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Countdown to Launch

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One of the great things about my job at VMware is the new technology and initiatives that I’m aware of and can participate in.  The downside is that you can’t talk about them until they are officially announced.  On Tuesday VMware will be making a large announcement that includes vSphere and vCloud, I’ll finally be able to start sharing my thoughts and experiences on everything that we have been working on.  You can join in to the online simulcast of the announcement from VMware corporate headquarters in Palo Alto.  I’ll also be posting photos (and maybe a video?) from the day…timing of which will be determined by my busy schedule this week.

Tuesday’s announcement completes the triad of announcements over the past month.  First was Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), their foray into the X86 based blade server computing market but designed around the virtualization and cloud computing needs of the enterprise data center.  Next came EMC’s Symmetrix V-Max (Virtual Matrix Architecture), the storage solution designed to power the virtual data center with scalable inter-connected storage that can even span multiple data centers.  Chad Sakac has posted a great virtualization specific overview on his blog.  Finally comes Tuesday…stay tuned.

(In preperation for tomorrow’s big event, check out hte Informationweek article on Why ‘Private Cloud’ Computing is Real — And Worth Considering.  I found this article to be a good overview on private cloud computing and has a few VMware teasers in it.)

Rumor: Microsoft Office Virtualization Edition

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I heard an interesting rumor this week that Microsoft is planning on updating their licensing model in the near future for Microsoft Office to introduce a virtualization version. The way it was described to me is that if you want to migrate your physical desktops to virtual desktops and run Microsoft Office on them, you will need to purchase a special Office Virtualized Edition.

What I haven’t heard is if this will be an additional license fee for Office or not (the way it was described to me made it sound like it was an additional cost to upgrade your current office to run it on a virtualized desktop).

(Note: I’ve pinged numerous contacts familiar with Microsoft licensing and no one else has heard this…)

Since I am in discussions with a number of my clients about desktop virtualization, I’ve gotten some exposure to the ins and outs of Microsoft licensing.  I know that many large enterprises have been pushing Microsoft for a per user licensing model for software applications, and this could very well be just that.  Or is this a sign that Microsoft is concerned that virtual desktops could cut into their profit margins and they are taking a proactive stance to prevent that?

After all, if I have 6000 call center workers spread out around the world in three different time zones and they all need to have MS office on their desktop, today I have to pay Microsoft for 6000 Office licenses.  With virtual desktops I can run 2000 virtual desktops in a data center that all my call center workers access and only have to pay for 2000 Microsoft Office licenses (as one center shuts down another center spins up and re-uses the same virtual desktop).

Microsoft isn’t going to sit by and lose all that revenue.  So hearing about this doesn’t surprise me.  It also won’t surprise me if Microsoft ends up charging more for the Virtualized Edition.  Which leads one to wonder if this is truely a new licensing version or just a virtualization penalty?  Time will tell…

vCenter Server as a Tier 1 App

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As virtualization becomes more and more pervasive across the data center, many of my customers are now considering their vCenter Server as a tier 1 application.  This means more focus is being places on maintaining the availability of vCenter Server.  To quote Gene Kranz:

“Failure is not an option.”

vCenter Server is central to the following aspects of a virtualized data center:

  • provides DRS & DPM monitoring and host load management
  • enables vMotion (central to both DRS and DPM)
  • centralized management portal for all VMs and ESX server running in a cluster (ESX and VMs still run without vCenter, but management become much more cumbersome)
  • feeding data from VMs and ESX to other IT management platforms
  • hosts SRM plugin for VM business continuity between data centers
  • provisions desktops for View (desktop virtualization)

There are a number of different strategies that can be taken to provide availability of the vCenter Server, these typically fall into one of two categories: a cold standby server or a warm standby server.  Since the time needed to manually bring up a cold standby server for a large vSphere deployment can easily reach into the hours, most large organization tend toward a warm standby scenario and leverage some software automation to trigger the fail over.  There are many options here that fall into the general categories of clustering or host replication.  These tend to be complex and not always application specific.

To fill this gap and provide the monitoring and fail over needs of running vCenter Server as a teir 1 application, VMware recently released vCenter Server Heartbeat, which provides monitoring and automated fail over of both the vCenter Server and (optionally) the vCenter database.

Key aspects of Center Server Heartbeat:

  • Monitors application (vCenter Server and optionally vCenter Database), network, and OS
    • underlying technology licensed from NeverFail for vCenter Server and SQL Server awareness and fail over
  • Supports VM or Physical deployments of vCenter Server
  • Uses replication engine to replicate data and transactions to standby server
  • fail over of vCenter and Database across wan or LAN
  • Protects from Split Brain scenario if a network outage were to occur
  • Fail over of IP address so all hosts/VMs continue to function with vCenter normally
  • Easy to configure, auto cloning of vCenter Server VMs (if deployed virtually) to create stand by server
vCenter Server Heartbeat Diagram
vCenter Server Heartbeat Diagram

My recommended approach to providing Tier 1 availability of the vCenter server

  • Ideally: run your vCenter server as a VM and utizliae vCenter Server Heartbeat to monitor and fail over vCenter.  All accomplished with the minimal amount of configuration due to vCenter Server Heartbeat’s VM cloning capabilities.
  • Minimally: run vCenter server as a VM and configure a HA pair for that VM.  vCenter HA operates independantly of vCenter Server and will function even when the vCenter serer fails.  Becuase it is designed to provide general HA for a wide variety of situations, it is not application aware like vCenter Server Heartbeat.  Also, many architects don’t prefer this solution becuase the fail over is being provided by the tool that you are trying to protect.  But, it is better than no fail over solution for vCenter Server.