latoga labs

I know that it has been rather quite here at the Labs for the past few months.  Not only has 2010 started off with a bang of activity, but I have also been preparing for my new long term project (details at my photography blog).  So lots of exciting stuff for 2010, just need more hours in the day.  Below is an abbreviated list of virtualization links that have come out over the past 2 months that caught my attention:

VMware Specific Links

• Recent Releases
  • VMware Labs was recently launched, a place for VMware engineers to share the cool internal tools they build with the rest of the world as technology previews.
  • VMware View 4.0.1 was released mid-February with some issues being addressed and enhancements to the PCoIP protocol
  • Site Recovery Manager 4.0.1 was released mid-February addressing a number of issues.
  • vCenter CapacityIQ 1.0.2 was released mid-February addressing a number of report related issues.
  • vCenter Update Manager 4.0 Update 1 was released end of February addressing an issue related to the upgrade of Cisco VSM modules
  • Fusion 3.0.2 was released mid-February addressing an issue so that Mac OS X 10.6 Server can run as a guest.
  • Technology Preview – VMware Guest Console (VGC) an application to manage the Guest Operating Systems installed on VMs. Eric has the links on the latest leaks around VGC.
• One of the biggest desktop related announcements recently was the VMware Acquiring RTO Software. A deeper analysis of this acquisition (including why some parts of RTO Software was not acquired) by Brian Madden.
• Another big VMW announcement recently was that VMware to Acquire Several Management Products from EMC Ionix.  (Interesting thought experiments abound on the future of management tools within VMware and an Insider’s Perspective from Virtual Geek.)
• VMware’s Mike Colman describes The Art and Science of Remote Display Protocols after the release of a recent desktop virtualization report funded by Citrix which posted some confusing and questionable statistics.
• VMware recently released a white paper discussing Anti-Virus Deployment for VMware View, a key issue with anyone considering virtual desktops.  Many of my clients looking at View are also looking at VMsafe based Anti-virus solutions to overcome per desktop anti-virus performance issues.

General Virtualization & Cloud Links

• Gartner had a number of recent posts that talk about Windows kernel-level vulnerability, which also affect Hyper-V and shed light on the value of a dedicate hypervisor versus one that is extended from the Operating System.
• Steve Kaplan has a few months old but pertinent comparison of Cisco UCS vs. HP Matrix: strategic vs. tactical approach to virtualization. Both an interesting analysis/comparison of virtualization computing platforms as well as a between the lines look at the future of our enterprise computing market.  Make sure to browse thru the comments as well.

Today’s the last day before a week long vacation over Thanksgiving and it’s been a continual mad dash for the finish line.  The rain is falling, the wind is howling, and I’m not looking forward to a vacation painting project…what better time than to catch up on a few key virtualization links that I have built up over the past…month! Wow, guess I’ve been busier than I remember.    Some of these might be a bit old news (unless you have been living under a virtual rock lately…like me), but still valuable to raise to your awareness.

Have a safe and relaxing Thanksgiving holiday (at least here in the States).

VMware Specific Links

• New Releases over the past Month.5
  • The New VMware Website…in case you didn’t notice, it was entirely redesigned and rebranded.  More details about Where Did the Boxes Go? and the new holistic and consistent brand
  • VMware Fusion 3:  all the details on the Team Fusion blog post announcing availability.  (Sad to say that I still haven’t build a Win7 VM for my Fusion yet…)
  • VMware Workstation 7:  again all the details on the Workstation Zealot blog post announcing availability.
  • VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1
  • VMware View 4.0:  Software based PCoIP!
    • VMware View Point: Why PCoIP is Ideal for Remote Virtual Desktops
    • View 4 Production Info and a collection of View 4 Videos on YouTube
    • Video Demo of the power of View 4 PCoIP from down under (great video despite the jerkiness)
    • View 4 product download (as of this writing View 4 was being made available for download on the VMware website…)
  • VMware vCenter Capacity IQ 1.0:  release notes
  • VMware vCenter Chargeback 1.0.1:  release notes
  • VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat 5.5 U2
  • SpringSource Spring Framework 3.0
• VMware Opens Next Generation Green Datacenter:  VMware opened a new green IT datacenter in East Wenatchee, Washington.  Read about how VMware plans to save $5M per year due to it’s design.
• Operation Virtualization: VMware CTO, Steve Herrod, discusses how virtualization changes the way we should think about operating systems.
• Hyperic + SpringSource + VMware = Goodness: Hyperic’s view of the open-source systems management world
• Access your View virtual desktop on your iPhone with Wyse’s PocketCloud.  No word on View4 support…yet.
• HP Announced their Converged Infrastructure Architecture recently, a “a blueprint for chief information officers to create elasticity in their technology environments.”  Here’s a video from VMware’s VP of Product Marketing talking about VMware and this new architecture.
• Need a local copy of VMware’s product documentation?  Then check out xtravirt’s VMware Documentation Downloader.
• Are you still confused about ESX 4.0 compared to ESXi 4.0?  Better start getting straightened out as ESXi is the way of the future…
• xtravirt has a great white paper on Tape Backup Integration with VMware Data Recovery (VDR)

General Virtualization & Cloud Links

• Many have wondered, and now we know…What would 6 Million Virtual Machines Look Like?
• Cloud storage market sees continued growth as Hitatchi Looks to the Cloud for Storage.
• EMC Provides Validated Approach for Customers to Apply Virtualization Technology in Oracle Environments.  (First you validate, then you…)
• An interesting look from CIO Magazine Inside One Firm’s Private Cloud Journey
• Which 50% Will You Virtualize? Some interesting thoughts on statements made about Hyper-V R2
• As Microsoft heats up their battle with VMware, I think we’ll all be more Layers and Layers of FUD…
• IBM Acts to Enhance Security of Virtualized Environments.
• Liveblog of Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie talking about Azure and more.

I’m a bit delayed with this edition of the Virtualization Round Up due to some challenges with upgrading my MacBook Pro over the weekend (don’t you just love unforeseen production outages!  And over a weekend no less…there’s a couple of blog posts coming out of this…).  Slightly delayed, but just still within the best when consumed by date, here’s the latest super-sized Round Up:

VMware Specific Links

• New Releases
  • Workstation 7 RC was recently released.  No, this is not the official release, but an early version that you can test and play with…
  • Fusion 2.0.6 was recently released.  A maintenance upgrade that is free for all Fusion 1.x and 2.x users.
  • It was announced today that Fusion 3.0 will be available on October 27th, pre-orders are currently being taken.
  • SRM 4.0 was released today.  This version of SRM works with vSphere 4.0 and NFS support.  Make sure you check the SA compatibly matrix to make sure your storage has an adapter available.  Some of the EMC platforms are currently not on the list…
  • While not an official VMware product, View Open Client 4.0 Beta 1 was recently released. (now that my Mac is working again, maybe I should try installing it…)
• Ricky El-Qasem of VirtualizePlanet recently release his vSphere Plugin Wizard which makes it easy to embed a website or web portal into vCenter.
• Dell and VMware recently announced a broadened partnership on the Desktop front in which Dell will offer VMware View as an option for its Flexible Computing solutions.
• Dave Lawrence has a great post out discussing getting more advanced with View.  A few more advance items you can can configure with View.
• Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4 and ESX 4.0 is a new guide available on the communities site.
• As I’ve indicated before, I think Fault Tolerance is one of the key new features within vSphere. In some recent testing that Todd Muirhead did he showed how even with using a 1vCPU Exchange VM,  FT is a real value added feature that shouldn’t be overlooked.  You may also want to check out Eric Siebert’s Master’s Guide to VMware Fault Tolerance for all the FT details.
• Are you a VMware shop that would love to run Oracle virtualized but hesitate due to support statement confusions?  Then you’ll find Oracle on VMware posts at Virtual Geek (including part II) worth the read.  The longer you’re in the industry the more you have to laugh at the games…
• VMsafe is another key new aspect of vSphere which I have been disappointed to see hasn’t taken off faster.  Every View client of mine has been beating up their security vendors on VMsafe for the past few months.  So, What is happening with VMsafe?
• I updated the VMware Network Port list with a link to an interested graphical representation of this information that another colleague of mine here at VMware created.
• An interesting post by Maish Saidel-Keesing & discussion about using memory over commit made me chuckle a bit as I remember ever time I heard a client proud about how they are running their systems memory at the high rate of 50% utilized.
• And those who worry about over committing memory better buckle their seats when they see what the future holds, as Intel and VMware discussed some of the new memory and power management technologies they are working on.
• James Urquhart hits the nail on the head with his recent posts Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 1 and Part 2.  His thinking dovetails what Paul Maritz has been saying since before the launch of vSphere.  With virtualization creating a huge mainframe, do you need all the bloat of traditional OS?  A application specific hosting container running as the “VM” starts making a lot of sense…oh yeah, and VMware bought SpringSource…
• A client recently asked for help in identifying which physical NIC his VM was using for troubleshooting, and luck would have it the VMware Networking Blog just posted a tip for doing this with vSphere.  If anyone knows an equivalent method for VI3, please post in the comments!
• I found this recent post Comparing VMware’s Cloud to Amazon S3 comical in it’s mis-understandings.  VMware doesn’t host their own cloud (at least not commercially for others to use).  They make the software that allows others to create their own cloud.  vCloud is just a marketing term to indicate partners who are building upon the VMware vSphere platform.
• As I have a number of clients planning large P2V conversions, Eric Siebert’s article on Removing old hardware after a P2V conversion is very timely.

General Virtualization & Cloud Links

• I found it interesting that Adobe is offering a cloud service for Flash, while this is essentially a CDN for Flash applications, it is another example of how far the cloud front as spread.  As Matt Mullenweg recently tweeted, has Cloud jumped the shark?  Maybe in marketing aspects…
• Ron Oglesby from Dell shares some great research around the question of is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization? While ever IT shop can argue how the adoption curve methodology doesn’t work for their organization, this is an important topic that all users of virtualization have to be asking themselves as dragging of feet with virtualization in today’s economy has the hardest of business impacts.

Well, it’s been two weeks since the end of VMworld, and how the time has flown.  Everyone should have seen plenty of write ups on VMworld by now (so I won’t bother) and the labs and sessions are now available at the VMworld site.   Based upon comments I saw twittering about online, it appears that some people didn’t realize that the data center built at VMworld was actually in use for all the hands on labs.  VM /Etc did a great interview with the Operations Team manager for the VMworld Data Center, to provide more of the back story on that.

And so, back to the regular roundup from the past few weeks, the usual collection of things that caught my attention recently for this reason or that.  Thanks goes out to all my colleagues and my twitter network for leading me to many of these gems!

VMware Specific Links

• New Releases
  • VMware View Manager 3.1.2 was release don Sept/04 (Release Notes)
  • VMware Data Recovery 1.0.2 was released on Sept/08 (Release Notes)
  • VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager 1.0.2 was release on Sept/10 (Release Notes)
• This is not new information, but I finally had a chance to watch the Burton Group’s Debating Hypervisor Performance session from their recent Catalyst Conference.  I thought it was great to actually see VMware and Citrix stand side by side and have the performance debate in person (versus the usual venue of blog posts).  40min video makes for a perfect lunchtime edutainment.
• Looking for a VMWare View Open Client for OSX?  Ron Peters has worked to port the linux open client to run on the Mac.
• As most VMware users should now be aware, the service console-less ESXi is the stated architecture for the future.  But in the meantime a document details Changes to the ESX Service Console for ESX 4.0 has been posted tot he Communities site.  Find out what’s new, different, and incompatible between ESX 3.5 and 4.0 service console.
• Looking to reduce data center power/cooling costs?  Have you looked at DPM?  There is a new whitepaper out entitled VMware Distributed Power Management: Concepts and Usage.  One of my clients just started evaluating DPM to power off servers during low demand times with huge potential for cost savings for them.

General Virtualization Links

• EMC’s Chuck Hollis recently wrote about Chargeback vs Pricing where he discussed how Pricing can be an effective tool to force consumers to change their consumption behaviors.  I had this general discussion this week with two clients on the path to private clouds; they are interested in VMware Chargeback so they could  start exposing consumption to their virtualization users even if there is no price associated with it…just to get the IT users to start realizing what they are consuming.  IT organization who are still trying to just drive users off of physicals onto VMs can use Chuck’s advice to drive this change of behavior through pricing.
• Cloudy days ahead:  2 In 3 IT Managers Have Cloud Funding, according to a recent survey.  This jives with my experience as 66% of my clients are actively moving forward with private clouds and the expectation of a federate cloud.
• Citrix announced plans to evolve Xen into the Xen Cloud Platform.
• In what appears to be a move into the Cloud space, Tibco Acquires DataSynapse. While I’m sure some of the folks I know at DataSynapse are happy about this, I haven’t had a chance to get their take on this acquisition yet.
• Floyd Strimling has an interesting view of the the newest battle between IT Giants, Why Cisco should fear HP.

On the final march to VMworld 2009, this will be the last roundup until after Labor Day.

VMware Specific Links

• First, some VMWorld 2009 Stuff
  • VMworld 2009 Unofficial Party List
  • Thanks to Chad Sakac, here’s an AWESOME peek behind the scenes of getting hardware ready for VMworld 2009
• After more conversations last week with clients about their private cloud plans (including bursting out to external cloud providers), I wanted to share the list of VMware Ready vCloud Service Providers.  I expect this list to grow post VMworld…
• A recent patch was released for vCenter Server 4.0 which fixes an issue where HA Cluster failover might not work if the servers were configured with certain IPs.  Full details are available in the Knowledge Base Article.
• Some more SpringSource centric posts
  • SpringSource announced Cloud Foundry, their Enterprise Java Cloud.  The VMware price tag for SpringSource is looking a bit more reasonable all of a sudden.
  • VMware’s SpringSource Acquisition: More Than Meets the Eye?
  • With SpringSource Buy, VMware Constructs Cloud Platform
• When a client asked me about running Documentum eRoom solution in a VM recently I found this great article about how EMC is doing that and Saved $1.5 Million in the process.
• The Vroom blog has a great posting about VMware Fault Tolerance Performance including a link to a FT architecture and performance whitepaper.
• Scott Drummonds recent community post Four Things You Should Know About ESX 4’s Scheduler helps to answer the common question of how man vCPUs to give a VM (as well as a few other questions…).

General Virtualization Links

• With 1 In 3 Developers Working On Private Cloud Apps, almost 50% of developers expect to be working on cloud applications within a year and think that Java is the best language for developing in the cloud.
• When talking about cloud applications, the business model of these applications can come into discussion (with the Free usually being mentioned at some point).  That’s why I found this simple formula to gauge a freemium model’s success so interesting.
• Security Showdown: Cloud Computing vs. On-Premise IT is an interesting podcast discussion actually discusses the private cloud between the lines.
• EMC’s Chuck Hollis talks about how he’s seeing more enterprises wanting to get going now on private clouds by building A Starter Private Cloud For IT.
• After seeing a few pallets of UCS systems being delivered to a client of mine last week, I found Steve Chamber’s post about The stars are aligning: VMware, Cisco and ESG rather timely and right on target with regards to the higher level value UCS delivers to the CIO’s office. “Make IT simple stupid” is a mantra that we should all live by.