VMworld 2011 Overview

Even with Hurricane Irene trying to dampen our spirits, VMworld attracted a record number of 19,000+ customers, partners, press and analysts, and 250 sponsors and exhibitors signifying major interest from the IT industry in cloud computing and the next generation of IT. There are now over 86,000 VMware Certified Professionals in 146 countries and over 800,000 vSphere administrators worldwide.

The VMworld Hands on Labs again set records.  This year the labs were run on a geographically distributed Public Cloud hosted in Switch (US-West), Terremark (US-East) and in COLT (Europe-East), all powered by vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5.  Some quick lab stats:

• 480 lab seats were avaialble for a total of 50 hours (24,000 lab seat hours)
• VMworld First: labs included partner labs from Cisco, EMC and NetApp
• Total of 13,415 labs were taken
• Total of 148,138 virtual machines were deployed (that’s 1.215 VMs/second!)
• 3 attendees finished all 27 Hands on Labs!
• Best of all…VMworld Hands On Labs will be going public in 2012…

Project Octopus will leverage data sync technology from VMware Zimbra and Mozy to enable enterprise-grade collaboration and information/data sharing. Additionally, Project Octopus will offer easy integration with VMware Horizon, VMware View and Project AppBlast to create a secure enterprise cloud service. These two projects promise to dramatically simplify the access and sharing of information across people and mobile devices, contributing to the Connected Enterprise.

Project AppBlast will provide the universal delivery of any application, including Windows-based applications, to any device supporting HTML5, enabling instant remote access to applications without the heavy footprint of the underlying operating system.

Horizon Mobile (formally MVP) to deliver virtual desktops to mobile devices and enable a new class of dual persona mobile devices. Mobile Virtualization for the Enterprise.

Want to see what you missed?

• The General Sessions recordings are available at VMworld.com.
• VMworld TV has overview videos from each day and a bunch of interviews up on YouTube
• SiliconANGLE has a collection of interview videos they conducted at VMworld that is well worth reviewing

Below are key announcements in each of the VMware Focus Areas with links to the full press release for each announcement.

End User Computing 

Application Platform

Cloud Infrastructure

(The following is taken from a newsletter I produce for my clients that I’m pre-posting here on the blog.)

Back on July 12th, VMware unveiled the Cloud Infrastructure Suite which included vSphere 5.

vSphere 5 New Features

• vCloud Director 1.5 - Now with fast provisioning via Linked Clones and more.
  
• vShield 5 - new flow monitoring, L2 firewall, REST APIs, enhanced groupings
• vShield App with Data Security - Adds policy based management to protect sensitive data is not being shared inappropriately.
• Site Recovery Manager 5.0 - works with vCenter 5.0, vSphere (host) based replication, Automated Failback, and more.
• vCenter Heartbeat 6.4 -  works with vCenter 5.0
•  vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 1.0 - New Product - allowing you to take local storage from up to 3 servers and turn that into a Virtual NAS. VSA is designed for the SMB users but can be useful for point deployments with the enterprise.

Following on the vSphere 5 License adjustment, VMware recently released the vSphere 5 License Advisor.  This is a tool that you can use to run against your vSphere 4.1, vSphere 4.0, or Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 deployments to understand how the vSphere 5 vRAM licensing entitlement will affect your installation.

Note: I’ve heard some comments that the tool may have some reporting issues in the GUI with deployments in excess of 1000 VMs, but that the exported report is correct.  I would appreciate anyone who can validate these reports…

So VMware announced a change in licensing with vSphere 5…the customers reacted…and VMware listened and adjusted the licensing in about 3 weeks.  Quite a rarity in the enterprise software industry…

When I talked to my clients about the licensing changes that were coming with vSphere 5, the reaction wasn’t really one of shock to a change (they had realized that VMware would eventually need to change licensing somehow as the server industry moved to larger sized servers) but  rather a raising of concerns over Enterprise Plus only having a 48GB vRAM entitlement and concern that the new vRAM entitlement in general would limit the desire to virtualize more Tier 1 applications. Non-production groups also had concerns over the transient nature of their dev/test environments which could have short spikes in vRAM usage when lots of VMs get deployed.  Apparently, my clients were not unique in their concerns…

Today VMware announced a change to the new vSphere 5 licensing:

• Raising the vRAM entitlements per vSphere editions
• Essentials / Essentials Plus / Standard are now 32GB  of vRAM per license
• Enterprise is now 64 GB of vRAM per license
• Enterprise Plus is now 96 GB of vRAM per license
• vRAM consumption per running VM is now capped at 96GB
• a VM configured with 96GB up to 1 TB of vRAM will only reduce the vRAM entitlement pool by 96GB.
• vCenter will calculate & report on a 12 month trailing average of vRAM usage rather than a high watermark
• This will reduce the risk of transient VM environments requiring additional vRAM licenses.
• Note: This change will not be reflecterd in the vSphere 5 reporting capabilities at GA time; it will appear in an vSphere 5 future update release but be trackable via a free utility from VMware until then.

VMware vSphere 5 by Editions

VMware also announced a new vSphere Desktop license package for those environments that use vSphere to host Virtual Desktops.  This new license only counts the total number of powered on virtual desktops and is available in packs of 100 desktop licenses.  Most View users usually purchase a View bundle which includes the vSphere licenses.  For those users who run non-View manage desktops on vSphere, they would purchase those licenses via this new vSphere 5.0 Desktop license pack.

Three weeks ago VMware announced and launched Cloud Foundry (right before I went on vacation, one of the reasons for the delay in this post). An open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) designed to support multiple programming models and multiple clouds for eventual deployment to. In the past three short week Cloud Foundary has seen thousands upon thousands of developers signup and receive free beta accounts…with an apparent growing queue as I’m still waiting on mine…I guess that’s what I get for taking a vacation and signing up late.

Between Rod Johnson’s post and Steve Herrord’s post introducing Cloud Foundry, you get a good sense of the initial offering (summarized by the above image). There are also a number of more detailed posts available at the Cloud Foundry Blog and of course the real gritty stuff of the open source code available at CloudFoundry.org.

But what does all this mean in the bigger picture to the Enterprise Programmer?

I have been dealing with a number of client product development teams recently.  The conversations have classically revolved around vSphere and vCoud Director and how they could use this to help automate their internal dev/test environments…yes, build a dev/test private cloud.  Lately, the meetings have not just included the IT support group from the team, but also developers.  More questions have been coming up around how the developers would interact with this private cloud.  If the developers have used AWS before, they start to compare and contrast it to AWS.  Which tends to be an apples to oranges comparison to vSphere + vCloud Director as they only provide the IaaS, not a PaaS.  With the addition of vFabric and the Cloud Foundry capabilities, a dev/test PaaS Cloud becomes a reality.

Even better, the enterprise developer can use many of the dev tools they are already familiar within within Cloud Foundry. Moving forward, they don’t have to think in the boxed confines of their single programming environment to solve all their problems.  Since Cloud Foundry can support multiple frameworks, and is open sourced to allow additional framework integrations, developers can now think about the best framework to solve the individual problems of their application.  Spin up and down environments based on those frameworks quickly in the cloud and even hook automated test harnesses into their cloud for automated testing.  Not that this is new in the general sense, but now the dev and test environments can expand and contract across the entire compute infrastructure, running as dev/test private cloud, based on demand and business need.

Self-admittedly, It’s been years since I last wrote any code and I may be simplifying things here…but that’s a large part of my job. A few years back I worked on boot strapping my own SaaS Application, so part of my simplification is based on personal experience.  At that time, we were limited to a few VPS service providers (we used Joyent and Linode) and spent way to much time building out IT infrastructure on our VPS’ to support our application development needs (code repositories, bug tracking systems, agile development tools) not to mention the development framework components that needed to integration test within our environment (message queues, GUI frameworks, logging infrastructure). We tried building out local (on our laptop) VM based development environments, but we couldn’t integrate them easily into our cloud based VPS’…even more time wasted.  At the time I was cursing the fact that we could just get this preconfigured in the cloud. We weren’t doing anything new.  I hated re-inventing the wheel.  In the end, time ran short and our personal window of opportunity closed on us before we could launch beta.

I expect to soon be seeing dev/test private clouds that will not only help to speed up and reduce the costs of current development projects, but allow entrepreneurial developers to turn their ideas into a beta reality quicker than ever before.  Within the enterprise this means more flexibility using the existing computing resources. Some of the Private Clouds of today will quickly become PaaS Clouds with the help of Cloud Foundry and vFabric.

Do you agree?  Or am I off my simplified rocker?

I hope that your holiday’s are already in full swing! If you have a VMware Administrator on your holiday shopping list (or you are one and haven’t bought yourself a present yet) I recently came across a few books that may help.

vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive

A new book from Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman.  If you have every wanted more details on the ins and outs of vSphere HA and how Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) works, this is the book for you.  If you’re read either of their blogs, you know these guys are the perfect duo with the hands on experience to have written this book.

VMware ESXi: Planning, Implementation, and Security

A recent book from Dave Mishchenko.  With the the future releases of vSphere being offered as ESXi only, if you haven’t started thinking about how to upgrade your environment to ESXi, this is a great resource or that process.

(note: Amazon is an affiliate sponsor of this blog)

Regular readers will have realized a couple of things:

1. Posts have been a little slow lately…still adapting to family life and focusing on building out some new family infrastructure. I plan on getting back to a more regular posting habit within a few months.
2. The Virtualization Round Up posts have stopped…they actually just move to a more suitable location, Twitter.  They are my tweets hash-tagged with #VRU.

Thanks to the wonderful search feature of twitter, you can now see the latest Virtualization Round Up Tweets on the sidebar (though the search results seem a bit unpredictable…).  You can also follow me to get the Round Ups in real time…

Scheduled meetings, hallway meetings, random meetings of chance, checking in on the Mrs. to make sure Baby Mini-G is still holding to his schedule (t-minus 5 days-ish). Quite the busy vmworld 2010, and that was just the first official day.

Tuesday’s keynote was a great introduction to VMware’s long term vision to the new three layer stack of IT in the cloud era of computing. The even better part of the keynote was the announcements of vCloud Director, vShield, and Project Horizon. Personally these announcements are so important because I can now start talking about all the things that I have been working on with customers and these products for the past 6 months. (Its hard to blog about things that you can talk about publicly!)

My clients have been working with early releases or discussing these products for a while now and have created quite the excitement. vCloud Director truly enables IT organizations to offer IT infrastructure as a service to their internal customers. What is most exciting about this is how quickly this is taking hold within organizations. I spent an entire day last week with one client working though data center strategy…they are at stage one of the journey and are planning their strategy with their sights not just to get to stage two, but clearly on reaching stage three of a cloud enabled data center.

The most interesting aspect of that particular client’s mindset is that they realize that the technology is easy, but the Three P’s (people, process, and politics) are the hardest part. This Is where the value of understanding other people’s lessons learned while traveling their own journey of virtualization to the cloud is so important. This is also where involving people from across all organization (servers, storage, networking, and now security) is so important. To achieve real tangible results for the enterprise, cultures and behaviors have to change as much as the technology. This isn’t just in the virtualized infrastructure layer but across all three layers.

VMware isn’t the only company that has multiple SaaS apps that are now critical to the operation of the company. Every company out there has multiples of these and CIOs know that (just maybe aren’t publicly acknowledging it because of the control issues this represents for them). Another client of mime has a very progressive view of this with the understanding that their IT department needs to become the coordinator of services for their internal users, regardless of those being internal or external services–that or run the risk of loosing all value to their internal users. This client is not fighting the flight of apps out of the data center but are embracing it; leveraging it to drive down operating costs and use the opportunity it presents to expand their internal employees expertise out into the public cloud and SaaS offerings to both keep employees engaged as well as provide the strategic advantage to the internal business unit customers by helping to negotiate the best deals with SaaS vendors.

This is where Project Horizon is such an invigorating solution for them. The whole problem of SaaS entitlement and reconciliation was something that many IT departments were struggling with. How do they give access to apps, both SaaS and Traditional, to their end users regardless of their device that end user need to run that app on (physical laptop, virtual desktop, employee owned, and mobile). In addition, why does thee need to be a different solution for those SaaS and Traditional apps? Control without restraint is the key to empowering business and workforce of today.

One client of mine who got an advanced look at Project Horizon saw it as a way to possible cut off one to one and a half years of development time and expense of an internal solution they were developing similar to Horizon. And that is without the uniform cross platform nature that Horizon delivers today to allow access to entitled applications from the locations and devices that users demand.

Of course the irony of the day wasn’t lost on me yesterday morning. For now it is still about the device and not about me; as I couldn’t watch the vmworld Keynote live on my iPhone while riding the train into San Francisco…becuase the streaming service required Flash. After all, this is about the journey to the cloud…we’re not there yet.

VMworld 2010 San Francisco is set to start in just four weeks (August 30th – September 2nd).  This year’s VMworld is already shaping up to be a killer event.  Compared to last year’s VMworld, I personally am seeing a 500+% increase in the number of clients of mine who are signed up to attend.  The reasons for this are multiple:

• Increased demand for virtualization within my clients
• Expansion from core virtualization (server consolidation) to virtualization to drive business efficiency
• Planning and deployment of internal private clouds
• Increased activity in desktop virtualization to help reign in desktop costs and provide a more dynamic and managable desktop environment

If you’re planning on attending VMworld this year, here are a few bits of advice:

• Browse through the VMworld FAQ soon as possible
• Use the Schedule Builder early to get into the sessions you want (ever year I hear from clients that the couldn’t get into the sessions they wanted, plan ahead and book early!)
• The breakout sessions and labs this year are all Self Paced, no need to preregister for anything.  Just show up, pick a technical session from the menu and the environment will be dynamically provisioned for you in the VMworld Cloud.  This is similar to the environment that was used for the VMware Internal Technical Summit earlier this year and I think all VMworld attendees will be amazed by it…  (I’m hoping the Lab Team has the same real time lab cloud portal which shows how many labs are running at any give time, it was mesmerizing to watch.)
• Make sure you reach out to your VMware account team or TAM (if you have one) and let them know you’re going.  There are lots of opportunities for more direct 1-on-1 conversations that we can arrange, but only if we have time in advance to do it.
• Bring with some snack bars…there is so much to do and see, I am sure you’ll completely forget about lunch at least one day if not more…

I’ve also been asked by a number of people if I was going to do another VMworld Portrait Project again this year.  Sadly, I won’t be able to.  This year I will be on stand by during all of VMworld as my wife and I are expecting our first born and his due date is right around VMworld.  I’m also planning on taking a few weeks off once he arrives to help adjust to family life, which will make it impossible to quickly turn around photos for people.  What this all means is no portrait project this year…we’ll see what next year looks like.  (I may be walking the halls with camera in tow, so smile if you see me pointing it in your direction!)

During the vSphere 4.1 beta period, two of my clients were very interested in the new Host Affinity Rules for issues they were having.  The day vSphere 4.1 was released I had a call to discuss Host Affinity Rules with another client to explore issues they were having that host affinity rules could solve.  Each of these global enterprise clients are running 1000′s of VMs in production and each have different uses for Host Affinity Rules that the average user may overlook.

I was planning on providing a quick overview of the Host Affinity Rules in this post, but Frank Denneman already provided a great overview that I can’t really improve on.  Start with his post to to understand the basics of the new Host Affinity Rules.

A few Host Affinity Rule use cases:

• Physical server based software licensing:  As hard as it is to believe, some software vendors still tie their software to physical computers.  Using Host Affinity rules allow you to purchase licenses for a subset of your physical servers in your vSphere cluster. (typically 2 so you have HA).  By forcing the VMs running the software in question to run on specific servers, you can ensure compliance with the software licensing.
• Isolation for troublesome VMs: as with most troubleshooting processes, the newest thing in an environment usually gets the blame.  For one of my clients this means that new workloads moved into the vSphere environment that have performance issues result in the application owners blaming vSphere for the performance issues.  Even after using something like vCenter AppSpeed to show the user where the performance problem exists in their application, app owners still won’t believe it until their VM is running by itself.  With Host Affinity Rules, you can force the problem-some VM to run on a server that has nothing else on it.  (Take that non-believer app owner!)
• Another approach to host pinning and reservations:  Some clients use pinning and reservations to help ensure certain levels of performance for some of their end users.  Like any over-riding control, you can eventually end up with more of these rules than can be realistically managed.  Host Affinity rules could be used in their place by forcing a more large grained control.  Of course, the same rule sprawl can occur with host affinity rules.  So it’s best to use them sparingly at first and really make sure the end users really need them before using them.  After all, cloud computing is supposed to make things easier for both end users and IT administrators…fight the gravitational pull of end user special needs.  More often than not these needs don’t really exist.

Today is the big day that vSphere 4.1 is finally released. This dot release is jam packed with new features that some of my clients have been testing for the past six months in beta. The ones that have been strongly received by my enterprise clients include:

• Increased vSphere scalability (2-3x increase in vCenter scale, see config maximums pdf for details)
• Storage IO Control (SIOC)
• Additional Storage Statistics in vCenter
• NFS Performance Enhancements
• Network IO Control (NIOC)
• VMware HA Healthcheck and Operational Status
• Host Affinity Rules
• vMotion Enhancements (5x better vMotion performance, note that small v… )
• Memory Compression
• USB Device Passthrough from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine (a peer of mine said he was amazed at how every USB device he could think to throw at it just work, though I’m sure someone will find exceptions to this.)

There was also some changes in the vSphere licensing. Specifically formalization of vSphere Kits and Editions:

• Kits are pre-packaged for specific use case needs.
• Editions are the different tiers of of increasing product capability to cover the spectrum from small businesses to global enterprises. There were some feature changes between Editions as well.

vSphere 4.1 Editions

Update: Here is Steve Herrod’s blog post on this release as well as Bogomil Balkansky’s blog post.  I also forgot to mention that free ESXi is now being referred to as vSphere Hypervisor, the first tier in the above diagram.

Additional product releases coinciding with vSphere 4.1:

• vCenter Site Recover Manager (SRM) 4.1 was released today as well.  This version of SRM is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and contains a number of new features, see release notes.
• VMware Studio 2.1 was released today as well.  This version is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and adds support for new Linux GOS and OVF versions as well as a slew of other features, see release notes.
• vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3 was release today as well.  This version is compatible with VC 4.1 as well as additional features, see release notes.

I know it’s been a long drought of round ups out here on the range…which means I have a rather larger backlog of items to share, some of these might be items you came across earlier but I thought were worth repeating.

With all the projects and activities I have going on (and unfortunately for the blog, too many VMware related ones being the kind I can’t talk about…yet), I’ve found it more difficult to post these Virtualization Round Up’s on a regular basis.  I anticipate it will only get more difficult moving forward, especially with the arrival of Baby Mini-G in about 3 months.

So, this will be the last regular round up for the foreseeable future (I may sneak one in now and again when big things happen).

To get more regular pointers to virtualization items of interest, follow me on Twitter as I will be switching to posting these types of links there during working hours with the hashtag “VRU”.  Note: I am crossing the streams in my twitter feed…

VMware Specific Links

• Recent New Releases
  • VMware Fusion 3.1: release notes (zoom, zoom)
  • VMware Workstation 7.1:  release notes (New Support for 32-Bit and 64-Bit Operating Systems)
  • VMware ThinApp 4.5:  release notes (relatively recent release…)
• Gartner issued their first ever Virtualization Magic Quadrant recently, and while they get upset when people steal their thunder and show you the graph I can say that VMW is the only one in the upper right Leaders quadrant…way up and to the right!  Gartner explains how the Magic Quadrant evaluation works.
  • Update 20100610: VMware has made the reprint of the Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure publicly available through Garnter!
• Steve Ballmer made it official today, VMware Now On Microsoft’s Enemies List last in line behind Oracle, Apple, and Google. (Thanks for the market cap bump Steve!)
• VMware Customer Surveys (from our Product Teams)
  • SRM customers, please provide your feedback to SRM Product Managers. Survey open until June 10th.
  • How you are using Snapshots in your environment.
• Psst…want to see an upcoming feature sneak peak?  Check out Storage IO Control (SIOC)
• Who’s using Wyse’s PocketCloud on their iPad?  I have had limited uses to date, but handy tool to have in the tool box. (I feel so dirty with my fingers all over the windows desktop… )
• Every one of my client’s is interested in transparently moving a running workload from one data center to another.  MikeD recently posted about F5′s Long Distance vMotion solution.
  • Are you interested in Long Distance vMotion? Love to hear if you’re doing it or why you’re can’t implement it today…leave a comment and share your thoughts…
• I recently learned that EMC has a Community forum covering Everything VMware at EMC.  Loads to great stuff in there!
• VMware environment took the top spot in a TPC Performance comparison, see the third table for 1,000 GB results.  Who says you can’t run high IOPS in a VM?
• VMworld 2010
  • Want to go to VMworld 2010 in San Francisco but can’t swing the cost this year?  Win A Free VMworld Pass From boche.net and Airfare from Gestalt IT.  The contest entry deadline is Noon Central Time on Thursday, June 17th…so hurry up and enter…Good luck!
• The Developer Cloud
  • Steve Herrod talks about VMforce and VMware’s “Open PaaS” Strategy and Rod Johnson, from SpringSource, discouss how VMforce Provides Spring Cloud Platform.
  • Steve Herrod talks about Google and VMware’s “Open PaaS” Strategy as well as a the acquisition of RabbitMQ.
  • Infoworld’s Neil McAllister shares his thoughts on VMware’s master plan for portable Java in the cloud
• Virtualization Security
  • Back in March RSA Announced Collaboration with VMware and Intel to deliver proof of concept for Business-Critical security, compliance, and control in the cloud. This was a future looking statement that flew a bit under the radar…
  • Few months back VMware published the final version of vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guidelines
• Desktop Virtualization
  • ClearPath posted the details on using scripts and View’s Group Policy ADM files to Location Based Applications with ThinApp and View
  • The ThinApp team describes Using ThinApp MSI’s to Replace a Native App
  • I’ve been running the VMware View Open Client on my MacOS for a few months now and love the native access from the Mac.  Yes, it doesn’t support PCoIP but it works as a great stop gap measure for the time being…
  • Andre Leibovici provides some great tips on How to troubleshoot PCoIP performance
• Recent VMware-ians who started blogging:
  • Performance Specialist Mark Achtemichuk’s Virtualization Eh (yes, he’s Canadian…   )
  • Senior Consultant Frank Denneman’s FrankDenneman
  • VP of Desktop Products Vittorio Viarengo’s Virtualization Journey

General Virtualization & Cloud Links

• Massimo Re Ferre’ recently talked about the Public Cloud adoption curve and how history repeats.
• It may come as not surprise that EMC’s IT team is working toward 100% virtualization (VMware’s IT team is at about 98%  ).  But did you know that EMC’s IT team is blogging about their Journey to the Private Cloud?
• Vittorio Viarengo has some More Best Practices for running IT Production virtualized.

In the past I’ve written about the DPM capabilities within vSphere.  I’m seeing more and more of my clients starting to implement DPM within their enterprise production data centers.  As they do, the issue of integrating DPM with their data center monitoring tools keep coming up.  How do you prevent your data center monitoring tools from sending off a barrage of false alerts when DPM realizes it can save power by shutting down servers?

The answer lies within the white paper VMware Distributed Power Management Concepts and Use. (specifically page 13).

There are events that get triggered within vSphere when DPM decides to power down a server.  These events can be tapped into via the vSphere API.  By adding some logic to your data center monitoring tool of choice, you can surpress alerts related to DPM actions or deprecate their priority to informational.  This will allow the event to be logged but not distract your operations team with false positives.

Coming soon to a City near you, the VMware Express….

As part of the Virtualization Tour 2010, keep your eye our for the VMware Express semi truckin’ down the highway or as part of various industry events.  Check out the tour website to see what dates it may be near you  and register for an event.

Inside the Express

VMware Express Conference Room	Multiple VMware Demo Stations	VMware View Comparison Station
VMware Express Server Room	VMware Express Long View	Honk if You Love VMware!

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?

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.