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.

This is not a new year predictions list.  Given the fact that it’s over two weeks into the new year, this is not a new year anything list.  However, after spending the better part of the year so far reviewing the business plans for my clients and working on 2010 strategies I thought it would be valuable to share the common trends I’m seeing as a snapshot of what large enterprises are doing with Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

Keep in mind that my clients cover a number of different business sectors, technology use cases, as well as technology adoption profiles.  Across all the business units and groups that I work with, nearly the full range of technology adoption categories are represented:  from early adopters to late majority.

Painting with a broad brush, here are the general trends that I’m seeing for the year ahead.  I’m interested in hearing from my readers on what they are seeing.  Please leave a comment and let me know!

Do More With Less…again

While economists and pundits alike claim the recession is over, I’m seeing the general attitude of doing more with less continue within Enterprises.  Part of this can be brought back to some groups leveraging the recession to invest in the future and work on game changing projects.  Some of this tends to be more cost cutting constraints where the cutting could be debated as being well past the muscle.  I’m even seeing a few groups adding in new key objectives for the year on top of the the ones they had previously agreed to, thus adding more work on the current staff levels.

IT As a Service

This has been one of the most talked about strategic initiatives for IT for over a decade now.  While the idea has had numerous names over the years, I’m seeing consistently more and more organizations moving their IT thinking to be more service based.  Rather than planning on a project by project basis, it’s about leveraging and maximizing the utilization of your infrastructure across all projects.  The logical out spinning of this is measuring and monitoring your capacity to stay ahead of demand.  IT organizations are either actively moving toward a services based approach or adapting their plans to start moving this way.  The biggest laggard in this area would be the financial systems to charge back IT services to the business units, but most IT organizations is not letting that hold them back — they just plan on adding that charge in when the financial systems catch up.   The side affect of this is the IT staff, those with an eye to the future are adapting their skill sets, those who aren’t will be wondering what happened when their jobs go away.

Private Clouds

While IT as a Service is not the same as Cloud Computing, there are many similarities.  Most of my clients are actively working on building Private Cloud environments where the end users are not just sharing all infrastructure as a service but are completely abstracted from the IT organization managing the infrastructure.  Users buy their VMs from a service catalog, get their VMs configured and deployed automatically and then get a bill with usage details every month.  When they don’t need their VM anymore, they click the delete button and watch their bill go down.  IT is moving to just configuring infrastructure and abstraction management tools and monitoring usage and planning for expansion.  The furthest along with this have gotten their with a small number of existing IT architects and engineers and will have an environment that can grow quickly with no additional head count needs.

Desktop Virtualization Foundations

Make no doubt about it; 2010 is the year that the foundation for desktop virtualization will be firmly cemented into IT.  The risk mitigation (keeping desktop data in the data center), time savings (quick deployment and updating times) and flexibility (re-use of physical office space for shift workers with each having their own desktop) of virtual desktops are understood and now being leveraged in pilot applications.  Once this genie is out of the bottle, desktop users will be wanting more.

The side affects of this include the eventual destruction of old dekstop oriented service vendors and the rise of new virtual desktop solution providers.  I don’t think the enterprise is ready for desktops in the cloud run by a 3rd party, but a few of my clients have been asking about putting desktops in their private cloud.

Cracks in the Towers

Another side effect of desktop virtualization is clear cracks forming in the various IT towers.  The knee jerk reaction I saw last year to desktop virtualization was the data center folks say “I’m not managing dekstops!”.  While moving desktops into the data center doesn’t shuffle the cards of responsibility for the different towers (the desktop team will still be supporting the desktops), it does force these towers to work together more than they have before.  Server teams talking to desktop teams.  Desktop teams talking to storage teams. All these teams talking to the networking teams.  The philosophies of “this is our domain and these are the rules you have to follow” are being softened by the stones being thrown at it from virtualization. Desktops in the data center requires everyone to think outside their normal boxes and understand the end users’ needs are changing.

Data Center Virtualization: Narrower and Deeper

As data center virtualization has continued on it’s march, it has resulted in the physical infrastructure options within the data center to narrow.  By standardizing on a smaller number of physical options within the data center, virtualize becomes less complex and automation becomes easier.  At the same time, the use cases for virtualization continue to get deeper.  Virtualization first policies are forcing all business units to run everything in a VM.

A side effect of these aspects of virtualization’s success is that CIOs are now looking at other areas of expense and driving for consolidation there as well: software, services, even real estate.

Migration to ESXi

VMware has been stating for a number of years now that ESXi (a thin hypervisor with API only access for automated management and a much smaller security attack surface) is the wave of the future. IT organizations have finally realized that VMware wasn’t kidding.  With only two weeks into the new year, I have seen more requests to discuss ESXi that I did all last year.  And with the automation and stateless aspects of ESXi that were talked about at VMworld 2009, I expect this area of activity to only pick up.

After finishing up a busy end of 2009, it’s time to catch up on some over due blog posts.

Recently, one of my clients discovered that SRM 4.0 has an issue editing the /etc/hosts file during DR failover of Linux VMs.  The result of the issue was the /etc/host file not being edited with the updated localhost entry as part of the failover process.

Good news is that the issue has been correct and should be rolled into the next point release of SRM.  If you are using SRM for Linux VM DR, keep watch for this update.

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.

Yesterday was a busy day for releases at VMware:

vSphere 4.0 Update 1 Released

Key enhancements:

• VMware View 4.0 support (hint, hint…)
• Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support
• Enhanced Clustering Support for Microsoft Windows
• Enhanced VMware Paravirtualized SCSI Support
• Improved vNetwork Distributed Switch Performance
• Increase in vCPU per Core Limit
• Enablement of Intel Xeon Processor 3400 Series
• HA Cluster Configuration Maximum
• IBM DB2 Database Support for vCenter Server
• Pre-Upgrade Checker Tool

For more details see the ESX release notes and vCenter release notes. Update 1 is currently available for download.

vCenter Server Heartbeat 5.5 Update 2 Released

Surprisingly many people are still not familar with vCenter Server Heartbeat, this add-on availability solution for VMware vCenter Server provides 360 degree protection for vCenter Server against a wide range of failure scenarios, including hardware failure, OS failure, network failure and application service failure resulting from natural occurrence or human errors. In addition to protecting vCenter Server, it also protects VMware vCenter Update Manager, VMware vCenter Converter, VMware vCenter Orchestrator, VMware vCenter Guided Consolidation, vCenter Server Database and VMware License Server.  And since it is licensed per vCenter that you want to protect, this protection is extremely cost effective.

Key enhancements:

• Support for the following new vCenter Server platforms:
  • VMware vCenter Server 4.0 Update 1
  • VMware vCenter Server 2.5 Update 5
• Support for the following new OS platforms relative to vCenter Server:
  • Windows Server 2008 SP1 (32-bit and 64-bit)
  • Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32-bit and 64-bit)
  • Windows Server 2003 SP2 (64-bit)
• Availability protection for VMware vCenter Management Webservices
• Single-installer (self-extracting) executable for VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat across 32-bit and 64-bit OS platforms
• Built-in 60-day evaluation mode (triggered from the date of installation)
• Compatibility with vSphere based licensing
  • Note: Existing vCenter Server Heartbeat (vCSHB) customers will be fulfilled with new unique licenses to be used with vCSHB 5.5 U2 builds. These new licenses are only applicable to vCSHB 5.5 U2 builds and will not work with prior versions of vCSHB 5.5

For more details see Server Heartbeat release notes.  Update 2 is currently available for download.