VMworld 2011 Overview

Even with Hurricane Irene trying to dampen our spirits, VMworld attracted a record number of 19,000+ customers, partners, press and analysts, and 250 sponsors and exhibitors signifying major interest from the IT industry in cloud computing and the next generation of IT. There are now over 86,000 VMware Certified Professionals in 146 countries and over 800,000 vSphere administrators worldwide.

The VMworld Hands on Labs again set records.  This year the labs were run on a geographically distributed Public Cloud hosted in Switch (US-West), Terremark (US-East) and in COLT (Europe-East), all powered by vSphere 5.0 and vCloud Director 1.5.  Some quick lab stats:

• 480 lab seats were avaialble for a total of 50 hours (24,000 lab seat hours)
• VMworld First: labs included partner labs from Cisco, EMC and NetApp
• Total of 13,415 labs were taken
• Total of 148,138 virtual machines were deployed (that’s 1.215 VMs/second!)
• 3 attendees finished all 27 Hands on Labs!
• Best of all…VMworld Hands On Labs will be going public in 2012…

Project Octopus will leverage data sync technology from VMware Zimbra and Mozy to enable enterprise-grade collaboration and information/data sharing. Additionally, Project Octopus will offer easy integration with VMware Horizon, VMware View and Project AppBlast to create a secure enterprise cloud service. These two projects promise to dramatically simplify the access and sharing of information across people and mobile devices, contributing to the Connected Enterprise.

Project AppBlast will provide the universal delivery of any application, including Windows-based applications, to any device supporting HTML5, enabling instant remote access to applications without the heavy footprint of the underlying operating system.

Horizon Mobile (formally MVP) to deliver virtual desktops to mobile devices and enable a new class of dual persona mobile devices. Mobile Virtualization for the Enterprise.

Want to see what you missed?

• The General Sessions recordings are available at VMworld.com.
• VMworld TV has overview videos from each day and a bunch of interviews up on YouTube
• SiliconANGLE has a collection of interview videos they conducted at VMworld that is well worth reviewing

Below are key announcements in each of the VMware Focus Areas with links to the full press release for each announcement.

End User Computing 

Application Platform

Cloud Infrastructure

(The following is taken from a newsletter I produce for my clients that I’m pre-posting here on the blog.)

Back on July 12th, VMware unveiled the Cloud Infrastructure Suite which included vSphere 5.

vSphere 5 New Features

• vCloud Director 1.5 - Now with fast provisioning via Linked Clones and more.
  
• vShield 5 - new flow monitoring, L2 firewall, REST APIs, enhanced groupings
• vShield App with Data Security - Adds policy based management to protect sensitive data is not being shared inappropriately.
• Site Recovery Manager 5.0 - works with vCenter 5.0, vSphere (host) based replication, Automated Failback, and more.
• vCenter Heartbeat 6.4 -  works with vCenter 5.0
•  vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 1.0 - New Product - allowing you to take local storage from up to 3 servers and turn that into a Virtual NAS. VSA is designed for the SMB users but can be useful for point deployments with the enterprise.

Following on the vSphere 5 License adjustment, VMware recently released the vSphere 5 License Advisor.  This is a tool that you can use to run against your vSphere 4.1, vSphere 4.0, or Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 deployments to understand how the vSphere 5 vRAM licensing entitlement will affect your installation.

Note: I’ve heard some comments that the tool may have some reporting issues in the GUI with deployments in excess of 1000 VMs, but that the exported report is correct.  I would appreciate anyone who can validate these reports…

So VMware announced a change in licensing with vSphere 5…the customers reacted…and VMware listened and adjusted the licensing in about 3 weeks.  Quite a rarity in the enterprise software industry…

When I talked to my clients about the licensing changes that were coming with vSphere 5, the reaction wasn’t really one of shock to a change (they had realized that VMware would eventually need to change licensing somehow as the server industry moved to larger sized servers) but  rather a raising of concerns over Enterprise Plus only having a 48GB vRAM entitlement and concern that the new vRAM entitlement in general would limit the desire to virtualize more Tier 1 applications. Non-production groups also had concerns over the transient nature of their dev/test environments which could have short spikes in vRAM usage when lots of VMs get deployed.  Apparently, my clients were not unique in their concerns…

Today VMware announced a change to the new vSphere 5 licensing:

• Raising the vRAM entitlements per vSphere editions
• Essentials / Essentials Plus / Standard are now 32GB  of vRAM per license
• Enterprise is now 64 GB of vRAM per license
• Enterprise Plus is now 96 GB of vRAM per license
• vRAM consumption per running VM is now capped at 96GB
• a VM configured with 96GB up to 1 TB of vRAM will only reduce the vRAM entitlement pool by 96GB.
• vCenter will calculate & report on a 12 month trailing average of vRAM usage rather than a high watermark
• This will reduce the risk of transient VM environments requiring additional vRAM licenses.
• Note: This change will not be reflecterd in the vSphere 5 reporting capabilities at GA time; it will appear in an vSphere 5 future update release but be trackable via a free utility from VMware until then.

VMware vSphere 5 by Editions

VMware also announced a new vSphere Desktop license package for those environments that use vSphere to host Virtual Desktops.  This new license only counts the total number of powered on virtual desktops and is available in packs of 100 desktop licenses.  Most View users usually purchase a View bundle which includes the vSphere licenses.  For those users who run non-View manage desktops on vSphere, they would purchase those licenses via this new vSphere 5.0 Desktop license pack.

Three weeks ago VMware announced and launched Cloud Foundry (right before I went on vacation, one of the reasons for the delay in this post). An open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) designed to support multiple programming models and multiple clouds for eventual deployment to. In the past three short week Cloud Foundary has seen thousands upon thousands of developers signup and receive free beta accounts…with an apparent growing queue as I’m still waiting on mine…I guess that’s what I get for taking a vacation and signing up late.

Between Rod Johnson’s post and Steve Herrord’s post introducing Cloud Foundry, you get a good sense of the initial offering (summarized by the above image). There are also a number of more detailed posts available at the Cloud Foundry Blog and of course the real gritty stuff of the open source code available at CloudFoundry.org.

But what does all this mean in the bigger picture to the Enterprise Programmer?

I have been dealing with a number of client product development teams recently.  The conversations have classically revolved around vSphere and vCoud Director and how they could use this to help automate their internal dev/test environments…yes, build a dev/test private cloud.  Lately, the meetings have not just included the IT support group from the team, but also developers.  More questions have been coming up around how the developers would interact with this private cloud.  If the developers have used AWS before, they start to compare and contrast it to AWS.  Which tends to be an apples to oranges comparison to vSphere + vCloud Director as they only provide the IaaS, not a PaaS.  With the addition of vFabric and the Cloud Foundry capabilities, a dev/test PaaS Cloud becomes a reality.

Even better, the enterprise developer can use many of the dev tools they are already familiar within within Cloud Foundry. Moving forward, they don’t have to think in the boxed confines of their single programming environment to solve all their problems.  Since Cloud Foundry can support multiple frameworks, and is open sourced to allow additional framework integrations, developers can now think about the best framework to solve the individual problems of their application.  Spin up and down environments based on those frameworks quickly in the cloud and even hook automated test harnesses into their cloud for automated testing.  Not that this is new in the general sense, but now the dev and test environments can expand and contract across the entire compute infrastructure, running as dev/test private cloud, based on demand and business need.

Self-admittedly, It’s been years since I last wrote any code and I may be simplifying things here…but that’s a large part of my job. A few years back I worked on boot strapping my own SaaS Application, so part of my simplification is based on personal experience.  At that time, we were limited to a few VPS service providers (we used Joyent and Linode) and spent way to much time building out IT infrastructure on our VPS’ to support our application development needs (code repositories, bug tracking systems, agile development tools) not to mention the development framework components that needed to integration test within our environment (message queues, GUI frameworks, logging infrastructure). We tried building out local (on our laptop) VM based development environments, but we couldn’t integrate them easily into our cloud based VPS’…even more time wasted.  At the time I was cursing the fact that we could just get this preconfigured in the cloud. We weren’t doing anything new.  I hated re-inventing the wheel.  In the end, time ran short and our personal window of opportunity closed on us before we could launch beta.

I expect to soon be seeing dev/test private clouds that will not only help to speed up and reduce the costs of current development projects, but allow entrepreneurial developers to turn their ideas into a beta reality quicker than ever before.  Within the enterprise this means more flexibility using the existing computing resources. Some of the Private Clouds of today will quickly become PaaS Clouds with the help of Cloud Foundry and vFabric.

Do you agree?  Or am I off my simplified rocker?

Here is an interesting video from Andy where he took the time to show the history of upgrading through each version of MS Windows by actually doing that inside a VMware VM!

Sure this video is interesting from the “wow, I remember that  OS…how far we’ve come” aspect. But I find it more interesting from the “a current version of VMware could still run that old OS” aspect. I have a colleague who’s client “upgraded” their control system for their assembly line not by paying the $100,000′s upgrade price to install new hardware and move to the latest OS and controller software version, but by paying a few $10,000′s to P2V the existing controller systems to VMs and then run them all on two modern mid-range servers. These systems didn’t demand a lot of performance, they just needed to work. The old version of the OS and controller software weren’t broken, just the model in which it all operated (physical servers versus VMs).

One of my clients even has a “convalescence ESX cluster” where they move old apps to so they can die a slow hardware oversubscription death.  These are apps that either can’t be tracked back to the owner but see an occasional blip of activity or are apps that the owners are steadfastly refusing to EOL. So rather than keep them running on old servers taking up rack space and excess power in the data center, they built a special ESX cluster just to run them all on. They are available and work when needed and it was the path of least resistance for the IT staff.

So, what Legacy workloads do you have running in a VMware VM in your datacenter?  Leave a comment and let’s see what is the most obscure OS / Software Version we can find.  Don’t worry…you can leave it anonymously to protect the guilty…

(Thanks goes out to @herrod for the pointer to the video.)

This past weekend, I was feeding Matthew when he fell asleep in my arms. As I’ve gotten into the habbit of doing during these moments, I catch up on my blog reading thanks to the iPad and Matthew both fitting in my lap at the same time (for now).  In the course of my blog wanderings, I came across this blog post of some Denver area Creatives who were reflecting on what they learned this year, this one quote struck me most at that moment:

You have about 25,000 potential days to work, but less than 1,000 weekends before your children will leave home.

That night I came across the following Ted Talks video while while fighting my sleeplessness:

These two put together became something worth sharing.

Note: in the past I’ve posted stuff when the Universe was talking to me. Multiple things (usually in threes….) would come to me over the course of a day or two and be linked by a common theme. Needing to be shared. I’ve now started calling these Universe Dots. Connect them when you’re aware, ignore them if you’re not.  Find mine moving forward under this topic.

I hope that your holiday’s are already in full swing! If you have a VMware Administrator on your holiday shopping list (or you are one and haven’t bought yourself a present yet) I recently came across a few books that may help.

vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive

A new book from Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman.  If you have every wanted more details on the ins and outs of vSphere HA and how Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) works, this is the book for you.  If you’re read either of their blogs, you know these guys are the perfect duo with the hands on experience to have written this book.

VMware ESXi: Planning, Implementation, and Security

A recent book from Dave Mishchenko.  With the the future releases of vSphere being offered as ESXi only, if you haven’t started thinking about how to upgrade your environment to ESXi, this is a great resource or that process.

(note: Amazon is an affiliate sponsor of this blog)

Regular readers will have realized a couple of things:

1. Posts have been a little slow lately…still adapting to family life and focusing on building out some new family infrastructure. I plan on getting back to a more regular posting habit within a few months.
2. The Virtualization Round Up posts have stopped…they actually just move to a more suitable location, Twitter.  They are my tweets hash-tagged with #VRU.

Thanks to the wonderful search feature of twitter, you can now see the latest Virtualization Round Up Tweets on the sidebar (though the search results seem a bit unpredictable…).  You can also follow me to get the Round Ups in real time…

Matthew - 4 Days Old

VMworld is over, and my biggest concern was skirted…that Baby Mini-G (who was due just after Labor Day) wouldn’t arrive early while I was in San Francisco at VMworld.  Skirted…but just.  Matthew arrive the day after VMworld to both mine and my wife’s surprise. And after talking to the delivery nurse we’re glad we weren’t the subject of a local news segment for being in labor on Labor Day.  In retrospect, we both were unmotivated to do anything on Thursday…almost like something was preparing us for the long day on Friday…

So, he’s the reason why there hasn’t been any post VMworld posts here on the blog…been focusing on settling into life as a new parent and an official member of the sandwich generation.  Hopefully, once Matthew settles into a better sleep routine and I catch up on sleep there will be a bit more activity here…thought that may wait until I’m officially over my NPTO (New Parent Time-Off).

Scheduled meetings, hallway meetings, random meetings of chance, checking in on the Mrs. to make sure Baby Mini-G is still holding to his schedule (t-minus 5 days-ish). Quite the busy vmworld 2010, and that was just the first official day.

Tuesday’s keynote was a great introduction to VMware’s long term vision to the new three layer stack of IT in the cloud era of computing. The even better part of the keynote was the announcements of vCloud Director, vShield, and Project Horizon. Personally these announcements are so important because I can now start talking about all the things that I have been working on with customers and these products for the past 6 months. (Its hard to blog about things that you can talk about publicly!)

My clients have been working with early releases or discussing these products for a while now and have created quite the excitement. vCloud Director truly enables IT organizations to offer IT infrastructure as a service to their internal customers. What is most exciting about this is how quickly this is taking hold within organizations. I spent an entire day last week with one client working though data center strategy…they are at stage one of the journey and are planning their strategy with their sights not just to get to stage two, but clearly on reaching stage three of a cloud enabled data center.

The most interesting aspect of that particular client’s mindset is that they realize that the technology is easy, but the Three P’s (people, process, and politics) are the hardest part. This Is where the value of understanding other people’s lessons learned while traveling their own journey of virtualization to the cloud is so important. This is also where involving people from across all organization (servers, storage, networking, and now security) is so important. To achieve real tangible results for the enterprise, cultures and behaviors have to change as much as the technology. This isn’t just in the virtualized infrastructure layer but across all three layers.

VMware isn’t the only company that has multiple SaaS apps that are now critical to the operation of the company. Every company out there has multiples of these and CIOs know that (just maybe aren’t publicly acknowledging it because of the control issues this represents for them). Another client of mime has a very progressive view of this with the understanding that their IT department needs to become the coordinator of services for their internal users, regardless of those being internal or external services–that or run the risk of loosing all value to their internal users. This client is not fighting the flight of apps out of the data center but are embracing it; leveraging it to drive down operating costs and use the opportunity it presents to expand their internal employees expertise out into the public cloud and SaaS offerings to both keep employees engaged as well as provide the strategic advantage to the internal business unit customers by helping to negotiate the best deals with SaaS vendors.

This is where Project Horizon is such an invigorating solution for them. The whole problem of SaaS entitlement and reconciliation was something that many IT departments were struggling with. How do they give access to apps, both SaaS and Traditional, to their end users regardless of their device that end user need to run that app on (physical laptop, virtual desktop, employee owned, and mobile). In addition, why does thee need to be a different solution for those SaaS and Traditional apps? Control without restraint is the key to empowering business and workforce of today.

One client of mine who got an advanced look at Project Horizon saw it as a way to possible cut off one to one and a half years of development time and expense of an internal solution they were developing similar to Horizon. And that is without the uniform cross platform nature that Horizon delivers today to allow access to entitled applications from the locations and devices that users demand.

Of course the irony of the day wasn’t lost on me yesterday morning. For now it is still about the device and not about me; as I couldn’t watch the vmworld Keynote live on my iPhone while riding the train into San Francisco…becuase the streaming service required Flash. After all, this is about the journey to the cloud…we’re not there yet.

VMworld 2010 San Francisco is set to start in just four weeks (August 30th – September 2nd).  This year’s VMworld is already shaping up to be a killer event.  Compared to last year’s VMworld, I personally am seeing a 500+% increase in the number of clients of mine who are signed up to attend.  The reasons for this are multiple:

• Increased demand for virtualization within my clients
• Expansion from core virtualization (server consolidation) to virtualization to drive business efficiency
• Planning and deployment of internal private clouds
• Increased activity in desktop virtualization to help reign in desktop costs and provide a more dynamic and managable desktop environment

If you’re planning on attending VMworld this year, here are a few bits of advice:

• Browse through the VMworld FAQ soon as possible
• Use the Schedule Builder early to get into the sessions you want (ever year I hear from clients that the couldn’t get into the sessions they wanted, plan ahead and book early!)
• The breakout sessions and labs this year are all Self Paced, no need to preregister for anything.  Just show up, pick a technical session from the menu and the environment will be dynamically provisioned for you in the VMworld Cloud.  This is similar to the environment that was used for the VMware Internal Technical Summit earlier this year and I think all VMworld attendees will be amazed by it…  (I’m hoping the Lab Team has the same real time lab cloud portal which shows how many labs are running at any give time, it was mesmerizing to watch.)
• Make sure you reach out to your VMware account team or TAM (if you have one) and let them know you’re going.  There are lots of opportunities for more direct 1-on-1 conversations that we can arrange, but only if we have time in advance to do it.
• Bring with some snack bars…there is so much to do and see, I am sure you’ll completely forget about lunch at least one day if not more…

I’ve also been asked by a number of people if I was going to do another VMworld Portrait Project again this year.  Sadly, I won’t be able to.  This year I will be on stand by during all of VMworld as my wife and I are expecting our first born and his due date is right around VMworld.  I’m also planning on taking a few weeks off once he arrives to help adjust to family life, which will make it impossible to quickly turn around photos for people.  What this all means is no portrait project this year…we’ll see what next year looks like.  (I may be walking the halls with camera in tow, so smile if you see me pointing it in your direction!)

During the vSphere 4.1 beta period, two of my clients were very interested in the new Host Affinity Rules for issues they were having.  The day vSphere 4.1 was released I had a call to discuss Host Affinity Rules with another client to explore issues they were having that host affinity rules could solve.  Each of these global enterprise clients are running 1000′s of VMs in production and each have different uses for Host Affinity Rules that the average user may overlook.

I was planning on providing a quick overview of the Host Affinity Rules in this post, but Frank Denneman already provided a great overview that I can’t really improve on.  Start with his post to to understand the basics of the new Host Affinity Rules.

A few Host Affinity Rule use cases:

• Physical server based software licensing:  As hard as it is to believe, some software vendors still tie their software to physical computers.  Using Host Affinity rules allow you to purchase licenses for a subset of your physical servers in your vSphere cluster. (typically 2 so you have HA).  By forcing the VMs running the software in question to run on specific servers, you can ensure compliance with the software licensing.
• Isolation for troublesome VMs: as with most troubleshooting processes, the newest thing in an environment usually gets the blame.  For one of my clients this means that new workloads moved into the vSphere environment that have performance issues result in the application owners blaming vSphere for the performance issues.  Even after using something like vCenter AppSpeed to show the user where the performance problem exists in their application, app owners still won’t believe it until their VM is running by itself.  With Host Affinity Rules, you can force the problem-some VM to run on a server that has nothing else on it.  (Take that non-believer app owner!)
• Another approach to host pinning and reservations:  Some clients use pinning and reservations to help ensure certain levels of performance for some of their end users.  Like any over-riding control, you can eventually end up with more of these rules than can be realistically managed.  Host Affinity rules could be used in their place by forcing a more large grained control.  Of course, the same rule sprawl can occur with host affinity rules.  So it’s best to use them sparingly at first and really make sure the end users really need them before using them.  After all, cloud computing is supposed to make things easier for both end users and IT administrators…fight the gravitational pull of end user special needs.  More often than not these needs don’t really exist.

Today is the big day that vSphere 4.1 is finally released. This dot release is jam packed with new features that some of my clients have been testing for the past six months in beta. The ones that have been strongly received by my enterprise clients include:

• Increased vSphere scalability (2-3x increase in vCenter scale, see config maximums pdf for details)
• Storage IO Control (SIOC)
• Additional Storage Statistics in vCenter
• NFS Performance Enhancements
• Network IO Control (NIOC)
• VMware HA Healthcheck and Operational Status
• Host Affinity Rules
• vMotion Enhancements (5x better vMotion performance, note that small v… )
• Memory Compression
• USB Device Passthrough from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine (a peer of mine said he was amazed at how every USB device he could think to throw at it just work, though I’m sure someone will find exceptions to this.)

There was also some changes in the vSphere licensing. Specifically formalization of vSphere Kits and Editions:

• Kits are pre-packaged for specific use case needs.
• Editions are the different tiers of of increasing product capability to cover the spectrum from small businesses to global enterprises. There were some feature changes between Editions as well.

vSphere 4.1 Editions

Update: Here is Steve Herrod’s blog post on this release as well as Bogomil Balkansky’s blog post.  I also forgot to mention that free ESXi is now being referred to as vSphere Hypervisor, the first tier in the above diagram.

Additional product releases coinciding with vSphere 4.1:

• vCenter Site Recover Manager (SRM) 4.1 was released today as well.  This version of SRM is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and contains a number of new features, see release notes.
• VMware Studio 2.1 was released today as well.  This version is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and adds support for new Linux GOS and OVF versions as well as a slew of other features, see release notes.
• vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3 was release today as well.  This version is compatible with VC 4.1 as well as additional features, see release notes.

I happen to find myself in the RTP area this week, the same week as a Raleigh VMUG.  So I’ll be attending this week’s lunch event, any readers plan on being there?  There will be some new interesting stuff to discuss by then…

I know it’s been a long drought of round ups out here on the range…which means I have a rather larger backlog of items to share, some of these might be items you came across earlier but I thought were worth repeating.

With all the projects and activities I have going on (and unfortunately for the blog, too many VMware related ones being the kind I can’t talk about…yet), I’ve found it more difficult to post these Virtualization Round Up’s on a regular basis.  I anticipate it will only get more difficult moving forward, especially with the arrival of Baby Mini-G in about 3 months.

So, this will be the last regular round up for the foreseeable future (I may sneak one in now and again when big things happen).

To get more regular pointers to virtualization items of interest, follow me on Twitter as I will be switching to posting these types of links there during working hours with the hashtag “VRU”.  Note: I am crossing the streams in my twitter feed…

VMware Specific Links

• Recent New Releases
  • VMware Fusion 3.1: release notes (zoom, zoom)
  • VMware Workstation 7.1:  release notes (New Support for 32-Bit and 64-Bit Operating Systems)
  • VMware ThinApp 4.5:  release notes (relatively recent release…)
• Gartner issued their first ever Virtualization Magic Quadrant recently, and while they get upset when people steal their thunder and show you the graph I can say that VMW is the only one in the upper right Leaders quadrant…way up and to the right!  Gartner explains how the Magic Quadrant evaluation works.
  • Update 20100610: VMware has made the reprint of the Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure publicly available through Garnter!
• Steve Ballmer made it official today, VMware Now On Microsoft’s Enemies List last in line behind Oracle, Apple, and Google. (Thanks for the market cap bump Steve!)
• VMware Customer Surveys (from our Product Teams)
  • SRM customers, please provide your feedback to SRM Product Managers. Survey open until June 10th.
  • How you are using Snapshots in your environment.
• Psst…want to see an upcoming feature sneak peak?  Check out Storage IO Control (SIOC)
• Who’s using Wyse’s PocketCloud on their iPad?  I have had limited uses to date, but handy tool to have in the tool box. (I feel so dirty with my fingers all over the windows desktop… )
• Every one of my client’s is interested in transparently moving a running workload from one data center to another.  MikeD recently posted about F5′s Long Distance vMotion solution.
  • Are you interested in Long Distance vMotion? Love to hear if you’re doing it or why you’re can’t implement it today…leave a comment and share your thoughts…
• I recently learned that EMC has a Community forum covering Everything VMware at EMC.  Loads to great stuff in there!
• VMware environment took the top spot in a TPC Performance comparison, see the third table for 1,000 GB results.  Who says you can’t run high IOPS in a VM?
• VMworld 2010
  • Want to go to VMworld 2010 in San Francisco but can’t swing the cost this year?  Win A Free VMworld Pass From boche.net and Airfare from Gestalt IT.  The contest entry deadline is Noon Central Time on Thursday, June 17th…so hurry up and enter…Good luck!
• The Developer Cloud
  • Steve Herrod talks about VMforce and VMware’s “Open PaaS” Strategy and Rod Johnson, from SpringSource, discouss how VMforce Provides Spring Cloud Platform.
  • Steve Herrod talks about Google and VMware’s “Open PaaS” Strategy as well as a the acquisition of RabbitMQ.
  • Infoworld’s Neil McAllister shares his thoughts on VMware’s master plan for portable Java in the cloud
• Virtualization Security
  • Back in March RSA Announced Collaboration with VMware and Intel to deliver proof of concept for Business-Critical security, compliance, and control in the cloud. This was a future looking statement that flew a bit under the radar…
  • Few months back VMware published the final version of vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guidelines
• Desktop Virtualization
  • ClearPath posted the details on using scripts and View’s Group Policy ADM files to Location Based Applications with ThinApp and View
  • The ThinApp team describes Using ThinApp MSI’s to Replace a Native App
  • I’ve been running the VMware View Open Client on my MacOS for a few months now and love the native access from the Mac.  Yes, it doesn’t support PCoIP but it works as a great stop gap measure for the time being…
  • Andre Leibovici provides some great tips on How to troubleshoot PCoIP performance
• Recent VMware-ians who started blogging:
  • Performance Specialist Mark Achtemichuk’s Virtualization Eh (yes, he’s Canadian…   )
  • Senior Consultant Frank Denneman’s FrankDenneman
  • VP of Desktop Products Vittorio Viarengo’s Virtualization Journey

General Virtualization & Cloud Links

• Massimo Re Ferre’ recently talked about the Public Cloud adoption curve and how history repeats.
• It may come as not surprise that EMC’s IT team is working toward 100% virtualization (VMware’s IT team is at about 98%  ).  But did you know that EMC’s IT team is blogging about their Journey to the Private Cloud?
• Vittorio Viarengo has some More Best Practices for running IT Production virtualized.

Lounging on the Couch with iPad and Dog

Part 3 of my iPad (32GB, WIFI, iPhone OS 3.2) review:

• General Review
• List of Areas for Improvement
• iPad for Consumers (here)
• iPad for Business Users
• iPad for Photographers
• My Current Favorite iPad Apps

(9/29 Update: Parental preparation and then adaptation has kept me from finishing this series on the iPad.  Once home life stabilizes in a few months I may try to wrap it up in some fashion…)

It is no secrete that Apple produces products for consumers (Steve Job indirectly admits this in the first paragraph of his Thoughts on Flash letter).  And the iPad is a wonderful consumer based computing platform.

Notice I didn’t say computer but rather computing platform.  It’s different enough from your current desktop/laptop that you can’t really compare the two (though we try because this is our current point of reference).   For the consumer, the person who primarily needs or wants to consume information/entertainment, the iPad is a great platform in which to do it.

It fits in your hands, you use your hands to interact with it, and applications are only starting to take advantage of the user interface.  It truly makes the information on the Internet more personable to you.  Each week there are more iPad specific information consumption applications that become available.  Whether your reading email or a book, browsing the web or the current news, watching a movie or a streamed TV show the iPad makes consuming content more enjoyable.

The iPad is an application platform, which means that the best way to consume content on it is through applications that take advantage of it’s unique capabilities.  Luckily, for content providers, these applications essentially pull data from their existing websites and just display it in a new, more personal, context of the iPad application.  So all a company like ABC, BBC, NPR, or the Wall Street Journal needs to do is build an App that talks to their existing websites.

This is why the issue of Flash not running within the iPad’s web browser becomes a less important topic.  Viewing content through the existing web sites of these content providers gives the consumer a less than optimal viewing experience on the iPad.  Most websites aren’t designed to truly take advantage of the iPad’s unique interface.  Over time they may eventually be able to take advantage of the interface, but not yet.  While supporting flash would give the iPad users more content options, Apple would rather have those content providers build an App for their content.  That’s the trick of any new platform, they only become successful if the platform provider can convince, or force through fear of lost potential market of consumers, others to build on top of it.

The fact that the interface is intuitive and hands on makes a more ideal platform for new or hesitant computer users…like elderly parents.  The self-contained nature of the iPad means less plugs and wires to go wrong and confuse a less savvy user.  I’ve heard of many iPad users who let their parents use it and had a hard time getting it back.  I honestly think that my mother, who currently doesn’t use the computer at all, would actually use the iPad (next time I’m home for a visit we’ll find out…).

The only downside to the iPad for consumers is that need for a another computer to activate and backup the device.  This should really be an optional step for syncing media to the device only.  If this was the case, I think there would be more people possibly using the iPad as their only computer…like my Parents.

A case for the iPad is a must.  After using my iPad for 3 weeks without a case, I finally got my back ordered Apple iPad Case and it makes a huge difference.  The ability to stand the iPad upright to watch a video or to prop it more upright in your lap is a must.  The non-slip surface also helps keep the iPad in the right spot on our lap for the most comfortable use, not to mention protects the iPad.  I recently also came across the Moleskine inspired DodoCase which I found really appealing.  The hand made DodoCase is made like a book and contains all natural materials to encase the iPad in a cover that looks more like a journal than. It was either my penchant for Moleskine journals or the thought of wrapping my high tech iPad in all natural materials that made me order one.  Check back in 4-6 weeks for a review.

Part 2 of my iPad (32GB, WIFI, iPhone OS 3.2) Review:

• General Review
• List of Areas for Improvement (here)
• iPad for Consumers
• iPad for Business Users
• iPad for Photographers
• My Current Favorite iPad Apps

So while working on the iPad, there are a number of small gotchas and issues that I found and have documented here.  The hope is that these items may help other iPad users/prospective customers as well as (ideally) be found by Apple and corrected in the future…thought I’m not holding my breath on the latter.  I may add to this list over the next few weeks as I continue to find additional stragglers; I’ll add a date to the items I add after the original post.

(May 7th, 2010 Update:  I added to my list based upon my time using the iPad at a 3 day technical conference…)

Issues & Areas for Improvement

• Mail Doesn’t Cache: If you are not online there is no way to do things like delete or move email since the mail app doesn’t cache changes locally, tries to connect to server to do change in real time. (exchange/does cache for imap, though it complains about not finding server later).
• Mail Has No Setting to Auto Download Attachments: this would be nice to have especially when you are using the iPad offline while traveling.  We can only hope that there will be a setting for this in OS4 to do this in the background.
• No Airplane Mode: Unlike the iPhone, there is no simple switch for an airplane mode to disable the wireless. This mode should start to force caching and cancel all network related warning messages.  Blame here can also fall on the applications as well, they shouldn’t always assume a network connection and throw error messages when you launch the app.  Lack of this mode is even more confusing considering the 3G version of iPad.
• No System Usage Data:  was planning on monitoring a full battery drain by resetting the usage stats, but realized that there weren’t any.  Not critical but it would have been nice to have (especially for the 3G version). I hope to see this get added in any updates for the 3G version.
• Notes App: not sure why, but I always had a problen activating the keyboard when I would jump into notes and the keyboard was hidden.  Touching the note to edit it didn’t always seem to bring up the keyboard…
• Pop Up Menus: This is a very nice usability enhancement to the OS.  There are many more places where it needs to be used for easier access to applications and there are times when data entry pop ups become unusable when the keyboard is visible and you are filtering a list (try clicking on an address or phone number in an email and then try adding it to an existing contact that you need to look up…)
• Numeric Lock Code Keypad Need to Randomize: unlike an iPhone’s small screen, the large screen on the iPad can make it easy for someone to see your lock code if it’s only numeric (the iPad pops up a numeric keypad automatically when you set a numeric lock code).  Making the keys change their layout randomly would be a nice added security measure to prevent someone from seeing your number pattern.  NOTE:  I recommend everyone to set a lock code on their iPads for security; my employer requires this and once configured exchange to connect to their email system I was forced to set a code.
• No Way to Sync clock on iPad with Internet Time Sources: I quickly noticed that my iPad and my Mac/iPhone clocks were off when alerts from iPad would go off just a minute or two later than my other devices.  Sadly, no way to automatically set the clock using an internet based time source.
• Email Still Doesn’t Support Meeting Invite Standards: This is 2010 already!  Anyone who has spent a few days working for a company who uses Exchange and deals with conference calls knows that the location field often contains a phone number or web meeting address (except apparently Apple Engineers).  Yet the iPad OS still doesn’t automatically turn those fields into clickable links. This has been infuriating on the iPhone and sadly the iPad doesn’t do any better.  This is another item that I hope gets changed in the OS4.
• Calendar Invites Don’t Cancel Meetings Correctly:  Another modern day business use case that is glaringly not handled.  When you get an meeting cancellation (and you click “cancel”) the iPad’s calendar doesn’t actually delete the meeting. This can be very confusing for busy people who depend on their electronic calendar to run their lives (or allow others to schedule meetings in their lives).
• Email Synchronization issues to IMAP Accounts: I still have problems (just like with the iPhone) of IMAP email accounts syncronizing correctly.  I’ll read eamil on the iPad/iPhone and delete messages, etc.  When I go back to my main computer and check that IMAP account, the messages are still there (even when they are gone from the iPad/iPhone).
• Alert Pop-up Messages are Disruptive: It would be nice to have a less disruptive alert message when you get a calendar invite or have a meeting alert go off.  The dialog in the middle of the screen is frustrating when you are engage in some other application (like watching a movie!).  It would be much nicer if there was an option to have a small message in the title bar or a self canceling alert in a corner.
• Web Sites Incorrectly send you to Mobile Version of their Site: I’m not sure if the iPad’s web browser can be differentiated by websites from the iPhone browser (I assume yes), but a number of sites default to their less functional mobile version of their site when I connect.  This is frustrating now that I have a larger screen to view the site.  Once of the biggest annoyances I found was with Google Reader and not being able to do certain things thru the mobile version of their site that I can do on the full version (like manage RSS subscriptions); even though I prefer using Google Reader using the mobile version on the iPad.
• There is No Front Facing Camera: While this is an obvious item, I feel this is so important that it’s worth mentioning.  For as revolutionary as the iPad is, it would have been even more so if it had a front facing camera to do video chat/video conferencing.  I honestly don’t see the value in a rear facing camera as the iPad is too big to be used as camera.  I find it hard to believe that the processor in the iPad couldn’t handle video capture (it does a great job with video playback).  I think it was a combination of legal agreements with the cellular companies and a product marketing strategy on Apple’s part.  I’m sure the AT&T can’t handle the iPhone data explosion still 3 years after it’s launch, and the added bandwidth consumption of video must scare them (as I think ahead to June release of new iPhone…).  But if there was a video camera, then how would Apple sell the next generation of iPads?  By putting the video camera in the next generation of iPads (based upon iPhone product releases, expected in 1 year), they have a second wave of customers who will swoop back in for more iPads.
• iPhone OS Really Needs a Centralized File System (at least on iPad): Currently all data and “files” can be stored at application level which makes sharing of files between apps and between iPad and other devices harder than it should be.  A OS based file system, ideally one that could be synchronized to the cloud (via mobileMe perhaps?) is such an obvious omission. (20100505)
• Quick Access to Key Settings:  there are a number of key settings on the iPad which you should have easier access to via the app (home) view.  The ability to activate airplane mode (oh, wait…), wifi network, VPN should be a quick finger motion away from where ever you are in the iPad. (20100505)
• Apps Have to Get Smarter at Network Syncing: Apps shouldn’t always expect a network, allow me to work without one and sync upon request or when the network is detected (or ideally in the background with the next version of the OS).  A great example of this is Evernote which tries to sync with the online service every time you open the app.  Which makes it unusable if you are offline and trying to use Evernote to do something like….take notes. (20100505)
• Adding Contact from Email Should be More Automatic: Why can’t the email packages pull out contact info from the email signatures?  We have been dealing with this long enough that this should be a standard feature by now.  For the iPad at least allow me to move the bubble-like contact add window so I can see the email message that the bubble window is floating in front of.  Currently it is a very cumbersome process that is not very user friendly. (20100505)

The iPad is primarily about media consumption, not creation. The potential is there for more, but it’s up to the apps and OS to still realize it. After 2 week of usage while at home, on the road, and at the office, this is the most succinct summary i have been able to come up with.

A little over 2 weeks ago I picked up a 32 GB iPad (WIFI only) after about 10 minutes of of hands on usage at one of my local Apple store. This was after a week of internal contemplation on why I would need one–most of this contemplate was triggered by an understanding of how much time I spend looking at computer screens daily and the recent San Francisco Magazine article Tech Gets a Time Out.  I also waited to give the typical Apple new product hysteria time to pass, but I’ll be honest that after a few minutes of use I knew I needed to purchase one though I couldn’t really explain why.  I have spent many an evening using the iPad at home, at the office, and on a week long trip.  What better way to learn the strengths and weaknesses of a new device than to use if as a replacement for your current device.

The iPad is not a replacement your current laptop. Especially if you consider yourself a power user.

I typically spend anywhere from 25-40 hours a week actively working on the computer (the cost of being a knowledge worker). This includes jumping between up to 15 different applications during a day.  Downloading files, creating files, saving files, sending files.  Huge amounts of typing.  The iPad alone (minus external keyboard) just couldn’t cut it as my only device.  I couldn’t go one entire day without needing to break out the laptop.  Especially when I needed to work on a file or when my hotel didn’t have WIFI available in my room…though the attention I got in the hotel lobby bar was more than usual. 

[For the record, I did type at least half of all these reviews on the iPad. Eventually realizing that the WordPress App for the iPad didn't support cut/paste!  So the second half and final editing was done old school...on a physical keyboard.]

While the user interface of the iPad is revolutionary, I believe that is still suffers from a few core issues that currently limit it’s potential as well as suffering from the typical 1.0 product issues.  Over the past weeks I have been collecting my thoughts about the iPad and will summarize them in this multipart review (each part will be posted a day or two after the previous):

• General Review (here)
• List of Areas for Improvement
• iPad for Consumers
• iPad for Business Users
• iPad for Photographers
• My Current Favorite iPad Apps

Now don’t get me wrong, if you’re not a power user the iPad may be a great secondary computer.  You just need to have another computer in the house to activate the iPad via iTunes.  And to back up the iPad.  Oh, and then there is the fact that the iPad only supports a single user…so it’s kind of hard to share between family members.  But, for someone who only needs to check a single email account and possible visit web pages (like my Parents), the iPad may be an ideal solution.  No more remote troubleshooting of wires and plugs with my Father after the grandkids visit and my Mother might even actually use it on her own.  (This was my backup plan when purchasing the iPad…until my wife confiscated it for 3 hours one night…)

It does take some time to get use to typing on the iPad, especially if you are a touch typist like myself.  I find myself constantly looking at the keyboard instead of the text that I’m typing.  If I look at the text, the lack of tactile feedback causes my fingers to drift causing mis-spellings that auto correction can’t even guess at or, even worse, I accidentally touch the text area causing the cursor to jump.  A colleague of mine indicated that some studies show that the fastest typers are on the iPhone/iPad keyboard once they get use to it.  If this is so it can only be at the cost of people completely giving up on typing what they wanted by letting the OS auto correct their mistakes to what it thinks they meant.  Not sure if I’m comfortable with that trend…

Ideally, if there was a OS level text to speach capability that applications could tap into, this would truly make me change my tune here.  While you can add a keyboard to the iPad, that’s just seems like a legacy boat anchor on this cutting edge device.  The ability to quickly enter data into the iPad with voice is something that I think we need to keep an eye out for in the future.

It is much more comfortable to use the iPad than a laptop, especially for doing stuff like reading email (not necessarily responding to email) and surfing the web.  You are truly holding the content in your hands and can sit more comfortably than with a laptop.  Typing on it is a bit more tricky, as I found it not really usable to put my feet up on the coffee table with the iPad in my lap for typing.  I needed the iPad higher up on my lap to type comfortably and it kept sliding down.  Similar issue when trying to type on the airplane, I found myself with the tray table down and me hovering over the iPad while typing. Though both of these will be different for each use based upon their build.  If you are watching something on the iPad, you will eventually want to rest it on something to give you hands, arms and/or neck a break.  This is where a easel style iPad case is a must have.   The best one appears to be the one from Apple, except that they seem to have under estimated the popularity of their case as they are sold out at all the Apple Stores I visited and back ordered on the online store.  Alas, I wait and suffer until mine arrives.

I did hear a unconfirmed rumor of a better case coming out in the near future, just not sure if that’s an upgrade of the Apple Case or a new 3rd Party one.

The iPad is a great platform for consuming media. Whether that is surfing your favorite (non-flash) websites; watching a streaming Netflix movie, one you have stored locally, or a TV show from ABC; reading your favorite news site, newspaper, or book, you can do it all beautifully from this one device.  Oh, and rumor has it there are some nice games for the iPad as well…

Again, the comfort factor for the iPad comes through here.  You have your own personal high quality screen.  A great headset and your good to go. I find myself walking around the house with the iPad getting caught up on news and blog reading.  And I have watched more Netflix steaming movies recently than I have the physical discs they send me.  The real risk here is how much time you end up spending staring at a screen.  Just like Crackberry and iPhone addiction, iPad addiction is sure to be on the rise.

It would be nice if multiple user support was added to the iPad in the future.  It would be good to be able to log into my own iPad view of apps, bookmarks, and email accounts separate from those of my wife’s.  Even at a lower price point, I don’t see buying a second iPad anytime before a new hardware version (with a front mounted camera) comes out.

Unfortunately, I have experienced the WIFI signal problem.  I get severe WIFI signal degradation on the iPad where I don’t with my Laptop.  After moving the home office out of the future nursery I installed an Apple Airport Express on the other end of the house to boost the WIFI signal and iTunes enable a stereo.  Amazingly, the iPad doesn’t seem to be able to pick up the signal or get handed off to the stronger signal of the Airport Express, even when I’m standing right next to it or connecting anew to the network in front of it.  This has been annoying at most and something I hope will go away when I upgrade my primary WIFI router to a newer model that fully supports 802.11N.

Net Net:  If you’re a consumer needing a new computer for just web access and email, the iPad should be seriously considered.  If you’re a business user and want the iPad for something more than attracting attention for the next few months at the hotel bar, think about what you really need your computer to do. Add a docking station/keyboard if you need to do any heavy typing.  Make sure you invest in an iPad case that can be used to prop the iPad up at different angles as this will make using the iPad much easier.  Just don’t expect the iPad to replace your primary computer just yet.  At least not until iTunes free iPad activation and cloud based backup of the iPad data becomes a reality.

In the past I’ve written about the DPM capabilities within vSphere.  I’m seeing more and more of my clients starting to implement DPM within their enterprise production data centers.  As they do, the issue of integrating DPM with their data center monitoring tools keep coming up.  How do you prevent your data center monitoring tools from sending off a barrage of false alerts when DPM realizes it can save power by shutting down servers?

The answer lies within the white paper VMware Distributed Power Management Concepts and Use. (specifically page 13).

There are events that get triggered within vSphere when DPM decides to power down a server.  These events can be tapped into via the vSphere API.  By adding some logic to your data center monitoring tool of choice, you can surpress alerts related to DPM actions or deprecate their priority to informational.  This will allow the event to be logged but not distract your operations team with false positives.