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Heading Out of the Redwoods Toward the Horizon

August 1, 2010 13 Comments

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.

Getting Ready for VMworld 2010 (Are You?)

July 29, 2010 13 Comments

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!)

vSphere 4.1 Hidden Gem: Host Affinity Rules

July 16, 2010 13 Comments

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.