… Most customers can’t afford that status quo, where the majority of their expenditures go into keeping the lights on versus innovation.  It really comes down to the CIO’s desire to enable their business strategy rather than a cost center. …

This is how Cisco’s John Chambers portrayed today’s VCE announcement during the joint webcast with EMC’s Joe Tucci and VMware’s Paul Maritz.  What Chambers was describing was the Private Cloud.  While only time will tell if VCE will be the tipping point of Private Clouds, today’s announcement was clearing laying out a destination for IT over the next few years.

What is VCE?

Industry Leaders at VMware vSphere Launch

Rather than repeating all the details that have been provided elsewhere, the cliff notes summary is that VCE is a partnership between Cisco, EMC, and VMware.  By combining Cisco UCS server hardware and networking with EMC storage and management VCE creates a certified and supported data center solution to enable turnkey virtualized data centers running VMware vSphere on Cisco and EMC hardware components.  Along with the partnership, a new corporate entity called Acadia was announced to provide solution services under a separate entity from the primary stake holders of Cisco and EMC with participation from Intel and VMware.

Here is a list of others talking in more detail about VCE Coalition (I’ll try to update this over the next few days as well):

• For high level details of VCE, see the press releases of Cisco, EMC, and VMware.
• EMC’s Chuck Hollis has a set of blog postings Announcing the VCE Coalition, Introducing PrivateCloud.com, Introducing Acadia, and talking about what’s Behind the vBlock.
• EMC’s Chad Sakac has an insider’s view of the Virtual Compute Environment along with individual posts about each of the 4 parts of the announcement (toward the end of his post).
• Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) released a company brief on how Cisco, EMC and VMware to Accelerate Large Scale Virtualization Deployments.
• A different view of the announcement from the application development side of IT on Capgemini’s CTO Blog.
• The Register reviews today’s announcement and discusses Inside Acadia.
  
• NetApp’s CMO Jay Kidd provides his take on the Importance of Being Open in response to the VCE announcement.  (gotta love the competitive jabs and punches in the blog-o-sphere!)
  

All of this private cloud chatter just a day after Gartner predicts cloud computing spend to take off.  Should be interesting to watch Cisco announce their Q1FY2010 earnings tomorrow…

Why Do I Think Enterprises Should Care about VCE?

Private clouds are a reality in the enterprises.  I have clients who are either mid-project of building a private cloud or deep in the architecture and planning for their private clouds.  The simple reason being that they know they need a fully virtualized, self service environment to respond to their internal business customer’s needs.  The stories of business groups being told it would take a year or more to deploy their new application environments are true.  Some times this is due to lack of data center space or capacity (that seems to be the pandemic spreading quicker than swine flu), sometimes due to lack of human resources in today’s recession recovering economy, sometimes a combination of both.

Virtualization is the key to the data center capacity pandemic facing many enterprises.  But just layering virtualization on top of the existing data center is like providing some Tamiflu to someone who is sick with the flu.  It may help them get better over time, but not over night.  There are still data center designs which don’t take into consideration the ramifications of virtualization.  I have clients who have plenty of extra floor space in their data center, but not enough power, or backup generator capacity, or floors that aren’t strong enough to support a storage array needed to fill the empty space with virtual computing infrastructure.

On top of that, virtualization with the legacy process in place don’t allow IT to respond to customers needs at the speed of business.  This is where private clouds with automated management and self-service provisioning capability come into play.  Take that low hanging visualization fruit and let the users feed themselves.  Providing internet cloud capabilities in the enterprise data center for web apps and basic services is just the start.  Once you start providing that self service capability for enterprise applications as well, now you’ve got something.

What I see VCE providing is the same building block approach that Amazon, Google, and Yahoo have each individually custom built for their own data centers, but in a packaged, tested, and supported format from trusted infrastructure vendors.  Now any Enterprise, big or small, has the ability to run their data center in an automated fashion using virtualization and hardware solutions purpose built for the task.  Enterprises are risk adverse in their IT departments, so having Cisco, EMC, and VMware standing behind the solution with a independent services and support group in Acadia, will help ease concerns.  And with the enterprise sales forces of both Cisco and EMC selling VCE solutions, access into the key decisions makers in Enterprises is there.

It’s easy in the early days of a partnership like this to show how all of this is nothing new, and in many ways true statements.  So the additional details that come out over the new few quarters will be important.  And the amount of traction that VCE has over that same time still needs to be seen.  But I see the foundation that is presented in VCE, as well as the potential that is there for the near future, as helping many enterprises solve the data center challenges facing them today as well as help enterprises break through that 30% virtualization barrier.

And What Impact Do I See to VMware?

I have seen various discussion today debating whether the VCE coalition is a good or bad thing for VMware.  Scott Lowe, for example, raised some interesting questions on the impact of VCE on VMware which sprouted some interesting discussions.  But over all, today’s VCE announcement was largely Cisco and EMC with support from VMware.  VMware’s partnerships with other hardware vendor’s and solution providers are still in full force.  If down the road the VCE coalition starts to show high numbers of VMware enableed servers shipped than other hardware vendors, there is nothing that prevents those other vendors form creating similar partnerships that include VMware.

In the end, it comes down to the same thing as always…market demand.  If the enterprise customers demand a fully integrated virtual data center solution, then more and more of the enterprise vendors will need to start offering them to remain competitive. As The Register pointed out, right now it’s a two vendor story: VCE and HP…and both include VMware.

And will VCE/Acadia be the tipping point for Private Clouds?  We’ll have to look back in a few years and find out.  But between now and then we’re all in for an interesting ride in IT-land.

This morning a little birdie pointed me to an HP Reference Architecture document that is hot off the press: HP BladeSystem Reference Architecture: HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 and VMware vSphere 4.0 which appears to be the vSphere 4.0 update to the previous reference architecture HP produced for VI3.  If you’re running or architecting vSphere deployments with HP blade systems (as a number of my clients are), you should check out this doc.

For the better part of the past two weeks I have been living the life of Employee Owned IT and dealing with the worst case scenarios.  For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, this is essentially where the employee owns their laptop and uses it for work.  The ultimate version of this concept is the employer providing a yearly stipend for purchasing any laptop or computer that the employee wants (usually meeting a minimum performance requirement) and then providing the employee a virtual desktop for all their corporate work.  The theory is that the employee is happy because they get the laptop they want, can (officially) use it for personal work, and they keep the laptop when they leave the company.  The employer is happy because they have shifted money on their books away from owning depreciating assets, saved money overall on the management of their physical client computers, and have a more secure and controlled corporate client computing environment that is compartmentalized using virtualization and primarily contained within their data center.

I have been living this life as a self-driven experiment.  Working on my personal MacBook Pro–which has all my personal software and utilities I use daily for both work and extra curricular activities (photography)–and running a corporate VM with all my official corporate software installed and VPN connectivity.  Everything has been working wonderfully…until the SuperDrive in my MacBook Pro suddenly decided it didn’t want to burn CDs/DVDs anymore. I had purchased the Apple Care protection plan with my laptop, so all I needed to do was take the MBP into the nearest Apple store, have them run a test to verify that the SuperDrive was kaput, and have them replace it.

All went according to plan up till the replace it part.  I needed to leave my computer there for 1-3 days.

1 to 3 days?  This is my production machine!  The Genius helping me at the Genius bar didn’t seem to understand what that meant.  I needed this computer to do my daily work.  Not just that, but could I trust them to have my personal computer, personal information, web browser passwords, and all for 1 to 3 days?

Welcome to the reality of EOIT.  A few of the hurdles that it faces:

• Hardware Failure & Repair:  The risks and abuses of some private IT repair shops are well documented by news investigations. So how does an employer embarking on EOIT protect themselves and their employees in these hardware failure situations?  Do they require that computers be purchased from only national distribution channels?  Are these the hardware manufacturers with retail stores so the employee can always physically take their computer to some expert for help or repairs?  How does the employer know the quality of the help or repairs?  Do they even care once they have pushed the expense of this off on the employee?
  • There is a bigger change in the dynamics of the computer sales model here as well.  If the retail store outlet is a requirement, now any retailer without store fronts is at a disadvantage.  The companies that have technology centric store fronts now become lucrative partners (i.e., RadioShack, Cell Phone companies).  Then the battle moves into the classic consumer product sales challenges of shelf placement, kiosks, and the like.  If this type of change were to occur, say goodbye to the enterprise client hardware sales person…I already know that the most forward looking of these sales people think they are seeing the end of their career runway because of the previously describe scenario.

• Information Security: In the EOIT scenario, the employer’s data should be secure because it is living in a protected VM.  A VM that is most likely living only in the data center and access remotely by the employee.  Or, for select power or mobile employees, living on their laptop but encrypted and password protected and could easily be moved to a an external hard drive before taking the computer in for repairs.  But what about the employees personal information?  Should the employer even care?  Ideally, wouldn’t it be great if the employee could have the same protections and ease of migration for their personal computing environment as they have for their corporate computing environment?  This is the goal of bare metal client hypervisors, like the announced VMware CVP.  One could copy their personal VM off to the same USB hard drive and copy a VM containing a fresh install of an OS to their laptop hard drive.  Now if the IT repair technician starts snooping around the computer, there is nothing there for them to find.

These are the two hurdles that I faces personally with my EOIT experience.  There are a few more that employeers face, like:

• calculating the actual cost savings that a company could achieve through EOIT
• determining all the possible risk scenarios that a company needs to account for with EOIT and deciding which ones they need to take on and which they are willing to push on to the employee.

My solution to the two hurdles mentioned above was rather unique to my situation.  First, I have a second MBP that I could use while my production system was in the shop.  Second, I was already planning to upgrade the internal hard drive in my laptop and had the new hard drive in hand.  So I was able to clone my personal laptop’s hard drive to the new, larger, hard drive; reformat the internal hard drive; and install a new installation of the OS.  So when I handed my personal laptop over to the Apple Store, there was no personal data on it at all and I could keep working by booting my second MBP off of the cloned hard drive.

Unfortunately for the EOIT vision, this was a very unique situation and I had the technical knowledge to achieve the work around.  For the EOIT vision to become a wide spread reality, these worst case scenarios need to be easily handled by the common employee, with general computer knowledge, through a simple process that includes only a few clicks of the mouse.  I think that technically we are much closer to this reality that most people realize.

However, the biggest hurdle still exists…does Employee Owned IT drive substantial cost savings and will enterprises embrace it?

I’m a bit delayed with this edition of the Virtualization Round Up due to some challenges with upgrading my MacBook Pro over the weekend (don’t you just love unforeseen production outages!  And over a weekend no less…there’s a couple of blog posts coming out of this…).  Slightly delayed, but just still within the best when consumed by date, here’s the latest super-sized Round Up:

VMware Specific Links

• New Releases
  • Workstation 7 RC was recently released.  No, this is not the official release, but an early version that you can test and play with…
  • Fusion 2.0.6 was recently released.  A maintenance upgrade that is free for all Fusion 1.x and 2.x users.
  • It was announced today that Fusion 3.0 will be available on October 27th, pre-orders are currently being taken.
  • SRM 4.0 was released today.  This version of SRM works with vSphere 4.0 and NFS support.  Make sure you check the SA compatibly matrix to make sure your storage has an adapter available.  Some of the EMC platforms are currently not on the list…
  • While not an official VMware product, View Open Client 4.0 Beta 1 was recently released. (now that my Mac is working again, maybe I should try installing it…)
• Ricky El-Qasem of VirtualizePlanet recently release his vSphere Plugin Wizard which makes it easy to embed a website or web portal into vCenter.
• Dell and VMware recently announced a broadened partnership on the Desktop front in which Dell will offer VMware View as an option for its Flexible Computing solutions.
• Dave Lawrence has a great post out discussing getting more advanced with View.  A few more advance items you can can configure with View.
• Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4 and ESX 4.0 is a new guide available on the communities site.
• As I’ve indicated before, I think Fault Tolerance is one of the key new features within vSphere. In some recent testing that Todd Muirhead did he showed how even with using a 1vCPU Exchange VM,  FT is a real value added feature that shouldn’t be overlooked.  You may also want to check out Eric Siebert’s Master’s Guide to VMware Fault Tolerance for all the FT details.
• Are you a VMware shop that would love to run Oracle virtualized but hesitate due to support statement confusions?  Then you’ll find Oracle on VMware posts at Virtual Geek (including part II) worth the read.  The longer you’re in the industry the more you have to laugh at the games…
• VMsafe is another key new aspect of vSphere which I have been disappointed to see hasn’t taken off faster.  Every View client of mine has been beating up their security vendors on VMsafe for the past few months.  So, What is happening with VMsafe?
• I updated the VMware Network Port list with a link to an interested graphical representation of this information that another colleague of mine here at VMware created.
• An interesting post by Maish Saidel-Keesing & discussion about using memory over commit made me chuckle a bit as I remember ever time I heard a client proud about how they are running their systems memory at the high rate of 50% utilized.
• And those who worry about over committing memory better buckle their seats when they see what the future holds, as Intel and VMware discussed some of the new memory and power management technologies they are working on.
• James Urquhart hits the nail on the head with his recent posts Cloud computing and the big rethink: Part 1 and Part 2.  His thinking dovetails what Paul Maritz has been saying since before the launch of vSphere.  With virtualization creating a huge mainframe, do you need all the bloat of traditional OS?  A application specific hosting container running as the “VM” starts making a lot of sense…oh yeah, and VMware bought SpringSource…
• A client recently asked for help in identifying which physical NIC his VM was using for troubleshooting, and luck would have it the VMware Networking Blog just posted a tip for doing this with vSphere.  If anyone knows an equivalent method for VI3, please post in the comments!
• I found this recent post Comparing VMware’s Cloud to Amazon S3 comical in it’s mis-understandings.  VMware doesn’t host their own cloud (at least not commercially for others to use).  They make the software that allows others to create their own cloud.  vCloud is just a marketing term to indicate partners who are building upon the VMware vSphere platform.
• As I have a number of clients planning large P2V conversions, Eric Siebert’s article on Removing old hardware after a P2V conversion is very timely.

General Virtualization & Cloud Links

• I found it interesting that Adobe is offering a cloud service for Flash, while this is essentially a CDN for Flash applications, it is another example of how far the cloud front as spread.  As Matt Mullenweg recently tweeted, has Cloud jumped the shark?  Maybe in marketing aspects…
• Ron Oglesby from Dell shares some great research around the question of is there an optimal adoption curve for server virtualization? While ever IT shop can argue how the adoption curve methodology doesn’t work for their organization, this is an important topic that all users of virtualization have to be asking themselves as dragging of feet with virtualization in today’s economy has the hardest of business impacts.

Links make the web go round.  And if someone links to something I wrote, it is usually the best indicator that they appreciate it.  One of the things that I have been doing for a few years now on my photography blog is to compile the top 20 sites who have referred traffic to me and provide a ranked list with links back.  A way of recognizing and saying thank you to those who sent traffic my way.  I think it is time to do the same thing here at the labs.

So, here is the first quarterly installment of quarterly links of thanks. Please take a moment to visit these other wonderful sites.  Thanks for the support!

latoga labs Top Referring Sites from 2009 Q3

1. vreference.com
2. vmworld.com
3. vmware.com
4. blogs.vmware.com
5. malaysiavm.com
6. communities.vmware.com
7. hypervizor.com
8. vmug.dk
9. yellow-bricks.com
10. raid-x.com
11. dailyhypervisor.com
12. vmug.nl
13. vsphere-land.com
14. boche.net
15. punchingclouds.com
16. get-admin.com
17. vmvisor.com
18. blog.scottlowe.org
19. conrey.org
20. cloudcamp.com

I’ll do this quarterly since that creates a nice interval for traffic generation and it means I only have to do the work to generate this four times per year…

Note: These stats were collected by Google Analytics. Any referral sites that are obvious web based email services, IP addresses, social networks, or RSS feed scrapers were removed.

Over 12,500 people descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center at the end of August for VMworld 2009.  Out of those masses, twelve took me up on my Portrait Project offer.  This diverse group included VMware vExperts, IT Strategists, and VMware Administrators from around the world.  Below, listed in alphabetic order, is one of the portraits from each of those individuals with a bit of information about them.  Most have an online presence focused on virtualization, so make sure you click through on their photo to visit their site (most provided one).

Thanks to everyone who participated!  What’s amazing, is that if you look at this set of photos you would never guess that they were all take within the same two block area of Moscone Center in San Francisco.  In retrospect, not sure if I would be able to do more than twelve of these during something as hectic VMworld.  We’ll have to see what next year brings…

Jason Boche, Lakeville, Minnesota

Peter van den Bosch, Gouda, the Netherlands

Dave Convery, Philadelphia Area

Jim Jones, St. Marys, Kansas

Ken Jorgensen, Ontario, Canada

Shawn Logan, Alberta, Canada

Vlad Nagornyi, Tucsan, Arizona

Stan Novinsky, Laurel, Maryland

Ron Porter

Bill Morton, Des Moines, Iowa

Seun Solanke, Houston, Texas

Andrew Storrs, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Update: As an added bonus, I even got a portrait of myself thanks to one of the participants!

Your Host: Greg A. Lato, San Francisco Bay Area, Califronia

Well, it’s been two weeks since the end of VMworld, and how the time has flown.  Everyone should have seen plenty of write ups on VMworld by now (so I won’t bother) and the labs and sessions are now available at the VMworld site.   Based upon comments I saw twittering about online, it appears that some people didn’t realize that the data center built at VMworld was actually in use for all the hands on labs.  VM /Etc did a great interview with the Operations Team manager for the VMworld Data Center, to provide more of the back story on that.

And so, back to the regular roundup from the past few weeks, the usual collection of things that caught my attention recently for this reason or that.  Thanks goes out to all my colleagues and my twitter network for leading me to many of these gems!

VMware Specific Links

• New Releases
  • VMware View Manager 3.1.2 was release don Sept/04 (Release Notes)
  • VMware Data Recovery 1.0.2 was released on Sept/08 (Release Notes)
  • VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager 1.0.2 was release on Sept/10 (Release Notes)
• This is not new information, but I finally had a chance to watch the Burton Group’s Debating Hypervisor Performance session from their recent Catalyst Conference.  I thought it was great to actually see VMware and Citrix stand side by side and have the performance debate in person (versus the usual venue of blog posts).  40min video makes for a perfect lunchtime edutainment.
• Looking for a VMWare View Open Client for OSX?  Ron Peters has worked to port the linux open client to run on the Mac.
• As most VMware users should now be aware, the service console-less ESXi is the stated architecture for the future.  But in the meantime a document details Changes to the ESX Service Console for ESX 4.0 has been posted tot he Communities site.  Find out what’s new, different, and incompatible between ESX 3.5 and 4.0 service console.
• Looking to reduce data center power/cooling costs?  Have you looked at DPM?  There is a new whitepaper out entitled VMware Distributed Power Management: Concepts and Usage.  One of my clients just started evaluating DPM to power off servers during low demand times with huge potential for cost savings for them.

General Virtualization Links

• EMC’s Chuck Hollis recently wrote about Chargeback vs Pricing where he discussed how Pricing can be an effective tool to force consumers to change their consumption behaviors.  I had this general discussion this week with two clients on the path to private clouds; they are interested in VMware Chargeback so they could  start exposing consumption to their virtualization users even if there is no price associated with it…just to get the IT users to start realizing what they are consuming.  IT organization who are still trying to just drive users off of physicals onto VMs can use Chuck’s advice to drive this change of behavior through pricing.
• Cloudy days ahead:  2 In 3 IT Managers Have Cloud Funding, according to a recent survey.  This jives with my experience as 66% of my clients are actively moving forward with private clouds and the expectation of a federate cloud.
• Citrix announced plans to evolve Xen into the Xen Cloud Platform.
• In what appears to be a move into the Cloud space, Tibco Acquires DataSynapse. While I’m sure some of the folks I know at DataSynapse are happy about this, I haven’t had a chance to get their take on this acquisition yet.
• Floyd Strimling has an interesting view of the the newest battle between IT Giants, Why Cisco should fear HP.

With the holiday weekend quickly following last week’s VMworld it seems like the show was longer than just a few days ago.  I wanted to thank all 12 of the participants in my VMworld 2009 Portrait Project for their eagerness to participate.  I also want to thank everyone for their patience with the timing of getting their photos.  With the holiday weekend also being my Anniversary I had to dedicate most of the weekend to the Mrs!

Participants can expect an email within the next day or two with a link to their private galleries of photos.

Those who missed the fun, stay tuned for next year and we’ll see if my schedule will allow for this again.

San Francisco From Above

I know this is a bit last minute, but I finally found some time in my schedule to put together a few vPhotwalks for those photographers who are attending VMworld 2009 in San Francisco next week.  The latoga photo walks San Francisco, are photowalks that start at Moscone Center and take you along routes with plenty of San Francisco landmarks to help you practice your photography.

Since my schedule won’t allow me to lead any photowalks prior to or during the show, I turned these into vPhotowalks by providing you a Google Maps file that will allow you to do the photowalk solo or with a small group of visitors.

Enjoy!

On the final march to VMworld 2009, this will be the last roundup until after Labor Day.

VMware Specific Links

• First, some VMWorld 2009 Stuff
  • VMworld 2009 Unofficial Party List
  • Thanks to Chad Sakac, here’s an AWESOME peek behind the scenes of getting hardware ready for VMworld 2009
• After more conversations last week with clients about their private cloud plans (including bursting out to external cloud providers), I wanted to share the list of VMware Ready vCloud Service Providers.  I expect this list to grow post VMworld…
• A recent patch was released for vCenter Server 4.0 which fixes an issue where HA Cluster failover might not work if the servers were configured with certain IPs.  Full details are available in the Knowledge Base Article.
• Some more SpringSource centric posts
  • SpringSource announced Cloud Foundry, their Enterprise Java Cloud.  The VMware price tag for SpringSource is looking a bit more reasonable all of a sudden.
  • VMware’s SpringSource Acquisition: More Than Meets the Eye?
  • With SpringSource Buy, VMware Constructs Cloud Platform
• When a client asked me about running Documentum eRoom solution in a VM recently I found this great article about how EMC is doing that and Saved $1.5 Million in the process.
• The Vroom blog has a great posting about VMware Fault Tolerance Performance including a link to a FT architecture and performance whitepaper.
• Scott Drummonds recent community post Four Things You Should Know About ESX 4’s Scheduler helps to answer the common question of how man vCPUs to give a VM (as well as a few other questions…).

General Virtualization Links

• With 1 In 3 Developers Working On Private Cloud Apps, almost 50% of developers expect to be working on cloud applications within a year and think that Java is the best language for developing in the cloud.
• When talking about cloud applications, the business model of these applications can come into discussion (with the Free usually being mentioned at some point).  That’s why I found this simple formula to gauge a freemium model’s success so interesting.
• Security Showdown: Cloud Computing vs. On-Premise IT is an interesting podcast discussion actually discusses the private cloud between the lines.
• EMC’s Chuck Hollis talks about how he’s seeing more enterprises wanting to get going now on private clouds by building A Starter Private Cloud For IT.
• After seeing a few pallets of UCS systems being delivered to a client of mine last week, I found Steve Chamber’s post about The stars are aligning: VMware, Cisco and ESG rather timely and right on target with regards to the higher level value UCS delivers to the CIO’s office. “Make IT simple stupid” is a mantra that we should all live by.

Recently I have been wondering if there may be more ways to cross the streams between my day job and my photographic passion. This originally started with me photographing the vSphere launch event back in April.  Recently I come upon a way to extend this to VMworld 2009 while also engaging more directly with my readers.

On Friday I was walking from the San Francisco VMware office to the the garage where I parked my car and ended up walking past the Moscone Center.  As I walked by my mind was in a photography mode and I started noticing how many great locations there are at Moscone for taking portrait photos (something I have been working on lately with my photography, including location lighting techniques).  And guess what, there will be thousands of people coming here for VMworld 2009.  Perhaps there might be a few people who either need or would like to have a new portrait photo taken in this great location?  Like some virtualization  bloggers who haven’t put a photo up on their sites yet to better connect with their readers.  Or some of the social media users who would like to update their online avatar.  Maybe just some attendees who are just looking for a different kind of memorabilia from VMworld.

Bam! My VMworld 2009 Portrait Project was born.

The goal of the project: to provide 15 different VMworld attendees (can also include spouses/significant others) each with two on location portrait photos taken around Moscone Center.

There will be no charge for these portrait shoots, only cost will be your time.  Each participant in the project will be granted fully rights usage to their photographs and will be able to download a high resolution copies of their portraits shortly after VMworld from my photography website.   In exchange, I ask that you give me credit if you use it on a blog and that I retain the right to use these images for an portfolio of portraits (I would like to do a blog post after VMworld with all the portrait taken during this project.

Here is how it will work:

• Working around the show schedule and my VMworld schedule, I have identified a window of availability each day for doing the portrait photo session (see schedule below, I will cross off slots as they are reserved.)
• Each window will be 30 minutes and the actual portrait session shouldn’t take longer than 20 minutes.
• We can meet up at the designated spot each day at the start of your session and do the portrait session at one or two different locations of your choosing on the Moscone Center grounds.
• Reserve you’re spot by posting a comment on this post stating your preferred time slot.  Slots will get assigned in order of comments posted and I will followup with an email confirming you slot.  If you’re a blogger or social media users, please include a link to you site for reference.

Portrait Session Scheduled Start Times

• Meet at Front Entrance of Thirsty Bear, location of the Sunday Night Extravaganza.
  • Sunday, August 30th, 5:30pm
  • Sunday, August 30th, 6:00 pm
  • Sunday, August 30th, 6:30 pm
  • Sunday, August 30th, 7:00 pm
  • Sunday, August 30th, 7:30 pm

  (Update: Since the SNE is so popular and likely to be overbooked, anyone wanting more slots on Sunday let me know…)
  

• Meet at the Moscone Center entrance near the Show Registration booths.
  • Monday, August 31th, 3:00 pm
  • Monday, August 31th, 3:30 pm
  • Monday, August 31th, 4:00 pm
  • Monday, August 31th, 4:30 pm
  • Tuesday, September 1st, 5:30 pm
  • Tuesday, September 1st, 6:00 pm
  • Tuesday, September 1st, 6:30 pm
  • Wednesday, September 2nd, 5:30 pm
  • Wednesday, September 2nd, 6:00 pm
  • Thursday, September 3rd, 2:00pm
  • Thursday, September 3rd, 2:30pm
  • Thursday, September 3rd, 3:00pm
  • Thursday, September 3rd, 3:30pm
    

Yes, there are more than 15 slots listed above to provide some flexibility.

I’m excited about this stream crossing project and look forward to providing those who participate with a unique VMworld 2009 memento.

Please Note:  After the photo shoot, time is required to process the photos to achieve maximum quality.  Due to my VMworld Schedule and commuting needs during the show, I won’t be able to provide photos until after the show.  Most likely this won’t be until after September 8th as Labor Day weekend is my anniversary (you’ll have to be patient or else my wife might prevent you from ever getting your photos!  JK    )

The reservation window is open….please help me meet my project goals by spreading the word about this project!  Even if you don’t participate, I’ll see you around the show…I’ll be the one lugging the orange and tan backpack around with my camera out…

photo by alandberning

It’s amazing how quickly the vacation effect can wear off you.  It’s been a few week since the last roundup and even thought I was on vacation for one of those weeks, there are a number of items that I had collected and wanted to share.  The usual mix of something for everyone…

VMware Specific Links

• VMworld 2009 is almost upon us.  I hope you have registered and booked your hotels by now!  If you haven’t registered, remember that you can use VMware Consulting and Training Credits to purchase your show access.  Hotels you’re on your own as the VMworld reserved blocks have now expired.If you’re attending VMworld and are a reader, let me know! I’ll be there most days and would love to meetup at Moscone.
• A joint white paper was released recently about running View on UCS with V-Max.  Internal tests showed 160 desktops running on a single half-width UCS blade (that’s 20 desktops per core!).  And these tests were for heavy use knowledge worker desktops!
• A while back, EMC’s Chuck Hollis had a great post on Why Oracle Doesn’t Like VMware.  Regardless of Oracle’s feelings, VMware customers are running Oracle in VMs on VMware (I have clients doing it today).  Even the most stubborn vendor will listen to what their customers want…even if it is only behind closed doors and with lawyers waving NDAs.)
• Chris Wolf’s article about SpringSource: VMware’s well-timed Acquisition is a great summary of the longer term strategy behind this acquisition.  (make sure to follow those links in this article)
• VMware – The Next Great Platform Company? is an interesting view of VMware from someone who experienced Paul Maritz and Todd Nielson working together in the past.
• Duncan Epping had a great post about one of the nuisances of HA where VM could be down and HA not restarting them. Since every client of mine turns on HA by default, every VMW admin should read and understand this.
  • Speaking of HA, have you seen this KB Article regarding ESX host settings for environments with up to 80 virtual machines per host in a VMware HA cluster?
• In a similar thread, Fault Tolerance is still raising questions form my clients, especially the hardware requirements.  There is a great KB article that talks about processors and guest operating systems that support VMware Fault Tolerance.
  • And here is a great white paper talking about VMware vSphere 4 Fault Tolerance: Architecture and Performance
• Techhead has started a list of VMware Tools that will be handy to keep in your vToolbox.
• vSphere Quick Start Guide, the book you’ll want on your gift list this VMworld! (not available yet, but stay tuned)

General Virtualization Links

• If you need an alternative way to jack the CPU load in your test environment, check out Bouke Groenescheij’s CPUBusier and CPUBusiest (multi-threaded) tools.
• Having lived in the SOA world for a while, I appreciated this article about Private cloud formations rising, but remember SOA lessons.
• The cloud, brought to you by flash storage brings up great points on how we’ll be seeing new storage models appearing thanks to the cloud.
• The economics of 100% data center virtualization does a great job breaking down the numbers of thinking completely virtual.  As my recent poll somewhat confirmed, I think Garnet’s estimates are considerably low.

In case you didn’t notice from the change of tone in my tweets, I have been on vacation with the family for the past week.  Enjoying the scenic grandeur (and at times solitude) of the Pacific Northwest and taking a ton of photos with my new camera (1388 photos to be exact…and 5 movies…).

Today, I had the joy of the first day back on the job and dealing with the flood of emails, followups, and catching ups that is the price we pay for taking some time off and not reading emails.  Like that wasn’t enough, today VMware (my employer) had to go an announce that we were acquiring SpringSource (and add a few more items to my list to completely dissolve that post-vacation glow! ).

After a day dealing with my inbox and urgent items, I had to take some time out of the evening photo processing to read the Steve Herrod and Rod Johnson blog posts on the acquisition.  And provide a bit of a different viewpoint on this acquisition…fresh from vacation and not knowing anything more about this acquisition than what has been publicly stated by others (so safe from saying anything other than my opinion – see disclosures in the About latoga labs in the sidebar).

I’ve Been Through This Before

I’m not talking about my employer acquiring a company.  I’m talking about a closed source Company acquiring essentially an Open Source company.  Before joining VMware I used to work for IONA Technologies (sound familiar….think CORBA…Yes!  That IONA!).  I was there when IONA bought LogicBlaze.  What made this acquisition interesting (especially for me…being part of the enterprise sales team at IONA) was that we went from having 1 closed source product (ESB) to three products (all ESBs) which competed with each other.  And I was only allowed to sell one of them.

Executing a successful merger is not easy even when the companies are very well matched.  But it becomes even more difficult when they have conflicting core values (and revenue models) like closed source code development and open source code development.  In my most recent experience, the Iona/LogicBlaze merger didn’t work as well as it could have because the two sides of the house competed against each other and management turned a blind eye to it while they tried to figure out a revenue strategy post merger.  Funniest thing is that a lot of the core value propositions we were discussing with clients at IONA in that Enterprise sales team that I was part of, still hold true today.  Back then virtualization was a huge hidden value savings that I couldn’t tap into.  Not any more…

Regardless of the synergies that two companies can provide each other technology wise, there is not as much focus traditionally placed on the social aspect of merging two companies.  It is that social aspect (like the social aspect of introducing any new technology in a company) that will drive the speed and revenue value of the acquisition.  Having been through this before in a rather painful way, it is important to mention this fact.

Why VMware + SpringSource Makes Sense

The good news is that this conflicting personality issue shouldn’t be a problem with the VMware/SpringSource merger.  First, there is no competing technologies between the two vendors.  SpringSource allows VMware to access the higher level parts of IT (Applications and App Developers) while also working together to enable the Cloud Vision of vSphere.

Second, based upon what Rod Johnson indicated in his blog post, he will be heading up SpringSource as a separate unit within VMware following the VMware BU organization.  This should mean that SpringSource will get to work as they have been to support their existing community and customers in that classic open source way while working together with the other VMware BUs to add bigger picture value through the combination of SpringSource technologies with VMware’s.

Paul Maritz has indicated in the past the need to move up the value stack of IT and has used the term framework more than once during the vSphere launch.  The ability to leverage the virtualization foundation of vSphere with vApp and abstract away the applications from the operating systems with SpringSource’s various build-run-manage products not only provides a much more open application development environment to compete with Google and Amazon, but also provides an solid migration path for Enterprises to move to the Private Cloud with all their web based Java applications.  Image a world where Java App developers have the ability to integrate via the spring framework right into the virtualization based cloud where their apps will be tested/QA’d/run.  Regardless of weather…er…I mean whether…that cloud is an internal cloud or an external cloud.

I see some very clear and interesting developments on the horizon from this acquisition which I’ll try to disclose my opinion on in the future.  And, as is can be the case when you put a lot of very smart people together with solid management, I’m sure we’ll see some surprises as well.  From the looks of my LinkedIn network, I’ll also be re-united with some old colleagues as well!

Tomorrow will be an interesting day of conversations with my global clients to hear their take on things!

Last night I presented the following at the SDForum Cloud SIG in Palo Alto (you’ll have to bear with the animations that didn’t come through well on the online version..).

We had a great turnout considering we are in the middle of summer vacations.  Thanks to Dave, Dave Nielsen & Bernard Golden for coordinating and everyone for attending!  (Even thought I have my brand new camera waiting to be used, I completely forgot to take photos!  Luckily others did and I’ll update this post there photos once they have them online)

My goals for the presentation was to first help everyone understand that Virtualization lies at the heard of cloud computing. Second was to explain that private clouds are just the evolution of an enterprise’s existing virtualized data center (their internal cloud) with the flexibility to expand the private cloud to external cloud provider’s data centers if and when needed.  The key point of clarity here is that an enterprise’s data center could be referred to as both an internal cloud and a private cloud.  But, the cloud that federates the internal cloud with an external cloud should always referred to as a private cloud. And my third goal was to detail the VMware components that go into creating a private cloud.

I was glad to see that everyone mostly understood that an enterprise’s cloud needs are not the same as a internet application’s cloud needs.  Enterprise’s have to deal with legacy applications that can’t or don’t need to be re-written to become fully cloud aware.  And with a vCloud enabled private cloud they don’t have to be.  But, if you have an application that you want to be cloud aware that flexibility is there.  Enterprises also have demands that require features like HA and Fault Tolerance and understand that adding those features may increase overall cost due to technical requirements these features require.

There will be a lot of additional cloud related announcements in the march up to VMworld 2009.  (Dave did a good job of trying to get a scoop on some…)  All the attendees showed great patience with my answers of coming soon with regards to more details.  And today they get a small reward with the Rackspace announcement: Rackspace Private Cloud leverages VMware to Extend Enterprise Computing on Demand.

If you’re attending VMworld 2009 in San Francisco in a few weeks, I included a list of a few sessions that help build on the overview that my presentation gives:

• DE-03 – Introduction to vCloud APIs
• TA3326 – Building an Internal Cloud-the Journey and the Details
• TA3901 – Security and the Cloud
• TA4100 – Internal Clouds: Customer perspective and implementations
• TA4101 – Buying the Cloud: Customer perspective and considerations on what you should send to an external cloud
• TA4103 – Engineering the Cloud-The Future of Cloud
• TA4102 – Unveiling New Cloud Technologies
• VM2706 – Improved cloud interoperability using virtualization management standards

There are many other cloud related sessions during VMworld, so make sure you check the schedule.  And Register early! Last year I had clients who registered too close to the show and couldn’t get into a number of the sessions they wanted.  Some are hands on labs and there are only so many VMs to go around…

And now, some links based upon some of the questions that were asked and items that I promised:

• My Fault Tolerance: Diamond in the Rough with links to additional FT resources
• VMotion between Data Centers—a VMware and Cisco Proof of Concept (check out VMworld session TA3105 – Long Distance/Data Center VMotion and watch for other announcements on this…)
• For those preparing for their vSphere VCP exam and have VI3 knowledge, checkout the VMware vSphere: What’s New [V4] class.
  

Photo by Stuart Herbert

A bit last minute, but for those in the Bay Area, I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow (Tuesday, 7/28) at SDForum’s Cloud Services SIG on the Convergence of Private Clouds.  If you’re in the area and available, join the event…

I’ll try to post the presentation here after the event.

photo by alandberning

Another few weeks have gone by and my list of Virtualization links have hit critical mass, time to thin the herd.  Lots of product releases from VMware and Private Cloud articles (just in time for my upcoming talk on the Convergence of Private Clouds).  Forgive the one day late posting…was too busy last night enjoying sunset from 2000 foot high ridge near my house–and too tired afterward–to post this yesterday.

VMware Specific Links

• The last two weeks saw a lot of product release come from VMware:
  • View 3.1.1 was released recently, check out the release notes for details.  This update is highly recommended for View users…
  • vCenter Server 2.5 U5 was release recently as well, check out the release notes for details.
  • vCenter Lab Manager 4.0 was released.  This version is compatible with vSphere 4.0, the release notes contain all the other goodness in the latest version.
  • vCenter Chargeback 1.0 was released to market.  (I have a number of clients looking at this just to provide viability to their end users on resource consumption, even if they don’t have the finance model in place to actually charge back for that use.  Social engineering goes a long way…)
  • vCenter AppSpeed 1.0 was also released to market.  Check out this great 1st Look Video from HyperViZor
• Using a Private Cloud to Improve Exchange Performance – great article from testing Dell did around running a private Exchange cloud in their lab.
• vSphere in a Box: A “Virtual Private Cloud” Blueprint – while not officially supported by VMware, running nested VMs is a great way to build out your lab…and here’s your blueprint thanks to HyperViZor.
• Exchange Performs Well Using Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS on vSphere – interesting storage performance numbers highlighted here from recent whitepaper (linked to in article).
• Memory Performance Chart Metrics in the vSphere Client – overview of Memory performance stats now available in VIC…err, I mean vSC (doesn’t quite roll of the tongue as well…)
• VMware’s Two Two Important Cloud Beta’s – review of vCloud beta releases.

General Virtualization Links

• Business Imperative for Virtual Private Cloud Services – from the Cisco Service Provider blog.
• Cloud Standards Coordination Wiki Site – great portal attempting to document all the work around defining standards for the cloud.
• Microsoft opened Linux-driver code after ‘violating’ GPL – interesting back story on Microsoft’s submission of their Linux drivers to the Linux community.
• Is A Private Cloud Worthwhile? – I agree that we can stop trying to define the cloud and get working on preparing for or building them.  The future industry leaders are using the recession to innovate in this area.  Are you?
• HOWTO: Download, Install and License EMC PowerPath/VE – A great video how-to from Chad Sakac.  Did you know that EMC’s PowerPath can also work with non-EMC storage?  I learned this recently from one of my clients…while there is a limited list of 3rd party storage that works this is still very cool stuff!
  

There was an interesting discussion today amongst some colleagues of mine.  What is the industry average for the percent of corporate computing workloads that are virtualized?  According to Gartner back in February, the estimated global virtualization penetration is expected to hit 20% in 2009 (it was 12% in 2008).

Of course the devil is always in the details.  First, you have to correctly calculate your percentage virtualized.  Second, are you counting all servers across your entire company or just those in your department? (i.e., Production IT, a Dev/Test group)

When I look at my client base, there are certain departments that are well above 20% virtualized.  But, some of them are less than 20% virtualized company wide (assuming they even know how many servers they have across the entire company, those crafty buggers get good at hiding under desks…).

I thought it would be fun to run a highly un-scientific poll across my readers.  How virtualized is your computing environment?  To make it interesting, I’m going to break this down into two questions:

First:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

(Consider “Your Department” to be the group that you work for and have the most knowledge about)

Second:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Please vote in both polls and spread the word about this post, the more who vote, the more interesting the results will be…

One of the recurring requests I hear from my clients is for a list or diagram showing the network ports that are used by the various VMware products and components.  Thanks to some of my VMware Professional Service Colleagues for creating and allowing me to share with you the VMware Network Port List.  I’ll keep this under the VMW Launchpad section of the blog and try to update it as time permits.

Short list this week (I think many people are still on extended vacations), but one time sensitive item I wanted to let everyone know about…

VMware Specific Links

• Run it with VMware! Video Contents – get crackin’, deadline is July 20th for your chance to win $5000 cash grand prize!
• Scalability Study for Deploying VMware View on Cisco UCS and EMC V-Max Systems – from our friends at Cisco
• Virtual Iron Safe Passage Promotion – Oracle may be discontinuing development of Virtual Iron, but VMware is there to help Virtual Iron customers save their virtualization efforts (for a limited time)
• VMware vSphere 4: Exchange Server on NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel (pdf) – even if you’re not interested in virtualizing exchange, this is a great comparison of different storage protocol performance in vSphere 4.
• First vSphere Patches Released by VMware – via Jason Boche
• vSphere Client on Mac OS X - while this is not a native vSphere client on Mac OS X, it is an alternate way (maybe even faster) of running the vSphere client than having a Windows VM in Fusion (via Punching Clouds…still love that name!)
• Energy Efficiency: Build a Green IT Infrastructure with Virtualization – A client of mine recently mentioned that they have fallen behind in applying for their state tax credits for virtualizing their data centers.  This made me realize that maybe people don’t even know about this.  Check with your local tax man and this portal for additional information.

General Virtualization Links

• Magic Quadrant for Web Hosting and Hosted Cloud System Infrastructure Services (On Demand)

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I did some back end maintenance on the blog tonight.  If anyone notices anything that doesn’t look right, please let me know.  The maintenance was rather simple, but you know Murphy and his darn law…