VMware
|
Sep 29, 2009
Citrix has gone and hired a new CTO
For me I'm seeing another business person at Citrix in charge of the technical direction, not someone that has a strong basis of engineering and technology.
Maybe I'm judging MBA's harshly, though they are bred and trained to aim for sales and revenue. Engineering backgrounds aim for better products and solutions. There is nothing wrong with either and every software business needs both. For me, it just tells you the focus Citrix has at the top. It isn't about the tech, its about the sales first and foremost.
What are your thoughts on a non-scientific or non-engineering based Chief Technical Officer?
Continue reading »
VMware
|
Sep 29, 2009
I've been watching things finally quiet down from VMworld 2009 and have some of the trends and summaries I have seen. Some of the trends are interesting, some not so much.
Twitter
Twitter really started the first time last year with following @vmworld. This year the # was all the rage. As long as you followed #vmworld you could see everything folks were talking about. Two good # that were fun this time around were
- The #vCloud - Take a Drink game.
- #VMworld3Word - 3 words for folks at VMworld.
I full expect this to only grow next year.
The Virtual Datacenters @ VMworld
Pretty impressive seeing the big one riding down the main escalator at the Moscone Center. Watch as they build it. 776 VMware ESX Servers, 37 Terabyte internal RAM Memory, 6208 Cores and 348 TB of Shared Storage. Wow. Then the talks were how performance wasn't there initially as the various engineers worked hard at resolving it. Things were running good by Tuesday Night/Wednesday morning. The one thing that many of us talked about was how the big data center just looked lopsided. There was 3 server style racks to each Storage style rack. The ratio just looked odd to most of us.
Next year I full expect to see one single big data center instead of having small, medium and large ones. I'm still hoping to get some answers from folks from my initial blog entry.
Booth Babes
A lot more booth babes this year. I'm not terribly excited about this. Sure the eye candy is nice. I'm going to talk with engineers, developers, product managers after wading my way through some marketing folks. In general if a show is all about the Marketing/Booth Babes (and Guys) then the vendor floor has next to no value for me.
Keynote Lukewarm
Both Keynotes this year didn't seem to really talk about all the cool stuff coming. Not sure if this is a new leadership approach or just not much going on this year with the financial slowdown or not. vCloudExpress stuff was nice though I expected to see more "You Gotta Check out the PCoIP stuff we are doing" and "This is mega cool".
Vendor / ISV issues
Lots of chats were around the general feeling of hostility coming from VMware to ISV discussions. Some talk about the rules limiting what Citrix/Microsoft could do and be demoing and shown at the conference. (Most of the talk was they deserved it for the stuff pulled last year. Some was a let down that we couldn't see what they were doing.) Some of the talk was interactions with ESXi and what was/wasn't allowed to compete with VMware's own offerings. The quote that I heard that best describes it was "Is VMware turning into the Microsoft machine now?"
Less Swag, Less People
My guess is the aim was 15k+ people and about 13k came versus last years 14k limit at Vegas. There was less swag which wasn't surprising since the financial changes in the past year.
iPhone
I have never seen more iPhones in a single place than in San Fran which was easily 1 in 10. Then when I went into the Moscone Center for VMworld it was easily 1 in 5. Crazy nuts what people were doing with their iPhones. I was introduced to a good 4 dozen apps that I've never heard of and now have a good solid set of reasons to get an iPhone.
The other fun was the discussion around the iPhones as a conversation starter of "How many bars do you have?" Depending on the day and time you'd have anywhere from 0 to 3. The lucky person was one that could actually hold a phone conversation while in/near the Moscone Center with their iPhone. Service from AT&T was less than ideal .
Better Bag
The VMworld given bag went back to the style of a true backpack instead of the messenger style. Personally I like this as my VMworld 2006 with the same style is starting to get a little well used by now.
Live Blogging
This is a skill I am not sure I have though I've learned quite a bit by watching, reading and learning how to properly live blog. If I look to do this again next year I will need to do some reading on different successful ways to do this kind of blogging. I tried 2 different methods with varying success in my book. For those of you that read through some of my Keynote Live Blogging posts.. I do apologize and promise to do better.
Overall a good conference again for the time spent with some quality people from VMware, NetApp, Cisco, HP, newScale and all the other individuals I talked with. I look forward to next year. See you all there.
Continue reading »
Server Virtualization
|
Sep 28, 2009
Recently I have been involved in discussions internally on what it will take to get Business Objects onto a Virtual Machine. The main talk has been around potentially removing another equivalent product and moving entirely over to Business Objects. Then we got pricing for Business Objects.
The standard piece of hardware today is pretty hefty even a small 1/2U system. They come with multiple cores. You have to do a special order to get anything less than a dual/quad core today. An enterprise doesn't order single sockets either. Kinda silly to save $500 when you can have 2x the power and be able to reuse this system in the future for other purposes.
They price and only price by physical cores in a system and on all systems their software could potentially run on.
Business Objects is blowing a potential sale since today we only need something like 6-8 cores worth of power today and making these systems into VMs is ideal. It isn't like Enterprises are out to "screw" vendors. Yes we all want a deal though Enterprises just want to pay for what they use. If they would just license use of ~8 CPUs (virtual or physical or core) and let us make these VMs they win.
Even for us to make these physical is a joke. We have to disable cores and sockets to make us legal.
So.. BO is blowing it. They need to grow up and stop making Mainframe's look cheap with their licensing policies.
Continue reading »
VMware
|
Sep 4, 2009
Day two at VMworld ended up being quite a bit more exciting than yesterday. The keynote by Steve Herrod was much more what I expected from the keynotes. He covered some of the "cool" stuff coming down the pipes in both the short term and longer term. The PCoIP demo showing Google Earth zooming up and down while connected to a machine in Portland, OR from the Moscone Center rocked. I want to have that to use while I'm sitting in the hotel room's blazing fast speeds while attempting to do something useful on one of my machines at home instead of using RDP with SSL.
I went to the IO DRS Tech Preview and got the same excitement I've had from previous years where you know your seeing something innovative. Several of the other sessions I hit were really partner style presentations that did not say much. So a good 25/75 day for sessions which is pretty good.
Now that the Self Service Labs were finally working properly I gave a shot at the vCenter Orchestrator product offering. The Lab was responsive and well documented. It was pretty nice and really hinted at the power this system can offer for DataCenter Automation. The theory is this is free with vSphere 4 so I'm going to have to really look into that and find out.
During my open times during the day I had some good meetings with some VMware employees to discuss some of the vStorage & vCloud directions, HP folks around OpenView and Virtualization tools, AMD & Intel on their functionality futures and Hitachi around their multipathing technology for VMware (still no roadmap).
The Party was fun. Foreigner still knows how to rock and I can actually climb rock walls. The nice thing about the party this year is it was right at the Moscone Center.
A very productive and long day.
Continue reading »
VMware
|
Sep 3, 2009
Once again.. another session I didn't sign up with and zero issues getting into.
To start off RIM & VMware have been working together for 2 years and it is officially supported on VMware. Together RIM & VMware have done many numerous and successful engagements running BES on VMware. The interesting thing is RIM runs their own BES on VMware for over 3 years now.
Today BES best practice is no more than 1k users per server and they are not very multi-core friendly. It is not cluster aware or have any HA built in. The new 5.0 version of BES is coming with some HA availability via replication at the application layer. One thing that has been seen in various engagements is if you put the BES servers on the same VMware Hosts as virtualized Exchange, there are noticable performance improvements.
The support options for BES do clearly state that they support on VMware ESX.
One of the big reasons to virtualize BES is that since it can not use multi-cores effectively the big 32 core boxes today are only able to use a fraction. By virtualizing BES can get significant consolidation. Then when doing the virtualization BES gets all the advantages of running virtual such as Test/Dev deployments and server consolidation and HA etc. Things that are well known and talked about already.
BES encourages template use to do rapid deployments. The gotcha is just what your company policies and rules are and can potentially save quite a bit of time. This presentation is really trying to show how to use VMware/Virtualization with BES for change management improvements, server maintenance, HA, component failures and other base vSphere technologies. VMware is looking towards using Fault Tolerance for their own BES servers.
BES is often not considered Tier 1 for DR events. Even though email is often the biggest thing needed to start working after a DR event to start communications. The reason is generally been seen due to the complexity and cost of DR.
The performance testing with the Alliance Team from VMware has been successfully done numerous times for the past couple of years. They have done testing at both RIM & VMware offices. The main goal of these efforts was to generate white papers and a reference architectures that are known to work. The testing was to use Exchange LoadGen & PERK load driver (BES testing driver). Part of this is how to scale outwith more VMs as the scale up is known.
The hardware was 8 cpus, Intel E5450 3Ghz, 16 G RAM and FAS3020 Netapp on vSphere 4 & BES 4.1.6. The 2k user test with 2 Exchange systems the results were 23% CPU utilization on 2 vCPU BES VMs. Latency numbers was under 10 ms. Nothing majorly wrong seen in the testing metrics. Going from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4 was a 10-15% CPU reduction in the same workload tests. Adding in Hardware Assist for Memory saw what looks like another 3-5% reducting in CPU usage. In their high load testing when doing VMotion there is a small hiccup of about 10% increase in CPU utilization during the cut over period of the VMotion. This is well within the capacity available on the host and in the Guest OS.
Their recommendation is to do no more than 2k users on a 2vCPU VM. If you need more then add more VMs. Scales and performs well in this scale out architecture. Be sure you give the storage the number of spindles needed. The standard statement when talking about virtualization management.
The presenter then went into a couple of reference architecture designs. Small Business & Enterprise with a couple different varieties.
BES @ VMware. 3 physical locations, 6,500 Exchange users. 1k of them have 5G mailboxes and the default for the rest are 2G. BES has become pretty common. They run Exchange 2007 & Windows 2003 for AD & the Guest OS. Looks fairly straight forward.
4 prod BES VMS, 1 STandby BES VM, 1 Attachment BES VM and 1 BES dedicated Database VM. Done on 7 physical servers and 40 additional VM workloads on this cluster.
Continue reading »
