Virtual Winfrastructure

New Update to EMC Storage Integrator

2012-01-17T18:55:02-08:00

If you're already familiar with EMC's Storage Integrator (ESI) than you know that it is a tool from EMC that simplifies management and provisioning of storage for Windows servers (I've posted a blog in the past showcasing how easy ESI is to use).

Using a series of wizards and a Microsoft Management Console plug-in (MMC), ESI can easily and quickly create new disks or storage LUNs, enable the new LUNs to be used with Microsoft clustering or even automatically deploy applications such as Microsoft SharePoint Server on the new drives – all within literally a matter of minutes! It also provides reporting of storage subsystem details and the relationship back to the Windows servers.

And what's the best part? ESI is FREE for all users of EMC storage.

So what could possibly be done to make this product better? Our incredible development team has done this by adding support for Hyper-V, providing Powershell cmdlets for all ESI functions as well as SharePoint FileStream RBS support, rollback support (undo recent changes), native MPIO support in addition to EMC Powerpath and several UI enhancements.

But enough talk, a picture (or video) is worth a 1000 words as seen in this latest demo on Youtube.

With the addition of Hyper-V support, administrators can now connect to a host and report on the total number of Hyper-V virtual machines on that server and access details about the VMs such as status or state of the VM, which storage array it is connected to, the disk details including name and capacity details and the type of VM (pass through or VHD). From the ESI console you can choose to connect to the host or attach to the virtual disk. This information can be especially helpful if you have a large virtual environment or if your VMs move from one server to another using Live Migration or Quick Migration.

The enhanced UI adds additional functionality in the Create Disk wizard so that you now have a choice to create a SCSI disk on the server or a Virtual Hard Disk or Passthrough SCSI Disk for Hyper-V.

So if you are a current EMC customer or partner and you're not using ESI, than reach out to your EMC counterpart to get a copy (or download it directly from Powerlink). If you have feedback or ideas on the tool, feel free to post them here! We'll also continue to have more information available on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community.

In other news, my friend and manager two different times at EMC (including most recently), Chad Sakac just received a promotion to run all of EMC Global presales. This is exciting news for EMC and for our entire technical community as Chad has endless amounts of energy and passion in everything he does. If you haven't followed his blog post, be sure to check out Virtual Geek to see his plans for helping to implement positive changes throughout the company. If you are a fan of EMC, than be happy with this move as I guarantee it is as a game changer for us. If you compete against EMC than good luck and I wish you well.

Introducing EMC’s mSpecialist Program

2012-01-09T08:50:05-08:00

Last month we unveiled a new program within EMC to recognize and reward our top contributors who specialize in Microsoft technologies. This new program, called mSpecialists is aimed at creating a community of highly specialized and highly motivated technologists who are passionate about Microsoft technologies.

For people who are familiar with EMC's Microsoft Community, we have a large group of existing resources who are already focused on Microsoft technologies and are recognized Microsoft experts both within the company and in the industry. So why create this new program? What the mSpecialist program will do is create a way to recognize these specialists and to better connect them to help share information among our Subject Matter Experts as well as extend this to our customers and partners. What is unique about the mSpecialist program is that we aren't limiting this to just EMC employees; this program will be open to our partners, resellers and other resources who help to promote and support EMC and Microsoft technology solutions.

So what makes an mSpecialist?

There are several attributes that help define an mSpecialist but the easiest way to define it is anyone who is helping to improve the company, the community and our customers by sharing information, educating others and developing new tools or solutions. In other words someone who is giving more than they are asking. Similar to Microsoft's MVP program in which Subject Matter Experts in their respective communities are sharing information to help educate others and are often the first to respond to questions or requests for help on specific, EMC's mSpecialists will include people who blog about technologies to help educate others around them or respond to questions posted on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community.

So what does an mSpecialist get in return for their efforts? In addition to helping our customers, partners and fellow technologists better understand EMC and Microsoft's deep integration and joint solutions, there are several additional benefits for their participation. A sample of benefits include:

Invitation to yearly gathering with special access to resources and roadmaps and hands-on labs on Microsoft and EMC technologies.
Ongoing series of meetings with EMC solution and product teams to help bring field requests to influence EMC Corporate roadmaps.
Webcasts with Microsoft product teams to learn of ongoing product developments and to discuss customer trends and requests.
On the spot rewards for outstanding achievers (in December we gave out 20 different prizes including tablets, network storage devices and SSD hard drives).
Passes to industry events.
Advance access to EMC beta code.

Interested? To become an mSpecialist you need to be recognized by someone on my team as an active participant in the community. To start, use the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community to blog, post information, share data and ask\answer questions. We will be looking for people who go above and beyond to help make others around them and the community as a whole better! Other things include creating demos or tools, sharing references, volunteering to help and being socially active. As they say Cream Rises to the Top!

To learn more, check out Sam's Inside the Partnership (an example of someone going above and beyond!) interview and overview of this program and our recent EMC Microsoft Specialist gathering!

EMC & Microsoft Technical Summit Recap

2011-12-09T17:34:48-08:00

Last week EMC and Microsoft held a three day Technical Summit in which approximately 120 of EMC's Microsoft Specialists from around the globe gathered in Redmond, WA to hear from Microsoft on some of their latest technologies. Some of the topics covered during the Summit included:

System Center 2012 Fabric & Storage Management
System Center 2012 Application & IT Process Management
SQL Server 2012 BI, Reporting and Analysis Services
SQL Server 2012 Always On Availability Groups
Windows 8 Server and Hyper-V 3.0 Overview
Sharepoint and FAST Scalability Testing
Hyper-V Disaster Recovery Best Practices
SQL Server and Private Cloud Fast Track Programs

What was great about the event was that it was largely material delivered by Microsoft speakers who were educating EMC specialists not only on the latest and greatest applications and tools but also on future technologies such as Hyper-V 3.0 which looks to be awesome (dare I say face-melting VirtualGeek?!)! When we did present EMC topics it was centered around Microsoft's technologies that were recently discussed and included EMC's management integration, best practices for applications and disaster recovery as well as EMC's Fast Track involvement.

Interested in some of these topics but couldn't attend? No problem we've posted most of the content on the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community (note due to the NDA nature of some of the presentations, we can't share them externally).

Below are a few pictures taken throughout the week including the Optional Hands-On Labs evening event in which over half the attendees joined us to play with EMC & Microsoft technologies hosted on EMC's vLabs and Microsoft Azure Hands-On Labs.

Stage and Room Setup to Host 120+

Lab Night in the EMC Offices

Partial Group Photo

One of the things we communicated during the event was the new mSpecialist Community at EMC. The mSpecialist Community is a new program to recognize the top Microsoft Specialists in the Company and provide them with special access and an assortment of goodies as a reward for their contribution. More to come on this in an upcoming blog post!

Overall the event was a huge success and I thank everyone for coming! We had attendees from throughout the US as well as Latin America, UK, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Australia, Singapore, China and the Middle East. Attendees also spanned different focus areas including pre-sales, solutions, engineering, product groups, consulting and Alliances which helped sparked some interesting conversations. It was great meeting everyone and I look forward to an exciting 2012, a big year for Microsoft and one that the EMC Microsoft Community will be ready for!

Exchange 2010 BDM

2011-11-22T22:30:01-08:00

A colleague (and good buddy) of mine recently posted a blog post addressing the impact of Background Database Maintenance (BDM) in Exchange 2010. This topic is often an area of confusion for people and was worth reposting.

Essentially BDM can be scheduled to run continuously on active databases or scheduled to run at specific times but it runs 24 x 7 on passive databases. Also, the BDM process generates a 5MB/sec Read workload per database so environments with more databases need to ensure that the environment has been properly sized including the network infrastructure between the servers and the storage.

For the full post, check out Paul's Flipping Bits site at: http://flippingbits.typepad.com/ and for further reading, be sure to check out the EMC whitepaper Microsoft Exchange 2010: Storage Best Practices and Design Guidance for EMC Storage for more detailed sizing recommendations when using EMC storage.

Looking Ahead at Microsoft in 2012

2011-10-28T16:08:25-07:00

I recently returned from a two week trip across Europe where I attended Microsoft's Enterprise Partner Summit (EPS) as well as met with various people from EMC and Microsoft including the Microsoft Technology Centers in Paris & Thames Valley and the Microsoft Cloud and Interoperability Center in Brussels. One thing that was consistent throughout this roadtrip is that Microsoft is excited about 2012 including the upcoming release of SQL Server 2012 and a little later in the year their release of System Center 2012 and then Windows 8 which will include Hyper 3.0.

Just SQL Server and System Center would make for a big year, add in Windows 8 and all of the enhancements to Hyper-V including advanced scalability, performance and virtual networking and it has the makings of a HUGE year for Microsoft.

At EPS, the message was clear. Microsoft is positioning themselves to be the premier cloud provider both in the private cloud and public cloud. A significant advantage for Microsoft is a common set of technologies that will connect the private and public cloud including Windows, Hyper-V, Active Directory and common development tools so end users can easily transition between a private cloud to a public cloud and back on premise again without a major forklift or "rip & replace" migration process. System Center 2012 will be a key piece of this technology bridge as well as introduce new features such as App Controller which will provide application monitoring across clouds.

Another focus point of EPS was the Consumerization of IT and the explosion of devices that users access on a daily basis. More and more users are bringing personal devices such as phones, tablets and iPads into work and expecting to use them in the office place while also accessing business files, emails and programs on personal devices when not in the office. Managing all of these devices, providing access to business information through all of these devices all while ensuring security has become a major challenge for many IT organizations! Again, this is an area that System Center 2012 will address.

So what were some key takeaways from all of this? While Hyper-V has continued to gain market share in the US, it is even more popular in areas throughout EMEA. For Microsoft, they will improve on the features and scalability of Hyper-V when Windows 8 is released but their real focus is on improving management through System Center 2012. System Center 2012 is looking like the real deal. Not only will it help manage private and public cloud environments while continuing to provide application and system management for physical datacenters but it will also extend out to additional handheld devices such as phones (not just Windows) and tablets including iPads.

It may be a little early to be thinking about 2012 but it's hard not to get excited if you're Microsoft!

EMC Cloud Meets Microsoft Big Data at SQL PASS Summit

2011-10-09T15:00:00-07:00

Next week is the start of SQL PASS Summit, the annual SQL Server and Business Intelligence conference. What's unique about SQL PASS Summit compared to many conferences is that it is put on by the SQL Server community (PASS or the Professional Association of SQL Server) opposed to a vendor. PASS holds several events throughout the year called SQLSaturday which are held in different cities across the year and then their annual conference in Seattle.

This will certainly be a big year for SQL PASS with the upcoming release of SQL Server Denali (29 sessions throughout the week). In addition there are 6 specific tracks this year including Application and Database Development, Enterprise Database Administration and Deployment, BI Platform Architecture, Development and Administration, BI Information Delivery, Professional Development and SQL Azure.

EMC will be a Gold sponsor at SQL PASS Summit yet again this year with a focus on Big Data Solutions. Matter of fact, EMC compliments many of the SQL PASS tracks by highlighting solutions in simplified management of SQL Server, simple and affordable infrastructure and data management for SQL Server OLTP and BI, deliver timely insight and collaboration from SQL Server data and manage structured and unstructured data growth.

EMC will also be highlighting the EMC Data Warehouse Fast Track configuration recently designed, tested and validated by Cisco, EMC and Microsoft. Microsoft Fast Track Data Warehouse for SQL Server R2 uses reference configurations optimized for data warehousing. By using reference architecture solutions, customers can easily purchase and build a similar model with expected results. In EMC and Cisco's Fast Track Data Warehouse 3.0 configuration, an EMC VNX5300 Storage array along with Cisco UCS C-Series rack mount servers were used to showcase mid-size to large scale data warehouse environments. The document contains the specific detailed hardware used for the configuration as well as detailed information such as disk layout, RAID groups and other storage specific information.

Come by the EMC booth (#201) if you'll be at SQL PASS to pick up a free t-shirt and meet the EMC experts. Some of the information and demonstrations we will be showcasing includes:

Leveraging Data for Business Insight and Advanced Analytics
- Highlighted by EMC Consulting for Business Intelligence for Infrastructure and services for upgrading and virtualizing SQL Server application and databases.
Delivering Dynamic, Efficient, Scalable Infrastructure for Virtualized SQL Server Environments
- Highlighting EMC Unified Storage VNX, VMAX, EMC Storage Integrator (ES), FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and FAST VP
Ensuring Data Protection for Virtualized SQL Server Environments
- Highlighting EMC Replication including Replication Manager, RecoverPoint, Avamar, Networker and DataDomain
Ensuring High Availability for Virtualized SQL Server
- Highlighting EMC integration with Microsoft virtualization technologies.

See you there!

EMC helps set High-End Scalability Record for Microsoft SharePoint

2011-10-04T17:06:34-07:00

Yesterday at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference, Microsoft announced the details of a test report in which they tested two SharePoint content databases with a total of 120 million documents and 30TB of SQL Server databases! The test report highlighted the amount of data SharePoint can contain and manage and how Microsoft FAST search can index and search very large multi-terabyte configurations!

As Microsoft stated during the opening keynote to Microsoft SharePoint Conference, "who did they turn to for the biggest and fastest hardware they could find"?? EMC of course!!! EMC's VNX5700 is a powerful, scalable and reliable Enterprise storage array that could easily contain the mass amount of data while also delivering instantaneous performance results. Matter of fact, in Microsoft's keynote they performed a live demo using Microsoft FAST search against a 14.4TB content database on the EMC VNX5700 and they were able to search and return results against 108 million items in 0.23 seconds. I'll let that sink in for a second.

Along with NEC for the servers, Microsoft demonstrated scale-up and scale-out techniques for a SharePoint farm and using FAST Search Server 2010 to search across the farm for fast query results. In the configuration, Microsoft tested with 3 physical servers and 22 virtual servers using Microsoft Hyper-V. A detailed diagram of the environment can be seen here:

Interested in reading more? Check out Microsoft's test report located on their website including detailed information about the configuration and detailed performance results.

As for the VNX, expect more detailed test documents using Microsoft technologies coming from EMC soon including how to better manage and protect databases of this size. Be sure to also check out the new survey from IDC in which EMC has been named the #1 storage provider for Microsoft SharePoint and other mission critical applications by customers!

EMC Cloud meets Microsoft Big Data at the Sharepoint Conference

2011-09-30T17:01:23-07:00

Next week is the start of the Microsoft Sharepoint Conference located in Anaheim, CA and like all of Microsoft's events and activities; EMC will be a major player! Microsoft Sharepoint is the fastest growing Microsoft technology and is the preferred data collaboration and web portal technical among customers of all sizes.

EMC will be a Gold sponsor for the event and will be highlight our Big Data solutions including:

Simplifying management of virtualized Sharepoint environments
Managing structured and unstructured data growth
Delivering timely insight and collaboration from Sharepoint data
Enabling advanced and efficient collaboration to your users

Where can you find EMC? Everywhere!

For starters, I'd recommend keeping your ears and eyes open during the keynote…expect more on this after the event!

EMC will also have two breakout sessions at the show including:

Proven Best Practices for Virtualizing Sharepoint and FAST Search hosted by EMC Proven Solutions. This will help customers to understand best practices to design and deploy a virtualized Sharepoint and FAST Search environment. Session SPC2993 will be held on Tuesday (10/4) at 3:15.
Searching Video with FAST Search for Sharepoint 2010 hosted by EMC Consulting will demonstrate how to integrate external video metadata generation services with native Sharepoint Search. Session SPC384 will be held on Tuesday (10/5) also at 3:15.

In addition to the sessions you can meet the EMC experts at our booth (#423) featuring 4 kiosks and multiple demonstrations including:

Leveraging Sharepoint Data for Business Insight and Advanced Collaboration, demos include:
- Upgrading to Sharepoint 2010 and Fast Search
- Managing Sharepoint as a shared service
Managing Data and Enteprise Content, demos include
- Captiva and Documentum integration
Simplifying Storage Management of Virtualized Sharepoint Environments, demos include:
- Performance and Storage Planning
- EMC storage Integrator (ESI) for Sharepoint
- SourceOne Archiving and Remote BLOB
Ensuring Data Protection for Virtualized Sharepoint, demos include:
- Replication Manager
- Avamar
- Networker
- DataDomain
Ensuring High Availability for Virtualized Sharepoint, demos include:
- Disaster Recovery and Security
- RecoverPoint Cluster Enabler stretched clusters

And that's just the start, we will have exciting prizes and giveaways including EMC t-Shirts as well as booth presentations and other activities!

So, coming to Sharepoint Conference – come visit EMC, you won't miss us next week!! See you then!

What’s NEXT for Microsoft Windows and Hyper-V?

2011-09-21T23:30:00-07:00

Between last week's BUILD conference and this week's SNIA Storage Developer Conference, Microsoft made some significant announcements to the future versions of Microsoft Windows and Hyper-V (Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V 3.0 also referred to as Windows Next internally at Microsoft).

Looking at Windows, they have modified the UI again (I can already hear people saying "just when I figured out where everything is…") this time making it more like the Windows 7 phone OS which means it will be touch enabled, use the tile layout currently available with the phone OS and operate more like a tablet. They also added significantly more Powershell commands, more integration opportunities, a Microsoft App Store and an increased focus on cloud technologies through networking and scalability. As one person told me from the BUILD conference, "there was non-stop cheering from the developer community".

The most significant change in my opinion to Hyper-V 3.0 (and there will be A LOT) is the ability to run Hyper-V over CIFS or a networking protocol (technically SMB 2.2). This isn't new to the virtualization world as VMware has had support for the file-based NFS protocol for years as has XenServer which supports both CIFS and NFS. Why the wait for Microsoft? It likely had to do with performance and scalability concerns which Microsoft has now addressed. This means customers will be able to deploy Hyper-V VMs using NAS in addition to SAN protocols like Fibre Channel, iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE). This should reduce the complexity of storage management with Hyper-V for some customers and will certainly reduce the cost associated with deploying Hyper-V VMs.

Other impressive changes planned in Hyper-V 3.0? Windows Server 8 will support up to 160 processors, processor cores or threads as well as up to 2TB of memory. With the increase in hardware performance, Hyper-V will also scale up with support for up to 32 virtual CPUs and 512GB of memory (a significant increase over the current limitation of 4 virtual CPUs and 8GB of memory). They will also now support up to 16TB for virtual hard drives. Hyper-V clusters will also be able to support up to 63 nodes and 4000 VMs in a cluster! Wow.

Other major changes include a new virtual switch for networking and new disaster recovery to expand how an administrator can protect Hyper-V virtual machines. Both features include APIs to allow partners to plug-in and add features to monitor and manage network traffic between VMs as well as simplify disaster recovery to easily replicate VMs between servers and storage (more on these later).

Add all of this along with the upcoming changes to System Center 2012 and Microsoft has greatly improved their private cloud, virtualization and management strategy.

So what's that sound behind you VMware? Don't look now but it's Microsoft quickly catching up to you!

Everything Microsoft at EMC

2011-09-18T23:00:00-07:00

Last week we launched the Everything Microsoft at EMC Community, an online virtual community designed to easily share information and collaborate between customers, partners and EMC employees. The Everything Microsoft at EMC Community is a central repository for EMC solutions, demos, marketing collateral, software downloads, updates on the EMC Microsoft Alliance, EMC best practices, blogs, discussions and other relevant information.

As EMC continues to deliver solutions with key application partners to support agile and flexible business operations, the intent is that this community will serve as the foundation for Everything Microsoft at EMC and will be the authoritative location for all things EMC and Microsoft.

Things you can expect to find on the community includes:

Discussions: Threaded, searchable and archived conversations between and among EMC's Microsoft focused professionals, customers and partners. EMC Subject Matter Experts monitor this site and are ready to answer your questions or engage in a conversation about any topic!
Documents: There are close to 100 documents already at launch including items such as Best Practice white papers, Proven Solutions, Reference Architectures, documents created with EMC partners, marketing information and so much more! Be sure to check out the list of Must Have Documents!
Blogs: Every member of the community can have a blog of their own and there can be community blogs as well. We also list our social media activity including EMC blog sites and twitter accounts involving Microsoft technologies.
Poll: Any member can create a poll, which all members can then vote on. This creates a dynamic, open decision making process.
Demos: A repository for demos of EMC technology with application technical context, providing EMC professionals, customers and partners with the ability to view EMC technology in action.

Finding information is easy as you can easily search by topics or use the Popular Tags box on the community home page to select a topic to learn more about.

To join us on this new EMC community, visit the EMC Community Network (ECN) registration page, and supply your login information. Then fill out your online profile.

We look forward to hearing from you and seeing you in the Community!