate to catch virtualization early on when a lot of others didn’t. We had a lot of customers who were not sold on virtualization for 2-4 years. Those customers are now very far behind the competition and are trying to play catch up. In some cases, I’m sure it’s meant the CTO is out of a job. We also utilized virtualization internally early on and reaped the benefits. Another example is our CMaaS Brokerage and Governance offering. We recognize the significance of cloud brokerage and the paradigm shift towards a hybrid cloud computing model. In this case we are out ahead of the market.

Ben: How about a time when GreenPages did fall behind a trend?

Chris: I would say we fell behind a trend when we began our managed services business. It was traditional, old school managed services. It definitely took us some time to figure out where we wanted to go and where we wanted to be. While we may have fallen behind initially, we recognized change was needed and our Cloud Management as a Service offering has transformed us. Instead of sitting back and missing the boat, we are now in a great spot. This will be a huge help to our customers – but will (and does already) help us significantly internally as well.

Ben: How about fear number 2?

Chris: Fear number two is not seeing around the bend.  From my perspective as the CTO at a solutions provider, things move so fast in this industry and GreenPages offers such a wide variety and breadth of products and services to customer – it can be very difficult to keep up with. If we focused on only one area it would be a lot easier, but since we focus on cloud, virtualization, end user computing, security, storage, datacenter transformation, networking and more it can be quite challenging. For a corporate CTO you are allowed to be a market follower, which can be somewhat of an advantage. While you don’t want to fall behind, you do have partners, like GreenPages and others out there, that you can count on.

Ben: That makes sense. What about a 3rd fear?

Chris: Another large fear for CTOs is making a wrong turn. CTOs can get the crystal ball out and there may be a couple of things coming down the road…but what happens if you turn left and everyone else turns right? What happens if you make the wrong decision or the decision to early?

Ben: Can you give us an example?

Chris: A good example of taking a turn too early in the Cloud era is with the company Nirvanix. Cloud storage is extremely important, but what happens when a business model has not been properly vetted? This is one of the “gotchas” of being an early adopter. To be successful you need a good mix. You can’t be too conservative, but you can’t jump all in any time a new company pops up – the key is balance.

Ben: Do you have any advice for CTOs about this?

Chris: Sure – just because you can doesn’t mean you should!

Ben: I’ve heard you say that one before…

Chris: For example, software defined networking stacks, with products like Cisco Insieme and VMware NSX are very cool new technologies. I personally, and we at GreenPages, think this is going to be the next big thing. But we’re at a crossroads…who should use these? Who will gain the benefits? For example, maybe it makes sense for the enterprise but not for small businesses? This is something major that I have to determine – who is this a good fit for?

Ben: How about fear number 4?

Chris: Fear number 4 revolves around retaining my talent. I want my team to feel like they are always learning something new. I want them to know they are always on the bleeding edge of IT. I want to give them a world that changes very quickly. In my experience, most people that are stellar employees in a technical capacity want to be challenged constantly and to try new things and look at different ways of doing things.

Ben: What should CTOs do to try and retain talent?

Chris: Really take the time and focus on building a culture and environment that harnesses what I mentioned above. If not, you’re at serious risk of losing top talent.

Ben: Before I get too scared let’s get to number 5 and finish this up.

Chris: I’d say the fifth fear of mine is determining if I am working with the right technologies and the right vendors. IT can often be walking a tightrope between vendors from technical and business perspectives. From my perspective, I need to make sure we are providing our customers with the right technology from the right vendor to meet their needs. I need to determine if the technology works as advertised. Is it something that is reasonable to implement? Is there money in this for GreenPages?

Ben: What about from a customer’s perspective?

Chris: The customer also needs to make sure they align themselves with the right partners.  CTOs want to find partners that are looking towards the future, who will advise them correctly, and who will allow the business to stay out ahead of the competition. If a CTO looks at a partner or technology and doesn’t think it’s really advancing the business, then it’s time to reevaluate.

Ben: Thanks for the time Chris – and good luck!

What are your top fears as an IT decision makers? Leave them in the comment section!

Download this free ebook on the evolution of the corporate IT department. Where has the IT department been, where is it now, and where should it be headed?

 

 

Cloud computing, End-User Computing, Featured, hybrid, IT Management, Network Infrastructure, Networking, Storage, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

Rapid Fire Summary of Carl Eschenbach’s General Session at VMworld 2013

By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne

I wrote a blog on Monday summarizing the opening keynote at VMworld 2013. Checking in again quickly to summarize Tuesday’s General Session. VMware’s COO Carl Eschenbach took the stage and informed the audience that there are 22,500 people in attendance, which is a new record for VMware. This makes it the single largest IT infrastructure event of the year. 33 of these attendees have been to all 10 VMworlds, and Carl is one of them.

Carl started the session by providing a recap of Monday’s announcements around vSphere/vCloud Suite 5.5, NSX, vSAN, vCHS, Cloud Foundry, and vCHS. The overall mantra of the session revolved around IT as a Service. The following points were key:

  • Virtualization extends to ALL of IT
  • IT management gives way to automation
  • Compatible hybrid cloud will be ubiquitous
  • Foundation is SDDC

After this, came a plethora of product demos. If you would like to watch the presentation to be able to check out the demos you can watch them here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conference/us/learn/generalsessions

vCAC Demo

  • Started with showing the service catalogue & showing options to deploy an app to a private or public cloud. Also showed costs of each option as well
    • I’m assuming this is showing integration between vCAC & ITBM, although that was not directly mentioned
    • Next they displayed the database options as part of the app – assuming this is vFabric Data Director (DB as a Service)
    • Showed the auto-scale option
    • Showed the health of the application after deployment…this appears to be integration with vCOPS (again, not mentioned)
    • The demo showed how the product provided self-service, transparent pricing, governance, and automation

NSX Demo

  • Started with a networking conversation around why there are challenges with networking being the ball and chain of the VM. After that, Carl discussed the features and functions that NSX can provide. Some key ones were:
    • Route, switch, load balance, VPN, firewall, etc.
  • Displayed the vSphere web client & looked at the automated actions that happened via vCAC and NSX  during the app provisioning
  • What was needed to deploy this demo you may ask? L2 switch, L3 router, firewall, & load balancer. All of this was automated and deployed with no human intervention
  • Carl then went through the difference in physical provisioning vs. logical provisioning with NSX & abstracting the network off the physical devices.
  • West Jet has deployed NSX, got to hear a little about their experiences
  • There was also a demo to show you how you can take an existing VMware infrastructure and convert/migrate to an NSX virtual network. In addition, it showed how vMotion can make the network switch with zero downtime

The conversation then turned to storage. They covered the following:

  • Requirements of SLAs, policies, management, etc. for mission critical apps in the storage realm
  • vSAN discussion and demo
  • Storage policy can be attached at the VM layer so it is mobile with the VM
  • Showcased adding another host to the cluster and the local storage is auto-added to the vSAN instance
  • Resiliency – can choose how many copies of the data are required

IT Operations:

  • Traditional management silos have to change
  • Workloads are going to scale to massive numbers and be spread across numerous environments (public and private)
  • Conventional approach is scripting and rules which tend to be rigid and complex –> Answer is policy based automation via vCAC
  • Showed example in vCOPS of a performance issue and drilled into the problem…then showed performance improve automatically due to automated proactive response to detected issues.  (autoscaling in this case)
  • Discussing hybrid and seamless movement of workloads to/from private/public cloud
  • Displayed vCHS plugin to the vSphere web client
  • Showed template synchronization between private on prem vSphere environment up to vCHS
  • Provisioned an app from vCAC to public cloud (vCHS)  (it shows up inside of vSphere Web client)

 

Let me know if there are questions on any of these demos.

Cloud computing, End-User Computing, Featured, Journey to the Cloud, Network Infrastructure, Software Defined Datacenter, Software Defined Networking, Virtualization, VMworld

Rapid Fire Summary of Opening Keynote at VMworld 2013

By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne

For those of you who aren’t out in San Francisco at the 10th annual VMworld event, here is a quick overview of what was covered in the opening keynote delivered by CEO Pat Gelsinger’s opening:

  • Social, Mobile, Cloud & Big Data are the 4 largest forces shaping IT today
  • Transitioned from Mainframe –>Client Server –>Mobile Cloud
  • Pat sets the stage that the theme of this year’s event is networking – basically setting the stage for a ton of Nicira/NSX information. I think VMware sees the core of the software defined datacenter as networking-based, and they are in a very fast race to beat out the competition in that space
  • Pat also mentioned that his passion is to get every x86 application/workload 100% virtualized. He drew parallels to Bill Gates saying his dream was a PC on every desk in every home that runs Microsoft software.
  • Next came announcements around vSphere 5.5 & vCloud Suite 5.5…here are some of the highlights:
    • 2x CPU and Memory limits and 32x storage capacity per volume to support mission critical and big applications
    • Application Aware high availability
    • Big Data Extensions – multi-tenant Hadoop capability via Serengeti
    • vSAN officially announced as public beta and will be GA by 1st half of 2014
    • vVOL is now in tech preview
    • vSphere Flash Read Cache included in vSphere 5.5

Next, we heard from Martin Casado. Martin is the CTO – Networking at VMware and came over from the Nicira acquisition and was speaking about VMware NSX. NSX is a combination of vCloud Network and Security (vCNS) and Nicira. Essentially, NSX is a network hypervisor that abstracts the underlying networking hardware just like ESX abstracts underlying server hardware.

Other topics to note:

  • IDC names VMware #1 in Cloud Management
  • VMware hypervisor fully supported as part of OpenStack
  • Growing focus on hybrid cloud. VMware will have 4 datacenters soon (Las Vegas, Santa Clara, Sterling, & Dallas). Also announcing partnerships with Savvis in NYC & Chicago to provide vCHS services out of Savvis datacenters.
  • End User Computing
    • Desktop as a Service on vCHS is being announced (I have an EUC Summit Dinner later on tonight so I will be able to go into more detail afterward that).

So, all-in-all a good start to the event. Network virtualization/NSX is clearly the focus of this conference and vCHS is a not too distant 2nd. Something that was omitted from the keynote was the rewritten SSO engine for vCenter 5.5. The piece was weak for 5.1 and has been vastly improved with 5.5…this could be addressed tomorrow as most of the tech staff is in Tuesday’s general session.

If you’re at the event…I’ll actually be speaking on a panel tomorrow at 2:30 about balancing agility with service standardization. I’ll be joining Khalid Hakim and Kurt Milne of VMware, along with Dave Bartoletti of Forrester Research and Ian Clayton of Service Management 101. I will also be co-presenting on Wednesday with my colleague John Dixon at 2:30-3:30 in the Moscone West Room 2011 about deploying a private cloud service catalogue. Hopefully you can swing by.

More to come soon!

 

CTO, Mac, Miscellaneous IT

The Mac Chronicles – A CTO Perspective

By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne

It was early February and I was quite excited because it was finally time for me to get a new laptop.  We had recently enacted our Bring Your Own Device “BYOD” policy so I had a decision to make regarding what type of machine I wanted to carry around for the next 3 years of my life.  I’ve been in consulting my entire professional career and always had a laptop given to me by the internal IT group of whatever company I had worked for, albeit with a little personal input on the matter.  So, for the past 16 years, I had carried a Compaq or HP laptop of some flavor in my bag.  Normally, I would always try to get the most bad ass machine I could, which in the land of HP meant a mobile workstation and they were always great.  Fast, multi-core processors, lots of memory, lots of disk space, great video card, and great screen with high resolution.  The downside for me, however, was constant neck pain after lugging around 8-10 lb. laptops over my shoulder for a decade and a half.  So, I decided this time was going to be different.

In my job roles over the past two to three years, I have not been as hands on in the field doing actual implementations and such so no longer truly need the horsepower to run multiple virtual machines, have serial cables to connect to routers/switches, or have a myriad of tools at my beck and call.  No, now that I am a ‘suit’ I need something that is lightweight and very portable as I tend to find myself on planes, trains, and automobiles quite often.  So, I decided to go with the sexy choice and started looking at MacBooks.  I was very skeptical of moving to a Mac platform from an application and productivity perspective but, at the same time, I wanted to learn more about OS X and its BSD/Linux underpinnings so I decided to take the plunge.  The following is an editorial of my personal experience in making this transition.

I picked out a nifty new 13″ Retina display MacBook pro vs. an Air due to the faster i7 processor and the Retina display (yes, I am still a nerd at heart so I do still care).  I was disappointed to discover that with the 13″ Pro you could not get more than 8GB of RAM and also that the memory is literally soldered to the system board so there is no upgrading.  Ok, well as I stated earlier, I no longer need to run 5 virtual machines at once so I’ll live.  I really wanted a lot of drive capacity and performance because I am an impatient guy who does still travel with every OS service pack dating back to Netware 4.11, Windows 2000, and ESX 2.5 (because hey, you never know when you’ll need that stuff right?) and a lot of ripped DVDs to make those 6 hour flights between coasts a little more bearable.  Well, the 512GB SSD option for said MacBook Pro was a pretty penny, but I found a 3rd party one online for a few hundred bucks less and figured, no problem, I’ll upgrade it myself.  So, a few days later, the shiny new Mac and separate SSD show up.  Now, here is where the fun really begins…

So, I know what you’re thinking…. Is this CTO guy really a big enough dumbass to buy a standard SSD to put into a MacBook?  Well, no, I was fully aware of the proprietary form factor of the SSD drives in the Retina MacBooks and did get the correct one and, yes, I know the legacy of Mr. Jobs still remains and he doesn’t want me jacking around with the inside of his precious work of art.  So, anyone ever heard of a Pentalobe screwdriver bit?  No?  Well, me neither. This is what you need to get the bottom cover off the MacBook in order to swap the SSD.  I went to my local Home Depot, Lowes, etc. looking for such a bit but no luck.  I then went to my trusty local Mac retail store (Not an Apple store, but the local mom and pop joint), and while they did have one, it was with their technician and they were not willing to let me borrow it for an hour.  At this point, I was starting to become a bit agitated (again, impatient) but sucked it up and found what I needed online and ordered the magical Pentalobe screwdriver set ($15) plus overnight shipping ($10 – again, impatient).  It arrived the next day and I was off to the races.

If you have not personally seen the inside of one of these MacBooks, the area where this special SSD goes is EXACTLY the same form factor as a standard 2.5″ laptop drive.  However, this special SSD that is just a circuit board has to go into a special case with a special internal connector which connects to a standard SATA cable, but the cable connects to the side of the enclosure vs. the back as a standard SATA SSD.  Wow, someone went through a crap-load of trouble to design a very proprietary solution which was absolutely unnecessary.  Note to Apple, I hope you are enjoying the margin you are making on this stuff!  In any case, I digress, so I got the new drive installed and was now ready to rock.

I got all of the key software I would need ready to go (Office 2011 for Mac, Firefox, Adobe stuff, VIEW and Citrix clients, VLC (gotta watch those movies), Skype, etc. and got them all setup.  And, just in case, I did install VMware Fusion and had a Windows 7 VM on the off chance I would need it for something.  Now, keep in mind that my ultimate goal here with the Mac was to go native.  If I had to constantly be in a Windows VM to do my job then what the F would be the point of using a Mac in the first place right?  Well, the first thing I quickly discovered is that Outlook 2011 is a piece of crap compared to Outlook 2010 or 2013 for Windows.  There is no home style screen where I can see my mail, tasks, and calendar in a single place.  There is no native ActiveSync but rather some ancient sync engine that has more conflicts than a schizophrenic sociopath.  Trying to use group calendaring to see where my team was and what they were up to caused issues because I had to have so many calendars open at the same time (mind you I did this with zero issue in Outlook 2010/2013).  Basically, I was back to using Outlook XP.  So, I thought, well, I want to go native so I’ll go native and use the built in Mail and Calendar stuff from Apple.  While there were some things that got a little better, it still paled in comparison when compared to the experience with full Outlook on a PC.  Then, I got to looking at some of the key reports I use regularly via Excel.

Ok, so there is no ODBC driver that comes out of the box with Excel/Office for Mac.  Oh, but you can buy one from a couple of 3rd parties and Microsoft is happy to point you in the right direction.  Personally, I wouldn’t care if they sold it for a penny, I still wouldn’t buy it.  Are you kidding me?  I can’t update a spreadsheet via an ODBC connection to a backend database?  I’m pretty sure I could do that with Lotus123 on Windows 3.1, give me a break!  So, it was off to the Windows 7 VM for Excel tasks.  Unfortunately, this was only the beginning of my headaches…

I immediately found problems with certain web sites that I use on a regular basis due to the Retina display and the way it scales resolution.  What I didn’t understand about Retina up front (and should have researched it more) was that while the advertised resolution is pretty stunning, the way it actually works is to show you a lower resolution desktop but cram a lot more pixels into a smaller screen area.  The result is admittedly incredibly readable text and super sharp images.  The downside is applications and web apps that are not written to be aware of Retina can have issues with this scaling process.  I also have an issue with the way Apple just assumes the driver of the machine is an idiot.  Example, in the display properties you cannot really select a true desired resolution for the built in display.  You have 4 options such as ‘Larger Text’, ‘Best for Retina’, and ‘More Space’.  Really?? Just please give me the damn list of supported resolutions so I can choose what I want.  I think by this point, you can probably tell where this story is going, and, given this is a blog entry vs. a novel I won’t go deeper into my issues except to regurgitate something I once heard from a friend that certainly rings true in my opinion…

“Using a Mac is like driving tricycle whereas using a PC is like driving a Ducati.  The tricycle is extremely low risk and will most likely get you to where you want to go eventually.  The Ducati, in the hands of an inexperienced driver (Mac User) can be quite deadly however in the hands of a trained professional it can do very amazing things.”

Admittedly, I do believe Microsoft is as much at fault here as Apple as it was the core Microsoft apps that were the bane of my existence throughout this experience.  So, I now have a HP 9470m business class ultra book on order.  It is the same weight and size as the MacBook, has the same or better battery life, requires zero dongles as VGA and gig copper port are built in, has a solid screen resolution of 1400×900, can be upgraded to support 16GB of RAM and can hold both a standards based mSATA SSD plus a traditional 2.5″ SSD or magnetic drive (no F’d up screwdriver required), and has docking capability.  Oh, and did I mention it’s half the price of Mac?

 

BYOD, End-User Computing, Featured, Miscellaneous IT, VDI, VMware

What’s the Buzz? Recap of VMware Partner Exchange

I am just returning from the VMware Partner Exchange conference (PEX) that was held at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.  While this was a partner vs. customer focused event, there were a few tidbits I felt made sense to share you so here we go….

Awards:

GreenPages was given the Virtualization of Business Critical Applications (VBCA) award for the Americas this year, which was a great achievement.  For those of you not aware, the VBCA program inside of VMware is focused on virtualizing the ‘big boy’ mission critical applications such as Oracle, SQL, SAP, Exchange, etc. that have historically been both technically and politically difficult to virtualize.  In addition, GreenPages was given the same award on a Global scale which was very exciting as it marks the first time that GreenPages has won a global award from any vendor partner!  This also marks the 4th consecutive year that GreenPages has won an award from VMware (2010 – Desktop Virtualization, 2011 – Rainmaker, 2012 – Partner of the Year, and 2013 – Global VBCA). The primary reason we won the VBCA this year was due to several projects which included the virtualization of large applications including a 5500 seat Exchange environment and production databases at a major professional sporting league.

End User Computing Updates:

Horizon Suite v1 will be GA by end of Q1 and will include Workspace, Mirage, and VIEW.

The Workspace product is a combination of what was formally Horizon App Manager and Horizon Data (code name Octopus).  For those that do not know, the App Manager side is meant to be an Enterprise App Store which includes SAML integration to various SaaS applications in addition to being able to launch ThinApp apps and VIEW desktops.  Support for launching XenApp published apps will come shortly after the GA date, figure April/May timeframe.  If you are familiar with Citrix Storefront, this is a very similar concept.  The Data (Octopus) side is one of the ‘dropbox for the enterprise’ apps.

Mirage will be updated to version 4.0 at GA time.  The key feature in this release is individual application layering.  For this, think Unidesk as the concept is very similar but this solution is really meant for physical devices vs. virtual or VDI, at least for now.  There is no real VIEW integration with Mirage yet, but that is coming.  The hold-up is mainly due to performance issues with running Mirage based workloads in a shared VDI environment.  One more interesting tidbit on Mirage is that the license now also includes Fusion Pro.  The purpose behind this is to lay down a Mirage based image to a Mac for corporate use and being able to maintain control/management of that image in a BYOD environment.

VIEW will be upgraded to v5.2 and key features here are 3D graphics enhancements including compatibility with some of the new Nvidia server based cards to offload hefty graphics and improve performance.  Additionally, HTML5 rendering of the desktops will come with this release.  This is the AppBlast piece that was shown at VMWorld back in 2011.  Keep in mind that HTML5 has some pretty major limitations so in most cases you’ll still want to deploy the full VIEW client, but in a pinch if you are on some kiosk type machine where installing a client is not possible, then you’ll still be able to get to your desktop and perform basic tasks.  Lastly, scalability is enhanced and will continue to expand with future releases.

VMware also announced official Radware and Riverbed Stingray support and reference architectures for load balancing within a Horizon/VIEW environment.  F5 support has been around for some time already.

vCloud Suite Updates:

This one, I was very disappointed in as I had expected to hear some pretty significant changes to the way the suite is packaged, however this didn’t happen and seems to have been tabled for some reason so nothing to announce here :( .

Cloud Credits:

Some of you may have heard of these already, but they are basically ‘chips’ that a customer purchases through GreenPages which can then be redeemed at any one of VMware’s vCloud VSPP service provider partners for public cloud IaaS services.

Virsto Acquisition:

Not much was said about this at the event other than the initial focus and use case will be on VDI acceleration.  Stay tuned for more detail here as I find it.

BC/DR:

Big topic here was vSphere Data Protection Advanced Edition (VDP-A).  Like regular VDP, this is based on the EMC Avamar engine but is more scalable to support larger environments.  It is missing some key features currently such as replication, but VMware is diligently working to add these features throughout this calendar year.

Integration Engineering Meeting:

I had the pleasure of meeting with some folks from this internal VMware team.  I will simply say this single meeting made the entire trip worthwhile.  I learned quite a bit about the team and how it works so I’ll give you an overview.  First off, in order to be a member of this team you must have a minimum of 10yrs employment by VMware.  Given that VMware has only been around since the late 90s, that requirement greatly shrinks the potential team members, but trust me when I say the guys on this team know their s**t.  Their primary charter is take the point of view of an external customer along with going out and meeting with actual customers and providing very candid feedback to the various product management teams inside VMW.  I love this team because they are a no bull$hit group of people.  If something sucks, they will say it, likewise if something is stellar they will say that as well.  Unfortunately I cannot share details of what we discussed as the majority of it was future/NDA type material but I think it is awesome that this team exists inside of VMware because they really do help make the products better.  As an example, some of you may be aware of the tool recently made available to make the process of applying SSL Certificates to the various VMware architecture components much easier and it was this team that pushed for the tool and helped get it green lighted.

Ok, that’s it for now… Back to work!

 

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Featured, Miscellaneous IT, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld

VMworld Recap: Day One

Day 1 at VMworld 2012 has been pretty action packed.  The first order of business was the official handing over of the reins from Paul Maritz to Pat Gelsinger as CEO of VMware.  Paul will remain involved as he is taking the Chief Strategist role at EMC which owns 80% of VMware so I would not expect his influence to go away anytime soon.  From conversations I’ve had with others both inside and outside of VMware, the primary reason for this move seems to be purely operational.  Paul is an absolute visionary and has taken VMware to some fantastic heights over his four-year tenure, however there have been some challenges on the operational side in executing on the great visions.  This is where Pat comes into the picture as he’s historically been a pure operations guy so I envision the team of Paul and Pat to do some great things for VMware going forward.

Some other key highlights from the Keynote are as follows:

  1. It is estimated that 60% of all x86 server workloads in the world are now virtualized and 80% of that 60% are virtualized on ESX/vSphere.
  2. There are now 125,000 VCP certified engineers worldwide, almost a 5-fold increase from 4 years ago
  3. The dreaded vRAM allocation licensing model for vSphere 5 is now officially dead with the release of vSphere 5.1.  VMware is going back to per socket licensing and neither RAM nor cores matter.  Personally, I am not sure this was a great move as I think most people were over the headache of vRAM and in reality I never saw a single customer who was adversely affected by it.  When Pat announced this, I think he thought the entire auditorium would roar in appreciation but that was not the case.  Yes, there was some cheering, but even Pat made mention of the fact that it wasn’t the full on reaction he expected.
  4. There are a lot of new certifications and certification tracks that were announced to better align with VMware’s definition of the new “stack.”  These tracks include the pre-existing datacenter infrastructure certs plus new ones around Cloud (think vCloud Director here), Desktop (View and Wanova/Mirage), and Apps (SpringSource).  I’ll be taking the new VCP-IaaS exam tomorrow so wish me luck!
  5. There was a light touch on both the Dynamic Ops and Nicira acquisitions.  Both of these have huge implications for VMware but really not much was announced at the show.  Both of these are very recent acquisitions so it will take some time for VMware to get them integrated but I am very excited about the possibilities of each.
  6. There was an announcement of the vCloud Suite, which essentially is a bundling of existing VMware products under a singular license model.  There are the typical Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus editions of the suite which include different pieces and parts, but the Enterprise Plus edition throws in about everything and the kitchen sink including….
    1. vSphere 5.1 Enterprise Plus
    2. vCenter Operations Enterprise
    3. vCloud Director
    4. vCloud networking/security (I assume this will eventually include Nicira networking virtualization and the vShield product family)
    5. Site Recovery Manager
    6. vFabric Application Director
    7. Lots of focus on virtualization of business critical applications and not just the usual suspects of SQL, Oracle, Exchange, etc.  There was a cool demo of Hadoop via Project Serengeti which automates the spinning up/down of various Hadoop VMs and this is delivered as a single virtual appliance.  GreenPages has done a lot in the business critical app virtualization space over the past couple of years and we remain excited about the possibilities that virtualization brings to these beefy apps.
    8. One of the big geeky announcements is around the concept of shared nothing vMotion.  This means that you can now move a live running VM between two host servers but without any requirement for shared storage, basically vMotion without a SAN.  This has massive implications in the SMB and branch office spaces where the cost of shared storage was very prohibitive.  Now you can get some of the cool benefits of virtualization using only very cheap direct attached storage!
    9. The final piece of the keynote showed VMware’s vision for virtualization of “everything” including compute, storage, and networking.  Look for some very cool stuff coming over the next 6 months or so in relation to new ways of thinking about networking and storage within a virtual environment.  These are two elements that really have not fundamentally changed how they work since the advent of x86 virtualization and we are now running into limitations due to this.  VMware is leading the charge in changing the way we think about these two critical elements and looking at very interesting ways to attack design and in the end making it much simpler to work with networking and storage technologies within virtualized environments.

Have to jump back over for Day 2 activities now, but be on the lookout for some upcoming GreenPages events where we’ll dive deeper into the announcements from the show!