Virtually Insane?

VMlover is moving...

2010-03-24T12:28:00.000Z

Hi all, I am currently in process of migrating this blog to Wordpress and on a private host....

Apologies for any transition delays in the process, I am hoping the move to Wordpress will give you the reader an all round better experience.

Hopefully the domain will transfer in the next 24/48 hours/years

Life on the other side

2010-03-10T21:10:00.000Z

Ex-CEO of SUN Microsystems just started his blog with a bang....

http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/

A good read and i'm hoping a book will appear soon...

Now for something Cloud related...

2010-03-08T20:59:00.001Z

This post is short and sweet....

After a week of more Cloud news it strikes me that Cloud is the new Black. In the industry we have big large software corporations who have made their owners and shareholders extremely rich with 20-30 years of business strategy that was a million miles away from Cloud with Client-Server models, most of which are all now pushing the future of their business strategy on the Cloud model.

This has started to sum one thing up for me....mainly around the fact I think
ISV's want to host services in the Cloud to ensure they do what humans do and learn from there mistakes, with these key feats of history never beckoning their door again by

Having complete centralised big brother monitoring of offered software usage, with no stone unturned for organisational usage of offered cloud services. This means no more true ups and no more EA's or GA's being operated on a trust basis
Being able to change Software license models at the drop of a hat (a bit like your gas/electricity bill),
Design applications that do not have excessive and long development periods to mean that they get the potentially underdeveloped software out to the end user and they can start to be more lucrative than competitors, with that under developed software being able to be amended at later points in time,
Kill the VAR/SI relationships for quicker PO's and to reduce internal ISV overheads of relationship management

So there you go...i've made some predictions, fail they may but I am more than sure people will start to realise this indirectly in some shape or form.

Home NAS - Iomega IX4-200d

2010-03-02T21:17:00.002Z

I had the great pleasure of getting my hands on a Storcenter IX4-200d monster NAS box and and I can safely say it has been a massive and beneficial peice of kit for use with my day to day home storage needs. Here is my review and feedback to what I think is a great product for the home and anyone wanting to do some good home lab testing.

Previously I ran VM's from a USB Drive with WS7, with about 3 Individual SATA disks homed in my local PC for other storage such as iTunes, MP3, Movies and Pics etc. This worried me, it wasn't raided, it certainly was starting to run low on free space and there is so long you can take running ESX in a VM on WS7. So I was looking around for a NAS solution which would be cost effective, fitted the bill functionality wise and provided good all round storage space. Originally i'd dabbled at the lower end models of the IX2-200d and thought maybe it would suffice, after a think about it something said to me though that an investment in a 1TB (With RAID of course) NAS would suffice on first 6-12 months but over time as my lab grow would probably end up with me wanting more space at some point so I felt the IX4-200d was yes intially oversized at 4TB (2.7TB Usable with RAID 5) but I know it will keep me more than satisfied for future storage needs.

Key selling points and benefits I've found for the IX4-200d are as follows;

Small form factor, it looked MASSIVE on the Iomega site and I imagined it to arrive like an EMC Celerra would! However I was so surprised when I got it out of the box (which was rather small too I might add) that it was no more than about 10x10 Inches which was excellent for storing in my small lab :)
Setup - Setting this up was a breeze, i was literally up and running in about 10 Minutes, it is RAID'ed from the factory (additionally supports RAID 1,5 and 10) and ready to go prepackaged, so easy and to be honest this is the way it should be
Protocol/Application support - iOmega is an EMC company, and all iOmega Storcenter devices are fully HCL compatible with vSphere/ESX when using iSCSI and NFS, this is great as I use this for home lab (see next section on this). Additionally DLNA support is available so I can stream movies to my DLNA compatible TV and also PS3! again excellent for playing music and browsing my camera photos
Speed - Doing time machine backup was about 20-25MB/s and general VM across NFS is really quick. Also copying files up and to is more than acceptable speed wise along with vSphere VM's running and cloning etc quite happily at an acceptable speed
File Migration - A cool feature is being able to connect my original USB disk and copy that onto the NAS without copying files across the network, I can also use the USB drive across a CIFS share all very good timesavers.
LED Screen - This is native to the IX4 and not available on other versions, you get a nice little interface to see storage volume capacity and other stuff like IP Address of the box etc

As said I use this at Home for my home lab, in this lab I have recently purchased a HP ML110 for lab testing and this works very well with the IX4-200d. Coupled with good vSphere kit the IX is a great piece of kit for consolidating out both you home media storage needs and Home Lab needs onto one easy to use and manage NAS, it has Block and File level storage capability which is great for playing with both versions of storage protocol and overall when used with 1GB networking is better than any extremely beefed up PC with Workstation 7. Overall I am very pleased, I am an Nandy pandy hands off Architect in my day job but using this provides me with all the needs that I would typically get when both using vSphere day to day or within a lab environment back in the office.

Product feedback requests

Now for the bad bit....what the IX4-200D doesn't do for me;

Mozy support - I use Mozy backup and it only supports Mozy backup when the IX is connected to a PC with USB (a big USB drive basically), you then use your the relevant drive the IX is mapped as with the Mozy PC Client. I seriously hope EMC/Iomega release an update soooon!
Copying files between CIFS shares can't be done within the Admin web page, I'd like to know or be able to copy files locally via the Lifeline OS and not have to use the device mounting volumes
Being a techy I wouldnt mind seeing a bit more performance monitoring from the core hardware, things like disk write/read speed etc would be a great option, even if it was not enabled by default

Great resources for IX4-200d

Gabe Van Zanten has an excellent write up on putting the Storcenter to the test and providing some benchmarking http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=909
Simon "techhead" Seagrave does a great piece on a complete home lab build with IX4-200d as one of the storage options http://www.techhead.co.uk/vmware-esxi-home-lab-why-what-and-how-considerations-when-building-your-own-home-lab
www.iomega.com of course!

Application efficiency in the Cloud

2010-02-09T22:04:00.001Z

As an afterthought after visiting a few recent Cloud Camp's and after talking to some very bleeding edge and clever individuals who develop applications and object based storage for the cloud I felt compelled to blog about my thoughts on this subject.

It appears that the mainstream adoption of Public cloud is starting tochange the mindset on how developers write code for web based applications, certain disciplines in the dev world are really are changing how they architect applications, additionally another news item that maybe concludes my thought is Facebook recently releasing detail on new PHP code that they claim reduces 50% CPU Overhead over legacy code.

This is great news, developers whom are building applications using compute within the abstraction layer of the Cloud seem to be now moving away from designing and developing lazy code that used to be unoptimised and hog as much Infrastructure resources as it could take, didn't scale horizontally as it needed to use hardware which scaled up (such as good old Mainframe) and additionally was heavily underutilised at times when it didn't operate its associated task.

So why do I think this is happening? well its simple....COST VISABILITY! Apologies for the CAPS here but I feel any direct metered costs which are applicable instantaneously to any typical public IaaS model or PaaS is driving this optimisation, Early adopters of cloud are starting to realise that they have a driver to save cost with an optimised platform that dosn't need uber amounts of compute resource and is cheaper.

Additionally at a higher strategic level I certainly think cost visability seems to be becoming higher the further you go into the Cloud, the below diagram shows how the Insourced model of IT has very low cost visability (in most organisations) against the transition into Outsourced/Managed Service IT that is billed to the client on monthly time periods all through to Cloud hosted IT components that have instantaneous cost visability to consumers.

Summary

So thats my summarised thought, you might think I am being Naive, but I do beleive we maybe starting to see the growth of more cost concious optimised applications for the better of both App and Infrastructure environments rather than the legacy world where they have constantly acted like Oil above Water.

Cloud Overbooking - Part 2

2010-01-28T19:57:00.001Z

Following last weeks post which went into where I think the potential requirement for similar algorithms that are used within the airline overbooking model may need to be used within a Public cloud provider such as EC2, I will now blog with a second part which provides some predictions on where I think that similar software and associated modules that may start to arise within the world of Cloud providers.

As stated in Part 1, I work for an airline, this dosn't mean this post will include industry based secrets, but what I will provide is a comparison of technologies used to ensure the overbooking strategy works.

The cloud revenue calculation thingy

Today within the Airline industry are various commercially available software technologies that calculate what an airline can make from various different seating strategies on certain key flights, dont ask how this does it but the companies that have designed this are certainly not short of a bob or two, meaning its very niche and very clever (and works).

Looking to compare this to the world of Public clouds and I think we may see Software ecosystems arise as has arisen within reservation and booking worlds. A couple of thoughts collated that I think may or may not emerge withing the future state of cloud computing include;

Potential third parties selling third party software to Public cloud providers to calculate optimal times or prices to charge customers, or do Amazon already do this?
If cloud is going to provide fluidity and flexibility than say your Electricity in the home will we potentially see variable seasonal or peak pricing charges emerging once the Cloud starts to become more heavily adopted and resource becomes scarce

Will we see larger customers obtaining a first class citizenship in multi tenancy environment and recieve higher weighting and priority when resources become scarce, the same as Airlines do in similar ways for frequent flyers, or will a model exist where they be exposed and at risk more like Economy travellers are in the Overbooking model where they pay smaller prices for services but run the risk of being bumped off of the core underlying cloud service? I am only speculating here, its difficult to know what really goes on within public cloud business plans but it maybe potentially something that may start to become more apparent as people transition from conventional outsourced models into cloud based environments.

Screen Scrapers

Just another crazy thought that i'll leave you with which is completely seperate to overbooking and is in regards the potential role of screen scrapers in "Cloud commerce". In the reservation world, screen scrapers play havoc on travel industry websites if they are not controlled, in a nutshell a screen scraper is basically a third party whom are scraping say a Airline booking site to scour for the best deal. If not controlled correctly, scrapers play havoc with underlying ecommerce environments because they consume transactional space and mean the real humans end user experience who is using the website directly suffers. Screen scrapers can work in an airlines favor though, some airlines have agreements with some third parties to "scrape" and some airlines have partnerships with third parties who provide indirect services.

So within the world of Cloud services are we going to see an influx of parties screen scraping big players like EC2 and draining ecommerce portals? Imagine hundreds of screen scrapers upon screen scrapers scouring main portals to see if EC2 has a good price, suitable AMI's, suitable SLA's (dont laugh), and many other charateristics within? It would degrade end user services and potentially steer them to competitors......Just more crazy thoughts that i'll leave you with.

Thats all folks until next time

Cloud Overbooking - Part 1

2010-01-19T22:06:00.001Z

Now for something cloud related as I haven't waffled on about cloud for a while. This Two part series (it got too long for one post) is based upon oversubscribing or over allocating strategy within public cloud world. Within this first part I will use the current Airline reservation overbooking strategy and use this as an example to potentially see where similar algorithms may start to be needed to calculate workload allocation in a typical open Public Cloud provider. This post was also super charged by this excellent post on what the blogosphere classes as the difference between capacity oversubscription and over capacity models within the Amazon EC2 service.

So ever been bumped up or bumped off?

No this isn't a question about your mafia status, I am talking about flight bookings. As you may have noticed from the "about me section" I currently work for an Airline, with this in mind I will use some of the (small) knowledge I have gained on how the oversubscription model works in our world. It is a well known fact that the Airline industry falls into a number of industries that "overbook" on certain flights, see this definition for full gory detail on how this whole process works behind the scenes but in a nutshell it is an algorithm used by the travel industry to work towards achieving full capacity on certain flights by taking more upfront purchases than is available in the reservation system. Overbooking tends to affect the lower entry level economy passenger who is paying less for his seat and is likely to be less of a regular customer, lastly overbooked passengers are all covered for compensation in many shapes and forms such as being offered either a seat on the next available flight or a volume of cash that makes them happy.

So hopefully after reading the brief detail on how the overbooking model I am beginning to think we are going to see a overbooking or oversubscribed type strategy needing to be adopted within Public Clouds. To justify my comparison, simplistic marketing from Public cloud companies state that you can buy a workload in EC2 from the Cloud provider and assume it will be able to provide you with the compute and networking requirements that you would get if hosting on premise. Based on this comparison in a shared multi tenant public cloud do you think the same rules could apply to allocation models of cloud workloads?

Rate of change of public cloud a problem?

Public Cloud adoption is happening at a very fast rate, in future I assume public cloud providers such as EC2 are going to start to hit massive problems with not being able to facilitate large volumes of customer requirements and I also predict that public cloud is certainly not capable of facilitating concurrently every single customer that has ever laid eyes on a public cloud Virtual Machine in such providers. Therefore I believe that to succeed, Public Cloud providers are going to seriously need to look at the level of service they can potentially offer and design an algorithm similar to what Airlines have developed within the Overbooking model. Remember you are not always guaranteed to get the seat on a plane that you always want but most customers are happy to take compensation in return. Interestingly the likely compensation from a public cloud provider is not likely to be high if you fail to get what workload you require....

Summary

I admit that using this comparison between Cloud providers and Airline reservations is quite a cynical view, but putting this into perspective my view is that EC2 and any other public cloud provider that is struggling to control who is able to buy a workload and who wants to use a workload is going to hit massive PR and Customer relation problems just like you get when an airline unfortunately overbooks a flight with 20-30 economy passengers.

In Part Two I delve into various areas and technologies that exist today in the Airline reservation world and align these to how they may emerge within the world of cloud as potential problems or answers to common problems.

Abstraction....love it or hate it?

2010-01-10T17:34:00.002Z

So I am an Infrastructure guy surrounded by massive volumes of technology in the industry which operate above Servers, Storage, Networking environments to enable certain goals. Within the technology some have a level of abstraction (or virtualisation) to provide a level of "ease" to make portability and migration easier between the lower level and upper level component i.e. VMware server Virtualisation or SAN Virtualisation arrays, we also have lower level components that we just don't realise like proprietary volume managers/file systems.

Unfortunately though the industry is still despite being full of such glorious technology plagued with any kind of easy migration and flexible movement capability and by this I mean some of the following examples that I hear and see about day to day in the industry;

Replicating/Cloning from one SAN Array Vendor to another,
Migrating a VMware VMDK File format to an alternative Hypervisor vendor such as Microsoft with VHD,
Migrating from one NAS vendor to another NAS Vendor,
Running a J2EE workload between two middleware stacks i.e. Weblogic and Glassfish,
Restoring backup jobs from one vendor onto another (even within the same vendor)

Fortunately with the above common examples you do have some technical options, for example on the SAN replication problem you can use a SAN Virtualisation appliance like a Netapp V-Series or a IBM SVC, however you do need one of each appliances on the target and source, for starters this is expensive and you also have support issues with this from the underlying storage array vendor, you also have various other potential issues that may arise all to achieve what is merely just copying data from A to B (maybe not that simplistic but im a simple guy remember).

To address cross Hypervisor migration, within the Server Virtualisation industry we have the Open Virtualisation Format (.OVF). As Server Virtualisation is more my bag I will use this example for the rest of this post. With OVF the industry has got together to build a standard for portability of Virtual Machines, bear in mind before you run off shouting EUREKA this isn't live migration, to migrate requires minimal downtime as it only works on cold migrations which is still a pain in the rear, however this means you can in theory move from one Virtualisation vendor to another by using export/import capability with OVF.

Unfortunately even with functionality that enables us to address the common interop problems in the datacentre such as replication between different array vendors and migration between Hypervisor Vendors, being humans and never satisfied the most common groan I hear is that they never actually provide 100% confidence and functionality that the original abstraction layer did, so for example with OVF you can't migrate "a la" Vmotion style between hypervisors. They also add large volumes of overhead and support, you need someone to operationally support VMware, you need someone to operationally support SAN Virtualisation arrays etc, and additionally they can end up actually costing more if you do not do complete TCO analysis on the actual solution being acquired to address the problem in the first place.

This leads me to the conclusion even with the limited knowledge in IT I have on such topics that unless large volumes of innovation and collaboration occurs we are never likely to see such technology or initiatives occur where we the customer or end user have this reduced overhead penalty for portability. Being the cynic I am, I am seriously starting to think that solutions that address problems are merely a level of abstraction that is pushing the problem faced higher up the stack for something else to be affected or to deal with, additionally the increase in layers means yes you got it more support and TCO costs. So based on my theory for example lets look below at how much abstraction is required to enable OVF functionality, and how this compares to abstraction of the application environment of yesterday;

As you can see the cost of gaining OVF means this functionality adds 2-3 more layers of abstraction in order to work and be fully exploited, and lets not forget the increase in Software cost/renewals in order for the Vendors to develop and support such features, lets also not forget the fact we have underlying components which are required to reach the goal.

Quilt, its a nasty thing

To be fair on the industry and VMware in particular this portability means tasks in the legacy world is a breeze. Before meant we faced the lenghty costly strategy of having to move that relevant Workload onto another x86 server with re-installation of OS/App components, we had to plan this a lot more harder and in actual fact it also very rarely actually happened when physical tin was EOL, the kit just sat in the datacentre rotting, we also didn't have OS Refresh capability.

My concern

So what am I getting at here? One minute I am whinging about abstraction the next I am praising it, I guess its a bit like Marmite with Abstraction, you either love it or hate it. But to summarise my concern is this, the more I hear about new technology that helps me to solve another problem the more I see a level of abstraction being introduced into the stack, this to me means that it now means more software purchase costs, more ongoing OPEX costs of that software, more layers of operational complexity, more concerns and arguments with my lovely ISV's on support statements i.e. and all round more TCO on products that already struggle to have a good TCO.

Moving forward and being so young and naive would it be unreasonable to hope that the industry vendors look to reduce this overall use of abstraction and to combat a problem in a more practical way that ensures we do not have multitude of abstraction layers? Or alternatively is there any technology which addresses the above problems that I am not aware of that bloggers are aware of? (on the later it is not an invitation for vendors to tender so forget spamming me if you are a vendor!),

Additionally I am not looking to implement such technology (yet), but I do see this as a potential snowball growing in size as the move towards the demand from businesses for more of an agile and flexible datacentre environment, so I am interested to know if you think I am talking absolute rubbish or whether you agree....

Goodbye 2009...hello 2010!

2009-12-28T17:08:00.003Z

Well what a year, and what a turbulent ride 2009 has been for anyone based within the Technology sector with job cuts and threats, diminishing sale and revenue for our beloved vendors/resellers (meaning less free lunches at VMworld) and general doom and gloom whatever which way you lookwith the increased prices of all important things such as Laptops, Storage, Ipods and...I mean I mean...bare essentials such as food and drink and clothes.

I feel after a rough ride I have come out moderately ok and had a successfull year, I started this blog in January and really felt it wouldn't go anywhere, I've tried blogs before and to be honest had problems writing suitable content that would grab good audience let alone bring sensible comments to blog posts (as in someone not offering to enlarge one's gentalia or claim a lottery win in Lagos.)

2009 has certainly been an interesting year, I have acheived the following and hope to strive to improve upon this in 2010;

Managed to hit approximately 20000 visitors on the blog which if you'd said to me last year i'd have laughed at you,
Made a post at least (work dependant) 1-2 times a week,
Have had a few Planet v12 top five mentions which was very cool, thanks for these Duncan it was really encouraging, I have also been linked on websites for external resources
Had good fortune to meet a lot of interesting people in the blogosphere who have also commented about my content and at least said its good (to my face anyway :))
Passed and upgraded to VCP4! great as I can now focus on moving forward and away from practical based qualifications until ESX5 (I hope)

So onto 2010 and some general New Years resolutions for me on the blog;

Will hope to publish less technical content and more content which is based on strategy and methdology, this will be more the case I think in 2010 as I'm not hands on now in my day to day role,
I have left massive volumes of content out of my blog in 2010 due to me just not feeling it was worth the bother of posting, this has been an irritant when I see someone else post and get kudos on there own blog...I hopefully will not do this as much in 2010
I will move off of Blogger!...the CMS is just a frigging nightmare and not worth waisting hours of my year in 2010 on....this may additionally bring a rebrand for VMlover.com, i have decided for the blog to go up a level I need to get rebrand so I can gain more target audience.
May try to bring external resource and knowledge from industry players and thought leaders with guest content, this will depend on whether I get interest, if you are interested then do comment on this post.

So I wish you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a Happy prosperous New Year and keep posted on the blog as your presence and comments are gladly appreciated.

Daniel

PHD Virtual - breaking into banking!

2009-12-17T21:17:00.005Z

Thought i'd share a interesting news feed I found on the PHD Virtual website on a recent success story for the PHD guys http://www.phdvirtual.com/company/press-releases/142-esxpress-ramatically-reduces-seattle-financial-groups-vmware-recovery-time

You may have read my review on esXpress 3.6 back in August, my opinion on them is they are certainly focussed in on resolving general backup pains and problem areas and are certainly serious about backup technology and methodology. If you get time over the festive period I seriously encourage you to have a look at the fully usable product demo.

This customer success story certainly shows that their products are capable of providing enterprise level backup and holding there own on large scale backup demands, look out and expect to see more great product developments in 2010 in the core esXpress product set and additionally I myself wish them continued success in 2010.

Views on Automated storage tiering

2009-12-13T19:43:00.010Z

In light of the latest introduction from EMC of its latest AST (Automated Storage Tiering) solution (funnily enough named FAST), here are some quick and easy to read documented predictions for you to maybe rip apart on the comments section of this post;

Array design

I believe storage arrays and storage disk layout will be designed and planned a hell of a lot differently than they are planned today. Typically functional requirements will become less and less taken into account when planning storage for an application or planning array deployments from scratch. With introduction of automatic array tiering into mainstream I see design considerations being based more on the overall disk capacity requirements and potential capable over subscription limits that can be achieved, and also ensuring that relevant SLA's based on workload characteristic are guaranteed i.e. Between the Hours of 10-12 this batch process will get X amount of IOPs

This I relate to in the same context as planning deployment of workloads into a VMware farm that uses shared HW resource capability. The "farm" or "pool" of storage will become the associated norm with the shift of responsibility of the storage admin being more on calculating and understanding the running capacity and available expansion space on the array with the AST algorithm calculating and reporting back the available location where workloads can be moved to back to the storage bod. (it is safe to say though that AST is going to certainly be in manual mode for even the bravest of storage admins for a while).

No thy workload

In most storage environments today we plan and over allocate for the worst case IOPs or MBPs requirement of the workload and in the event of any potential issues arising they get dealt with in a reactive manor. If it does what it says on the Marketed Tin AST will make this type of planning irrelevant, we won't need to know the workload, it will move it for us.

If limited performance metric on app profile is available in the first place (which I expect), then AST enabled arrays will provide the option to monitor post deployment and then have the peace of mind that you can migrate with no downtime to the running workload. Meaning advanced tiering provides the Administrator with greater opportunity to turn reactive issues into a proactive scenario by having greater visibility of what the application does (and whether the vendor is lying about requirements).

Additionally I expect (and hope) vendors with AST functionality will provide tools which provide expected "Before and After" results of what will occur by moving storage that doesn't sit on on AST enabled array into an AST enabled environment. I also expect to see an onslaught of third party software companies providing such a facility (if they don't do this already).

Adoption rate

In my opinion the latest incarnation from EMC of FAST will most certainly not be deployed and adopted in aggressive fashion within Storage infrastructures for a while, the feature is not back supported into Enginuity for DMX3/4 so only the rare customer who has bought a VMAX or CX-4 recently will be one of the few capable of implementing this technology. Additionally FAST isn't free, expect to see people keep there hands in there pockets until this technology has been proven

Higher storage tier standbys

SSD's are an expensive purchase, and AST enables the possibility of being able to introduce sharing capability of SSD between workloads (if planned appropriately), you maybe in the position to oversubscribe the use of SSD between applications. If an app that runs in the day needs grunt in the shape of IOPs, it can share the same disk pool with an app that requires throughput out of hours.

Virtualisation and AST

Expect to see AST benefiting and working heavily at API level with VMware, i've already written back in July about a vision for this in the following post, the basis of this was that Virtual admins will not have as much concern with placing Virtual Machines upon the best suited storage. Today various LUN's and RAID VMFS volumes need to be deployed so VM's can be hosted to match application workload. We may see the need to have a generic based VMFS Volume and AST Technology move volumes based on workload requirements of VM's on that disk (in time)

Summary

Hopefully I have made some valid points on where I think AST will fit into environments and where it will change general design best practices, I do not use a AST enabled array and will not have the capability to for some time so excuse me if some of the above is already possible or being done.

Exchange 2010 - Infinite Instance Storage

2009-12-10T19:43:00.005Z

It has been a while since my last post, i've been busy on a lot of fronts, i've been revising for my VCP4 Exam (which i passed :) ), working heavily on projects at work and also had a holiday.

After my hectic month i've now had the chance to catch up with the latest Exchange 2010 product changes and felt compelled to post on what I discovered within this. It appears that Microsoft has removed from 2010 Single Instance Storage functionality/

Single Instance Storage

Introduced in Exchange 4.0, SIS (or Deduplication) ensures that attachment files that get emailed to multiple people are basically only stored as a single master file to avoid storing multiple copies of that file within every user mailbox, so from an overall Exchange Database perspective multiple sent files appears on used storage as just the size of a single file.

You were probably as dumbstruck as I was when I read about EOL of SIS on the lastest Microsoft blurb, and your probably thinking to yourself exactly what I did which was there must be a new type of SIS or a new fandangled name for SIS that either improves upon SIS or even completely new architecture to save on storage consumption all together. Well it appears it was neither of those...I digged deeper and came up with the following blog post to that it is now completely EOL.

It does seem that like me readers of the official Microsoft blog have great concerns on the architectural changes and the side effects within a typical large scale environment of implementing 2007 compared to 2010. Additionally echoed are concerns on what types of problems it will lead to in future within an operational environment day to day. To be frank Microsoft sound a bit blase when providing justification on why they have removed SIS, they seem to infer that technology like SIS is legacy and customers do not actually benefit from storage reductions, and in fact SIS is being removed to provide performance benefit.

How Microsoft can measure that SIS is not usual anymore is beyond me, Exchange customer use cases are all different, but in reality in the field the actual fact regardless of what Microsoft think SIS however small has benefits to reduce storage costs for most organisations, additionally it has made things in Exchange more efficient in other areas such as reducing backup windows and the associated restore times for Exchange databases.

The justification from MS seems to be that today compared to 4-5 years ago Disk is cheaper and bigger and yes they are right, it maybe cheaper when they go and compare this to DAS connected environments I have no issues with this. However my issue is that most large organisations like mine do not use DAS for large scale Exchange and large enterprises don't do this with Exchange due to some of the following reasons;

DAS does not provide Volume snapshot capability for backup and restoration activity
DAS Storage volumes cannot be replicated for any purpose to a secondary offsite or local array
Backup windows with DAS compared to using a SAN are not even worth providing examples of the difference, backup across the wire with DAS is unquestionably for large volumes of Exchange data going to be slower
You cannot clone a DAS storage volume nondisruptively in the background and quickly like you can on SAN, this is usefull for things that you should regulary perform such as Production backup integrity test.
You have dependancy with DAS between host and storage, you can move/change a Fibre connected server much easier than DAS.
Try providing cache priority or QoS to a DAS volume!
Try managing DAS remotely and from central consoles!
On a TCO front a SAN most probably provides you with much better cost savings and operational savings compared to having pockets of large storage pool with DAS

I'm not a SAN Bigot (maybe just a bit) but I'm sure some of the above reasons orgs use SAN shows what limitations arise by using DAS in the enterprise and why for applications like Exchange you need to implement such infrastructure.

The example cost hike

So to see what type of cost increase I may experience with no SIS by Upgrading to Exchange 2010 take the example calculation based on 1000 Users being sent a Mail with the Christmas message from the CIO which happens to be a 5MB attachment, this attachment being sent to 1000 people would calculate to theoretically 5GB of storage consumption on the Exchange DB which would be avoided with SIS in Exchange 2007, multiply that example in a typical messaging environment with Carbon Copy of example large presentations, more company announcements with attachments (maybe a Lotus Notes Quotation from Procurement?) etc and it will certainly start to become a very expensive option to use Fibre Channel with something like SIS.

Additionally lets not forget here that most organisations who have deployed 2007 have most likely implemented this on new SAN Arrays which are not likely to be renewed and have the capability to host 2010, a SAN is not unfortunately something you can throw away and replace with DAS, Additionally remember DAS has the hidden costs associated with operational management.

So to summarise on the negative side of this post I am not happy with such functionality being removed, by removing SIS from technology I will have no choice to upgrade to in future i've just increased my storage costs by 10% and also increased the volume of disk that I now require in my array moving forward (tough using proprietory tech hey). Lastly to put this into perspective I can't be bothered to find pricing from Microsoft on Exchange but I am more than sure the price of the software is now not 10% less with 2010 :)

The positive comments for Microsoft from this post

I'm not that hard on Vendors all the time, i've got some positive comments here. My positive side of this post mainly focuses generally with the fact features such as SIS moving forward means you should be focusing more on treating your storage strategy and all round planning more seriously with complete Archive methodology.

With a Commercially available Archive solution such as Symantec E-Vault or Quest Archive manager means you can host mail items on lower tier SATA or archive disk storage media, which in turn means you reduce the size of primary Exchange storage and the associated storage requirements of the higher tier level of storage. Importantly however by archiving shouldnt mean you cut your own nose off despite your face and replace SAN with DAS, it still has the tangible benefits across most large enterprise environments for many other reasons.

Summary

Maybe i'm being unfair here to Microsoft with my vendor rants, we have had SIS functionality reducing storage costs for a while wihtout realising and have taken it for granted, I think more and more moving forward we will need to shift to more focus on alternate strategy using Archiving products more and more and be sensible about the lifecycle of storage management within email environments. Longer term it will be interesting to see results from people migrating to 2010 to see if they notice a dent in storage costs if they are using SAN and not the horrible dreaded DAS!

Does HP-UX provide historic roots to take on VCE?

2009-11-09T21:16:00.011Z

You might be wondering why I have mentioned HP-UX and VCE in the same topic for this post and come to think of it your right, firstly though you maybe wondering what HP-UX is? Well its HP's Unix OS which ships and runs on their Integrity line of Server class....it's a rock solid Unix platform and runs as the big Iron in a lot of companies that I know of, it has built in partitioning (or more Containerised Virtual capability), it provides comparative performance to other alternative RISC based processors, has ported to Itanium, has integration, high availability and management layer etc. So cutting to the chase the reason I've posted is this....With the recent VCE announcements VMware/Cisco/EMC have put the wind up most big vendors in the last week I am sure by finally sh%ting and getting of the proverbial pot and creating an alliance, and fair play to them its a dog eat dog world look at how HP acquiring EDS shook the world of Services...

So to date HP in its armoury has the Storage, has the Server, has the Services and Integration with EDS but one main important ingredient missing in this equation to offer customers that alternate and what is it???? Yes the Hypervisor....

With HP having previous experience of running a development program Internally with HP-UX it is quite possible they could quite potentially release a Hypervisor themselves with the capability to build a commodity converged solution to completely compete and go it against something like VCE. Think Xen based hypervisor with openness naturally built in to provide customers with the portability and flexibility to move Images between other Xen based Hypervisors and dare I say it hybrid clouds with EC2....? HP have the internal resources I am sure to do this, they have done it for years with HP-UX already.

So this maybe a zany thought but when you look at Oracle having Sun/and Virtual Iron portfolios under its belt, and now VCE being fully announced isn't HP seriously going to suffer if it wants to concur all like so many of the vendors at the moment in the Datacentre space? Somehow I don't think pushing the Hyper-V and Xen OEM deals more agressively in spite of VMware being part of the VCE alliance will be enough to not lose at least some larger customers....

SSD....maybe not as widely adopted

2009-11-05T21:51:00.005Z

This news feed made me chuckle, its on how STEC shares plummeted this week due to EMC cutting back on an intial order with them for Shiny fast expensive SSD that they make for DMX/Vmax.

EMC are very clever in how they market and promote the success of relevant technologies, in fact the top tier vendors are king at this in the world of Tech and I really respect them for this it goes with the clique of trying to flog a Fridge/refrigerator to an Eskimo as people (not me) will most likely buy them under this presumption.

2009 has certainly been the year the SSD gets marketed and promoted as the killer disk medium for high IO intensive applications. At most events, in most magazines, vendor blogs etc they have pushed them like crazy. However after the STEC news I think it is quite clear that 2010 will be where the hardwork of trying harder to shift very small capacity and very expensive SSD disk will be coming for EMC!

Cloud fail? Get outa here...

2009-10-13T20:17:00.004+01:00

So I thought I'd post my views on the Tmobile/Danger outage along with the massive amount of views that have been plastered all over the world of twitter and large volumes of cloud bloggers. I wont go into technical detail on the outage, I'll be going philosophical on the whole thing.

First question being asked is was it the Cloud that failed? First things first, I (and many others) have mainly been pissed off with the fact that a vast array of short sighted people and reporters have quoted this as being a "Cloud" failure, I wont go into definition of Cloud as I've got many posts that provide this (and still continue to do so as Cloud Evolves), but what I will say is that this outage was by all means not a Cloud issue. Yes I repeat it was not Cloud issue....the issue was a managed service issue, a service that was being managed by Danger that T-Mobile outsourced to Danger, and Danger were obliged contractually by Tmobile to provide relevant services. Turn the clock back 5 Years and this outage would have been described as just that... an Outsourcing failure. Its important to state that the delivery method of the Cloud didnt fail to end users (the internet)....the Cloud Computing/storage strategy didnt fail (hardware did)...the crux is the managed service companies obligation and duty of care to operate it successfully failed.

Now flick to the other side of the coin....Danger were paid to provide a service and software to Tmobile, that payment was probably bare minimal cost base and tightly screwed down on overall price with absolute zero investment in any extended expensive SLAs with them, and obviously as Tmobile is the only operater with egg on there face here they were the only Operator to use Danger services and thus most likely the primary source for Infrastructure Investment fund for avoiding such outages, as anyone in business knows a single large customer is never enough SO before your eyes is a complete vicious circle of why this thing was doomed to fail...Two companies hedging bets basically on a business model supported by shoestring Infrastructure services and trying to reap every reward going financially.

The Cloud is not to blame, it is greed.....

"Everything happens for a reason"

Now that rant is over I provide reflection on why I think this outage was a good thing.

Sadly with the evolutional theory of natural selection this little chick of MS Danger had to fail to make the current leaders in the Cloud industry stronger and more capable. And with this outage I wonder how many of these Cloud/Managed Service providers reviewed backup and continuity strategy this week ;). Think of it as a lesson learnt, a lesson unfortunately learnt by Tmobile whom I am sure will settle in court and make lost revenue back and the consumer whom will also gain recompence.

And this lesson is one that can be taken on board by every aspect in the dark world of IT services and outsourcing, this goes from the bare basics of the Outsourcing of IT Services model where "Your mess for less" mentality is strive through to the bleeding edge side of IT within the Cloud world of services such as Amazon EC2 and many other cutting edge suppliers that are still yet to break the adoption curve into mainstream due to less high profile outages.

Additionally on this Mr Vinternals provided an excellent view point where he highlighted that example issues can additionally be used for you and I who most likely struggle to educate management on the phrase "you get what you pay for", and I add to this that the lack of visability on what your purchases and using for services no matter how good or reputable a service provider is should never be taken for granted. An example of this is the other high profile outage this week of a very reputable airline's primary reservation system which was being hosted in a managed service datacentre run by THE biggest and apparently most reputable managed service provider....Unfortunately I can't probably use the Phrase "You get what you pay for on this one" for services not granted but this guy really really made my day when I read this

Over and out...

Cloud "Are you ready" - Part 2 - PaaS

2009-10-04T20:27:00.007+01:00

Part two of my "Cloud are you ready" series focuses in on Platform as a Service or more commonly abbrieviated as PaaS. Now one has disclaimers with part 2 and 3, and that is I am an Infrastructure guy, I am not skilled and greatly knowledgeable on application architecture, that withstanding I am aware of emerging trends and strategy which is present in most of the cloud based technology and the emerging strategy from vendor PaaS offerings. Hopefully you won't be disapointed that this will not focus as much on cloud readiness as Part 1 as it will focus on fast facts picked up during research activity on current PaaS solutions and strategy. I wouldnt want to blog about something as a little knowledge has potential to be dangerous, I merely provide running views and opinions gathered.

Myself like many Infrastructure bods are seriously having to learn a lot about PaaS and SaaS strategy extremely FAST, this certainly shows that the Infrastructure bods which used to just be only concious of the bottom of the stack need to focus and diversify on alternate datacentre strategies and methods for delivery of core services. I am mightily interested and also quite concerned by the potential power of PaaS and SaaS to change the model for how Infrastructure delivery methods work. I am concerned if I don't get a grip on the basics of PaaS and SaaS I will be left out in the cold and app teams will start to scale environments and supportive IaaS which with "Cloud" simplifying strategy I am very skeptical this won't turn into the same as issues that occur in common architectural strategy by app bods doing this in todays world.

Now PaaS i've heard of that...

PaaS is growing exceptionally fast and has large volumes of industry interest, one of these reasons is mainly due to PaaS having app development at its heart still and the fact that coders beaver at code and they can still code happily away with PaaS. New PaaS strategy means there isnt "as" a initial massive shift compared to say changes that have occured in IaaS on how things get delivered.

Key advantages with Hosted PaaS cloud solutions for developers is they can code anywhere with anyone through central repositarys across the internet, example PaaS cloud providers include Microsoft Azure (currently in beta) and Google Appengine, you also have the PaaS purpose built frameworks such as Adobe Air and MS Silverlight, additionally some charateristics of PaaS include;

PaaS development frameworks are used to build components and services presented at the SaaS layer, examples include .Net, PHP, Java etc,
PaaS applications have potential improved intelligence capability to interact with the IaaS layer and provide developers with more statistic, I will emphasise more on this later in the post,
PaaS is built with more openness, PaaS providers are building platforms (and this is more not a complete u Turn) with SDK's and frameworks that support a cross range of different frameworks, even Microsoft with Azure are doing this with things like a Java SDK.

PaaS intelligence

The potential areas and intelligence for PaaS developers to exploit within its architecture is immense, for example if you take a PaaS built application the developers in almost real time can interogate and investigate every intricate detail on what consumers or users of the application are doing and what they want from applications, this is mainly due to the fact that the PaaS services hosting the SaaS applications are running across the internet and across various service buses.

From a security standpoint this is very important to consider if you are considering using a public PaaS cloud provider such as Microsoft Azure or Google Appengine, in theory cloud providers have the ability to obtain complete knowledge on any data stream that goes through the Platform that is hosting your SaaS built applications, I compare this in simplistic terms to them having full access to rummaging through your Private databases. I guess that certain laws prohibit this and to succeed in the world of compliance they wouldn't, but this is certainly one issue in regards to security and cloud that is not completely acknowledged and known and the hatchet buried.

Death of the OS?

Last comments from an Infrastructural viewpoint is the fact a lot of peeps believe that PaaS will be one of the strategies in Cloud that kill the current generation of OS as we currently know it. My sceptical view is first incarnations of PaaS will most certainly not replace the OS, to succeed it will need an underlying platform able to be compatible with current dev frameworks. Additionally we mostly do not have programming frameworks which are capable of not completely being able to run without using resource management features in the typical OS to scale.

Longer term prediction for the next 2-3 years we will possibly see PaaS applications being hosted as with current datacentre services upon JeOS or Tailored cut down type OS's like Ubuntu JeOS and in some respects Oracle Unbreakable Linux (The below diagram provides depicts this), these provide the bare minimal footprint required to start just limited services and supportive services such as Apache or the relevant proprietory app/db and are finely tuned.

The "Just Enough" operating system strategy certainly leads to some interesting thoughts on what will emerge and how architecture like this will affect the underlying IaaS model. Google as an example of this appear to be concentrating more on Dev Framework and API, they see the OS and Virtualisation as a barrier to achieve more for scalability of Cloud based applications and for certain application workload thats scales out such as Web apps I agree with this. Web based services scale horizontally, and growth of this at the scale being demanded even with streamlined approaches to Infrastructure delivery within IaaS can still be a problem, however if you remove the dependancy on the OS this means that speed and agility is less of an issue for the application but at what cost in other areas of the datacentre? that is the question and maybe something to discuss in further posts.

Summary

So there is my partial view on PaaS and what I believe it will shape to be (no sniggering please), my advice is if you are serious about looking into using PaaS and strategy similarily internally I seriously recommend you talk and discuss strategy with your incumbent Application Architects/Gurus. Emerging trends like Microsoft Azure are now being pushed by the industry marketing machine, this means that you will suddenly start to find a massive sideways approach to adoption by current application teams adopting without you even knowing which will leave the complete department at a quandary.

Abiquo Abicloud

2009-10-02T16:12:00.002+01:00

Came across this little gem today http://www.abiquo.com/en/products/abicloud It looks like a very slick open source freely available Private and Public Cloud manager.

The product video shows some screendumps (although the women narrating sounds a bit strange) which is quite cool and has similar features seen in a lot of the cloud managers.

We do seem to have an emergence of these with Players like CohesiveFT and Eucalyptus being the dominant players, I will probably have a look into this and post some reviews/comments on it.

Thanks

Dan

Who is next?

2009-09-28T19:59:00.002+01:00

Perot Systems bought last week by Dell and then ACS go this week to Xerox so the question is who will be next?

Other big names that may possibly go include;

ATOS
CSC
Fujitsu
Cap Gemini
Computacenter
Logica
Steria

It is amazing how much consolidation is occuring and how quickly in the industry today and its quite alarming what the big powerhouses are prepared to do to jump onto the IT services bandwagon, Especially when you hear about Outsourcing pricing being whittled down to bare minimal profit margin with customers demanding much more out of there contracts.

Now if you were Xerox or Dell why would you buy an IT services integrator and provider? Many thoughts come to mind such as;

Entry into the IaaS space
Build a portfolio of offerings which will be ready for the economic upturn
Improve indirect sale, they will claim to remain agnostic but the longer term goal is to adopt customers to there platforms/solutions
Quash competition, namely IBM, Oracle and now HP after EDS

Future Predictions

Oracle buy FJS or even possibly CSC, and why do I think this? They both have credible history and large customers within the Government and Public sector, provide further international coverage with multiple continental reach (especially FJS) and lastly a possible for consideration for purchasing Fujitsu is it builds the current SPARC chips and Oracle has commited to staying in the Hardware business so I expect will want control on the production line.

Another is Cisco are a possible to buy Accenture, they work together on current engagements apparently (how cute) and I see them probably being closely matched in regards to target audience. Accenture is very expensive and has a large price tag but Cisco is one of the few orgs who are capable of buying them HP/EDS stylie. Cisco might even go for an Indian Outfit like TCS or HCL, they are into emerging markets and they probably have large outsourced operations over there already so maybe a good cheaper mix?

Whatever the next acquisition is it will raise an eyebrow, with emerging countries making the world a smaller place and price of companies being at a lower value due to the economy it is bound to happen.

Virtualisation V1.0...V2.0...V3.0

2009-09-23T21:26:00.008+01:00

In between doing some work on the Part 2 of the post series "Cloud are you ready" I thought i'd post in between with some thoughts related to Virtualisation strategy within the datacentre and how I think we need to change and knuckle down to start to get Virtualisation to do what it is supposed to do for businesses....do more with less yet provide more agility and flexibility.

Virtualisation version 1.0 in where the industry performed basic DC consolidation and sat reaping the benefits drinking Kool Aid has and still is currently the predominant phase. In V1.0 the Hypervisor provided organisations with extremely good performance factor, clever and turn key benefits to consolidate along with supportive functionality such as Vmotion, DRS, HA and excellent provisioning opportunities. It probably sounds a bit unfair to sum up current Virtualisation based on the hard work VMware and its development team has done so far, but I am sure that even VMware would admit for x86 Virtualisation to truly succeed in the datacentre and more importantly impact and become the defacto server platform within the Datacentre it needed to diversify.

This diversity was evident, they bought companies such as Dunes (Lifecycle and Stage Manager) and Akimbi for Lab Manager so hopefully this post doesn't come across like i'm saying VMware was not business ready or serious about Datacentres...they are and they got the hell of One app per server and Physical Bloated server consolidation off the ground so we could SAVE BIG BUCKS/POUNDS to invest into IT someplace else more effectively.

Enter the dragon

So enter the next phase of Virtualisation, stage 2.0 strategy which is built upon the feature rich business focused products that has evolved and grown in ecosystems of the big virtualisation companies like VMware. The stage still predominantly in the infancy phase (when say infancy stage I think my statement was backed up recently when about 5 hands out of 50 at a local London VMUG knew what Lifecycle Manager was) V2.0 builds upon and uses the solid Virtualisation 1.0 consolidation fundamentals. It uses the later end developed enablement technology in Vmware such as available orchestration tools, chargeback, capacity management tools and self service portals to streamline IT delivery and services. Further afield of Virtualisation strategy and one step higher up the technological stack is Cloud Computing (or strategy), this combines large amounts of the technology that surrounds the V2.0 Ecosystem such as web based service catalog interaction and billing, the granual chargeback tools, rich API and many more to provide this in many different service delivery methods to organisations. And whether it is a Public or Private Clouds they all have to use such technology and process automators to ensure they meet cost and service expectation.

So the question I have is do we see V2.0 strategy completely in full adoption yet within the industry and ready to evolve further? Based on feedback from events and from blogs etc I'm not entirely sure it is, Maybe I'm not asking the right audience but I do feel adoption is not large enough yet to say it is there.

Based on the fact that businesses want to do more with less and how how extremely process centric IT is today I do feel it is the right thing for IT in organisations to move to this V2.0 engine and fast. Without this automation and interaction more with our business processes we will suddenly start to hit the same issue that were hit with Physical sprawl and our Virtualised worlds will mean an untenable situation to provide justification for further investment.

Cloud - Are you ready? - Part 1

2009-09-16T21:36:00.015+01:00

Cloud computing and overall Strategy in its current lifecycle is mostly at the early adopter stage. However with the popularity of methods such as metered server usage, shrink and grow capability and per hour driven costs for workloads, based on what Businesses want from IT with the limited budgets available today means the strategy is quickly turning it into a solution which will most likely become mainstream in the next 2-3 years as a common core business strategy for delivering and supporting core services.

This Three part series of post's will hopefully provide an overview of each the component layers that formulate a cloud strategy, I will provide detail on example attributes that exist within the relevant component layers and I also provide some operational and architectural readiness advice to be able to ensure that you can exploit the cloud strategy and reap inherent benefits.

Cloud stacks

Cloud Computing is not a tool or piece of hardware you buy, it is not software you buy off of the shelf and it is not something you can buy from an SI or an Outsourcer, so to your average IT professional it has very confusing definition statement about what it actually is which can be very misleading when trying to adopt and preach the strategy to internal business leaders and potential sponsors for your initiatives.

For this series of posts I define each component that builds up the typical Cloud Computing stack. There are many views on the definition of cloud computing is, upon observation in the proprietary world it appears that Cloud Computing is being defined into the "as a Service" stack layered component approach, from which I fully agree with and embrace for simplicity. Below is a diagram (or attempt) which shows the component layers that build the Cloud stack and the relevant attributes within each Relevant "as a Service" section that we commonly know today in most areas of IT and the datacentre;

The important thing to note with the above shown Cloud stack is that each component and running attribute within is portable and naturally decoupled from each layer and can easily shrink/grow on demand according to business requirement.

For a model example of something within this stack is a typical Web application, for this app the underlying Server workloads are needed (IaaS), the Middleware to run session data and to broker info to/from a database is needed (PaaS) and the presentation layer of a Web application that feed data's from the end users (SaaS) is used.

Cloud Computing is defined as all of these services and components glued together to become a complete extensible engine for your Datacentre. To gain a more broader picture of how the Cloud and inherent stacks fit together privately and publicly check out my post on the future vision I have on operating cloud services across public and private based cloud infrastructure.

So is your current IT ready for cloud?

Adopting a service oriented view of hosting infrastructure whether Privately or Publicly means you will need to introduce some changes and amendment to how you operate IT today and how your Business processes operate. You probably think you are going to struggle to adopt a cloud strategy, however you are not the only organisation who won't initially be able to successfully transition to cloud based services with your current IT and process.

Most organisations big or small have barriers in the way for adopting new strategy, for the larger enterprises is usually a financial barrier, current outsourcer lock in, or a people political barrier and for smaller sized organisations it maybe that you have again invested in Infrastructure and cannot justify throwing away kit or you just don't realise what you can achieve from using cloud strategy. In the next sections I set the scene on some hot areas you can focus on developing and progressing to ensure you can work towards implementing a cloud strategy.

The first steps

In order to put what you have today into a "Cloud" perspective I am firstly going to talk about IaaS which is at the lowest denominator of the cloud stack. If you have Server Virtualisation in your datacentre you are certainly in a good position to start to transition into cloud strategy at the IaaS layer. If using Private Clouds you can establish yourself as having basic foundation capability for hosting decoupled servers that can move from one IaaS provider to another. If starting to deploy a private cloud you have flexibility to perform fast deployments on the fly and you also have granular visibility of metered usage to bill out to internal customers.

Because everything whether it is in a private cloud or whether hosted in a public cloud needs to be paid for in some shape or form some of the questions you need to ask yourself about your virtualisation estate being capable for an IaaS strategy are;

How does your business pay for Infrastructure services today? - Is it on Capex, is it Recharged to business units on an Opex basis, is it on lease, do projects pay for individual requirements on an ad hoc basis,
Do you chargeback on services based on usage and consumption? Probably answered in question One but if you currently chargeback this is a good thing, IT units see cost as an Opex which is one of the clouds benefits.
If you do chargeback for VM's how do you do it? - Do you use a tool or do you have a rule of thumb per Virtual Machine that you use internally?
Do you use Orchestrational capability - Do you deploy VM's through a web portal which is aligned to a Service Catalogue?

Whether you do any of the above is most likely for the majority to be a no, a lot of companies have only just started to adopt the strategy for how Infrastructure is billed and how it gets paid for using Chargeback and Opex based financing in your business. If you have implemented such processes aligning and moving to a Cloud strategy will be far much easier. The below diagram is a conceptual on benefits which can be achieved by combining Orchestration and Chargeback models within current virtualised infrastructure, Like I said on my questions above if you have this today you are at the extremely mature end of adoption for your current Infrastructure and will most certainly find moving into a Public or building your own Private cloud easier than most.

If you don't have the above process and underlying technology to support such a process flow for service requirements from your business, define your requirements from the business and then look to relevant tools and solutions which can enable them within your Infrastructure.

Once you have the "engine" and the IaaS platform that can be exploited to support a complete cloud it is then important to look at how your costs are defined for the provisioned services that your customers require and want. It is important to know that even within the Cloud world cost is based on Opex and not up front Capex for services. With the cloud the end goal is that you only pay for what workload you want, you can shrink and grow application landscapes and financial to avoid the upfront capital expenditure to procure more physical Infrastructure to support any growth and burst.

The key for moving into the start of Cloud is to ensure you have processes in place, my diagram is a conceptual vision and is by all means not going to be completely relevant to your organisation, and with that you need to engage with who is responsible in your business for budgeting and finance and ensure you align this to cloud based strategy.

Summary

Hopefully for the first post in this series I have set the scene as to what the basic components that exist within a Cloud are and what layers build up the cloud. Additionally hopefully you have learned about what the first component in cloud strategy, Infrastructure as a Service is and how you can possibly start to move into a cloud strategy a lot quicker than you may think.

In the next post I will describe what PaaS is and how I think the common OS will operate and function in the future PaaS Cloud stack. Additionally above this layer it will be interesting as I have no idea how middleware and such like works so it will certainly be an interesting read for you I'm sure!

VMworld 2009 Aftermath

2009-09-08T20:13:00.002+01:00

After attending VMworld last week I was pleasantly surprised to see some of my previous blog posts almost being based what VMware are using as future strategy, things such as the use of vCloud and IO DRS were two in particular, and no I have not had an NDA for many months.

The event was about average compared to previous years, vendors were strive with Marketing in full 5th gear and the word C*oud was being used on I kid you not probably every vendor stand except the beer stands on the welcome party. Amusing as it may sound this was rather frustrating, I am a believer in cloud and the architectural principles that surround it however simply bolting on the word cloud onto your sales pitch simple doesn't cut it with me, if anything it sends me the other way.

Back to the show and on the Tier 1 vendor stands I got to spend some decent time with Dave Graham talking EMC Atmos, checked out Vmax, on the Cisco stand I saw some of the cool UCS kit (and had a laugh selling it to some random guy), spent some time struggling to find out if Layer 2 was only supported with Long Distance Vmotion (don't ask), spent moderate amounts of time asking questions on the VMware stands on new tech, and got plenty of free useless goodies that I will probably never use/wear.

Once i've had time to do some time studying sessions I attended in more detail and look at sessions I wasn't able to attend I will be most certainly writing some core material. Amongst many these will include discussion on Spring source and vCloud direction in further detail. After attending detailed sessions on vCloud I've started to understand in more detail how vCloud will work, I will endeavour to provide some technical learning material, views and opinions on this. Will provide some posts on Storage IO DRS based on what VMware.

Keep posted folks!!!

Cloud - Likely to bite you on the arse

2009-08-25T21:29:00.007+01:00

I overheard an interesting discussion today between some application guys (who are purely fictional) , they were saying that they had spoke to another respected Application bod from another company at a recent networking meet up who are currently using cloud services for application services, they then proceeded to say they will be looking to engage with a cloud provider currently offering a Cloud Application based service currently in beta (which is also fictional as this one works ;), additionally one of the fictional guys said they could see excellent benefits that can be reaped by turnkey production environment roll outs and development environments that can be built up on demand in the "Cloud".

I'm sure this type of conversation alone is enough to put the fear of god into any Infrastructure bod, from my stand point yes its scary to hear this stuff, however the context and goal for this post is I am only concerned with the issues and approach on how cloud is being adopted and not what the Cloud replaces, I am an advocate of Cloud and this type of talk should be embraced in IT departments and between teams. I do worry though when I hear this type of discussion as it means cost and IT budget goes to waste when it should be being invested using the correct methodology and process to implement new solutions into organisations. My immediate thoughts with a conversation like this is if cloud adoption is approached in this manor it has potential dangerous consequences for IT departments as a whole. My concern with this type of "shortcutting" lie with a possible emergence of business application peeps being blinded by the cloud marketing vendor hype, and being blinded like moths to a lamp in the way that the actual cloud providers are making the service offerings seem relatively simple to adopt for applications you currently have.

Most Infrastructure guys will know that for years we have had to implement and design around poorly written and designed application stacks, and yes this isn't just bespoke apps it includes COTS and proprietary middleware/databases that we now struggle to virtualise and avoid having excessive server sprawl from by having to employ strategy such as one app per server whether virtual or physical. So enter into our lives the cloud provider that can offer the opportunity to Change current deployment process for business applications and services, bypass any current Infrastructure design authority and the people that make the engine run today that supports the current bloated app stack. All seems so easy doesn't it, it would do to an application bod, they tend to think differently and approach IT differently to Infrastructure types. This is one of the reasons why we struggle to sell server virtualisation to application bods, they want platforms that provide above and beyond and not just "enough" workload, they simply don't understand consolidation and to be honest why would they?

If application peeps approach a Cloud strategy in the strategy that I explained I think it will no doubt end up being great for the cloud providers but I feel this will end up being bad for the organisations who adopt it in such a blase manor. My reasons to suggest this are around the fact that we still have many current unanswered questions on Cloud in Enterprises, and the fact that cloud is still at the bleeding edge stage of the adoption curve.

Using the Cloud without ensuring that you have a finely tuned hosted application may actually mean services could (and I say could) end up longer term being more expensive due to the way that Infrastructure is used to cover up for sloppy Software configuration in Private infrastructure today. If public cloud services are used to host current "dodgy" bloated apps that consume excessive network and sucks CPU cycles then knock yourself out but be prepared if an application is being used on a pay per use metered basis, it will need to be lean and mean, you cannot simply migrate like for like and assume that the app and associated processes and dependencies on that app will provide the cost savings cloud touts.

As I've said this is a basic overview of why I feel the Cloud may bite anybody who is looking to move current application services into the cloud well and truly on the arse. When cloud services are mature and accepted within enterprises it will no doubt offer significant benefits to being hosted within the metered shrink and grow environment, however applications need to change and the way we architect systems will need to change, and this strategy is not as you will have found with Virtualisation adoption something that can happen over night, this could take years.

Which leads me onto the Vmware cloud strategy and fully optimized stacks which may emerge with the Springsource acquisition....hey I couldn't have a post without a vendor name drop, maybe another post at a later point in time ;)

Tech Review - PHD Virtual esXpress

2009-08-20T15:29:00.003+01:00

I posted a few weeks ago about PHD Virtual technologies release of esXpress version 3.6, on this post I delve into each new feature and the benefits that you can acheive with your virtualised backup strategy;

Company Background

PHD Technologies was formed in 2002 and they are based out of Mount Alington New Jersey, USA. They have well over 1600 customers and this customer base includes big enterprises such as Siemens, Barnes and Noble, Tyco and are extremely popular and big in the SMB Space and the Academia space.

Technology Background

PHD provides organisations with a cost effective and robust solid backup tool, esXpress is now in its 3rd generation and has been designed to combat the problem of backup in Virtualised estates since the ESX 2.x days. Now in the 3rd Generation release esXpress provides core functionality and technological advances that give PHD a leading edge against other players in the space and allows them to compete for Enterprise custom due to the extensive technical offerings.

PHD utilise VBA (Virtual Backup Appliances) to perform backup and restore from either a connected RDM Disk to your Virtual ESX Hosts, an NFS Share or even backup to a VMDK file. VBA's are something PHD has architecturally used within its product set since 2006, they enable backups to be performed with the following benefits for your Virtualised estates:

Negates the Need for VCB agents/proxys so Esxpress can be used to remove the need for agent level backup on VM's hosted on entry level ESX license versions
Removes the need for backup agents within VM's or Using VCB meaning you can virtualise more due to reduction in Host overhead.
In current environments using VCB it reduces the need for a VCB Proxy server thus reducing cost of this server and any SAN requirements
Each backup VBA can perform 16 concurrent jobs, competitors max at 8 (more detail on enhancements later)
VBA's are completely fault tolerant in that they are VMotionable to another Host in the possible event of a disaster striking VBA's can be installed extremely quickly with the OVF import functionality.

Esxpress 3.6 benefits

Vsphere 4 Support

3.6 provides full support for this and also has a VC Plugin which is supported on the vCenter client. Additional admin is performed either via a Web interface which provides you with the ability to manage the backup environment from any desktop and not have to worry about having to install GUI's wherever you go or want to check and manage backups.

Data Deduplication

Massive reductions in backup space requirements can be acheived by using this feature. With VM's being backed up with VCB using conventional backup products like Backup Exec or even Netbackup performing inline dedupe operations is not capable natively by the underlying Backup software, you need an appliance or piece of additional software to do that at additional cost. esXPress 3.6 Provide Data deduplication inline completely free of charge within your license entitlement. Dedupe in esXpress is claimed to provide upto a dedupe ratio of 25:1.

The real magic in esXpress happens on what PHD call there Dedupe appliance, this dedupe appliance is built using the PHD San appliance which is available to download additionally at http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/virtualization-utilities, this appliance can provide you with the option of using shared VMFS across Local DAS storage on your ESX hosts without buying a full backend SAN. When using the Dedupe appliance and backup method incremental VM restoration is also possible for deduplicated backup.

EsXpress Deduplication technology also means you can backup and restore any delta changes across your VM's, this is extremely beneficial for remote located VM's, the delta block change capability means that you can exploit use of the WAN to backup across sites to reap the benefits of a complete centralised backup strategy, using a centralised backup stategy provides you with benefits such as reduced manpower overheads to change backup media and monitor jobs remotely, improved security of having data stored offsite, reduction in possible Tape vaulting costs and many other benefits pertinent to your organisation when removing remote infrastructure.

Improved restores and backup streaming

In my opinion restores are the most important aspect to consider for of any backup technology, it is no good backing up quickly if the restore activity is long and increases your RTO time. File level restores in VCB Virtual backup software is never quick, mainly due to you having to mount the VMDK and then extract the file, for a 15-20GB file this can take considerable time. Esxpress 3.6 has improved multi user point and click restore functionality from within the esXpress java GUI, the extraction is made possible by unique executable file format and not a TAR similar file.

Total backups per host is always a limiting factor in virtual backup architectures, VMware VCB has a recommendation (setup dependant) of 4-6 concurrent jobs per ESX Host, esXpress 3.6 now can allow backup of a total of 16 concurrent jobs per ESX host, meaning shorter backup windows.

Product Summary

ESXpress is a great backup tool and touts some great niche technical features, this is most certainly a good product to use in the SMB space due to the lack of requirement to use VCB and can be used within the larger virtualisation estates with the concurrency and deduplication benefits.
I think the most attractive component in esXpress is its Dedupe capability and the fact you can exploit a side benefit of this in remote backup across your WAN, centralised backup is becoming a very popular strategy in virtualised estates.

Check out esXpress at its website http://www.phdvirtual.com and a full 30 day demo available on http://phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual-backup. For any Vmworld attendees they are also on the exhibitors stand #1502 at Vmworld 2009 in San Francisco http://www.vmworld.com/community/exhibitors/phdvirtual/ so check them out and pass by the stand.

As if by cloud magic...

2009-08-16T09:47:00.008+01:00

Since my last post where I discussed the Microsoft Azure cloud service and highlighted that I felt companies competing in the cloud space such as VMware are now diversifying past the Hypervisor to reach aspirations of Cloud, and then Vmware go and do me a favor and make me look like i'm a visionary and extrememy intelligent and buy Spring Source!!!.

I have had all week to digest the views and opinions from various Industry analysts and bloggers and see what they are thinking and saying in general on the Spring acquisition and now heres my attempt (ARSE COVER DISCLAIMER - I am not a Software Architect/coder/guru/white sandals & sock wearer so excuse any rubbish) at trying to predict where the purchase will lead VMware's current business model and what will evole from the acquisition, lastly I also highlight what the industry needs from any of Vmware's clouds offerings.

VMware - Now not just a virtualisation company?

VMware are now kick starting themselves into providing multi tiered service offerings, and with the latest acquisition are slowly creeping up the layers and stack past just the underlying Datacentre Virtualisation technology. This natural growth is mainly I feel due to demand from the industry and current customers for more agile cloud based services and coverage across more of the datacentre.

The Springsource acquisition enables Vmware to move into the PaaS (Platform as a Service) market, this effectively means that they can provide organisations with an end to end operational stack starting from the underlying Virtual Machine workload, through to the presentation layer for orgs to run JVM type workloads and webservices. With this solid framework VMware can provide presentation layer building blocks alongside technology such as vApp and they go further than providing just the solid underlying platform infrastructure which is present within the VDC-OS intiative.

Customers can also benefit from the confidence instilled through partnerships and alliances formed in the Datacentre virtualisation boom with the likes of EMC, Cisco, IBM and HP. What will also attract any customers is the fact that Spring is open source and common knowledge to most people in development meaning any future developments and offerings won't be a closed shop like Azure (We Hope). Overall within the cloud space I believe VMware will probably have the competitive edge to attract Enterprise customer base when pitched against other competitors in this space such as Microsoft and Google. This is mainly due to current core datacentre infrastructure values and them being the company respected as being the ones to establish the defacto baselines for capable Server Virtualisation and consolidation products.

What does this mean for an Infrastructure bod?

Some people maybe asking themselves (like me) "Well VMware have bought these guys what does that mean to me and my current investments in VMware technology". From my observation the Spring acquisition isnt going to be a tactical point purchase like Propero, Beehive and Dunes, I see Spring being the key driver for Vmware to start to be able to provide a sustainable reputable driven cloud based offering for current enterprise based customers and for new potential customers that would be considering Azure and Google Appengine. Looking at available hooks within Spring and by the Spring.NET and I presume you will even extend and be able to use the app components available upon Microsoft Azure services which is a very smart move if this happens, this will mean you will have the flexibility to run certain components on alternative clouds and not be locked into using the complete end to end VDC-OS stack.

Below is a self compiled diagram which includes my vision and picture of what architecture within the VMware suite may start to look like, you might think its a load of rubbish and if you do then please pass comment, however I feel we will have an emergence and movement now into Cloud being accepted more and more due to the capability of VMware having a open framework and the capability to host the application being hosted anywhere with the massive scalability options such as being able to burst workload on demand for more required capacity and utilise and offer your organisation standard machine building blocks with vApp and Virtual appliances.

The future vision

VDC-OS is quite clearly going to be VMware's stack for hosting cloud workloads privately and publicly, to provide openness within the industry VMware will have the OVF Format to ease hosting virtual workloads upon multiple carriers and vApps within the VMware space to define building blocks and provide metadata on any whereabouts of objects.

All of these items which are being provided today will ensure that transition into a Cloud Architecture will be achievable and cost effective and I sincerely hope it won't mean a complete throw away of your underlying existing Virtual Infrastructure, and I would hope you will have ease of portability to other platform providers if you want or have an need within your enterprise to do this.

Within the VMware strategy I think to succeed the industry needs some of the following ideas and functionality in future from cloud with Vmware;

vApps and Virtual Appliances starting to grow further with Spring and its inherent available turnkey middleware and webservice building block stacks, and with the underlying Vsphere Platform being available this complete end to end stack can now be turned into a moveable and flexible workload across Private and Public cloud infrastructure, with that I would like to see live migration capability between Clouds and certainly more portability for external cloud usage. Private clouds can be hosted internally via vCloud api's, an example could be a company like SAP that would be hosting SAP instances privately but that hosted workload is not limited to a firewall or boundary between each of them,
Federated security between Clouds for any running workloads and applications regardless of what datacentre or cloud hosting partner the platforms and applications sit on. I want ease for security and ease to move to cloud providers when I want without penalty or obstacle,
Virtual Desktop will evolve into revolving around less of a hosted OS centrally and more of a application orientated strategy, with the applications being hosted upon any cloud and accessible via any browser or OS, similar to how Adobe AIR apps work,
Burst capability With intuitive interaction between app presentation and the core VDC-OS I would hope we see more automated orchestration activity in the event for example that you need to increase and burst to more workload. By using vApp you can essentially acheive this with pre automated configurations and knowledge available as to any external dependancy within the metadata such as a Database server that could become constrained if more app stack workload was added etc.

Other avenues

I am going to go over some of my predicted possibles in more detail in future posts once the dust settles with the Spring acquisition but one of the prime benefit that I can see to this is the possibility that we may start to shift into VMware building defacto affordable Middle/Web stacks just as Redhat do with JBoss. This may additional mean that we will move away from the performance and tuning arguments and issues of running certainly Java workloads within VMware machines, we move away from the issues of ISV compatibility and also away from the expensive licensing infringements to use DRS and Multiple hosts for our benefit that the likes of Oracle impose.

Summary

Well thats enough babbling and digressing for one post, hopefully I have raised some possible avenues that will arise for organisations on yet another acquisition that VMware have made. This one is certainly an eye opener and it is going to be very interesting to see what the vibe is like at VMworld 2009 on what direction VMware are now moving into, and lastly it will be very interesting to see in 6-12 months time how VMware shape as a company with such a diverse acquisition.

Azure - Microsoft's new baby

2009-08-05T18:03:00.008+01:00

I've noticed last week or so we have had a bit of a rise in Hyper-V bashing, so I thought it was time to write a post on where I think this whole thing is going longer term rather than just talking about the today comparatives of the technical nuts and bolts of the underlying Virtualisation tech/

Looking at how Hyper-V has performed within the analyst popularity stakes since its release I don't think market share is still any better for Microsoft, analysts are saying that only really Citrix Xenserver is the competitor with single percentage gains on market share on Vmware and if anything Uncle Larry at Oracle is likely to succeed in gaining more uptake on Oracle VM due to the Sun acquisition finally closing.

My view (if you want it) on Microsoft's strategy for Hyper-V is that they are now shifting concentration to the Azure Cloud platform and not the underlying Datacentre server virtualisation platform. My justification for this is that in all reality to them Cloud is seen as almost a software layer and an extension of services within your datacentre today such as Exchange and SQL. Azure being hosted within Microsoft's datacentre will no doubt rely on Hyper-V but to be honest it is the interface to components that will be where Microsoft concentrate on exploiting, they are not in the game to make money from a Hypervisor this is why it is an inclusive product to Windows 2008.

Microsoft would never be taken seriously running capacity planner exercises and on engagements to work with you to configure optimal infrastructure platforms to gain large consolidation ratios, and I feel neither will Gold Certified MS partners (most are VMware resellers anyway). Instead I feel Microsoft will stick to what they know best and have the developer teams internally being capable to run such a beast within the application arena, this then provides them with the ability to kill two birds with one stone and concentrate on similar strategy to Google whilst gaining foot hold in the Cloud service space.

There is speculative rumour that the domain www.office.com has been bought and registered for a new online version of Office probably arriving at release time that 2010 Office arrives, also MS has Exchange 2010 on the roadmap for next year which is going to be tailored for Cloud environments so if at least anything else, moving focus in the Hypervisor arms race with Hyper-V and flogging a possible dead horse would have the potential negative impact of losing ground on Mr Page and Brin. Microsoft will no doubt spend less development money on Azure than designing Hypervisor related technology, most of the development I expect will come from development blueprinting done on things such as Live Services, MOSS and Collaboration tools such as MSN messenger. And you don't necessarily need server virtualisation capability to run a cloud, you can provide ASP like services with just a fully optimised application stack, this is something that Microsoft has a better chance at providing with current portfolio offerings such as MOSS and Exchange and future technology on the horizon meaning no need to focus on the underlying platform.

Cloud Computing still has a rather large volume of unanswered questions and it is still very much a bleeding edge stage for the technology, it is clear though that even the likes of VMware are not focusing on the Hypervisor platform as much and are having to diversify and concentrate efforts on the bigger picture of a cloud environment with vCloud and other core components within the whole VDC-OS. So by following this strategy of being mostly a application cloud provider means that Microsoft isn't seen as the conquer all vendor by taking on the Hypervisor market, it means they are classed as a fluffy software provider still but are able to keep on track in competing with the likes of Google. It also means they can resell services through partners and hosting companies and still ensure that software partners such as the likes of Quest will still be able to use the API that they offer to provide niche partner software beneficial to both parties.

I will find it interesting to see if my predictions come true, if anything its worth a stab at guessing as in today's fast pace world of Cloud it can quickly be blown away by the wind in minutes :)

Virtualisation within today's IT Frameworks

2009-08-02T21:13:00.027+01:00

When I look at current IT frameworks that are followed within corporate environments it still appears that people are still trying to erratically bolt on any methdology and best practices created by new emerging game breaking technology. My main target area of technology that evidently shows that this problem exists is with bringing processes up to date with the current explosion created by the introduction of Virtualisation technology to datacentres.

The higher level issues

Today we have mature IT Libary's and frameworks such as ITIL, MOF and many others which have over the years focused on building operational and technical processes that you can tailor to operate a streamlined Infrastructure (in theory). Libary's like ITIL had to start with a baseline somewhere, but with technology growth this is however something that needs to continuously evolve to changing fads and paradigms. Examples of this include the fact that 3-4 years ago hardly anyone virtualised servers like they do today, nobody ever heard of the Cloud let alone looked at using it, nobody performed Outsourcing as rediculously as they try to do today and we certainly were not under the same financial constraints that we all face due to the credit crunch.

So enter to market at about 2004/5 enterprise server virtualisation into this arena, with the technology having one of the biggest impacts to IT since the actual physical servers it has consolidated, and having many many technological advances which have fully matured 5 years later and is now mature enough to suggest it will be here for many moons to come. However even with the dramatic impact it has had it still appears that IT Frameworks still lag in providing any focus on how Virtualisation technology changes process within datacentre ops. When I google "ITIL and Virtualisation" I get very little to suggest I'm wrong.

Back at the ranch and in the datacentre and with new technology or not the op processes still need to be followed to keep the ship running, Architects and operations guys that know Virtualisation inside out and have seen it mature to the stage that it is at today want it desperately to change to make sure that they are continuously are not drowned in legacy process which limits potential of the core technology they believe in. It isnt just going to be Virtualisation that suffers, add game breaking technologies into this arguement such as Cisco UCS and EMC Symmetrix VMAX that reduce even more reduction of process in the management and operation of the datacentre and this is going to become more and more of a pain in the arse to you and me.

Yes I know...

Virtualisation and the underlying technology that supports the virtual landscape is deployed as a point solution, this is also the case for the example technologies that are changing the shape of datacentres, you procure them and you can solve common datacentre problems. Virtualisation ecosystems as in the software and components that you can deploy however can reduce your process by default and with very little need to implement any fandangle add on or interfaces, however you still need to ensure that this potential is exploited correctly.

Any problem areas of a datacentre that have been remediated by Virtualisation had various processes and framework activity previously structured around them which was expensively designed for them when the infrastructure was placed within the Physical world. For an analogy of this the Physical world is rather much the equivilant of turning an oil tanker around in the Panama canal, instead now you have replaced the oil tanker with virtualisation technology that now means everything has the potential to move at 1000MPH, meaning now instead of the tanker you are turning around a hovercraft in the Panama canal. This speed and agility however can be a double edged sword, it now means your process certainly has to be a lot more streamlined and lean and you need to be on top of defining processes for any operational activity alongside any IT service management teams.

A comparison

An example of differences in contrast is within Vsphere and that you now have the possibility of features such as Virtual Machine server resource upgrades being possible on the fly with Hot Add of CPU/RAM all via the gui with a soft change. Question is does this type of thing require a full attention of the CAB? Surely it is low risk, it doesn't require an outage, it dosen't go wrong (yet). Other examples include run book reductions in the event of a DR scenario, by using something like Vmware SRM to replicate VM's negates this, previous it would need probably half a department of people and a runbook as long as your arm to intiate even a reduced functionality test.

So the question is what can you do to help transform your processes to align to a technology evolution like this?

People Change

The first place to start is by educating operational teams on what Virtualisation actually is and how it changes the game for IT service management, you need to evangelise and show them how the technology works, you need to ensure that they will see a benefit in both there day to day job role and most importantly you need to ensure that they do not feel the new technology is likely to put them and there role at risk.

It's important to highlight any differences in technology and to explain clearly and concisely what has changed, bull in a china shop tactics with service management players won't cut it, you need to explain the real basics first, examples of this could include;

Release Management - Includes covering how the day to day service automation and features such as Vmotion work first, then work onto working with them to define where you can reshape other process flows for say a change mechanism for upgrading your virtual resources or deploying various new VM's in an automated script.
Root Cause Analysis/Incident management - Explain that vSphere can offer a full blown visable internal and extensible monitoring repositary to see what has changed and when, this can show them that you can remove the need for witchhunts on RCA procedures. It's also extensible into current service management tools such as BMC remedy, Veeam Nworks with HPOV and MS SCOM.
Change Management - Cover things such as how Vmotioning means that you do not need to turn off VM's to power down the ESX host, the VM's can be migrated, and explain how other technology such as Storage Vmotion can even provide reduction in outages on your SAN.
Capacity Management - Explain Resource Pools and the ESX Scheduler, this doesn't need to be to a VCP understanding, keep to a basic overview that Virtual Machines can be rate limited or provided with reservations in resource pools.
Release management - Explain you can perform activity such as a snapshot before any change is made on a VM for instant rollback and service dependant you may negate the need for a CAB approval by the change being deemed low risk. Also explain you can negate potential bottle necks by P2V'ing machines with technology such as Vmware Appspeed.
Continuity Management - Explain the runbook can be completely disolved with technology for DR such as SRM, Also explain you won't need to organise outages during bank holiday weekends when you should all be enjoying a pint down the pub!

These are all example areas to kickstart your approach, I could write hundreds of gamechangers which evolve from technological advances. Like any new technology the important thing is to ensure that you view the processes you need to transform from a different angle and viewpoint, the people responsible for managing the operational processes will 9 times out of 10 probably want to emulate what they do today "because it works and thats how we have always done it" thats rubbish I Say, ensue you make sure you educate and ensure that the newer technology you are designing is effectively not just being put in as project process exercise and you actually get the best TCO out of the technology.

The Future and media methods

Looking at how we can solve the problem and I do beleive we will always be constrained on keeping processes upto date with new Technology trends until we can change how IT moguls set goverend criteria for being adopted into a formal Libary.

New technology mediums with things such as Wiki's and Blogs may emerge into actually being the methodology medium, subject to obvious approval by relevant bodies this is something that I beleive will become more and more accepted by the pragmatists. When you look at how the Encyclopedia has evolved it went from book to Encarta type resource through to mostly where we are today with the Internet with Wiki's so the next logical step has to be moving from classroom based environments into online web 2.0 experiences for realtime updates with trends.

Summary

Some of this you may think is rubbish, hey I don't proclaim to being an expert in ITIL, This is something that most people adopting new technology may face so hopefully I have provided you with a possible approach to reduce process and provide to your business what matters most which is core quality services and streamlined delivery.

vSphere Service Console and Partitioning

2009-08-01T23:10:00.004+01:00

After doing some work on vSphere builds in the lab It looks as though you cannot specify the desired size of a VMFS partition when installing Vsphere via a manual deployment from CD.

Previous versions of ESX held the /Boot within the RHEL formatted disk partition's. Vsphere differs, it now has the Service Console stored within a VMDK which can be either held on a local VMFS partition or from a Shared Storage VMFS LUN. Some of the advantages to this include;

Being able to perform a snapshot the VM and have the opportunity to rollback if ever needed after upgrading/updating due to issues on the changes
Maybe to remove the way the COS being tied to CPU0 as it is in ESX 3.x, with it being a VM it can be scheduled i presumed on any of your zillion cores.
Probably means being able to provide dedicated resource throttling for the VM running the actual VM so it doesn't run away with the whole of a single CPU resource

From my current observations when performing a manual install of Vsphere from DVD/ISO it formats under a extended partition all of the complete spare disk space with VMFS to cater for the Service Console VMDK partition.

The Problem

So why is this a problem? In most environments it wont be, however If you want to ensure you have freedom to partition and to keep the Service Console on a seperate VMFS partition away from VM's on a local VMFS volume then it will not be possible by manual install.

The Solution

The only way I have been able to acheive creating manual partitions is with building a customised Kickstart Configuration File. Vsphere again appears to have changed on this front, in previous versions you created a KS by downloading from the ESX web sites, again a difference in Vsphere is the easiest way I found of building a KS file was to build the ESX host from CD first and then grab the KS.CFG file from /Root, I then edited this file with the relevant parameters for storage with the following;

part '/boot' --fstype=ext3 --size=1100 --onfirstdisk
part 'none' --fstype=vmkcore --size=110 --onfirstdisk
part 'Storage1' --fstype=vmfs3 --size=15000 --onfirstdiskvirtualdisk 'esxconsole' --size=7804 --onvmfs='Storage1' part 'swap' --fstype=swap --size=800 --onvirtualdisk='esxconsole'
part '/var/log' --fstype=ext3 --size=2000 --onvirtualdisk='esxconsole'part '/' --fstype=ext3 --size=5000 --grow -onvirtualdisk='esxconsole'

Word of advice in any of the preincarnations of ESX it was always best practice when building ESX to either physically disconnect your connectivity to shared storage on an ESX OR remove any zoning to the SAN. This again is something I strongly recommend you do, if you don't you may hose a complete VMFS lun.

Hope this helps and anyone from VMware can shed some of the benefits of using a VMDK for the Service Console now are set aside the obvious ones.

PHD Virtual ESXpress 3.6 - New Release

2009-07-23T22:50:00.001+01:00

PHD have just announced support for vSphere in ESXpress 3.6 for the full detail on the product visit http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual-backup

PHD Virtual have been a market leader within the virtualised backup industry since the ESX 2.x days, they are one of "the" original Virtualisation backup vendors who noticed a gap that needed to be bridged to be able to successfully back up VM's without sacrificing ESX host and VM resources to backup agents/frameworks;

The latest version of 3.6 includes the following features;

Full Vsphere 4 support
Global side Deduplication of virtual machine backups (Note this is deduplication across the whole of your backups and i've seen the compression rate its fantastic)
Multi User Instant file level restore
Up to 16 Concurrent Backups per ESX Host (VCB Recommendation is 4-6)
Built in Incremental backups
And many more niche technologies which give them a competitive edge over other vendors

In brief ESXpress by design is different to most other virtualisation backup products in that it doesn't use the Vmware VCB Framework, it utilises a Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) on your ESX host to backup VM's located upon that Host. It also has some exceptionally clever deduplication algorithms which also separates's it from competitors by deduplicating the complete

Installation and configuration of critical backup jobs is a breeze, this is certainly obvious when looking at how to install it is exceptionally easy as this video showshttp://download.phdvirtual.com/docs/esXpress3-5.swf . I will certainly be installing and evaluating the new release at some point from the PHD Virtual website and I highly recommend you have a look yourself, when i've had a chance to look at the new release I will hope to post some reviews.

SSD and next generation OS's

2009-07-23T11:47:00.007+01:00

Someone in my office recently got a nice shiny new Solid State Drive for there Laptop. It really does sound really cool to have one of these and Im sure most expect it to be beneficial to removing what is probably the weakest link in most laptops today of Boot times, defrag issues and general slow down over time of the OS environment.

When I looked at it though through my sceptical eyes my first thought was....Are the currently available Operating Systems optimized to use capability in SSD yet? On the SSD my colleague has Windows 7 on it so all very swish....thing is is W7 optimized for SSD as what is a "next generation" Operating system and is possibly one of Microsoft's last OS's in the Architectural sense that we know today?

After having a look around on some websites to back this up and I found http://apcmag.com/windows_7_gets_ssdfriendly.htm and http://ajaymatharu.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/windows-7-and-ssds/ so it appears we are still at very early days of being able to exploit full capability in SSDs and a lot of enablement technology hasn't made it through development into Windows 7 yet. I know that Windows 7 is not GA'd yet but I am pretty sure this functionality won't make it through to GA in the next few months. So what is it that will propel SSD to bridge the early adopter gap and into being fully commoditised.

Future OS's

Google just announced an OS last week which I predict will be an OS that will be designed to cater for future hardware such as SSD. Netbooks today run many Linux variants such as Ubuntu and Fedora which are continually in open development and lifecycle due to the nature of Open source will also be OS's that will exploit the benefits for Notebooks/PC's.

The TV

I compare the SSD experience to the TV, We all love our TV, its been a device in the home that has functionality available within seconds, press the big red button on your remote control and your tuned in and ready for action. This is exactly what I would expect from a computer running SSD, I want to be able to press the button and boot into my programs, I don't want to wait and make a cup of tea while it boots, I also don't want to sit waiting for it to turn off either! I also think that anyone who is a Mac user will know how dam good it is to just open and shut your macbook to resume where you left off, I hardly turn mine off, the pitfall of this is gradual battery drain but its still what I would want to see from a future machine built with SSD however from boot.

It appears it is in the hands of the ISV's for us to start to see instantaneous available functionality becoming defacto for OS's, I do predict that Google and Apple will be ahead of this curve before Microsoft (please post if im wrong MS and you have SSD in your roadmap). Building an OS from the ground up maybe a benefit to Mr Google, it certainly gives them the opportunity if it is based on a Linux kernel to continuously evolve the kernel around the technology that is ever evolving a lot more easier.

Hopefully this post has shown that SSD in the Laptop/PC is not certainly something you will obtain large benefits from if you are looking to become an early adopter however I am more than sure it will provide better benefits than what is available in PATA/SATA today. SSD's in a SAN on the other hand is a different subject post all together....:)

Optimal VM Placement

2009-07-09T12:06:00.012+01:00

UPDATE: Readded diagram due to link issue, apologies RSS Subscribers

This isn’t an educational post on how many VM's you place per VMFS volume or how to plan your VMFS luns, its a thinking matter post in response to a question that Steve Chamber's raised on possible ways to script optimal placement of your VM's on VMFS/RDM storage LUNs to gain the best performance. This got me thinking (highly dangerous yes) with some possible responses, the main topic for debate on this post is "Is VMDK placement on LUNs really something that should be decided by a Scripting logic or evenly balanced with an algorithm like Vmware DRS does?"

Storage virtualisation and natural decouplement within ESX architecture means that you can design and build a Virtual Machine that can have a Virtual disk drive such as the main OS or partition for flat file copies hosted on lower end SATA Storage or Networked storage, you can then run on the same VM other disks that require higher IO Log and DB disk volumes on more capable Fibre Channel or EFD media. This technical capability all ensures that you can achieve and obtain the dedicated IOP's needed for running the virtualised workload and more importantly allows organisations to reduce cost by not using higher end storage for lower end storage demands. The diagram below hopefully provides a simplified view of this.

Optimal VMDK Placement

It is important to ensure optimal placement of VM's upon any storage volumes and plan ahead for expected workload, also important is to ensure that the spindle count and raid level is suited to the running workload. These factors are probably longer term more important than rightsizing your virtual hardware. Within early virtualisation projects you could quite happily operate most VM's on just a RAID 5 set with 5 or 7 disks, this was mainly due to the fact that it was low hanging fruit and was heavily underutilised before when it was first on its original Physical Platform. More recently with the new major Scalability benefits that are available in Vsphere allow scaling to large amounts of vCPU and RAM which now means you are going to almost want to exploit and use this new capability to target and facilitate virtualising Tier 1 Applications and databases, you'd be silly not to.

Engagement work is needed at the architectural planning and design stage to gain a predicted indication from your Application teams and ISV’s jointly on what requirements the workload will have based on the business requirement of that application. Gaining storage relevant statistics such as how many IOPs and the expected Disk Read/Write characteristic of the running workload are paramount to deciding where to host VM's. In most projects however their are inherent problems with this in that most Virtualisation/Server Ops guys struggle to engage or obtain this information from Application owners/support unless it is easily accessible within an off the shelve application/DB such as MS Exchange or SQL. Also issues exist with bespoke applications or web services that tend to not have the available technical resources and any performance information from the application developers or the ISV to factor this into your design.

The problem is...

In most provisioning scenarios, IT Operations create VMFS LUNs, present them to ESX Hosts in preparation for VM requirements. When deployment occurs the Virtual Admin will put new VM/VMDK on a LUN that aligns to having appropriate maximum amount of VM’s on that LUN that is set to avoid excessive HBA Path Thrashing, some will just put VM’s on LUNs based on spare space available. Unfortunately when it comes to facilitating for high IO workload both will at some point likely lead to performance problems due to bad placement. Currently best practices and guidelines from VMware work effectively, so you can avoid hot spots on LUN’s to a degree with prior planning for placement at both the SAN and Virtualisation Layer, however the more that you attempt to virtualise Tier 1 Workloads that demand constant amounts of compute resource the harder it will be for people to operate such workloads effectively without constraining resources within the virtual estate.

FAST for VMware

One future possible solution to move to the panacea of automated balancing is something that will feature in EMC’s new Symmetrix V-Max high end array called FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering). In a nutshell FAST works by monitoring the storage LUNs and migrating workloads to more suitable tiers. I will spare full detail on how the EMC solution works as Barry Burke provides this on his EMC blog on http://tinyurl.com/cmawre. Additionally similar technology is also available today in what will be almost the same as FAST initial release within DMX with technology called Symm Optimiser, Symm Optimiser reports on hot and cold spots on your LUN's and balances them to prioritise workloads against others.

Using automated tiering technology which is automatic and balanced according to the monitoring at the VMFS layer of utilised or underutilised VMDK’s rather than monitoring at the complete LUN would seriously be cool, imagine your SAN array receiving from the ESX host a trap that you have a VMDK that is IO constrained and needed to be migrated onto a VMFS volume that was able to facilitate such as Solid State Disk, or say you plan a regular monthly migration under a defined policy to move a VM from SATA to Fibre Channel for certain periods of time when payroll runs or when you run a batch job, once its complete you move the VM back to sit on SATA.

The Goal

The premise of using automated tiering at array level is to remove any dependency on Human activity within the Operation teams that are today performing excessive amounts of either live Storage Vmotions which on a grand scale are reactive and point driven solutions to problems, other benefits to automated tiering include being able to reduce excessive amounts from the side effect of best case “guestimates” of the VM placement by having to Cold Migrate VMDK's, cold means downtime which unfortunately costs businesses of any size money and pain.

By using intuitive monitoring techniques across both ESX host and the Storage array and offloading resource balancing from the virtualisation stack to Arrays means the beefy Storage Array can control optimal placement activity which inturn offloads and reduces any imposed overhead from the ESX host, this means more compute resources are available to the running VMs to basically virtualise more or larger workloads.

Other options

Svmotion'ing in response to any storage thresholds being reported in vCenter is another option as an interim action plan until new wacky ideas and technology like automated tiering appear mainstream. Within vCenter you can now use alarm thresholds for;

VM Disk Usage (KBps)
Total Disk Latency (Ms)
VM Disk Aborts
VM Disk resets

These when meeting thresholds all can trigger alternative actions. Before you think automatic migrations here with an invoked script it is seriously recommended to Svmotion constrained VM's manually, you need to seriously consider load imposed on the VM, ESX host and the Storage Array of this type of activity at the moment. Overall I am no scripter but I am sure it would be feasible to output lists of VM's that were constrained on Disk IO to assess what is utilised and under utilised and then choose to migrate with minimal impact.

Summary

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail is the motto for this post, you seriously need to plan and design storage for Virtualised environments for a variety of workloads before you implement anything into production. To plan for workload requirements needs full scope and detailed workshop activity to occur with the application bods, ISVs and SI’s, this maybe impossible with some bespoke applications but someone will know, whether its a "one man and there dog" developer shop or Microsoft what the workload characteristics of the workload is, if they don't know then seriously consider the consequences of the application being run within your environment and highlight the risks before it gives Virtualisation a bad name!.

The Virtual Glue

2009-06-28T10:07:00.027+01:00

Available today is latest beta release of VMware Studio 2.0 beta which enables you to create pre compiled Virtual Appliances, you can then create them as OVF's and also add these appliances into a new form of grouping applications in vSphere called vApps. With VMware studio offerings you can compile your own internal wrapped appliances for your own Virtualised environment and is not exclusively for ISV's, to show this it even does Microsoft in the 2.0 release.

I recommend you check out full detail and recorded demos at the official vmware site on http://tinyurl.com/n7lv7l . The benefits of VM Studio and using vApps are huge, it is certainly going to be the enabler for future strategy of application delivery in completely virtualised environments and something I will be looking into in more detail.

The release of VMware studio got me thinking about the state of the whole current Virtual Appliance scene, one of the questions that I asked myself when looking at the presentation was;

Virtual Appliances's, shouldn't they be mainstream now?

Virtual Appliances (VA's) are at some point going to certainly become more and more present within Virtualised datacentres but the main question around this is when. Mendel Rosenblum the original Virtualisation visionary and founder, intially promoted the whole Virtual appliance trend by quoting in 2007 that Virtual appliances would be mainstream and adopted heavily by external ISV's to wrap COTS applications, he also stated that this would also replace the OS as we know it and be almost baremetal to the Hypervisor.

Highlighted value proposition included;

Removal of the OS in the stack, replacing MS Windows with JeOS/busybox type OS's to run core services
Application deployment turnkey capability of say a whole CRM landscape into one OVF file, this would include multiple VM's within
Sending OVF content and updates to the customer by a dynamic delivery process via the internet/cloud or shipping on DVD etc directly to the customer
Appliances and application would be tuned by the ISV and not the internal application or IT ops team, this removes any burden incurred on configuration.
Licensing is much easier, you throw this burden to the ISV to manage, this is the same for product updates too, they deliver these dynamically.

All benefits of pre packaged VA's ultimately means that any work and scope of activity that is undertaken pre project phase today is heavily reduced in scope, even the system sizing is a breeze as the ISV does this and tunes it to the volume of users physically possible on that relevant appliance. This is no different to networking/security appliances that exist in datacentres today, they are built with a BSD/Linux variant and finely tuned to a maximum amount of theoretical user base.

Contrary to all of the benefits of Virtual appliances being quoted by the visionaries we are still in 2009 yet to see vast arrays of Virtual Appliance offerings from the big vendors such as SAP, HP and Oracle. To date I am only aware of one example that has had high amounts of advertisement and was targeted at organisations was the BEA Weblogic LiquidVM, this consequently with the Oracle merger appeared to get quashed.

So Why the lack of mainstream adoption of VA's into virtualised datacentres? A few things I believe that maybe the reason and possible barriers of adoption are;

The R word...Responsibility!

Ultimately large amounts of responsibility needs to be taken onboard by Internal Virtualisation teams to promote the art of the possible with VA's and to educate on what benefits they provide as apposed to current methodologies. Development tools such as the latest release in VMware Studio can also enable internal teams to build wrapped custom builds for internal applications and take away the large amount of work of deploying components in the VM. The barrier of adoption here is that there is limited amount of mileage in promoting VA's and custom packages unless business application teams and other parties involved in a typical deployment are able to share pre deployment options on there side of the story for the relevant application stack.

Responsibility also lies with ISV's to educate in a sideways fashion any customers on Virtual Appliances. Your App bods probably meet on a more regular basis with ISVs than you think and do what the Infrastructure peeps do on typical engagements with hardware suppliers such as the gaining regular technology updates, presentations and roadmaps on latest products, I am sure the ISV does educate or have the odd slide on Virtual Appliances (if your lucky) but more interaction between app bods and infrastructure bods is needed when this is known to allow you to use this technology.

It is clear that the future datacentre whether mainframe or x86 will be fully virtualised so therefore its time for ISV's to start aligning their strategy, ultimately it may mean more revenue certainly if the appliances can be delivered dynamically across the internet and be dropped straight into the customers virtualised farm.

Culture change

As you can see from my pathetic attempt at a rough process flow diagram (excuse the poor resolution) below I show a rough guide of typical people and processes involved on the delivery of applications, also shown are the areas that are manually performed deployment tasks against automated tasks. It is clear to see multiple people are involved in the average deployment, the role call in many corps include change teams, test teams, project managers, procurement, architects, IT ops and many more bods.

By deploying turnkey Virtual Appliances with for example a new SAP ERP Landscape on 10-20 Machines in a period of say 2-3 days rather than 2-3 Machines in 10-20 days clearly shows that current long deployment processes are redced and less people need to be involved on a deployment when using Virtual Appliances alongside side orchestration and groupings such as vApp. The problem however with this is you get people protective on roles and the oldage turf war developing so it is not something that can be just implemented straight away.

Evangelising about the agility that VA's provide within Virtual appliances is definitely something that can aid the adoption of Virtual Appliances. For education purposes it is recommended to start on showing the quick win examples such as LAMP Stacks, this will get end users aware of what can be packaged within a VA, it will show that VA's are nothing out of the unusual and they will certainly become ok with the fact that its not all bad once seeing a basic example that they are familiar with in typical VM's. Once confidence has grown move onto cut down appliance OS's such as JeOS...its just a matter of breaking the barrier down.

vApps functionality in vSphere enables organisations to reduce even more manual and people process. It enables you to compile the complete application stack and configure all associated components by one single master definition. Tie this in with some VMware orchestration capability where you could say deploy via API the Database components as part of the VM build and provision the relevant Networking components and it is clear the potential is going to be huge.

ISV's

It is going to be quite a while before current licensing models that ISV's offer and what companies signed up for in 4-5 year agreements are moved and migrated into licensing plans tailored for Virtual Appliances. Also at the moment very few organisations are likely deploying new application landscapes due to the economic climate. For those who have apps that do have VA alternatives there is naturally a transformation project cost associated with this to move the application.

Also important to highlight is the reseller chain that large ISV's use to distribute software would most likely be redundant. By deploying applications dynamically from centralised HQ's would almost remove any reseller and distribution partnerships.

Ye olde IT engineer

Something also which maybe a reason for lack of adoption is this guy/gal, they like to deploy a full SOE and to customise according to the application requirement, they also like the fact that they can administer that server and the relevant OS nuts and bolts such as running processes and services, also they like the fact it can be monitored and looked at if things go Pete Tong (wrong).

Take this role away from the average IT ops guy and run bare minimal Appliances and its quite easy to see how you can be disillusioned and disgruntled by changing how things are done today.

Summary

Hopefully this post gave some hindsight into what barriers you may experience and how to overcome them. Massive amounts of potential exists in Virtual Appliances and what VMware studio can do. The vApp potential is rather large and I will hopefully write a post on this when I get time to have a look in more detail at the beta of vmware studio.

So the Frankenstein Hypervisor begins!

2009-06-21T17:06:00.006+01:00

As expected after the recent acquisition of Virtual Iron Oracle have wasted no time in slashing any future Virtual Iron technical development, check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/19/oracle_kills_virtual_iron/ for full gory details of the bloodbath.

The Virtual Iron brand as we know it has also been slashed as a procurable product meaning that any current customers are now hung out to dry and they have to either transition across to the new frankenstein hypervisor of Oracle VM or seek an alternative product. The recent news from Oracle also means that any partners that resell the software will lose out and have this cut from any technology offerings and they will most likely be smaller resellers due to Virtual Iron not being as mainstream and feature rich as market leaders meaning it will hit there sales revenue. Oracle have stated support for Virtual Iron customers will be a lifetime offering (not know what charge though). This support can only be of any use to current customers for only 6-12 months due to it being difficult to virtualise newer applications due to ISV's classing the hypervisor platform as legacy.

Bolt on neck

Oracle have claimed that Virtual Iron technology will be integrated into the Oracle VM, being the skeptic that I am I seriously doubt that we will see much transition of Virtual Iron technology into Oracle VM other than quick wins such as live migrate and a few other current de facto standards for a Hypervisor product. The only statement that may prove this to be total tosh is that they also quoted that they preferred Virtual iron to the xVM Sun offering which I find interesting and will post another on why I think xVM is a better platform at some point in the future. Transition and development of VI into OVM is likely to be quite a while and I expect we are talking yearly time frames rather than periods of months for the change to occur.

One thing this announcement shows is how keen Oracle is to get into the Hypervisor business mainstream, in comparison (and I know its not finalised yet) they have revealed very little planning activity officially on what will happen out of the SUN acquisition, so for them to completely cut off any growth spurt of Virtual Iron and send the message it is becoming part of OVM shows they want to focus on beefing up the Oracle VM platform and get the rubber hitting the road.

Time to capitalise

Various people think this is the right time for VMware, Citrix or Microsoft to gain some more market share of current Virtual Iron customers and I agree with this, lets face it any customers who want to expand current Virtual Iron estates will be faced with only the Oracle VM technology for future roadmaps, some may be coming up to maintenance renewals and considering whether they need to grow up and get into a Hypervisor that is sustainable and capable of virtualising any workload such as vSphere, vSphere also has some great low end product offerings that can get smaller companies onto the Vmware ladder.

Customers who are looking to go elsewhere for a datacenter virtualisation platform will need to know that some of the following may arise;

OVM may continue to have a Lack of partners and maturity level in datacentres unless it grows up fast. For over Three years Vmware has worked heavily with hardware and software partners to ensure that high performance levels can be achieved with the various infrastructure components hosting the virtualised environment and the applications that run on top of the virtualised infrastructure,
I predict longer term OVM is likely to be more expensive (come on we all know its the Oracle way) and current extended support maintenance with VIron will rocket to false people onto OVM,
There maybe a lack of extensive management capability that is currently on offer today with alternatives such as vSphere, and competitors that are slowly behind VMware,
Oracle VM may lack within the new OVM the offer of granular licensing plans and levels, this is where VMware is currently very strong and dominant.
Performance maybe weak...come on look at results coming from vSphere http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/05/integrated-vsphere-enterprise-workloads-all-together-at-scale.html

Summary

Evidence is here to suggest Oracle want to propel themselves into the Virtualisation industry and they are not hanging about, this will hopefully mean good news from a licensing perspective for both the users of Oracle technology that want to virtualise if they run OVM. This may also remove a barrier currently in place by Oracle and allow users of other hypervisor's to also be able to virtualise, this maybe possible as Oracle gain more "happiness" that they are gaining revenue with popularity of OVM and lacks the "rules" to virtualise current apps and DB platforms.

For you and me this also means that at least VMware (and Citrix at a push) are kept on their toes and can take note that eventually they will have another Virtualisation vendor who is going to be biting at their heels for market share in what is going to be a more predominant form than Oracle VM today.

vSphere - The littlest things make a difference

2009-06-16T21:13:00.008+01:00

With the recent arrival of a DL380 G6 to test vSphere I have been able to see some of the extended features and also some available product functionality unleashed with the new Xeon 5500 Nehalem Chipset and its associated CPU extensions such as VT-d, VT-c etc. Some of the nice features l've noticed so far include;

Storage Views (Inventory > Inventory > Datastores > Select your DS > Right click on sort tabs)

This is real usefull especially when it comes to SWAP consumption and if you are operating with multiple LUN's and have multiple sized VM's that you have in the past tended to use rule of thumb sizing to calculate on each LUN what is needed to be reserved. New extended vCenter views enables you to visably see the amount of space consumed by the memory swap to disk.

VM Memory Options

I've always like AMD64 chipsets, they have always used NUMA, Intel originally on the other hand didnt, they decided to go with a North Bridge for RAM accessibility to CPU.

Intel with Core i7 (Nehalem) now has NUMA and this is definately going to mean better things for running Virtualised workloads on Intel chipsets. I've noticed the "NUMA memory affinity" option below to assign memory nodes to VM's in turn which I presume offers improved performance enhancements for VM's that would benefit by using certain dedicated memory banks rather than accessing memory on both.

Interested to know if anyone has used this with Vmotion and whether vmotioning to a Host that dosnt have NUMA i.e Xeon 7400 is allowed (I predict not).

Rescanning for Datastores

This is a real nice one, it enables mass rescan of new datastores which in ESX 3.x was a pig, you had to do it on each host. This now takes it up the heirachy, I expect this would be usefull when provisioning a new host or using in DR scenarios.

I'll feedback in the next week (I do have a day job you know) with some new and beneficial options, time to test newer features like FT and VMdirectpath I/O.

Dan

A dark dark cloud

2009-06-09T21:04:00.003+01:00

Just catching up with blogs/news and noticed that this event happened this week http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/08/webhost_attack/ the geezer who ran the company also took his own life http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Bangalore/Techie-hangs-himself-in-HSR-Layout-/articleshow/4633101.cms So a very confusing story mixed within the technical catastrophe that occurred.

More on the talking tech side and this event really is a stark warning of the potential destruction that a self service provided administrative interface for "cloud" services can wreak to end users, this particular provider was easily exploited due to technology insecurities in the HyperVM product giving exploiters extended full root access to delete practically anything public facing.

Ok so this hyperVM app was insecure but how many other shops enable root because they are lazy? Who remembers when we used to have root enabled by default in ESX 2.x???? I wonder how many other apps that are developed in what is effectively still the early adopter era for Cloud are being developed with very little security governance and certified hardening process (I'm not a developer so excuse the possible lack of knowledge here).

This news piece has also provided a warning that public Cloud services and the current ecosystem of management interfaces in its current bleeding edge form is still very raw and rough around the edges, it certainly highlights cloud services are susceptible to destruction on this scale by the security flaws possibly found in any interfaces that manage "cloud" datacentres.

I guess the question is would this type of exploit occured in a Datacentre which was physically secured and more conventional to today i.e. a Private Cloud? I think not, the security model is more aligned to current conventional security policies, you are not putting security in the hands of your service provider as much and you are most likely using a proprietary management interface and Virtualisation platform like VMware which is tried and tested and not of the new generation of cloud developed software.

Another thing with this news story is the sheer lack of backup and recovery activity that seemed to be on offer and used to restore customer workloads, again this along with less stringently imposed SLA's are what initially makes Cloud cost look so appealing on the figures and balance sheet, something that many C levels certainly are likely to be attracted to in Cloud computing. Before investigating the feasibility of the cloud it maybe wise to ensure that typical belt and braces activity such as backup and recovery which is currently defacto in any datacentre is part of your service or even performed to another cloud provider such as Amazon S3, if backup isn't an available option think very hard about committing and running your business on what is effectively a ticking timebomb.

Hopefully this provided a brief outlook on Cloud and any possible insecurities that may exist to any current early adopters and my condolences go out to anyone related to the poor guy that took his life.

New Poll - Blueprinting before you upgrade to vSphere

2009-06-08T10:50:00.002+01:00

After seeing a few "minor" issues people within the VM community and Blogosphere are getting with vSphere 4 upgrades I have built a poll to see who is going through Blueprint and UAT testing processes before performing an upgrade.

I guess if you have done a blueprint you are very efficient and have a good working relationship with Vmware to be on beta programmes etc.

Will be interested to see the results!

Cisco UCS C Series - Some answered questions

2009-06-07T12:08:00.005+01:00

For those unaware this week Cisco has announced rackmount servers to complement the UCS family http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/03/cisco-unveils-rackmount-servers-for-ucs/.

Way back in March on this VMlover blog post http://vmlover.blogspot.com/2009/03/ucs-again.html I raised a few opinions and views on UCS and questions around the possible future of the overall hardware offering, surprisingly Cisco answered some of these directly in a direct feedback video (I nearly choked on my coffee when I found this out), the original post brought up some of these questions around whether Cisco would release a Rackmount solution along with Blade to provide customers that do not use Blade today with server alternatives within the Cisco range and lo and behold now it appears the questions have been asked by a hardware server release of C Series Rackmount servers in UCS!

Cisco's strategy for entering the datacenter world is exceptionally aggressive and certainly risky in the middle of an economic downturn, I give them ultimate credit for this. Now Cisco have the full server model portfolio I provide some more thoughts and questions on Cisco's Datacenter 3.0 strategy;

Will UCS be fully price competitive against vendors like HP/IBM/Dell or will it simply be of the same price point and highlight to customers more about indirect cost benefit savings achieved through reductions with Unified Connectivity and enchanced agility with "free" centralised management tools?

With Cisco having mostly large datacenter coverage with Networking and Internet connectivity I suspect that they will be competitive to a large degree. I'm not talking Dell drop your pants material here but I do think they will bite at HP/IBM offerings and market customers with aggressive sales.

Cisco will most likely want to perform TCO/ROI exercises to "work with your organisation" they do this quite successfully on product sets today and why not as long as they can show you that it has cost saving potential, it it dosnt I think they know where they are heading with customers, this is commodity remember.

Will the provided UCS management tools extend to cover Rackmounts?

I suspect that we may see point management of server builds and deployments in Rackmount and we may see FcOE provisioning and zoning policys being defined via UCS manager as with the B Series boxes.

Most alternative blade manufacturers provide the management stack built in at host level with examples being HP SIM/Altiris offerings, so UCS is not new to this arena. But what UCS does have that is different on B Series Blades is a component which resides on a Fabric extender module called CMC (Chassis Management Switch), although on observation it looks to work in similar fashion to iLO on HP Blades but extends further down the stack to perform activity such as manage physical hardware components, zone storage, apply QOS networking policy on each physical UCS blade and many more.

It will be real cool if Rackmounts also have this central operational control and management policy driven environment all being provided through the onboard CMC across unified fabric, it will truly add to the value add proposition of reducing operation cost without purchasing additional tools and networking infrastructure to run it. This could even be the start of the truly lights out datacenter! God UCS really is the x86 Mainframe when you look at its potential.

Could C series Rackmount be more popular than the B Series blade?

With Rackmount being the grandfather of commodity computing in datacenters this could happen. Some organisations select Rackmount servers because it reduces risk and it is within their comfort zone, It will be interesting to see how sales figures look between the two.

Turn this statement on its head though and Networking folk have used Blade in telecommunication for yonks, the 6500 Series data switching is fully bladed and offers BIG cost benefits with overall consolidated footprint and management, also MDS SAN Connectivity is chassis based. With Nexus being blade based this could mean Blade sales are more predominant with UCS. I personally think Blade is the way to go, its consolidation at the highest level which drives efficiency in your datacenter.

Rackmount likely to provide more dense memory?

Most certainly yes, architecturally rackmount tin has more space to put the RAM, also with the new Cisco UCS extended memory capability's this offers larger opportunity to exploit the custom "Catalina" ASIC which provides more Memory capacity within UCS than competitors.

You could argue is 384GB of Memory in a Blade enough though! However I'm sure we said this about 4GB of memory pre x64 bit era.

When do Cisco buy the storage company or at least OEM storage?

I'll maybe let the future do the talking on this one...I can see it happening and just wanted to give me opportunity to go back and revisit unanswered topics in months to come :)

Summary

Overall the more I read about UCS and its in inbuilt technological benefits the more I really want to see it in action and being deployed to see what results can be achieved both technically and operationally. I believe Cisco is releasing UCS this quarter so will be extremely interested to hear on the grapevine and blogosphere who is deploying UCS.

Nexus 1000v

2009-05-29T15:41:00.003+01:00

For any vSphere'ers this has been released via Ciscos website http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9902/index.html its downloadable as a demo for 60 days so go get it...v.easy to setup the relevant components (even I have) but caution RTFM as this is a "real" Network switch running a real IOS.

Nexus is a great step within the world of VMware networking, it means that the network bods now retrieve back some turf in the Virtualised datacenter and will need to start to work together with VMware peeps to design scalable networking solutions capable of delivering great network capability to Virtual Machines. This is most certainly something organisations will need as they become fully converged and virtualised with initiatives such as Cisco UCS. (god i sound brainwashed but hey it rocks)

Adoption of Nexus 1000v within datacenters will be a large hurdle that needs to be jumped, questions need to be raised in pre planning awareness workshops and design sessions, typical topics that may come up are whether the networking bods know about current de facto grass roots capability of Virtual Switches, are they are aware of the trunking and vlanning methodologies on offer. And in reverse I would expect the networking bods to provide technical benefits to the Virtual bods on how Nexus benefits virtualised worlds.

Commercially any large enterprise customers being Cisco based I won't be surprised if we will see a sideways approach to adoption, if networking divisions go and buy the Nexus family of switches that 1000v falls under no doubt 1000v will get pushed as being viable and suitable to the virtualised world that the physical Nexus switches will use.

A few great resources with information that might help education and awareness is available on the following links;

Steve Chambers provides some excellent commentary on typical issues and how to resolve http://viewyonder.com/2009/05/22/virtualization-barrier-4-the-network-engineer/

Ken Cline has a post that he could almost publish as a book! Great resource http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/2009/03/29/the-great-vswitch-debate-part-1/

Siloed DRS Clusters - Would you, do you or will you have to?

2009-05-27T20:15:00.008+01:00

My shop runs various applications which are subject on the commercial front to Circa 1990 ISV Licensing models, this most certainly becomes a big issue when wanting to reap the benefits of VMware DRS and dynamic load balancing.

Getting push back when wanting to Virtualise applications which are still under licensing policies that go back to the dark ages is definitely a kick in the teeth to anyone waxing lyrical about Virtualisation, also its very hard for someone who believes in the excellent benefits of cutting edge technology such as VMware that an ISV could be so backwards and cruel. The most common barrier with the licensing model you experience is you can't virtualise something due to the fact you have to license all Physical CPUs and sometimes even the Cores on 32 hosts in your DRS Cluster just to run it on a single VM instance, the cost just makes it impractical and I think any VM Lover would see sense (after punching a wall) in this.

One option to get around this is you could Silo DRS Clusters or segregate ESX hosts, This has its plus and minuses, some things I can think of are;

Advantages

Implementing Silo'd clusters allows you to sensibly afford the licenses to cover for the workloads in a virtual environment that are subject to the ludicrous rules, it allows you to virtualise across say 2-3 Hosts and still reap benefits of dynamic load balancing and high availability with Vmotion but within a smaller cluster.

Indirectly this may also work well for supporting the higher end more expensively licensed database technology (hey i'm generalising here) that are subject to different SLA coverage, you may for example only want to license the underlying hosts for additional technology such as for DR purposes with VMware SRM which is licensed per CPU, you may not necessarily want to license hosts for SRM that have non critical tier 3 VM's running but have coverage for tier 1 apps.

Disadvantages

Silo'ing clusters is going to be a pain in the arse for architects and designers to plan the Virtual landscape for large scale environments and also to plan for the DR of this. Technology wise this option limits you to embrace and achieve what VMware is designed to do of sweating your underlying Tin and Infrastructure assets.

Silo'ing doesn't allow you to make use of resource and scale out as much across the hosts in a DRS cluster to facilitate the smaller app workloads and to slot into the gaps that are available when you have larger apps running within a Cluster. On the operational side this creates more day to day management overhead within the virtual environment and management console, it also means you have more things that can go wrong in your environment and more change control considerations going forward.

I'm sure its evident that Siloing clusters is probably more hassle than its worth to acheive virtualising your un-license virtualisation freindly applications, carefull investigation is needed to ensure that the business case stacks up and you will gain benefits cost wise to virtualising your workloads. A saving grace for Virtualisation adopters is that VMware makes this possible, it allows you to design and build your environment in ways to facilitate this.

Summary

Another thing to also consider when it comes to licenses is the latest ESX licensing changes with the introduction of dare I say it vSphere Enterprise Plus. ESX Licensing across the complete ESX Landscape may mean we silo ESX versions to economically make use in datacentres of extended features such as Powerpath VE. In other areas of the datacenter this is done at application level with products such as SQL, it is not economical to put a low end 5GB DB on a Enterprise cluster so Standard clusters get built to host workloads that do not require the high end functionality.

All of these pointers and thoughts may well be something that Virtualisation peeps will cringe at the thought of doing, it certainly is not something I like as I like shared clusters and making use of my Infrastructure, but the mindset might have to change and it may have to happen due to there being no option or room for negogiation with ISV's to virtualise such workloads at both the Virtual Host and the Application licensing stack where ISV's wont budge to allow us to virtualise on a per vCPU basis.

ESX IOPs - This is NOT a HyperV bash!

2009-05-22T21:32:00.009+01:00

Now I'm not a nasty horrible person (although some people might think that) I just like proving facts, a google to find material on Virtualising Microsoft Biztalk and I stumbled across this excellently written Microsoft paper on how BTS benchmarks when running on Hyper-V against conventional physical hardware. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123100

Conceptually this document gave me some great resource material to use as I have no idea on how Biztalk server works, how the architecture of Biztalk is configured on the box or how components figure across a landscape. The best bit for me was that Microsoft kindly provided the Storage IOPs profile to compare and benchmark, this gave me the following quoted figures for expected IOPs when virtualising Biztalk on Hyper-V;

Now amateur alert here......I currently only have a very basic test and development platform rig currently running ESX 3.5, its only got DAS and is running a RAID 5 across about a zillion disks so is not the best system to provide me with the 400000 IOPs that is touted as being possible with vSPhere. The specifications of the Hyper-V VM against my sh*tpit server were as follows;

To gain a quick comparative idea on how a Microsoft quoted Biztalk simulated workload would run on an ESX setup I set to test the benchmark IOmeter parameters within my ESX 3.5 VM to see what comparable IOPs and Other readings I would achieve by using VMware ESX.

The results I experienced were as follows;

I think the results speak for themselves even with ESX being run on a lower expected performing platform. Now please don't sue me Microsoft for writing about this....I really give you upmost credit for writing this document as it gives someone the opportunity to learn how your application stack works and is expected to perform and would like to see more material and vendors following suit (including VMware)

Dynamic hot add features for VM's - Friend or Foe?

2009-05-21T21:22:00.008+01:00

With the latest feature sets on offer within vSphere focusing on enabling IT departments to perform dynamic on the fly change to Virtual machine resource, this post is provides a simplified view point on the likely impact and required changes to existing processes in departments today, commentary is also provided on what issues may arise within current change processes and what effect this has on typical financial authorisation processes internally. The main question of the post is;

"How will Hot Add features fit into current IT environments and processes?"

The general consensus and observation across various virtualisation experts on the newly introduced sets of feature is that some view the feature as a god send to operations, some as a mechanism to reduce numbers of people involved in the process to actually implement change outside of conventional outage periods and some at the opposite end see it as potentially even technically being detrimental to performance when hot add occurs, the later certainly stands quite true, when adding more CPU's this increases issues with large amounts of %RDY time if you have a workload or OS which isn't capable of dealing with multi threaded activity.

For operational change management teams I predict we will most certainly see the feature requiring careful planning and adoption control when being introduced into departments that currently already have business processes in place for planned maintenance, and lastly most organizations that also have approval processes for gaining cost approval on components associated with Infrastructure services and upgrades will need to change and control dynamic growth.

The crux is that something that anything current IT departments are looking to buy into that has a charge associated with it is almost certainly going to need a sustainable business case as to why you should purchase it. Any organisation is in the current economic climate most certainly experiencing large amounts of kickback for any future potential investment above and beyond the norm, it maybe a Small business that has been told you need to use VMware server for free rather than buying ESX or a medium business being forced to only use ESXi rather than full blown and get on with managing your hosts on a singular basis all the way through to large corporate enterprises that are being forced to reduce spend on Vmware features such as the topic of this post Hot Add.

It is definitely a dead cert that Hot Add resource will save time and money in the small and medium sized operational environments, it avoids spending money planning out of hours coverage as changes if approved are technical possible during the day, the size of the business and maturity level of Infrastructure usually means that the department has to be quite reactive when it comes to reported issues with performance. This flexibility may not be the case in larger enterprises, most larger organisations have a defined business process implemented that has a change control process enforced to ensure that large outages across the Infrastructure landscape are mitigated and also ensure that any proposed changes are regressable within decent time frames if or when that change goes wrong. Change and approval processes are also in place within organizations for things such as service improvement plans, a technical design authority within a company will approve a larger upgrade such as increase of RAM to a host or multiple CPU upgrades due to the overall effect on the larger picture i.e. your Virtualisation farm and general Infrastructure.

Vmotion remember that?

In comparison when you look at how a technology such as Vmotion works today, this has certainly made organisational process required to plan for maintenance and upgrade tasks to physical hosts a hell of a lot faster and hot add is no doubt going to be very similar, the premise being that you are enabling IT Operations in large amounts of organisations the opportunity to be able to mitigate and perform maintenance tasks that they would not usually perform on VM's unless pre agreed outages are approved by CAB that allows them to shutdown the VM and add resource. As with most things however their are some possible barriers which may not mean hot add is a possibility, the risk and caveat associated that I can see causing stumbling blocks in organisations are as follows;

Hot Removal

I've investigated the support of hot removal and it doesn't exist as a supported function in Windows versions (only hot add/replace), vSphere may support hot removal at Virtual Hardware level but the important factor is at the operating system layer the OS doesn’t, this may shoot you in the foot when quoting that hot add/remove can be performed at any point in time without disruption, remember CAB's like a regression path (lack of this is quite a good excuse most times for them to defer a change) say you experience more problem than before and can't remove a CPU or RAM unless you turn the service off and you are walking a dodgy tightrope. Also reducing CPU's from VM's is NOT a cleancut 1-2 process, it needs HAL changes. (which I believe on Windows 2003 is not supported in full)

Cost approval and control

RAM and CPU is not free, yes we all know that virtualising workloads provides additional HW resource to use the underutilized hardware resources more efficiently, but each Megabyte of RAM in your hosts still costs money, this starts by you needing to ensure that lower level Virtual admins do not have access to add RAM at the click of a button the minute that a support call gets raised from someone experiencing poor application performance. This is where implementing a full vCenter delegation model is very important.

Within organisations that are currently recharging per VM and recharging back on the actual VM size this is quite important as there is scope to use more underlying resource for the same money if a corner is cut, increase the amount of RAM/CPU constantly and this cost model goes out the window and so do your bottom line figures.

The alternative model of using a Chargeback model for VM’s certainly works more in tandem with hot add, a billing mechanism ensures that if a business unit or a developer requests more RAM it will end up on a PO for approval. If using also VMware FT, this volume of RAM increase needs to double! (FT dosnt support more than one vCPU). For Chargeback enablement in your organization look out for vCenter Chargeback which provides this functionality within the vCenter console http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-chargeback/

Summary

Ultimately to avoid any possible issues and arguments in CAB, the key is to ensure you rightsize your Virtual Machines and match the workload correctly in the first place. Hot Add of resource for OS’s supported running in VM’s really is a great thing, it is enabling x86 Workloads to act almost non stop mainframe style which means you have very little experienced downtime for apps and services, this is exactly what you get when you use Mainframe systems and the associated benefits of non stop. This strategy of dynamic growth enables VMware to acheive the goal of turning x86 into the new mainframe, this will undoubtedly play even a small role in adding huge amount of functionality improvements and value add within your organization so make sure you embrace it but make sure it dosnt get out of control.

VM Sprawl - prevention rather than cure

2009-05-17T11:43:00.010+01:00

The subject of vm sprawl is probably becoming quite common within any organisation that has virtualised a vast majority of their server estate. With analyst reports such as this one http://www.techworld.com/virtualisation/news/index.cfm?newsID=115876&pagtype=all who are stating huge growth and adoption of Server Virtualisation within datacentres over the coming years, it is now time to start to look at methodology, technology and IT governance to control this popularity and sprawl and ensure that you do not truly become a victim of your own success gained through Virtualisation. This post will go over some of the small amounts of methods and techniques you can use to control and govern VM sprawl through both technological solutions and through governance and auditing processes.

Within the virtualised world today many people who have deployed virtualisation have the problem that business leaders and purse string holders now know about the great fantastic cost benefits that they can obtain from investment in VMware and other Hypervisors, examples of some of these benefits include;

Ability to do more with less physical infrastructure and with less upfront capital expenditure
Capability of deploying cheaper DR
Reductions on project opex resource costs
Introduction of improved agility for development lifecycles
Reductions in deployment times on production rollout of server instances
Reductions in real estate, they can even rent out your space if your part of a massive group of organisations

Large amounts of IT shops have enforced the ever popular "Virtualisation first" policy since the virtual boom time around 2006/7, this opportunity has been enabled by the excellent benefits and the excellent work VMware have done in ensuring that production workloads can and will be most certainly suitable on a Virtualised platform. This policy and the return benefits that the end service requestee has gained however is now almost likely starting to mean that your Infrastructure is growing out of control and at quite a rapid rate due to the popularity, also you are finding due to the agile benefits requestees for projects are probably slipping in the odd extra VM in an estate which they would not typically do with Physical tin due to the associated cost and process to deploy. You may find you start to experience operational issues such as your storage array is becoming full, your Networking switching full due to host demands and in worst cases that lovely space that you gained back through aggressive P2V's strategy circa 2005/6 is now needed back for ESX hosts, all requiring investment again.

Reactive measures

In its simplest form VM sprawl reactive resolution can start by general house cleaning, this wont require you to purchase a product as using Virtualcenter can quite easily accomplish and target reductions if needed. For example some VM's might be not registered on ESX hosts, some might be replicated or spun off to a clone due to original operational issues when the app team or ISV deployed the VM. You may also find that your actual presented VMDK's for VM's are way under filled so they can be shrunk to regain space.

On the consumed storage issues, vSphere 4 introduces a few added peices of functionality which will aid and reduce this in future, any recommendations are based on current releases. Main features include Thin Provisioning of VM's, this will enable you to grow VM usage and not have what is effectively whitespace within your VMDK's unable to be used.

Proactive planning and prevention

Every virtualised environment should have at least some kind of documented audit, if you have not got a CMDB then in simplest form an Excel spreadsheet provides a simplistic view of your Virtual Infrastructure and allocation. Virtualcenter has exportable reporting built in to contribute to build even a simple spreadsheet, to see this in action withinin your Virtualcenter today goto "VM and Template View" then select the highest level folder then select "File > Export > Export List". Some VI Admins may be quite clever with powershell scripts or by building SQL queries but this is quick and easy and intuitive. You can use this type of audit to also help capacity planning for your environment, this enables you to monitor how much space you have left and perform simplistic "What If" analysis on how much disk, RAM and CPU resource you would have when adding a new machine that is being requested.

Again VMware Virtualcenter will at some point this year have functionality within a module called CapacityIQ to enable you to gain this functionality from within the vCenter console, for more information see http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-capacityiq/ on this. I've seen it in action and its great, it provides out of the box functionality which will most certainly aid what I've said about within this post.

The Rolls Royce solution

For larger enterprise sized Virtual environments, keeping track of the constant demand and growth demand is impossible and to succeed IT services ideally need to be self service based with the end user or customer being able to request what they want through web mechanism. It would sound stupid to provide the enduser with control to increase even more the created problem of sprawl that you are experiencing, however to combat this the SSP (self service portal) can be provided with delegated privileges, pre defined object creation control, approval processes to higher level management or project support offices and also they can provide proactive benefits such as what if analysis and tombstone of Virtual Machines. All policy within the technology which is applied is set by IT governance policies and defined according to business requirement within the tools.

Two example products which provide self service portals include;

Vmware Lifecycle Manager (also Lab manager and Stage) http://www.vmware.com/products/lcm/
DynamicOps http://dynamicops.com/

These technologies are currently rather low on uptake and adoption within organisations today, there maybe more technologies on the market but with using example functionality in the above products we will certainly start to see more and more as IT departments struggle with the demands from the business for Infrastructure. I also predict that the technologies will also start to become known as has with VMware the killer app to reduce lost productivity gain within organisations and project teams.

The issues today with the products are they currently they do have medium to large price tags associated which puts off the typical bean counter when businesses cases are put forward, so before building any proposals do your research on the product and see where you feel it is able to reduce and cut current tedious expensive business processes, VM Sprawl and improve your budgeting cost projects so this can be equated into a measurable deliverable ROI post deployment of such product.

And the VM war continues....

2009-05-13T18:58:00.005+01:00

VirtualIron has finally been bought by Oracle with a finalised acquisition which has been an industry suspicion for a few months now, see http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/03/oracle_to_buy_v.html;jsessionid=2FZ22WY3F2H1WQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN

This really is quite a tactical move by Oracle, as I have highlighted before on a previous post see > http://vmlover.blogspot.com/2009/05/oracle-still-helping-red-pills.html, Oracle's main Virtualisation platform currently is the Oracle VM hypervisor which is a hypervisor offering that quite clearly lacks any tangible benefits which are available within market leading products such as Vmware, HyperV and Xen, and with the recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems provides Oracle with the brains in a jar responsible for current xVM architecture and Unix offerings, both Oracle VM and xVM are XEN based hypervisors which ensure that he can relatively just bolt on the best bits of each component without having to do major architectural changes to the underlying hypervisor method.

This may see increase in development of heterogeneous migration/management of x86/Unix hypervisors from Oracle, they may develop xVM manager to be the ultimate management product similar to Microsoft SCVMM which can manage competitors to suck them up and then move across to Oracle offerings.

On a hot topic and providing some possible general views, this purchase may also see some interesting developments within the VM Hypervisor Wars that are currently going on which is like a really fast rollercoaster at the moment and I am sure that many customers are considering what options they have based on what they spend in other areas of IT. For example if you are a large Oracle shop and are already forking out for Licensing or have an ELA with them, you run high end systems with Solaris then Oracle growing in size on the Hypervisor front may just kill any current and future aspiration you have as a techie with your current preferred virtualisation technology, it will simply come down to the fact of cost and the bottom line figure, they won't care if you can hot add CPU/RAM, scale to excessive amounts of RAM and all that good greatness in Vsphere...fact.

Current competitors to VMware entering the hypervisor market with dominance in other areas of IT infrastructure such as Microsoft don't have the luxury of being able to charge customers for maintenance costs on every level of the Infrastructure stack (if you have this that is) IBM have done this for eon's with mainframe except they missed a trick and do not now have an x86 offering (yet), now that Oracle has bought SUN and your datacentre starts to look like an Oracle datacentre.

If your a VMware customer today it is probably not going to be the breeze to gain buy in for it or keep using it within your organisation as it was 12-18 months ago, Put the costs of VMware (with recent rises) in front of your beancounters and that cost and end figure being spent on alternative hypervisors today is at heavy risk of being on the next Oracle license negotiation being thrown in the direction of Oracle HQ (if they have any sense that is)

It is a shame, I feel VMware is likely to start losing "some" ground on the Virtualisation market at a time when they have just announced technology we wouldnt have thought about 3 Years ago. Back in the boardroom this may mean that any VMware evangelist who is passionate and wants to keep VMware within their architecture and roadmaps definitely will be needing solid core business case and technical benefits/drivers to ensure you can keep using the technology in force, so be prepared!!.

Amongst many requirements main ones needed to succeed in gaining VMware buy in get to know your product further than just what it offers within the technical benefits and product feature set, get to know really how licensing works based on the overall cost and value add that is wrapped around this and also ensure you liaise with a dedicated VMware SE and make sure they do large amounts of selling for you if you are that passionate about VMware.

As a summary overall changes with Oracle are not likely to not start to start to hit IT departments for 12-18 Months, so lets hope current changes adrift at Vmware with licensing in vSphere and other nonsense that may arise doesn't make this more difficult to determine the decision makers purely on cost and ease of licensing renewals.

Cisco UCS - Direct feedback to the blogosphere

2009-05-11T20:50:00.004+01:00

Some of you guys may have read and seen my views on Cisco UCS and read about how I feel Cisco may or may not gain massive popularity within the datacentre infrastructure space.

Cisco have provided direct from the horses mouth responsive feedback on comments such as mine that industry bloggers have raised and I am mightily impressed they have done this, it certainly takes a lot for an individual to represent the organisation to provide responses to feedback and possible criticism composed on various web blogs. The interview with Wendy Mars Cisco Director of the UCS Intiative is available in video format to view on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDUbttbatBo&feature=channel_page , responses were very good and cisco like, analytic and positive with no fear of that what has been said by the likes of myself is likely to give UCS a damaged impression at such an early stage and it is a very positive review. Cisco have as i've said before not got into the blade server market to dabble, they are here to become number one.

Collectively the blog commentary has probably come across in some respects as quite a hard critism on Cisco and pointed quite aggressively and looked at flaws that the new converged strategy they are using. Run up to the California UCS Launch was marketed from the outset by Cisco themselves in moderate build up and I think a lot of people not privy to internal discussions with Cisco directly were quite amazed at how architecturally basic the technology and strategy is yet on the flipside of this amazed at how it is likely to turn datacentre consolidation up a notch by the sheer simplistic nature of converged backplanes and converged IO between SAN and LAN with FcOE.

In response to my question which was "Do enterprises want to unify networks, storage and servers?", It does seem that large amounts of views on UCS have come from a bottom up engineering nuts and bolts perspective not from the top down C level view or even a middle view which is an Architect who needs to invest in the right technology yet not sacrifice functionality, scalability etc for their organisation/customer.

I think a lot of engineering folk are most likely afraid or more probably concerned at how Converged networking affects the SAN or LAN admin as we know it and the role that they both play in IT today, I think it will be very hard to find any C level bods that have as a harsh view on how it will integrate, post descriptive recommendation from trusty aide they will most likely love the overall benefits with the reduced opex costs of running a datacentre with fewer cabling requirements and costs of fabric switching and Lan switching (longer term not immediately). Engineering folk will probably find it similar to Server Virtualisation and blade backplane technology such as Virtual connect and will need to find time to adapt with the new way of working within a structured IT department.

Lets hope we see more response to blogger opinions and questions on the internet, the organisations and companies that we comment on are nine times out of ten obtaining free marketing for large amounts of revenue gain in return so videos like this to appease us are the least they can/should do.

Hot Add CPU - Vsphere

2009-05-10T20:27:00.006+01:00

Seems a few peeps are playing...I mean evaluating the new hot add CPU/RAM feature within VSphere.

To summarize the following OS's only support hot add CPU/RAM regardless of whether a physical or virtual machine;

Windows 2003 Enterprise (RAM Only) and Datacenter (CPU & RAM)
Windows 2008 Enterprise (RAM Only) and Datacenter (CPU & RAM)
Linux running kernel 2.6.14 or above

When looking at how the hot add cpu feature works within the Windows OS it does appear that the running application and processes which are not system or SVCHOST based do not benefit on first plug of the CPU basically meaning that a reboot is required to ensure that the OS Can use the CPU Effectively and applications running as processes other than the supported can actually use the CPU's, I presume this would mean apps like MS Exchange with Store.exe or SQL servers process which are not currently going to benefit immediately.

This is something you will need to take into consideration as to whether your hot add of a CPU actually is going to benefit. Microsoft SQL 2008 Supports hot addition manually after first plug, so I presume most of Microsoft's future backoffice applications will too, not so sure how current MS applications likely to be virtualised will cope though.

Below are some links on more detailed information and resources i've picked this from for you to look in more detail.

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cpu-hotplug.txt

http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/f/d/afdfd50d-6eb9-425e-84e1- b4085a80e34e/SVR-T325_WH07.pptx

http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/paul/post/SQL-Server-2008-Hot-Add-CPU-(and-affinity-masks).aspx

POST UPDATED 23.07.09 with more clarity on features supported on Enterprise OS's

vSphere emergency dumps

2009-05-05T22:07:00.006+01:00

Make what you want of the title of this post but VSphere includes functionality within the SDK and within HA that performs a screen dump of your Virtual Machine when you get a bluescreen or VMtools not responding (also something you can do in Vmware workstation) Eric Sloof has coded a great app to see each of your VM's current screen dump, this can be found at http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1097-Big-Brother-Really-Is-Watching.html...

This got me thinking wouldn't it be cool if VMware got a screendump of every virtual machine in use globally and made a big master collage out of this, a bit like what this kid did http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article578081.ece

This is also a good reason to disable screen savers in your VM's, they consume CPU cycles and also means you wont see what's going on ;)

Oracle support backlashing

2009-05-03T23:48:00.012+01:00

Jeff Browning, an EMC employee has raised some exceptionally great points on the current state of affairs that surrounds Oracle support within Virtualised environments. Within his post is a simplified view on why he feels the current support model or more should I say the lack of support model at Oracle is technically floored and really not about the actual technology and more about the corporation building an agenda to basically monopolise and gain more revenue, read it as it sets some ideas running in your head. http://oraclestorageguy.typepad.com/

Being an early adopter of Vmware Virtualisation has meant that in the past I have faced this type of support hurdle many a time and felt of the same opinion, one example being SAP, from the way I see it, it took SAP large amounts of use case and almost eating the dog food themselves first internally to gain trust with ESX 2 being used to host its main B2C training and demo suites.

The scalable benefits of ESX VI3 arrived with larger than 3.6GB of addressable RAM per VM, multiple CPU's and it was then the start of them being able to comfortably provide customers with full blown production support for running SAP within a Virtualised environment. Microsoft is another one, they have in the last year introduced the SVVP program http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx to ensure that Microsoft software customers play straight dice and align MS software versions to the latest releases and service pack revisions to gain break fix support from them. Although larger enterprises were able to gain acknowledgement for support entitlement under their Premier support agreement it was always a grey area of what would actually happen when the inevitable phone call had to be made and you had to migrate or replicate a problem with the software which was running say 10000 Exchange accounts! (it just wasnt practical lets face it).

In regards to why we still have a lack of clear positive Oracle alliances is that they more than likely still see Vmware (and other Hypervisors or soft parition mechanisms) as a threat to licensing and associated revenue, this is one of or if not the most important part of Oracles business model. Run considerably more Oracle workloads on less physical processors or run Oracle within a DRS cluster and that's less revenue for them. On the licensing front they do seem to have tailored licensing for VMware (bit funny as its not supported) to mean that you have to license ALL possible hosts that a VM running Oracle could run upon, as you can gather this is just ridiculous and almost a non starter.

When it comes to aligning Oracle to any goal or hope of a complete virtualised datacentre you can see its just not going to fly and add up on your business case (or at least be easy at the moment), the licensing model is no doubt designed for large mainframe Iron which has no dynamic virtualisation capability such as Live migrate or resource scheduling. Interestingly however they now support LDOM's which is a Hypervisor based Virtualisation tool (this was predate the SUN acquisition), http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/133/4/opt-sysadmin/21419 I can't find if they have tailored licensing plan for this yet (they do for CMT Sparc processors) but this is a Hypervisor so no technical issues or arguements exists here then with the hypervisor indirection being used so this just increases the suspicion that Licensing rules the roost over virtualisation support.

Hopefully in future we will see some real movement in Oracle licensing schemes and acknowledged support, it is obvious that they are dependant on each other. Other issues arise within larger enterprises as it is hard to determine and show your data/dba teams that running Oracle on VMware is a reality, I could probably add loads of detail on how and what you can do to achieve this but will save for another rainy day.

The whole support, licensing and 100% virtualised datacentre vision will start to become more interesting when Vsphere arrives with all of its great scalable benefits along with the high availability benefits that are brought to organisations that can enable you to consolidate Tier 1 workloads, This was what happened in my example of SAP and others around release of ESX 3 so hopefully Oracle will acknowledge this and can forklift customers into building enough revolt to get Oracle on the straight and narrow and get focused on who is the most important person at the end of the day.....the paying customer.

The Oracle - still helping red pills?

2009-05-02T14:32:00.006+01:00

Ok, i'm not a massive Matrix fan but a hunt through wikipedia states that in the film "The Oracle" helps the Redpill takers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redpill , it states within this page a phrase which is quite a good analogy of how the current acquisition of SUN by Oracle will in my view look within the Virtualisation wars between all of the market leaders (mainly Vmware), it states;

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." Morpheus describes the effects of the two pills to Neo

Maybe i'm bending something to get a bit of spin going here with comparing this to how Oracle will now fair within the Virtualisation space, but with Oracle purchasing SUN they now have a massive amount of Virtualisation technology and development teams on their hands to utilise and grow already great under rated technology. Current SUN Virtualization offerings cover x86 and RISC, they offer management tools which have admittedly under the SUN team lacked lustre and finesse. But when you look at the nuts and bolts of recent acquired virtual technology that Oracle now have under there belt this could be what is probably the biggest threat to VMware's stronghold (and others). Oracle have attempted to lure Oracle customers into using the current Oracle VM as a stable supported stack for current software products but analyst figures show that uptake within organisations suggest this has not succeeded to date. So Enter new acquired SUN toys, with current offerings of LDOM and Containers on the Iron side, and xVM on the Tin side with Solaris running the whole shebang and you have instant synergy which can propel this into more of a reality for Sun and Oracle.

On the profile side when you look at Oracle's business focused model, they inherit have built a reputation within enterprise organisations and have provided C level executives with large business process transformation results in short periods of time and the same can be said for SUN's Iron Business. Lower level technical offerings which have spurted up in Oracle through organisational growth (and I expect through Larry's vision) have probably not provided enough return on investment impact for gaining large amounts of executive buy in and it has also been hard for Oracle to gain popularity to streamline this into an Infrastructure which has large amounts of alternatives already in place. Its also been difficult to introduce what are marketed as business tools to IT departments full of Geeks who like the uber cool technology to fiddle and play with.

Will the SUN purchase now change this? All of a sudden Oracle has not only got the SUN Virtualisation offerings but Hardware to run it on, all and program teams within SUN which are probably more capable of gaining revenue on tech such as RAC, ASM etc. A lot of unknowns exist today with the SUN purchase but one thing is for sure to purchase a company with the amount of cash Oracle used, it will certainly not be to just gain small volumes of customers lost to MySQL!

This latest purchase could (and i say could) stall any dominance of Virtualisation vendors today (namely VMware), and I do think it will make a difference to the vendor market shape. VMware can not ignore this and have to remain competitive, they have grown up from startup originality (not projected through an acquisition as EMC have left them alone up until Diane Greene went) being innovative, IT problem focused and more importantly being able to provide turn key cost savings without having to deal with the ugly black suit and boring tie services arm like IBM make you do. This in comparison is an approach similar to SUN, it has the original silicon valley geek factor within its product range, you have various options which scale heterogeneously so it has to mean competition will arrive once Oracle probably start to push the Virtualisation technology within organisations.

Don't get me wrong I live eat and breathe VMware products, in the last 2-3 years they have grown phenomenally and have enabled massive amounts of vision to be full filled in organisations Infrastructure strategy, they need to be care full though a acquisition has been made by Oracle and I am sure the partnerships that have been in place in the past between Oracle and Sun will mean lots of interesting strategies being employed against the likes of VMware, IBM and HP.

The move to private clouds

2009-04-18T21:11:00.009+01:00

I was able to catch up and listen to the EMC roundtable discussion which was on Private cloud computing emergence within customer datacentres, and how EMC/Cisco and Vmware are enabling this between each other (think the death star strategy...only joking). Apart from the webcast being largely a promotional activity on what each individual companies vision was for private cloud and underlying infrastructure, they raised topic in discussion on how service providers will figure within the new private cloud world, discussion was pretty interesting and it brought a few ideas up in my head, So here is my ramblings which you may or may not agree with.

Definition of what a private cloud actually is are still a bit shoddy and mines no better but i'll give it a go, one example of Private cloud strategy is VMware's who have revealed there take on Private cloud, its on the basis of a completely onpremise internally purchased virtualised datacenter (VDC-OS) that has potential global flexible turn key delivery capability within your organisation and gives you the option to externally goto other external cloud hosting providers (Linked Vcenter mode), workloads within the private cloud can dynamically migrate internally (DRS) or move according to certain factors such as following the sun for internal support coverage models or cheaper utility that would be offered in certain locations (cloud vmotion it will come watch this space), so for example you could migrate a datacentre to make use of free cooling facility and use this capability to cool your datacenter at certain times of year for low costs. Private clouds although predominantly used for internally based IT departments allows flexibility dependant on network connectivity to go and use external cloud providers in the same way you would colocate rackspace today in a scenario where you may need additional overflow capacity or hosted DR.

Private clouds can also be used by organisations that outsource services and datacentres, except that the private cloud is spread across multiple service providers to gain business benefit and best value. When comparing at how you build and enter service agreements in today's Outsourcing and Managed Service/Hosting world in a nutshell you build a list of requirements, agree if it can be delivered within cost and budget over a period of years, define roles and responsibility within that binded contract and sign a contract (then argue about SLA's when it doesn't work).

One question on how Private clouds compare is that when comparing more bleeding edge public cloud service offerings which bill in a "pay as you go" usage model within organisations like Amazon, Terremark and 3tera, will any future new "Cloud" service offerings from the likes of the big monolithic service providers such as IBM, EDS, CSC completely shift to providing a utility based model? This will mean they have to remodel how they define service catalogues and commercial billing frameworks, staffing structure etc etc. Will dramatic business model change be too much and will the model of hosting/mgd services continue in similar fashion as it does today with cloud really just being a fancy name in the portfolio offering which is really still the old age hosting and Managed service but with smoke and mirrors (and a lot of ball ache)?

Its probably a certainty that service provider's will refresh how they offer services across their current technological and the commercial portfolio and cater for basic "cloud" based services, it might not be the real deal but it will fool most people, plus I doubt they will have much option, with customers having a 100% Virtualised Datacenter will mean you can take your toys and play somewhere else a helluva lot easier than when you have hundreds of bits of tin to migrate that they previous impregnated themselves into, the 100% Virtualised estate will make the transition massively cheaper for the customer. All of these factors and upper hands the customer has will be most certainly a bandwagon they will jump on as they have had to do with early standard server virtualisation strategy organisations have followed so it maybe something they leech onto..who knows.

The other considerations with Private cloud is that if your outsourced today you have most likely signed a multiyear deal which has large amounts of contractual and commercial commitment for a number of years, moving across to a separate cloud provider will not be easy and will need to include heavy negotiations or financial write off to reap benefits of the efficiency you may obtain when using multiple cloud hosts.

To reap externally hosted private cloud benefits will for a number of years be dependant upon what your internal IT model is on both financially, operationally and technological fronts. If your IT is currently outsourced and host services within an off premise solution using multiple private cloud service will be easy to introduce to the department but difficult to move into due to embedded contract with current incumbents who may or may not offer what you want.

If your an internally hosted IT department the Private cloud will mean you can obtain freedom and flexibility to outsource pockets of your environment if ever required without the contractual mumbo jumbo that is present in todays outsource/colocation world, so for example an ERP system could be quite easily hosted within a cloud provider yet federate with your internal world as you would do when hosting that system internally.

Summary

Personally I cannot see the large outsourcers changing internal models in a hurry to cater for cloud for a long long time, the largest providers are all large oil tankers that need to be shifted, I suspect they have various business models internally that are designed with profit and margin in mind. If they have to alter this into a utility model like current Public Cloud offererings I'm not so sure they are ready to stomach this or whether they fully are confident cloud is even the way to go yet.

The good news I feel is likely to be for internally hosted organisations that are agile and have freedom to roam, your likely to be the sensible one who has not got yourself involved in shackled contracts that do not offer flexibility to roam and gain benefit of multiple different private clouds.

Windows 2008 Cluster webcasts

2009-04-13T21:18:00.002+01:00

Some great webcasts to top up on new and future Windows 2008 Clustering capability...

http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit/archive/2009/03/20/time-to-get-clustered.aspx

Virtualisation of Production Workload Hurdling - Olympic Sport?

2009-04-13T11:23:00.004+01:00

Day to day I see, hear and talk to with various organisations that are Virtualising current datacentre infrastructure. Being the Server Virtualisation advocate and evangelist I am It's always very good to hear this and see that people are currently aggressively reducing capital and operational cost and spreading the gospel (Praiseeee the lord) about what they have achieved. However with the proliferation of growth and volume of companies virtualising do we really see what lies beneath the cracks of the implementations?

This isn't a jibe or criticism at a vendor (for once), its not a post to single out any one company or individual, its a post to see what possibility may lie ahead for anyone who is in the early stages of Virtual maturity and are just starting to embark on a virtual journey or even go from Virtualisation being a point solution and into more of a fundamental enabler of your infrastructure ecosystem. It will provide you with some pointers and tips on what to do when faced with wanting to push the boundary of virtualisation into Production.

The Wow factor

Ok so you've virtualised 50-60% of your estate, mainly most of this is likely to be Dev and Test, and your cooking on gas, your finding it easy to deploy new VM's for your organisation needs, you can ensure you have clarity on when you are due to run out of capacity due to extensive monitoring capability, you can snapshot and make up for development team errors and cockups, backups are a breeze with VCB, DR for you would seem so much easier when used on your complete estate, and many more in built benefits of the core tech.

Importantly the Infrastructure team are the flavour of the month, your developers actually now talk to you at the coffee machine rather than grunt when they pass you in the corridor, they are your new best friend as hey you can spin them up a VM in hours not days you can make up for their mistakes with snapshot reverts, you can make up for there poor planning etc etc.
Your senior members of staff however see this new found ease and benefit differently, and most likely dont even care about the technical benefits, they maybe have provided the funds you to virtualise in the first place.

So after the success of the Development environment consolidation, the next natural stages are you are looking to virtualise your Prod workloads and need to go back with a solid case to Virtualise and increase overall Physical Infrastructure to support the consolidated environment. This is where it starts to become a problem, The P word now means core solid investment being needed, something any company will struggle to do if the current physical environment is stable, solid and able to facilitate the business need. Doubts and hurdles you may find are as follows;

"But the current hardware is a year old and needs to be depreciated"

This will be hard for anybody to argue against the kit being a sensible candidate for consolidating, would you sell your current petrol car and go and buy a diesel just because it paid back over a period of months and was easier to run, maintain etc. Chances are in that analogy no (and specially in todays car market), however possible arguements you may find benefit the decision in the server world include;

Reductions in Network and Storage connectivity
Removal of any breakfix maintenance on that box
Ability to now provide High Availability and zero downtime with VMotion/HA/DRS on a platform that was unable to have this in the physical world due to cost etc
Ability to clone into a Development environment in pristine fashion, not by a lenghty backup and restore process etc

Other benefits include the reuse of this physical platform, a few blog posts have popped up recently which have highlighted that reuse of kit to use as either a main Virtual Host platform or use as a DR Platform in todays current economic climate is much more of a reality for corporations. My background has always been to approach Virtualisation and consolidation activitys in this fashion, hey it is nice to have brand new kit for consolidation but using your Year old platform for a remote office consolidation exercise or Dev and Test will be perfect and suit most business need and the benefits of VMware on the licensing front certainly enable companies to do this cost effectively.

"My platform isnt suitable for Virtualisation due to performance"

As you may have experienced with any introduction of new technology this will be a common one, and hey as your the new guy with the new ideas it will be you that has the "its his fault for bad app performance" tagged to your Active Directory profile for all of the company to see that its your fault, hey if your gona virtualise production you gota be used to putting your head on the block remember :).

With recent developments in new generation server platforms which are now tailored for Virtualisation such as HP Proliant and Bladesystem G6 Ranges this issue is now becoming less of a problem for people to consolidate more IO intensive workloads. Couple this with improvements which will come in VMware Vsphere VI4 and it will no longer be as much of a problem (I didnt say it wont be a problem). Remember with Consolidation you are still slicing and dicing a physical host, this has a layer of indirection which will if not suitably planned cause you problems when the workload demands more compute power.

Companies adopting virtualisation really should invest in tools which allow you to analyse the complete estate, VMware capacity planner can do this, Novell Platespin Power recon is also a good tool to use, however some companies cannot afford to do this and larger companies may do a scoping exercise 6-12 months before they actually start to consolidate workloads so it cannot cover all workloads, within this time you may have had new applications put in, or your business requirements and processes may have changed which means your application workload is increased.The key to this are obvious ones but maybe of use, these include;

Get to know your application, its no good just asking the app bods for the thumbs up, they most likely do not know the infrastructure layer components and the four main bottlenecks that affect virtualisation performance, Network, Disk, CPU and RAM. Using monitoring tools before this in even the simpliest form such as Perfmon will enable you to observe the platform in more detail and observe factors such as Page Faults, heavey disk paging, high Disk queues and excessive process threads.
Test test test, yes you can do this. Building a Virtual Machine and OS from scratch and then asking application teams to install the app on a clean build is an easy reality for you to be able to test and derisk. If your looking for a quick turnaround and are confident that you only need a slight amount of confidence instilled into application teams, then one option is if you have dev and test environments then using a P2V tool such as VMware converter or Platespin Powerconvert to migrate your physical workload to test in a quarantined environment will enable you and your application bod to ensure you know how the workload will perform and its possible problem areas when virtualised. The alternative to testing in a dev environment is to completely reinstall the application from scratch, this would be my prefferred.
Consult the ISV, these guys will if a big software house be able to provide at least some partial advice on performance profile which is expected, take some of this with a pinch of salt though. Unless they are a SAP or an Oracle mould then chances are they will not know Virtualisation as indepth as you, hey didnt they get us in this mess in the first place by speccing highly rediculous minimum hardware specifications :)

Other core drivers

Other drivers to virtualise production workloads which have been implemented recently maybe;

Turnkey DR, DR may not have been in scope of the project so was not funded, remember you can easily replicate VM's now, something that provides 1-2 Hour RTO Times against what is probably if no funding was provided a 24-48 Hour RTO from backup process.
Snapshots and instant restores for Future software upgrades,
Improved Performance monitoring being available, improvements in future releases with Vmware Appspeed will enhance this even further.

Summary

Well thats enough hopefully to kick you off, obviously being the VMware evangelist you are now and knowing how much confidence you have in the product the above will assist, your passion and drive will hopefully instill confidence within itself. You know the more extended benefits brought to the table in areas of Business continuity and agility, something which is usually a key driver.

Use Powershell?

2009-04-09T00:03:00.004+01:00

Darren Woollard has compiled a PDF to provide standard requirements for installing and being able to use Powershell in angst, this is based on using a number of great free tools available to interrogate using the VC SDK.

Powershell is extremely powerful and can be all downloaded for Zero, this is great if you are a small shop or a roaming consultant and don't have the opportunity to use extended management tools to interogate Virtualised Infrastructure.

Enjoy

http://www.vmote.net/documents/vmote-Creating_PS_VM.pdf

Nehalem Day - start of a new tin era?

2009-03-30T21:26:00.005+01:00

Well today marks the day when new x86 server ranges from the core market players HP, Dell and IBM all released new generation servers based on the i7 Nehalem chipset. Its probably the first time that chipsets and server ranges have been built and tailored for Virtualisation and associated workload and not the other way round where VMware is plonked on top of a big beefy multi core server with loads of Layer 3 cache.

Nehalem has changed the game, it is built to cater for Virtualised workloads and most importantly to work effectively with VMware and i expect in future other Hypervisor vendors (kinda helps VMware have Intel as an investor though).

Various features within the chipset will most certainly benefit, some examples when compared to the older chips includes improved memory controller access and speed due to Quickpath technology being implemented onto the CPU Die rather then externally on the Northbridge, flexible vmotion migration between generations of Intel Chipsets to ensure we don't need to go and buy massive clusters worth of kit, general power reduction and Hyper Threading comes back from the dead.

For Virtualised environment newer architectures bring benefit with Extended Page Table (NPT in the AMD world), this feature was shown with a whitebox prototype way back at Vmworld 2007 on a keynote. This evolves upon how current Shadow Page Table algoritms work to allocate memory register within ESX's. SPT has brought benefits which has allowed us to obtain higher consolidation ratios with lower utilised machines in the first phase of VMware maturity in most organisations. Next level demand for higher intensive workload can be catered for in most cases by NPT/EPT. Both nehalem and AMD barcelona/shanghai are able to offer built page table management within the actual CPU and remove associated overhead which was previously incurred when new page requests were required at the hypervisor layers. Applications and environments which have large amounts of Processes running within the box i.e. Citrix/terminal server will benefit from this, but not all environments will benefit as greatly as these.

When I was at the Intel stand in Cannes i asked the geezer if Nehalem was 8 Core, he said "oh yes its eight core blah blah", being the skeptic I am I investigated, it turned out it was just dual threaded or more better known as Hyper Threaded. I seem to remember in the early days hyper threading caused more hassle than it was worth, it kind of didn't actually matter then, OS and application was able to interact. This new generation I feel will change the mould, instead of the yesterday era of single core processors which were just logically split and presented to a host OS, we now have a friendly more environmentally, easier to manage etc etc layer of indirection called the Hypervisor, couple this with neat new features in the vSphere technology and this will hopefully work better than previous incarnations did.

I don't believe that adding continuous amounts of cores is the answer, look at Sun UltraSparc and this works in a similar fashion http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/, it basically has multiple threads making use of memory lag, this allows more CPU cycles to be made available to the virtual machines. Will be a shame if IBM buy Sun as I think they will just EOL this architecture.

Overall Nehalem benefits are application/workload dependant, be very wary of buying it with the intention that it will solve your problems, like most things in todays world its mostly hype and isn't a silver bullet, you may find that going with AMD will benefit, they have offered Nested page table support with RVI for a long time now and it is mature.

So...now onto arguing whether its worth waiting a week or two for this kit and also badgering vendors/resellers to find out prices and lead time!

UCS again....

2009-03-22T19:21:00.007Z

There has been an absolute massive amount of coverage on the new Cisco UCS announcements on Monday this week, with large amounts of speculation such as are they badged or designed by SUN, large amounts of talk within the Storage blogosphere on how being only FCoEs changes the game for connectivity and may shoe horn people into it regardless and many more.

Few thoughts and questions i've thought about when reading about include with my view and answer;

It looks to me like Cisco will just concentrate on the x86 market, does this limit there growth and coverage in enterprise customers?

Most probably they will, they have designed blades from scratch which cater for high dense virtualised Vmware environments, something current vendors are just about achieving with offerings today pre Intel Nehalem. Maybe Cisco are going along with VMware's claims that ESX/Vsphere will be able to run any workload as a valid agreed strategy. Maybe they see larger organisations moving away from non agile big monolithic mainframes that are hosting core applications and onto commoditised distributed grid environment to reduce risk and cost and using platforms like Linux or JEOS.

Will Architects or Designers recommend solutions and roadmaps which include running dual vendor shops with Cisco Blades and any current tech? IBM and HP both manufacture RISC architecture and Itanium Blade offerings respectively which fit in the same Chassis so its a tough one to call and needs benefit to outweigh commercial impact and risk.

Tough one, standardisation reduces operational overhead and associated cost and all vendor value add offerings start to take great affect when using fewer (not one) vendors, yes VMware decouplement reduces issues with the underlying physical services but you still have an ecosystem that exists within the Physical landscape to update and maintain the environment from central operational tools. UCS uses BMC Bladelogic to provision and manage services it appears, will shops want to run this alongside tools such as Altiris and have to go through vigorous training or even recruit again?

Also commercially this could limit your buying power if siloing on Cisco for Blades, you may require rackmount for certain requirements that UCS cannot meet i.e. Dongles or Specialised PCI devices. (BTW HP Do have a PCI Blade IO Module).

Will Cisco have no option if they do not achieve intial sales growth targets and popularity to release MDS/Catalyst modules that are compatible with core networking/san in datacentres today?

Not having true access to any of the technology it seems that Cisco are going to limit themselves if they do not provide connectivity which allows customers to transform across to FCoE, most companies have probably procured kit before any credit crisis in 2007/8 on what maybe a three to four year refresh cycle policy. They make connectivity options for there new competitors so can't be too hard to do this if customer uptake is stumbled due to this.

Or does the I/O have backward compatibility? i.e. can you connect to conventional fibre connection points already, maybe someone can put me straight as I'm speculating on something I've never had the fortune at seeing/playing with yet.

If most of what i say is right, that's a bit effort to dump your HP/IBM blades and all the expensive chassis components you've procured?

A few other quick ones;

Will cisco open up and allow Brocade to build backplane switches?
Will this work in DMZ environments? or will you need designated blade chassis/backend networking for this.
Are Cisco aiming to transform Rackmount only shops into Blade?
Will HP/IBM just jump on the bandwagon and quash Cisco due to current popularity in the datacentre? How unique is UCS and how good is it to actually dump a Vendor you've used and had relationships with for ion's?

Maybe people can pass comment on above or email me, i might be talking utter rubbish (as per usual) but i thought that was what your own blog was for :) Hopefully its raised some valid points or is what others are currently thinking as well.

Thanks

Cisco Blades - Paradigm shift or Flop?

2009-03-16T21:18:00.011Z

Well Cisco have finally revealed the hype surrounding there entry into the Blade server industry today, codename "California" offering has been revealed in a simplified manor with a clear message that they want to consolidate and remove the problems experienced in computing today and change how organisations provision and deploy. I provide a few thoughts and views expressed here with some possible comments to look back on in the future once this stuff goes mainstream adoption.

Unification is the main name of the game and it could either propel the underlying connectivity and IO within the Nexus Unified switch range into the mainstream or it can carry on being an investment along with the full blade package which will be on the back burner until the financial crisis finishes. Something which will be hard certainly with most organisations being on a tightrope budget for what will be until next year if fortunate.

On the other hand i'm sure readers on Vmlover will realise that there are potential cost saving and ROI benefits to consolidating your infrastructure with Virtualisation and Blades even in a financial crisis, if you can raise a business case or if you have a budget from last year its seriously a possibility that you can go for next generation technology such as blade and unified core networking and use this to host your Virtualisation environment to save massive bucks short and longer term.

Once Blades and Virtualisation are deployed you have more agility, quicker response to business demand and overall cost savings from reduced overhead of your operation deploying the solution and again you can reap the cost saving.

Whether you feel Cisco has the whole package with there new offering and you feel it can be offered to deploy turn key without having to worry about your SAN/LAN provisioning is dependent, maybe this will be a target for initial installs for medium sized organisations who feel that they can jump up a level and go for the full all in one package. Not many organisations are fortunate to be able to refresh there core networking and server environments, most are locked into an investment previous purchased

Other considerations on this new venture is who's going to sell this solution and then possibly deploy all this kit and deploy the Servers? Typically a solutions provider/reseller will recommend a blade spec and deploy SAN and LAN configuration on the chassis backplane, install at customer and then hand over to the network bods. Is the network bod in this Cisco unified blade world going to do the network and the chassis and then hand over to the Virtual/Server bod? Maybe not this might be "the empire strikes back" with cisco blade, Network/Storage bods have been shoved out in most organisations on LAN/SAN config of blades with new simplified tech such as HP Virtual Connect. Or is the whole deployment going to go and push network/storage bods back even further with provisioning process? Plug your FCoE in and off you go server bod....

Cisco versus the rest of the world

I will be interested to see how who are now the vendor competition and previous partners for shipping IO connectivity on current market blades muster in the new battle, someone the size of Cisco is not moving into Blade servers to dabble, they want to take on the world like they do with networking and storage products. With there competitors IBM and HP have backplane options that go upto up to 10GB LAN/8GB SAN, will they now start to lose the first class citizen status of what they want developed with Cisco? Will the other Blade vendors struggle with FCoE adoption and partnership and is this why its been a bit slow on any new strategy for FCoE with Blade recently? Probably not to the above other people are building switches that support FCoE so if Cisco do then there take alliance with a vendor like Brocade.

I do like Cisco's pitch and approach, I like the unified fabric architecture lets see what the rest of the industry says and does, however i wouldn't want to dive in and be lumbered with a technology like VFrame was. This is something i expect will be the case across most IT organisations with this latest entrant to the server world so were see.