Posts Tagged "VMware"

VMware needs to integrate Orchestrator into vCloud Director more to improve Cloud automation

Posted by Brian on Nov 17, 2011 in Cloud, Orchestrator, vCloud, VMware | 0 comments

In working on several Cloud related projects one of the items that sticks out to me is the need for deeper automation within the vCloud Director product. I understand this is still just version 1.5, but with how hard VMware is pushing the “Your Cloud” journey. I think that some parts are just not ready for what some companies need to do in the way of automation.

If self-service is suppose to be such a big part of Cloud, then the need for automation is going to play a big part. Not everything can be accomplished from creating templates and using customization to change the identity of the new VM. In server virtualization this worked great and saved time for most IT shops. But there were still manual processes that some shops needed to do. This breaks the idea of self-service IT, if a user still relies on someone to execute a manual process to have a VM or application provisioned from vCloud.

I guess what this mostly deals with is private cloud. Many IT shops are trying to automate the creation of as many servers and platforms as possible, to reduce their work load in provisioning new servers. But there are still some manual processes that need to take place and I think that being able to tie vCenter Orchestrator more tightly with vCloud Director could go a long way in help this issue.

Other cloud software companies such as DynamicOps are already doing this type of thing. By making the workflow or automation part of their offerings built into the same admin console. This allows for tight integration and opens up the options for what you are allowed to automate.

If you listen to rumors and in dark alleys you might hear that this type of integration is coming from VMware in a future release. Nobody knows if it will be the next release or even when that will happen.

 

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Recap of Chicago VMUG User Conference 2011

Posted by Brian on Nov 11, 2011 in VMUG | 0 comments

Well October 31st and Halloween have come and gone and I’m just getting around to writing my recap. It was a busy day all round between the overwhelming success of Chicago’s first VMUG user conference and sugar overload from candy. I can’t say how proud I am of the turn out that the VMUG had. We broke an attendance record for a first time user conference with 500 people showing up at the conference. I believe the previous record was 390, so we have something to be proud of Chicago VMUG members.

The conference had speaking tracks from VMware and Partners on some great topics. I was able to attend sessions on View 5 and related products and a deep dive on ThinApp. Both were really good sessions with great speakers from VMware. I know that the VMUG leaders would like to thank everyone that came out to the conference and the Vendors that sponsored for making it all possible. But a huge thanks goes to VMware and the VMUG organization for helping plan this big event and making sure things went off without any issues.

I was able to meet a bunch of new VMUG members from Chicago and look forward to staying in contact with you all and meeting more. I hope that people that attended the user conference are able to attend our quarterly VMUG meetings that we hold. Growing our membership and creating a community around VMware in Chicago is a big part of the VMUG.

The Picture below is a view from the View 5 session that was presented by Josh from VMware. He covered all the infrastructure parts of View 5 and what roles they play. There were several good questions from the audience and he covered some real world implementation stories.

The image below is a picture from the exhibit space at the VMUG conference. We had tremendous vendor interest in the meeting. There was 55 boots in the space and some really great vendors and partners were there talking with VMUG members and helping them with products and solutions.

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HP updates CIM drives with more visability

Posted by Brian on Nov 7, 2011 in Blade Servers, Hardware, HP | 0 comments

Since vSphere 4 came along VMware has been working with CIM (Computer Information Model) drivers to try and present up details about the underling hardware that vSphere is running  on. Initially this was things like health of CPU, Memory and errors like a failed fan and such. But something that I always thought was missing is visibility into  locally configured RAID volumes.

For example if you are running ESX(i) on a mirrored pair of local drives, if you are a shop that does not have very good hardware monitoring you might have no idea of the health of this mirror that vSphere is running on. So this becomes even more important with more shops experimenting with running certain workloads on local disk. With VMware and storage companies creating Virtual Storage Appliances that can run on these local disks and still provide the benefits of shared storage, this becomes a must to understand what is happening in your local disks environment.

With the latest batch of CIM drivers from HP they are now exposing some of these details. You can now see the drive configurations and status. The image below shows that a drive is rebuilding in the RAID config. This should be a feature that many HP shops will be happy to see. If you have noticed any other good features from this update leave a note in the comments for others.

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So what is VMware Thinapp Factory

Posted by Brian on Aug 31, 2011 in ThinApp, VMware | 0 comments

By now if you attended or watched the Tuesday morning VMworld Keynote speech by Stephen Herrod you have heard of something called ThinApp Factory. But most of you are probably wondering what is this product? Is it a place where you can drop off install media and some elves package your applications and mail them back to you for work. Not exactly, but it is something that will assist you in the packaging of common applications.

I spoke with an End User Computing (EUC) specialist today and got some of the following details. The idea behind Thinapp Factory is an appliance that will auto package Thinapps for you. You will point it towards an MSI or install file for an application. For example the Firefox install file. Then Thinapp Factory will auto spin up and Virtual Machine (VM) and do the application packaging for you. It will then generate a Thinapp EXE package for you. Right now only EXE files are available but MSI packages will be coming as the product matures.

To start Thinapp Factory will be able to package applications that follow standard MSI sequencing standards. As additional applications are certified VMware will continue to add them to the Factory. So this only leaves applications that cannot be done easy for you to have to package manually.

One thing of note also the VMware person told me was that if you point Thinapp Factor at 6 applications to install it will auto spin up 6 separate VMs and package them individually for you. I look forward to hearing and seeing more on this product.

If you found out any more details about this drop the details in a comment below and share with others.

 

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VMworld 2011 Las Vegas Day 1

Posted by Brian on Aug 29, 2011 in VMware, VMworld | 0 comments

I’ll be writing about some of the sessions and activities that I experience through the week. Since it’s my first VMworld I am trying to get down the routine and enjoy the sessions.

First thing this morning I grabbed breakfast in the massive dinning hall for VMworld. The hall is a seeming endless sea of tables. It reminded me of being directed to a parking spot at a sporting event, the wait staff was there to guide attendees to available food tables.

My first session started a 8am sharp as was VSP1682 VMware vSphere Cluster Q&A presented by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman. The session was one hour long and was an open Q&A session about all things HA, Cluster, DRS and Storage DRS. There was a wide range of question from people stating they don’t use HA to people with advanced designs wondering how the new features will affect them.

One of the other sessions that I attended was the ESXi Quiz Show (VSP1956). This was more of a fun session than a deep technical lecture session. The idea of the session is that 2 separate of teams competed against each other with the winner moving on to battle against a team of VMware employees. The questions were mostly ESXi related with a few general VMware questions. The session was high energy and they did a good job of getting people excited and involved.

I took sometime to experience the Hands On Labs (HOL) just to see what was happening there. Most of the topics available as labs are things that I am doing on a regular basis or do not pertain to my job at this time. So there was really not anything that I needed to take a lab for but just wanted to so I can know how they stack up when talking with others. I elected to take the ESXi Auto Deploy lab which was the most appealing to me. The lab was about 70-80 minutes in length and the instructions and slides that guide you along the process were very well written and easy to follow. The only thing I would maybe improve is some of the install parts were a bit slow and could have probably already been done for the participants to speed things up.

So far one thing that I noticed and heard from several others is that most of the sessions are very high level. These are great for customers and management but do not offer enough deep content for partners. It is causing me to revisit the sessions that I have signed up for and will be spending a good deal of my time talking with vendors in the solutions exchange.

VMworld Keynote

It was now time for the keynote and with this being my first VMworld I was not sure what to expect from this large presentation. The room was huge and must have easily held 10,000+ people. It was a top notch event and the presentation was perfect, except for the boom camera guy accidentally got in the way of the other camera once.

The keynote opened with some thundering music and great visuals on the large screens on both sides of the main stage. The visuals were almost Tron like in some parts and the image below shows how they took videos from users that submitted them and the audio and incorporated this into the intro.

First up on stage was Rick Jackson who presented the agenda for the Keynote. Rick also gave an attendee count of over 19,000 people for this conference. He mentioned that VMworld 2012 will be back in San Francisco and will be August 27-30. Then he spoke about how they originally created the Hands On Labs cloud in 2009 as an internal cloud. Then in 2010 the HOL cloud because a Hybrid Cloud and the 2011 HOL Cloud is not a Public cloud with 3 separate data centers in different geographical regions. A goal for the labs this year is to deploy more that 200,000 VMs in the 4 days of the conference. This will be a tall task even with the number last of 140,000 VMs.

Then it was time for Paul Maritz to come out and speak. I think Paul usually does a good job and it helps to have some exciting technology to talk about. I will cover more of the specifics of the Keynote shortly but I have to say that a large part of the keynote content was focused on application platforms which are very important but the audience that was there is largely VMware admins and infrastructure people and they were just not that interested. I saw a steady stream of people leaving the keynote after the halfway point.

In Paul’s presentation he talked about creating the Cloud Suite and getting all version numbers in alignment. He stated that he expects that by next VMworld they will be announcing version 5.1 of each product within the Cloud Suite. This would continue the aggressive pace that VMware has been on over the last few years by announcing a major update to their base hypervisor offering.

Some fun facts that he spoke about during the keynote are listed below.

• About 800,000 VMware admins globaly
• There are now about 68,000 VCP’s from 146 countries
• A new VM is created every 6 seconds, more thamn 20 Millions VMs around the globe exist
• A 5.5 vMotions every second, there are more VMs in flight than plains

It was announced that View 5 is expected in the future. This is a product that I am heavily involved with and would like to find out any new details possible. Below are a few bullet points that were mentioned.

• Bandwidth improvements
• View clients will be available for almost every device you can think of
• VOIP / Unified Communications

Paul did talk briefly about the mobile phone virtualization offering that they are working on. This seems like it would be pretty cool and once they figure out how to perfect it and phone technology is powerful enough to support I can see this catching on.

 

 The remaining parts of the show were all vFabric and application platform discussions. I’m not going to write about this because it’s not a focus for me or this blog at this time and someone else can probably do a much better job at it. I do think these products are important but not in my area.

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