Here is an interesting video from Andy where he took the time to show the history of upgrading through each version of MS Windows by actually doing that inside a VMware VM!

Sure this video is interesting from the “wow, I remember that  OS…how far we’ve come” aspect. But I find it more interesting from the “a current version of VMware could still run that old OS” aspect. I have a colleague who’s client “upgraded” their control system for their assembly line not by paying the $100,000′s upgrade price to install new hardware and move to the latest OS and controller software version, but by paying a few $10,000′s to P2V the existing controller systems to VMs and then run them all on two modern mid-range servers. These systems didn’t demand a lot of performance, they just needed to work. The old version of the OS and controller software weren’t broken, just the model in which it all operated (physical servers versus VMs).

One of my clients even has a “convalescence ESX cluster” where they move old apps to so they can die a slow hardware oversubscription death.  These are apps that either can’t be tracked back to the owner but see an occasional blip of activity or are apps that the owners are steadfastly refusing to EOL. So rather than keep them running on old servers taking up rack space and excess power in the data center, they built a special ESX cluster just to run them all on. They are available and work when needed and it was the path of least resistance for the IT staff.

So, what Legacy workloads do you have running in a VMware VM in your datacenter?  Leave a comment and let’s see what is the most obscure OS / Software Version we can find.  Don’t worry…you can leave it anonymously to protect the guilty…

(Thanks goes out to @herrod for the pointer to the video.)

Yesterday was the VMware Community Roundtable discussion on View which featured VMware’s own John Dodge.  If you haven’t participated or listened into one of the roundtables, this is a great one for those who are doing or thinking about virtual desktops.

At one point the discussion turned to Employee Owned IT (EOIT) and offline desktops within View.  It was great to hear all the different individuals whose companies are thinking or implementing EOIT in some form or fashion.  One aspect of EOIT which I have touched on in the past, is security.  Security has come up with multiple of my clients when discussion desktop virtualization and EOIT; I was a bit shocked that the topic didn’t come up yesterday during the roundtable.

When you start letting employees bring in their own computers, connect to the corporate network, and then run a corporate supplied desktop VM locally (or connect to a corporate supplied virtual desktop remotely) to do their work there are still some security risks to keep in mind.  Namely, the uncontrolled operating system attached to your corporate network.

Corporate IT may have locked down the VM the employee is using, but more times than not there are not adequate security mechanisms in place to protect the network from the EOIT OS that is running on that EOIT laptop.  What sites were the employee’s children looking at last night?  What malware might be lurking on the EOIT laptop?  And that employee just plugged their laptop into your corporate network.

Walk into most large enterprises (and many smaller ones too), plug your computer to the physical network and you probably are now behind the firewall.  Many companies don’t have any security in place to prevent outside computers from getting an IP address and instant network access–I know this because I’ve had this discussion with my clients when discussing EOIT and I’ve done it myself in the past.  Most companies setup their wireless network to require authentication, and if it doesn’t require authentication it only gives you guest access to the Internet only.  But this is not the case for the physical networks because the assumption is that those inside the building should have full access.

For EOIT to really take off in enterprises, this existing security mindset needs to be addressed.  Either at the physical network level or at the local computer level.  Since the entire idea of EOIT is to not need to manage the computer, it puts us in a tough spot.  Most large enterprises would take years of time and lots of money to update the security on their network to a level that would enable EOIT for wide spread use.  Many smaller companies would do it much faster and cheaper where the cost savings of EOIT far out ways the security measures needed to be installed.

But how do you solve this problem for the large enterprise?

For the better part of the past two weeks I have been living the life of Employee Owned IT and dealing with the worst case scenarios.  For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, this is essentially where the employee owns their laptop and uses it for work.  The ultimate version of this concept is the employer providing a yearly stipend for purchasing any laptop or computer that the employee wants (usually meeting a minimum performance requirement) and then providing the employee a virtual desktop for all their corporate work.  The theory is that the employee is happy because they get the laptop they want, can (officially) use it for personal work, and they keep the laptop when they leave the company.  The employer is happy because they have shifted money on their books away from owning depreciating assets, saved money overall on the management of their physical client computers, and have a more secure and controlled corporate client computing environment that is compartmentalized using virtualization and primarily contained within their data center.

I have been living this life as a self-driven experiment.  Working on my personal MacBook Pro–which has all my personal software and utilities I use daily for both work and extra curricular activities (photography)–and running a corporate VM with all my official corporate software installed and VPN connectivity.  Everything has been working wonderfully…until the SuperDrive in my MacBook Pro suddenly decided it didn’t want to burn CDs/DVDs anymore. I had purchased the Apple Care protection plan with my laptop, so all I needed to do was take the MBP into the nearest Apple store, have them run a test to verify that the SuperDrive was kaput, and have them replace it.

All went according to plan up till the replace it part.  I needed to leave my computer there for 1-3 days.

1 to 3 days?  This is my production machine!  The Genius helping me at the Genius bar didn’t seem to understand what that meant.  I needed this computer to do my daily work.  Not just that, but could I trust them to have my personal computer, personal information, web browser passwords, and all for 1 to 3 days?

Welcome to the reality of EOIT.  A few of the hurdles that it faces:

• Hardware Failure & Repair:  The risks and abuses of some private IT repair shops are well documented by news investigations. So how does an employer embarking on EOIT protect themselves and their employees in these hardware failure situations?  Do they require that computers be purchased from only national distribution channels?  Are these the hardware manufacturers with retail stores so the employee can always physically take their computer to some expert for help or repairs?  How does the employer know the quality of the help or repairs?  Do they even care once they have pushed the expense of this off on the employee?
  • There is a bigger change in the dynamics of the computer sales model here as well.  If the retail store outlet is a requirement, now any retailer without store fronts is at a disadvantage.  The companies that have technology centric store fronts now become lucrative partners (i.e., RadioShack, Cell Phone companies).  Then the battle moves into the classic consumer product sales challenges of shelf placement, kiosks, and the like.  If this type of change were to occur, say goodbye to the enterprise client hardware sales person…I already know that the most forward looking of these sales people think they are seeing the end of their career runway because of the previously describe scenario.

• Information Security: In the EOIT scenario, the employer’s data should be secure because it is living in a protected VM.  A VM that is most likely living only in the data center and access remotely by the employee.  Or, for select power or mobile employees, living on their laptop but encrypted and password protected and could easily be moved to a an external hard drive before taking the computer in for repairs.  But what about the employees personal information?  Should the employer even care?  Ideally, wouldn’t it be great if the employee could have the same protections and ease of migration for their personal computing environment as they have for their corporate computing environment?  This is the goal of bare metal client hypervisors, like the announced VMware CVP.  One could copy their personal VM off to the same USB hard drive and copy a VM containing a fresh install of an OS to their laptop hard drive.  Now if the IT repair technician starts snooping around the computer, there is nothing there for them to find.

These are the two hurdles that I faces personally with my EOIT experience.  There are a few more that employeers face, like:

• calculating the actual cost savings that a company could achieve through EOIT
• determining all the possible risk scenarios that a company needs to account for with EOIT and deciding which ones they need to take on and which they are willing to push on to the employee.

My solution to the two hurdles mentioned above was rather unique to my situation.  First, I have a second MBP that I could use while my production system was in the shop.  Second, I was already planning to upgrade the internal hard drive in my laptop and had the new hard drive in hand.  So I was able to clone my personal laptop’s hard drive to the new, larger, hard drive; reformat the internal hard drive; and install a new installation of the OS.  So when I handed my personal laptop over to the Apple Store, there was no personal data on it at all and I could keep working by booting my second MBP off of the cloned hard drive.

Unfortunately for the EOIT vision, this was a very unique situation and I had the technical knowledge to achieve the work around.  For the EOIT vision to become a wide spread reality, these worst case scenarios need to be easily handled by the common employee, with general computer knowledge, through a simple process that includes only a few clicks of the mouse.  I think that technically we are much closer to this reality that most people realize.

However, the biggest hurdle still exists…does Employee Owned IT drive substantial cost savings and will enterprises embrace it?

In case you didn’t notice from the change of tone in my tweets, I have been on vacation with the family for the past week.  Enjoying the scenic grandeur (and at times solitude) of the Pacific Northwest and taking a ton of photos with my new camera (1388 photos to be exact…and 5 movies…).

Today, I had the joy of the first day back on the job and dealing with the flood of emails, followups, and catching ups that is the price we pay for taking some time off and not reading emails.  Like that wasn’t enough, today VMware (my employer) had to go an announce that we were acquiring SpringSource (and add a few more items to my list to completely dissolve that post-vacation glow! ).

After a day dealing with my inbox and urgent items, I had to take some time out of the evening photo processing to read the Steve Herrod and Rod Johnson blog posts on the acquisition.  And provide a bit of a different viewpoint on this acquisition…fresh from vacation and not knowing anything more about this acquisition than what has been publicly stated by others (so safe from saying anything other than my opinion – see disclosures in the About latoga labs in the sidebar).

I’ve Been Through This Before

I’m not talking about my employer acquiring a company.  I’m talking about a closed source Company acquiring essentially an Open Source company.  Before joining VMware I used to work for IONA Technologies (sound familiar….think CORBA…Yes!  That IONA!).  I was there when IONA bought LogicBlaze.  What made this acquisition interesting (especially for me…being part of the enterprise sales team at IONA) was that we went from having 1 closed source product (ESB) to three products (all ESBs) which competed with each other.  And I was only allowed to sell one of them.

Executing a successful merger is not easy even when the companies are very well matched.  But it becomes even more difficult when they have conflicting core values (and revenue models) like closed source code development and open source code development.  In my most recent experience, the Iona/LogicBlaze merger didn’t work as well as it could have because the two sides of the house competed against each other and management turned a blind eye to it while they tried to figure out a revenue strategy post merger.  Funniest thing is that a lot of the core value propositions we were discussing with clients at IONA in that Enterprise sales team that I was part of, still hold true today.  Back then virtualization was a huge hidden value savings that I couldn’t tap into.  Not any more…

Regardless of the synergies that two companies can provide each other technology wise, there is not as much focus traditionally placed on the social aspect of merging two companies.  It is that social aspect (like the social aspect of introducing any new technology in a company) that will drive the speed and revenue value of the acquisition.  Having been through this before in a rather painful way, it is important to mention this fact.

Why VMware + SpringSource Makes Sense

The good news is that this conflicting personality issue shouldn’t be a problem with the VMware/SpringSource merger.  First, there is no competing technologies between the two vendors.  SpringSource allows VMware to access the higher level parts of IT (Applications and App Developers) while also working together to enable the Cloud Vision of vSphere.

Second, based upon what Rod Johnson indicated in his blog post, he will be heading up SpringSource as a separate unit within VMware following the VMware BU organization.  This should mean that SpringSource will get to work as they have been to support their existing community and customers in that classic open source way while working together with the other VMware BUs to add bigger picture value through the combination of SpringSource technologies with VMware’s.

Paul Maritz has indicated in the past the need to move up the value stack of IT and has used the term framework more than once during the vSphere launch.  The ability to leverage the virtualization foundation of vSphere with vApp and abstract away the applications from the operating systems with SpringSource’s various build-run-manage products not only provides a much more open application development environment to compete with Google and Amazon, but also provides an solid migration path for Enterprises to move to the Private Cloud with all their web based Java applications.  Image a world where Java App developers have the ability to integrate via the spring framework right into the virtualization based cloud where their apps will be tested/QA’d/run.  Regardless of weather…er…I mean whether…that cloud is an internal cloud or an external cloud.

I see some very clear and interesting developments on the horizon from this acquisition which I’ll try to disclose my opinion on in the future.  And, as is can be the case when you put a lot of very smart people together with solid management, I’m sure we’ll see some surprises as well.  From the looks of my LinkedIn network, I’ll also be re-united with some old colleagues as well!

Tomorrow will be an interesting day of conversations with my global clients to hear their take on things!

© Greg A. Lato - All Rights Reserved

Over the past few weeks I have been involved in long term planning discussion with the senior IT management from multiple clients.  While I can’t go into details  of these meetings, a few common general trends emerged in these long term virtualization strategies.

First, all of them were roughly at the benchmark of having 30% of their compute workloads virtualized and looking at how to get well beyond that (see my prior post on Breaking the 30% Barrier).  Part of the growth strategy included defining a specific set of applications that are set aside from virtualizing in the next wave, typically somewhere between 10%-30% of the overall computer workloads.   General reasons for this are:

• Organizing things into the next logical set of workloads primed for easy virtualization
• Setting aside the workloads where resistance was being felt toward virtualization to give the business users more time to warm up to virtualization
• Workloads that are “too big” to virtualize (typically because of CPU requirements, storage requirements, or IO requirements; some of these are just misnomers with the current VM scalability limits of vSphere 4)
• workloads where the ISV specifically don’t support the software running in a VM (this is becoming less and less as more ISVs actively embrace virtualization or Enterprise customers flatly tell their ISVs “we’re running it in a VM, get on board”.)

Second, they are all planning on building a specific internal cloud within part of their infrastructure.   This alone isn’t that surprising.  There are specific use cases where a self-service internal cloud solves a lot of problems for the business users, most glaring being dev/test scenarios where lots of dynamic short used workloads are involved and web hosting where the business units (typically marketing) need to be able to react faster to market opportunities and popularity spikes of new products and viral marketing activity.

What is surprising is that when IT started to talk about the ideal end state view of their “non cloud” virtualized environment…it was essentially a cloud.  As Jian Zhen described recently in The Thousand Faces of Cloud Computing Part 4: Architecture Characteristics there are a set of architectural characteristics that describe cloud computing:

• Infrastructure Abstraction
• Resource Pooling
• Ubiquitous Access
• On-Demand Self-Service
• Elasticity

(Note: Jian Zhen changed his list of characteristics in the above post from his initial The Thousand Faces of Cloud Computing post.

The enterprise long term vision for their virtualized computing environment include all of these characteristics with exception of On-Demand Self-Service and in some ways Ubiquitous Access.  On-Demand Self-Service is typically not in their plans because the Enterprises don’t have a key part of this, an internal finance model that allow for charge back of resources used — though most seem to be thinking about that. On-Demand isn’t as needed in this part of the enterprise environment as the workloads are the known sized, planned, enterprise applications that are the classic “Enterprise IT”.   Ubiquitous Access is also something that isn’t being thought of by IT for this part of their environment primarily because access to these workloads is already pre-defined by the workloads themselves: web servers are accessed by web browsers, email is from an email client (whether static or mobile), etc.

And yet, all the other things that Enterprise IT strategist are thinking about fall squarely in the realm of “cloud computing”.  Get the business users to think in terms of capacity and SLAs and abstract all other aspects of the infrastructure from them.  And then drive up the utilization on that infrastructure to maximize their ROI.  Some are still only comfortable driving per physical server utilization up to 50%-60% range while others are damning the torpedoes and want to get as close to 100% as possible.  On an overall basis across the entire infrastructure, you can never reach 100% utilization because not all work loads are that consistent, this is where resource pooling and elasticity come into play.

Thought I do have to argue that Resource Pooling is not the best term to use for what is meant for this characteristic.  Creating and managing pools of resources is included in this specific characteristic, but I think a more accurate term to describe this is as Resource SLAs.  The end users of the environment are buying  a specific amount of resources as a “guaranteed maximums” or as a an “on average maximum”.  The architecture of the cloud needs to ensure that spikes in resource usage by one user are serviced up to their agreed upon limit, but also allow IT to “over subscribe” the environment during the non-spike times.  Then mixing in guaranteed with on average work loads allow the performance spike of guaranteed work loads to be serviced at the cost of the on average work loads should no extra capacity be available.

It becomes a game of how tight of an IT airship do you want to run…

This afternoon I had a discussion with a client on strategies to increase their level of virtualization within production IT.  It appears that the magic threshold seems to be 30% virtualization.  Companies seem to easily achieve close to 30% virtualization by taking a basic two prong approach:

1. Take a Virtualization First policy for all new projects.
2. Convert all low hanging fruit from physical servers to VMs

Within a few years, an organization naturally will achieve virtualization levels approaching 30% based upon a reasonable growth rate.  Eventually the growth rate slows and the challenge then becomes breaking that 30% barrier.

To further increase virtualization within Enterprise IT at a similar growth rate requires an active virtualization plan that addresses:

• Application engineering to stack rank the existing applications and proactively educate application groups to lead them to virtualize with a carrot instead of driving them to virtualize with a stick
• Social engineering within the business units to accept VMs instead of physical servers and adapt their expectations into SLAs
• Organizational engineering within IT to create a Virtualization Center of Excellence that transcends traditional IT silos
• Financial engineering within IT to determine how reclaimed or early retired systems will be accounted for (this especially becomes an challenge when the business units bought the physical servers and their conversion to VMs happens before the end of life of those physical servers.)

This is journey I’m currently undergoing with a few of my clients.  I’ll try to share my expereinces from this journey here in the future.

With loads of rhetorical flying around the internet on cloud computing these days it’s refreshing when clients start showing the “that just makes sense” sign. A few days back I was visiting a client discussing desktop virtualization, this particular client was a member of the desktop team at his company. Desktop virtualization discussions always migrate into the sacred territory of the data center. While discussing the data center components of desktop virtualization, this desktop architect had his “that just makes sense” moment.

While talking about the ESX hosts and the server VMs compared to the desktop VMs, the realization occured that it doesn’t matter what machine you run the VMs on:

“…in theory desktop VMs and server VMs could run on the same physical server.  All those server resources are just there to run a work load, regardless of what the workload is…”

This is where I leaned back in my chair, smiled and said “That’s cloud computing”.

What was glorious about this moment is that here was a desktop architect realizing the power of an internal cloud back in the data center.  Seeing a sign like this tells me that my next 6 months is going to be very busy indeed.

Thanks to a tweet today from cloudmeme, I found the InternetNews.com article VMware CTO : Cloud or software mainframe? where VMWare’s CTO, Steve Harrod, is quoted:

“Some call it a software mainframe others call it cloud, it depends on when you were born,”

I have heard a number of VMware’s executives use the term “software mainframe” when describing the new VMware Cloud OS, vSphere.  And as Steve indicated in his quote, it’s all about finding a term that resonates with the generation of your audience.

Today I joined in a virtualization discussion between the IT management teams of two Fortune 500 companies.  One of the more timely items that was discussed (with regards to the above article) was the implementing of an internal cloud.  One of the executives described it as a “change-request-less data center” where the business client is abstracted from the technology and given a transparent view of their own utilization within the data center.  Then, an executive from the other company nodded and said “getting back to a mainframe, a software mainframe”.

They were discussing their interpretations of what it meant for their business to have an internal cloud within their data center infrastructure.  And the reality is that it is starting to look more like an easily expandable, multi-vendor, distributed/modular mainframe enabled by software.

I found it interesting that the key aspect that defined an internal or enterprise cloud for these executives was the fact that the transparency of utilization was there (just like for an internet cloud and just like on the mainframe), but that the chargeback for the cost of that utilization may not be there.  Most enterprises don’t have the internal financial systems set up to do chargeback of computing resources.  And for an enterprise to change their internal  financial system is a non-trivial task.

However, levering virtualization technology to build an internal cloud that has the ability to track and report on utilization (even if the cost is null) puts the enterprise into a very powerful position:

• Quicker servicing of their business customers needs
• a simplified infrastructure which reduces operational expenses via automation and standardized IT offerings
• the ability to run the existing computing jobs of the business with little or no modifications
• a self service model which helps reduce operational costs even more
• transparency to the business clients to help them understand how much of the IT infrastructure they are using and socially drive them to use it more consciously
• an environment in which the technology can be managed at any time because it is abstracted from the business users
• and the ability to change their internal financial system in the future without major upgrades to their data center or infrastrcuture.

The software mainframe.  The enterprise cloud.

One of my clients made an interesting comment this week about a new way they are thinking of measuring their data centers.  Anyone dealing with virtualization knows that measuring a data center on square feet or number of physical servers alone is rather meaningless.  We mostly talk about ratios:  VMs per Socket (CPU) or VMs per Core.  But as green initiatives push on I had one client mention the new metric of VMs per Kilowatt hour.

This is interesting because it not only takes into consideration the efficiency of your virtualization solution, but also the power efficiency of your servers, storage, and network.  What is the efficiency at which one can run a data center?  When you get into a cloud computing environment where users pay for what they use, don’t the providers also want to only be paying for what is required?  If companies are now placing notes in their annual reports on their corporate carbon foot print, shouldn’t they also be thinking about defining, measuring and tracking their data center carbon foot print?

This takes one down an interesting thought process that I think I’ve only scratched the surface of.

(Thanks goes out ot Mike P. for pointing me to the above Dilbert strip!)

After a hectic past two weeks of traveling to the east coast, catching some sort of bug and recovering, and attending most of the first World Wide Technical Summit for VMware’s Field Organization, I find a long back log of both emails and blog posts.  While I prepare some of the more writing intensive posts, here is a quick link to a recently published vShpere whitepaper:  What’s New in VMware vSphere 4: Performance Enhancements (pdf download).  It’s a great summary of all the performance enhancements that VMware’s Performance Team has measured in vSphere 4.

I found the following items of specific interest:

• Efficiency improvements from hardware-assisted memory virtualization
  • Apache Compile was almost 55% more efficient – of special interest to my client who is looking at virtualizing part of their Rational software development environment, specifically their build servers.
  • Citrix XenApp (aka, presentation server) was 30% more efficient – of interest to my client who is wrapping up the virtualization of their XenApp environment to an ESX Cluster.  with vShpere 4 they may be able to reduce their 40 or so ESX hosts due to greater density of XenApp VMs possible with vSphere 4.
• VMotion performance enhancements show huge reduction in time  (almost 1/5th the time) to vmotion an active VM.  Every client of mine will love this as they all depend on VMotion to administer their virtual machines.
• Fibre Channel VM Boot performance enhancements showing massive reduction in time (again, almost 1/5th the time) to boot 512 VMs from a fibre channel SAN.  My client who is building a virtualized training lab environment and needs to boot 800 VMs in preparation for some training classes will really appreciate this.

With all the performance enhnacmenets in vSphere 4, there really does appear to be something for everyone!

Monday I was too busy with helping customers optimize their current data centers with virtualization to write about the (finally) announced Cisco Unified Computing System.  And I’m glad that I didn’t have the time, because now I can expand my original thoughts based on the rumors and reactions that IBM is in talks to buy Sun.  I’m not surprised that in the same week we see the server vendor marketplace expand we also see possible signs of it’s contraction; honestly it is about time someone buys Sun, it it isn’t done soon their future could parallel SGIs and they just fade away from existence.

First, Cisco

I have known about Cisco’s California Project Servers, now UCS, for a number of months now thanks to my role at VMware.  Since the moment that I first heard about them and later when I learned a bit more about the architecture, I could see how they could help change the data center as well as the hard struggle Cisco would have to do it.  One of the biggest use cases I see for UCS is with virtualized desktops.  With all the memory these systems will have in them, uses should be able to achieve higher density numbers for virtual desktops per core than with other servers.  Desktops typically are idle most of the time, the limiting factor on gaining higher consolidation density is memory, especially when you consider memory requirements for desktops will only increase over time possible eroding virtual desktop density numbers.

UCS’s promise of a centralized managed and clustered high density computing environment will enable data centers to consolidate physical space in their data center even further than could be accomplished with just virtualization.   Making this a reality will still require some changes in how data centers are run.  Primarily, not being afraid of running a server at higher than 30% or 50% utilization.  While you can’t run them all at 100% utilization as there is no place to failover, I still see many people running virtualized environments in much too conservative a fashion.  Let’s get server frugal, pinch that server penny to get all you can out it.

Cisco’s biggest challenge will be convincing customers to adopt these servers in large scale.  I don’t know if pricing has been disclosed yet, but considering that Cisco’s classic play book is to operate in key hardware markets where high margins can be maintained, I expect the cost per physical device to be higher than the competition.  Which might cause sticker shock for those who aren’t adjusting their thinking to cost per virtual machine from cost per physical server.  In addition, most of the big customers that Cisco will need to go after already have existing server vendor relationship in place.  And that server vendor relationship is with a vendor (i.e., the top three server vendors of IBM, HP, and Dell – see ZDnet’s Larry Dignan’s post) that sells more than just servers to a company.  Most of the large enterprises have pretty straightforward formulas for dealing with their strategic vendors, Cisco gets X-ish% of budget, HP gets Y-ish% of budget, and IBM gets Z-ish% of budget.  If a customers is going to increase Cisco’s percentage, where is it going to come from?  Another vendor?  At what risk to the rest of the operation?  Decisions like this are highly political in nature.  It will be interesting to see who decides to upset their politics.

Second, Sun

I have been wondering for the past year or more “who will end up buying Sun?”  Years ago I heard stories from high level Sun sales execs about how Sun’s upper management didn’t get that it’s not about the servers but about solutions.  Last year at Startup Camp in SF,  Johnathan Schwartz gave the kick off address.  After talking for 15 minutes about how people don’t know what Sun does, I was expecting him to wrap up his speech with a clear statement and direction for the company.  Nope, he left it hanging out there…as if he was saying “no one really understands what Sun’s goal in life is…including me.”

So, the real question of the day is “who is considering buying Sun?”  Many rumors that the IBM leak was just to drive up the price for the real bidder.  Some think it could be Dell, which would be a good way for dell to capture more market share but still keep it in the #3 spot.  Some think it should be Cisco, which would help Cisco catapult into 4th spot in the server market but hard to do considering all the money they just spent on the UCS development and launch (though some have been hypothesizing about the large amount of money Cisco borrowed a few months back, last time they did that was right before they bought WebEx…).  I find it interesting to think about Apple buying Sun, how much longer can Apple continue to grow without putting both feet in the business pool.  Apple wouldn’t want to do that on the desktop side since they would then have to start exposing future direction to business customers to allow them to plan for future changes (which ruins their big launch surprises) but doing this on the server side allows them to keep the Apple shock factor…though I don’t see the long term strategy there.

Either way, I think it will be inevitable for someone to buy Sun.  Investors want their money back.

Third, Data Centers

It is inevitable that partially alone, but definitively in combination these two announcements will impact the data center of the future.  The data center of future running on top of a virtualized data center operating system has to built out of standardized and common hardware building blocks. This means less hardware vendors and more innovation in the automation and services front.  Needless to say, the data center strategy discussion I will be having in the near future with one of my customers will be very interesting.  Partially because of the vendors that will be in the room and partially because of how the customer will be reacting to each of them based on these announcements.

Even with all the economic woes and recession depression, at least the shock waves from these two announcements will keep the server technology market interesting for the rest of the year.   I can’t wait to see how this all shakes out over the next few weeks…

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

If you haven’t seen them, here is a short list of interesting articles I have read on the Cisco announcement:

• Cisco seeks for data center what Apple created with iPhone — a new market that stops the madness
• The good and bad of Cisco’s UCS servers
• Scoble’s video interview on UCS architecture

Favorite quote from the Cisco buzz:  “Cisco and Intel are joined at the chip.”

And a second set of interesting articles about the Sun purchase announcment:

• IBM’s potential purchase of Sun: Here’s why it makes sense
• IBM buying Sun Microsystems makes no sense, it’s a red herring
• Why Cisco, Not IBM, Should Buy Sun
  

Today was day 2 of major announcements in technology, Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Software Preview (video of full announcement should be up on that link soon).  For me, the past two days have been quite busy on multiple fronts with all the announcements being just one of them.  When days like this occur I end up finding interesting sites and leaving browser tabs open until my computer starts to scream “no more!”.  So I’m hitting things in reverse and posting some thoughts on the Apple announcements before I post my thoughts on yesterday’s Cisco announcement (then I can close some of my browser tabs).

First, if you don’t want to sit through the video of the Apple Preview, check out the archive of live comments from engadget (scroll to the bottom on work up) or Don MacAksill’s live twittering.

Second, I have to classify myself as a business-geek users of my iPhone and my comments will flow from this classification.  I use it primarily for business items like monitoring exchange email, moving between meetings in my exchange calendar, and doing more calls that I care to admit in a day.  But I love it for the fact that I can all my geek stuff on it as well because it is an application platform (much like my old Palm Treo was).  Using applications like a Twitter client, WordPress client,  Webex client, Netflix client, and others social networking clients allow me to interact will all the web services I want or need.  And then all the photo applications to allow me to extend my photography addiction to the phone.  All that being said, it’s the business side of stuff that really drives my use (not to mention pays the bills for the iPhone).

So, here is a list of the major pains that I was hoping would be fixed in 3.0:

• The ability to click on a phone number in emails and outlook calendar invites to dial a number!  Since copy/paste has never been available, I always expected at least this feature, especially considering my blackberry could do this…
• Landscape mode in email and all apps I need to type in.  I have fat fingers, the portrait mode keys on the iPhone are small.  And the spell correction can be annoying with the combination of both.  (Fixed)
• Fix the lag with larger Contact databases.  There are times when opening or working with my contacts just hangs.  When 2.0 was released I heard that it was because the system wasn’t designed for large contacts lists.  I work in sales, I have thousands of contacts in my phone and I never know which ones I may need.
• Fix the contact search feature.  This scrolling to find someone is such a waste of time.  The search feature works much better because after typing 3 characters I usually see the person I’m looking for (see previous bullet item).  But the search area scrolls off the screen.  Allow me to lock it to the screen so it is my default view.  My Treo excelled at this.
• Tethering:  there are still times when I need to have my laptop connected to the internet to accomplish something while I’m out and mobile (though less frequently now that the WebEx client is available), give me this safety net.

So, from what I can tell…25% of what I want is in 3.0.

Here are the other items I think are important from this release:

• Copy/Paste.  I don’t buy the excuse of “security was an issue” as to why it took so long to have this.  This has always been a black eye on the iPhone.  BTW:  I still want clickable phone numbers in calendar invites…and I want it to auto dial the passcode for conference lines (since I’m asking).
• Landscape mode (as mentioned above)
• universal search.  But what would be nice is if you could build search filters that could be linked to a button on the spotlight home screen.  Maybe I want to search just contacts and calendars when I type something in to cut the huge list of results.  Would be nice if I could just have a customized filter button below my search window..type the text and then my custom filter button to see my results.
• Voice Memos:  this is nice, but will need to see how this is different from other voice recording apps currently available (Jott, Evernote).  Now this is where Apple needs to be careful not ot add built in apps that will alienate their app developers.

I should be interesting to see how app developers use the new APIs and features..I can already see some interesting things coming with the peer to peer capability.  Can’t wait for the free upgrade.

Today I had yet another of my customers indicate that they are trying to figure out how to get rid of the corporate owned laptop.  Last fall I had a similar discussion with a customer about employee owned laptops.  At that time it was a conversation with an IT knowledge worker who would have rather been given the choice of which laptop he could use versus be forced upon a single brand.  This time it was from an IT executive who would rather reduce his corporate desktop support costs by getting ride of the physical computers all together.

By providing a yearly or bi-yearly stipend and a set of minimum system requirements, let the employee buy the laptop of their choice.  The company provides the business desktop as a virtual desktop that runs back in the data center and the employee accesses it from their own computer.  Lower or no hardware support costs, data is secure in the corporate data center, easier centralized backups, and longer refresh cycles as the virtual desktop’s computing power can be dynamically expanded when needed and the servers can run for 4-5 years versus the company paying the expense of the refreshing laptop hardware every 2-3 years.

I think this company could get there eventually.  Though it won’t be for all laptops in the organization, but a larger enough number of them to make the savings turn into real dollars.

I had an interesting discussion today with an engineering manager at one of my customers.  We were discussing the capabilities of ESX and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS).  During the discussion I needed to explain how virtualization helps to build clouds, but not grids.  At least not typically.  And not Supercomputers.  At least not yet.

Grid Computing generally refers to breaking up a large compute intensive work load into smaller blocks, then scheduling those blocks to be run across a set of smaller computer systems (typically small enough so that the work load will utilize nearly all, if not all, the computing capacity of the computer system).  Widely known examples of this are the SETI@Home project or the Search for Cancer projects that ran as screen savers on your PC when you were not using it.  Typically in a high performance grid environment you don’t want all the overhead of a traditional operation system, so each system runs a special operating system that just performs the compute job on the block of work and then returns the answer to centralized scheduler before getting the next block of work.

Cloud Computing on the other hand is about turning your compute capacity into an on demand utility.  Self-service infrastructure that allows any compute job containing inside of, just about, any container (Operating System).  The computer systems of a cloud envrionment can be small or big, lately the trend has been toward big.  Users can request access, load and run their compute jobs and be billed just for what they use.  Need more, add more and pay more.  Need less, remove capacity and pay less.   Some Cloud Systems are more restrictive like grids in that their infrastructure is designed for running certain types of applications (LAMP stacks).  Others are less restrictive and let you run any application.

Virtualization is the foundation of Cloud Computing.  Hypervisors like ESX provide the infrastructure and manamgent tools layer on top of that to add the self-service, automation, and control.  Virtualization can also be the infrastructure on which Grid Computing can run.  The reasons you would do this is for the flexability of managing the underlying hardware or if the underlying hardware has more compute capacity than the Grid can use for each compute job.  While this is usually technically, I haven’t seen it very often.

Once you connect a large storage array, fast and large network pipes (10GigE is getting more popular for this, and faster unified fabrics is not far away), and large computing capacty (cpu and memory) you get something that looks awfully similar to a supercomputer. But one thing is always the case for either Grid Computing and Cloud Computing.  The compute workload (in whole or the grid block) is always running on just one physical computer within the environment.

If you have 3 VMs running on an ESX host and that host only has one CPU/core and 1 Gig of RAM capacity left and the next VM to run needs 2 cores or 2 Gigs of RAM, that square peg won’t fit into the round hole that is available.  With VMware’s DRS, the system is smart enough to either place the square peg into a square hole of the right size, or shuffle around the VMs to turn the round hold into the right sized square hole.  But virtualization can’t split that computing workload up and run it across the compute capacity of two physical systems. Or take the CPU from two physical machines or RAM from two physical machiens and give them both to the same VM.

That is the line in the sand that separates Cloud Computing and Grid Computing from Supercomputing.  At least for today.  I wonder how much longer that line will exist?  In the near future you will see virtualization provide more capabilities that used to be the realm of specialized systems.  It won’t be that much longer until you see if step across that supercomputer line.

One of the great things about working directly with customers is learning about all the wonderful things that they are doing within their enterprises.  A recent example that impressed me from a cost savings and “wow, hadn’t thought of that” perspective is a customer of mine that is using virtaulization to archive computer systems to meet their legal requirements.

We all know the old jokes about the armies of lawyers that large companies have.  Just like most jokes, there is always some truth behind that.  And one of the things that these laywers usually need to deal with is how to archive data to meet the companies legal needs.  Rather than just backing up the data, they have been saving and archiving the entire computer on which the data lives.  Literally stacking boxes of desktops and servers into secure rooms in case the data on them in needed in the future.

Can you imagine the expense of that?  Or even the operational nightmare when a lawyer needs to retrieve data from one of them…bring in the fork lift!

What one of my customers is exploring is using virtualization to solve this problem.  With the help of VMware vCenter Converter they can P2V all the physical machines that Legal needs to archive in virtual machines and then just store them on a secure data store.  With a small ESX cluster, they verify that each conversion was successful by powering on the VM and then archive it.  If a lawyer needs access to a data, it a simple matter of booting up the VM on the small cluster and pointing them to the machine over the network.

All of this at a much lower total cost than moving and storing physical machines.  Capture the data and reuse the resource.

Sometimes you run across a technology that just makes you start salivating, something that is either so cool or so useful you want it immediately.  Thanks to KentLangle I recently came across a company that has been working on wireless power and I had that moment.   Imagine using your laptop anywhere in your house or office and, with no wires, and always having a full battery.  That’s what wireless power promises.

Powercast’s Lifetime Power is a solution that uses special batteries and an RF receiver module to receive power wirelessly from a RF transmitter module.  Image a RF transmitter built into each of your electrical outlets and all of your portable electronics using the special batteries with the RF receiver modules built into them.   You would never have to plug in your devices again!  Truely lifetime power for your devices…how sweet would that be!  It would definitely stop the complaining about Apple’s new sealed internal batteries.

Assuming there is no health concerns from this technique, and that they can increase the wattage that can be transmitted to provide the power needs of most mobile devices today, this is truly a revolutionary technology.   Now, if Powercast can only get some more funding to get the technology off the ground; based upon their website, it looks like that is what is currently holding them back.

Today it dawned on me how some technology can have the unforeseen consequence of allowing us to get a view inside a person’s head.

While driving down the street today my radio station was overwhelmed by the broadcast of a nearby car’s iPod FM broadcast device. Curiosity took hold; I looked around and only saw one car close enough to be the source. I sped ahead at the next light to test my theory.  Yup, as I pulled away from the car, the car’s broadcast ended and my radio station came back in; they had to be the source.

When I pulled up to the next stop light I glanced over to see the driver; I was curious to see if my mental picture of the person who the music belong to was accurate.  Not even close.  Looking at the driver, I just couldn’t  quiet imagine them listening to the music I had heard.  And yet, the music had to be coming from her vehicle.

Sometimes you get a chance to see beyond the surface of a stranger. Thanks to the wonder of technology this can happen when you least expect it.

In general, I don’t like to post a link to someone’s blog post without providing something of additional value to the original post. Then there are those rare occasions where you just want to share something (thank goodness Twitter & FriendFeed are perfect for taking up the slack there!).

This is one of those in between cases.

All I have to add is that this is one of the technology industry’s dirtiest little secrets, not just Programming’s Dirtiest Little Secret.  It is also a huge pet peeve.  How can you work in an industry and not invest the time to learn the most basic skill of that industry?  Follow that link for a well written and humorous take on the subject.

(For the record, in the past I have freaked poeple out becuase I would do business interviews with various people from IT organizations and take all my notes touch-typing…while look at them, not at the keyboard or screen.  Maybe now I know why some of they really tended to squirm during those interviews…it wasn’t the questions…it was the feelings of inadequacy. 

I also freak my wife out when she watches or hears me type…  )

A few weeks ago I was casually talking with one of my enterprise clients about VDI. This client has a few VDI enabled desktops in their enterprise primarily for users who demand high powered systems for computationally intense work (it was cheaper for the company to invest in a small VDI infrastructure with powerful servers for these users than buying true high end desktops…especially since this customer makes the powerful servers themselves).  My client mentioned how maybe he’ll just buy a MacBook Pro himself (a laptop he hasn’t been able to convince his employer to buy for him) and run his desktop as another VDI instance.

This is where I shot the conversation off on a tangent to talk about a friend of mine who was interviewing at a startup that expected him to buy his own laptop.  The surprising thing about the startup was that they just expected him to already own a laptop that he would be willing to use for work purposes.  I commented on how the future may be allowing employees to use what ever laptop they want for the work computer and the employer will just provide everyone a VDI desktop for use as their “corporate desktop”.  This definitely eases the administration, security, and hardware refresh burden for the company.  One would just expect some sort of stipend for the employee to go toward a personal laptop computer.  (I’m purposely leaving the hardware support issue out of the conversation, but with Apple Stores proliferating this could be the outsourced hardware support for my MacBook craving client.)

So I was surprise this week when I received my latest copy of CIO magazine and found an article asking Is It Time For Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs? Some analysts are saying that this is the next logical step in consumerization of IT, especially when you see how many non-approved smart phones, or laptops are already finding their way into corporate workplace (I’ve done this myself with my previous employeer…but that’s another story). Why fight the trend?  With VDI, IT Executives can make their end users happy by letting them use whatever hardware they like, install any applications they want on the hardware (they own it, and there is only one application on the hardware that IT cares about…the VDI client).  They can make their finance people happy by reducing the endless cycle of desktop hardware refreshes by using VDI to run the desktops on server hardware and use VDI to scale user’s CPU and Memory “power” as needed by the users business workload.  They can also keep the security people happy by providing a locked down environment that lives in the data center.

I can see this being a total desktop solution that more and more companies will start implementing in the near future.

Let’s just hope that the hardware stipends are reasonable…

Last night I attended CloudCamp Silicon Valley. Having recently attended VMworld, Orcale OpenWorld, and CloudCamp, I have to say that I still think there is great value in the Unconference Format.  While VMworld was one of the most productive trade shows that I have ever been at, one can only hope that it can maintain that productivity as it grows.  Oracle OpenWorld has grown into the typical trade show venue where attendees are locked in sessions most of the time and vendors sit around their booths checking email.  While the unconferences are held for the benefit of the attendees and the attendees decide what gets discussed and vote with the feet (walk to the discussions you like and feel free to leave if you don’t find it valuable).  I was a bit concerned about the event being held at Suns EBC, but it worked well overall, nice facilities for the group and infrastructure for the sponsors to show their stuff before the event began (thought there were a few predatory vendors in the group who don’t understand the the point of an unconference…I’ll admit it felt good to shoot a few of them down; I only hope they learned their lesson)

It was great running into not only old colleagues and industry contacts, but an alumni of my university as well.  Fun stuff reminiscing about old times back at UWEC CS department and the hindsight value of that program.

One of the sessions I attended was lead by Mike Pittaro from SnapLogic (a company I did some consulting work for earlier this year).  His discussion was well attended by over 15 poeple to discuss Connecting Clouds.  Essentially talking about the integration needs of cloud computing, it’s similarity to SOA, and the cyclical nature of integration along with computer trends in general.  I found how personal corporate connections came up during the discussion: my ex-collegue from IONA Steve Vinoski was referenced with his REST vs SOAP discussions; the demise of SOA vendors referencing IONA’s recent absorption into Progress Software; and the proprietary versus open standards discussion referencing VMware’s ESX hyperadvisor.  We also discussed open standards for connecting clouds versus proprietary connections between clouds, will proprietary connections emerge as the cloud coellesces from it’s post big bang state into gallexies and solar systems?  This discussion was very timely considering GNU Founder Richard Stallman’s recent comments on cloud computing.

Even more interesting the the last session I joined which was lead by James Urquhart and discussed the current legal situation around cloud computing.  Unfortunately, this was a very thinly attended discussion based on the importance of the discussion to anyone doing anything in cloud related.  We discussed topics ranging from the Stored Communications Act, legal ramifications of non-US customers to US cloud companies based upon the physical location of their cloud service, and even the concept that cloud computing and virtualization enable of Follow the Law computing (similar to Follow the Sun or Follow the Moon computing, moving your computing to physical locations that are legally favorable to the work that you are doing). There are definitely some legal aspects of Cloud Computing that all cloud companies and cloud users need to realize and get changed or risk Cloud Computing progress disappear into the ether. Very interesting night of discussions…

One of the most interesting aspects I took away from the night is the split between the Web 2.0 Cloud and the Enerterprise Cloud.  The Web 2.0 Cloud is the all the classic cloud services that you think of when you say Cloud Computing:  Gmail, SalesForce.com, Joyent, Amazon Services, etc.   The Enterprise Cloud is the continual migration of internet technologies into the internal enterprise data center along with the evoloution of virtualization in the enterprise and the move of large enterprise IT organizations into true internal service provider role.  VMware’s vCloud initiative and technology vision will enable an Enterprise Cloud to connet with the Web 2.0 Cloud and move computing from inside the enterprise out or oustide the enterprise in. But all the discussions were based around using or building around the Web 2.0 Cloud or a few vendors who were talking about the cloud computing technologies for the enterprise.  Companies and individuals need to be clear on which of the two sides of the cloud they live on.  Nothing is worse than talking on a topic for 15 minutes only to realize that each party is living on the oposite sides of the cloud.  I assuem this disparity is part of the reason that VMware didn’t official sponsor or get involved in CloudCamp; which is a bit surprising considering the new recent announcements and focus.