In the latest realignment, HP is consolidating these release sets with its Proliant Support Packs (PSP’s) and the Firmware releases that were previously three separate distributions.  In addition, HP is adopting a date style of numbering, matching the release set scheme, rather than the version numbering previously used with PSP and Firmware releases.  This will allow administrators to quickly recognize how behind a system is from the current release.

Consolidation also allows a single interface, qualification schedule and unified release for customers on all systems.  Although a solid step, the release sets did not completely match the release of Firmware DVD’s from HP and sometimes there were issues with support where case workers asked that you update firmware out of compliance with a release set.  During their first year of existence, release sets came out often and in many ways, shored up stability in our blade environment, but in the past year, they seemed to have lagged behind in releases.

Back when I first covered release sets, I also noted that it the release sets were a very good thing for customers, since the sets gave a supportable configuration and schedule of compliance.  Although I didn’t say it, compliance meant that the customer could finally force the support side of HP to work a case instead of hiding behind the ‘please patch to latest firmware’ excuse.  My hope is that the SPP will do the same in a unified firmware and driver software release.

On many of our critical systems, we have observed an increased interdependency between the firmware versions and the driver versions which need to be loaded together to gain stability.  Consolidating all these separate releases into a single engine and distribution makes logical sense as these dependencies increase.

In an effort to target exactly what customers need, there will be a master distribution of the SPP along with 6 additional subset versions targeted towards specific needs, per the HP website.    These will be smaller, which translates to faster downloads and a more customized installation, including only what is required for these solutions.

HP touts four major areas of improvement by introducing the SPP — it reduces customer qualification cycles, reduces resource usage, maintenance windows and downtime.  Since firmware patching is typically not the most fun part of a system administrators job, reducing the frequency of these upgrades is a welcome change.

HP plans to offer 3 to 5 of these SPP’s per year.  The first version released is version 2011.09.0 and 2012.01.0 is expected soon.

iChat

I’ll start with iChat, the grand-daddy of the messaging apps.  It debuted in 2002 and was primarily Apple’s own instant messaging client for AOL Instant Messenger.  At first, it was a text only chat, but later versions added video features, screen sharing between other iChat users and even presentation sharing and video conferencing.   compatibility with other messaging networks has also expanded over time.  iChat now supports Jabber-based networks like Google’s Talk, Windows Messenger and Facebook, MobileMe/iCloud accounts via the AIM network, and Yahoo Messenger, and even ICQ.

Great for: Mac to Mac communication and Mac to PC communication.  Since it supports third-party networks, anyone logged into one of these networks is accessible to you as long as you also have an account on that network.  If a mobile phone user has a client and is logged-in, you can communicate with them too.

Downsides: Advanced features, such as video chat, conferencing, and screen sharing, are iChat to iChat only features and requires an AOL Instant Messaging account to make these features work.   There isn’t an iChat for iOS, which is odd considering all that it could do.  It would be nice to have a video conference with Mac users while on the go.

FaceTime

With the iPhone 4, Apple introduced a  proprietary video chat called FaceTime.  It was first released as an iPhone to iPhone video chat, but Apple quickly released a version of FaceTime for Mac which allowed Mac to iPhone video chat.  For phone to phone, it uses the customer’s mobile phone number to be able to FaceTime and for Mac users, it uses an iTunes account and email address to identify the user.  The Mac app resembles the iPhone address book with Favorites and Contacts listed like the iPhone call screen. In the past year, FaceTime has been added as a feature to the iPad 2 and iPod Touch, as well, using iTunes accounts and email addresses to identify users.

Great for: Dead simple video chat between users of Apple products.  It does not require a third party network (AIM, Yahoo, Google) or an account, but relies instead on an iTunes account which every iPhone and Mac user likely already has.

Downsides: FaceTime came with one big limitation – it is Wifi only.  It does not work over cellular networks.  There is no Windows client.  Although certainly simpler to use, FaceTime does not seem like a full Mac app and seems it could be integrated with iChat (or vice-versus) since there is feature overlap.  The primary difference is third party chat network versus Apple proprietary FaceTime.

iMessage

Similiar to FaceTime, iMessage was introduced as a text messaging or SMS alternative.  It relies on open internet and it an Apple proprietary network.  It auto identifies other iMessage users and prefers that network to the carrier’s text messaging network when it finds two iMessage users (with iMessage enabled).  The message changes from the normal green colored talk bubble to a light blue talk bubble when using iMessage.  The best thing is that it isn’t a switch the user must think about – it just happens automatically.  The closest product on market to this is probably Blackberry’s Messenger product that allows Blackberry to Blackberry free messages.

Great for: Text and image messages between iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users running iOS5. It also lessens customer’s dependency on the carrier’s expensive text messaging plans.

Disadvantages: There isn’t a Mac client for iMessage.  It doesn’t work with other mobile devices – only iOS devices.  Wouldn’t this be handy to have in iChat somehow?  When the internet is clogged (like Disney World during Thanksgiving), messages can get stuck going out, but you can turn off iMessage and switch back to the cell network in settings.

Skype

And then there is Skype.  It is not an Apple technology, but its worth including given the fact that it runs on Mac and iOS devices, plus it adds the text message, video calling and voice calling features in a single app.  Skype is also written for almost every other device in the world and it is capable of calling anyone with a phone number anywhere in the world.

Great for: Calling PC users, users without a computer but with a phone number and strong video chat technology over both 3G and WiFi (technically, even 2G networks, though data speeds are too slow for video to work effectively). It allows very inexpensive international voice calls (computer or mobile phone to phone number).  Video chat and computer to computer voice calls are free.

Downsides: Requires another third party account.  Another billing source (if you make voice calls to phone numbers).  Many users complain of dropped calls and non-existent customer support, but what can you expect for a free service.

Disclaimer: This isn’t an exhaustive list of chat client, nor is it intended to be.  As you’ll see on my Mac App Discovery page, I have been a longtime user of Adium, however in recent years, my primary iChat use is remote screen sharing to help my friends when they run into problems.  Adium doesn’t do that, iChat does.  I use iChat.  There are lots of options – Trillium, Adium, etc.  Point is, I’ve got confused friends when it comes to the stock Apple solutions and which one to use for what.  Just trying to clear that up… 

I was pleasantly surprised and impressed how the developers chose to translate a mouse and keyboard based remote device onto a touchscreen device.  The mouse simply stays stationary and the screen moves with touch behind the interface.  It may sound counter-intuitive, but its quite elegant and easy to use.  You can make use of all of the normal iOS controls such as pinch to zoom to increase the size of the remote screen.  The keyboard is shown and hidden by a key on the menu bar at the bottom of the remote screen.  The bar also has keys to switch between right and left clicks for the mouse, which are executed by taping or double-tapping.  There is a magnifying glass key to zoom in and out and a complete list of settings behind a settings key. 

In addition to remote control, the file management and transfer capabilities that exist in the desktop version of the LogMeIn products is also baked into the iOS version.  You can pull copies of files from local disks on the remote computer and open them in iOS programs, using Quick Look or other features to play common media types.  In addition to the ability to download, since iOS has no native file manager, LogMeIn Ignition includes file storage as a feature within the application.  But file management doesn’t end there, it also includes cloud file storage

To switch between tasks, Ignition uses a multi-window concept, like in Safari, to open windows for Remote Control, the list of available computers, and file transfer.  You can easily switch between your open tasks.  All in all, its a well rounded and complete remote management solution for your desktop from your iOS device.  I am very impressed.

A couple months ago now, I sent out a cryptic tweet: “Its like Christmas in September. I’m spending some time this evening with a new product. More details to come soon on the blog…”  Soon being a relative term, I didn’t expect almost 3 months to pass before I revealed the device and my experiences with it.  But I am excited to finally talk about my experiences with the NextIO vNet I/O Maestro, officially released in mid-October.

The NextIO vNet is a converged PCI interconnect solution which takes standard PCIe network and fiber channel adapters and provisions them in a shared way back to individual rack mount servers.  The vNet extends PCI outside of the physical server through a special (albeit simple) riser PCI card then via cables to the vNet.   The provisioned resources can be reassigned to different physical hardware, if required, offering a level of portability for systems and disaster recovery.  In addition, the vNet does not add any specialized drivers or software on the hosts and the host simply see a PCI device presented to it from the vNet.   The nControl management software handles creating virtualized WWID and MAC addresses that are assigned to the individual rack mount servers through an intuitive interface.

Configuration & Testing

Installation of the vNet was very straight forward.  The unit is 4U in size and installs into any rack.  To bring the unit online, we connected power and a single network cable for management.  Once connected, the unit retrieved an address by DHCP.  Once it got an address, we were free to configure it to a static address (as most enterprise would like do).

The unit required very little configuration on our part.  The unit had two Ethernet and two Fiber Channel cards loaded on the interconnect slots.  These dual port cards were presented in the nControl management console along with all 30 possible servers which could be connected via PCI on the back-end.  The administrator is free to create profiles on any of the available server connections and these virtualized WWID and MAC addresses are portable between profiles, meaning that in the event of a failure for a critical system, the addresses could be reassigned to new hardware and the system brought back online (assuming similar enough hardware that the OS will not complain and the ability to move the OS disks to a compatible model server).

On the rackmount server side, we only needed to install a small PCI pass-through card and connect the cable from it to the vNet and it was ready to be powered on.  After this, all configuration is done in nControl.  Drivers for the Fiber Channel and Network adapters is done as normal in the operating system.  The cards I received in my demo were newer than ESX 4.1 and required us to add a OEM vendor supplied driver to ESX and the same would be true for Windows.  But in many cases, the OS vendor will bundle appropriate drivers and the solution will just work.

The management interface is easy to use with drag and drop and the vNet also supports command line configuration through SSH.  The command line interface reminded me of a configuration similar to our HP or Cisco managed switches.  Commands were easy to understand and I found no limitations of what could be configured and viewed from command line, which I know will make some Unix administrators happy.

I have always believed that a picture is worth a thousand words, so below is a logical view of how a vNet connects to a set of rack mount servers.

For my internal testing, I had two ESX hosts setup on the vNet and I was able to test network throughput between virtual machines on both boxes at amazing speeds. I was never able to get the device SAN connected to truly test some advanced features such as vMotion and disk IO due to limitations of my test hardware.  The vNet requires PCIe card slots, so users should know that going in they will not be repurposing a lot of older equipment onto a vNet, although anything produced in the last 3 year should be compatible with the solution.  I ran into issues with available hardware for my abbreviated testing since my systems were older Proliant DL380 G4′s.

I did not see boot from SAN as an option since the fiber channel card did not show during the POST of the test rack systems.  I believe this may be an option depending on the fiber channel card, but I cannot recall the exact discussion I had with NextIO about this.   Boot from SAN would greatly improve the ability to make OS profiles portable between rack servers since you no longer have to manually swap OS disk drives.  Boot from SAN could mean a remote administrator could perform a hardware failover while offsite.

Advantages

The advantages that I see with the technology are very similar to the benefits I initially show with HP Virtual Connect, although a little different since it is with more industry standard hardware.  Some of the advantages include:

• Reduced need of ports for Fiber Channel and Network, which is really useful when few applications can consume the capacity of an 8Gb fiber channel port or a 10Gb Ethernet port.   As with virtualization in its first phase which sought to increase utilization of processor and memory in hosts, this technology can be used to increase utilization of under-utilized connectivity.
• Less costly upgrades to the newest technology allowed by adding a single PCI card of a specific technology and then sharing the new features to the backend rack mount systems.
• Server to server traffic not interacting with systems outside of the vNet’s domain does not need to leave the vNet device and can travel between systems at PCIe native speeds.
• Very intuitive and easy to learn interface to provision interfaces to backend nodes.
• The special PCI riser cards are pass-through modules with no firmware or intelligence to patch and maintain.
• Interconnect cards are industry standard PCI cards – nothing special or proprietary.
• PCI traffic passes through the vNet unit even without the management module in service, meaning that a firmware upgrade or other outage in the module would not cause downtime.

Disadvantages

To be fair, I can see some downsides to this approach and these are downsides I have found with the HP Virtual Connect solutions.

• Converged solutions sometimes introduce new complexities for maintenance and patching firmware on the PCI interconnect cards and due to share nature, it could be difficult from a coordination stand-point.  This is a consideration when deciding what to run on a vNet, and in my mind makes cluster nodes and virtual hosts good candidates so that you can fail workloads onto nodes on a different vNet to enable maintenance periods.
• The solution could introduce a single point of failure, but this is easily overcome with the use of two vNet devices, although that does double the cost for both interconnect cards and vNet units.
• In some ways, it introduces a new black box to the environment whose traffic cannot be inspected which is a downside on the security end of things.

For a number of reasons, I think this solution could have a good use case with virtualization.  Particularly with a customer who is just adopting virtualization, this solution could give them the ability to repurpose fairly new servers and connect them to SAN and 10Gb Ethernet with ease.

In addition, I think that a customer who needs to limit the number of SAN and 10Gb port investment would find the technology beneficial.

vCenter Orchestrator is installed by default along side of vCenter Server Standard edition and can run on the same host, but in other environments, it may make more sense to deploy it as a vApp instead.  If you’re interested in deploying a vApp (which I did not do), see this post from Cody.  I’m going to detail my installation procedures as an example of the install, which is fairly simple.  These are by NO means the official procedures, just my experience and anything I learned along the way.  But first…

What does vCenter Orchestrator Do?

vCenter Orchestrator is, at heart, a workflow tool.  It is used to string together a series of tasks that can be kicked off repeatedly and performed on different objects within vCenter and with additional system, using additional plug-ins.  It is used to automate repeated tasks that are done in the environment, handle bulk operations and handle integration points.  It can be used to receive actions from help desk and monitoring systems and kick off actions based on tickets or alerts.

As I have written about before, I have come to define a cloud as an pool of compute, storage and networking resources with a self-service portal and lifecycle management to automate provisioning, management and decommissioning systems.  The key to this definition is in the automation and workflow of processes.  Although it is not as advanced, I think vCenter Orchestrator can represent a solid first step towards automation and workflowing deployments and management of datacenter assets.  Said another way, I think its a solid first step for many organizations towards the cloud.

My Installation Procedures (as an example)

In our environment (and I assume in most), vCenter Orchestrator is installed by default along with vCenter Server.  The primary requirement to bring up vCenter Orchestrator is an additional database, either Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server. Before you begin, you will want to know the following things:

• Database server, user account and password and database name for vCenter Orchestrator
• Basics of your LDAP configuration and have an account with read access to LDAP
• Have a LDAP group which can be assigned as the vCenter Orchestrator administrators group.
• The name of vCenter Server and an active user account to access the license for vCO.

General

To begin the installation process, you navigate to the VMware folder on the Start menu and choose vCenter Orchestrator Configuration.  A web page launches and you login with the generic vmware/vmware login to begin configuration.

• For security, the first step is to change the generic password to something specific for your environment.  To do this, click the “Change Password” tab under the General section.

Network

The next step is to configure the network configuration, which is fairly simple.  Choose Network on the left sidebar.  Once it loads, there is a drop-down list of IP addresses assigned to the server along with the DNS name to get to the vCenter Orchestrator configuration.  Click Apply Changes and we’re moving along.   In addition to the network, the SSL Certificate is also located here.

• I chose to use the same SSL certificate as my vCenter Server, so to do that use the “Import from URL” option, type in the URL of your vCenter server, and click Import.  The URL would be similar to “https://vcenterserver.domain.int“.

LDAP

After network, you should configure your LDAP integration, so choose the LDAP option on the left sidebar.  You will need an account capable of reading your LDAP (likely Active Directory in many shops).  You have a choice of Active Directory, eDirectory or Sun Java Directory as the LDAP client mode.  Fill in the server names of your LDAP servers (domain controllers).  You will fill in the LDAP root, for instance “DC=domain,DC=int“, depending on your configuration.  At this point, fill in your username. For Active Directory, it can be DOMAIN\username, username@domain.int, or full LDAP distinguished name format.  In my configuration, username@domain.int format worked.  Fill in a password and then apply changes.

Go back down to the “User lookup base:” option and then click Search located to the right of the text field.  If everything is configured correctly above, you should be able to query the LDAP server and locate the OU or CN where your users are located.

• One problem that I ran into with a generic AD configuration, with users stored in the default “Users” folder, is that Orchestrator expects an OU and not a “CN=Users,DC=domain,DC=int“.  I had to configure the User and Group Roots to be the same as my Root.  Your mileage my vary depending on your LDAP configuration.

Last, but not least, you must choose a group in LDAP that defines who is an administrator in vCenter Orchestrator.  So at the “vCO Admin group:” option, choose Search and find the group.  Apply changes, and then use the Test Login option to test everything.

Database

Next up is the Database configuration.  This is fairly straight forward.  Choose the type of database from the drop-down menu.  Enter the username and password to login to the database server.  Enter the FQDN of the database server and the port that the database is listening on.  Finally, enter the database name and instance (if needed).  For Windows Authentication, you may need to enter a domain and tick the “Use Windows authentication mode (NTLMv2)” option.  Apply Changes and if everything communicates, you will be presented the option at the top to install the database (initialize it with the vCO schema).  If there are communication errors, those will be presented.  Just continue to tweak the configuration until everything communicates.

License

Finally, license.  vCenter Orchestrator shares a vCenter license, so it will communicate with vCenter’s licensing service and pick up its license.  You will need to fill in the name of the vCenter server, the port that web services are running on (443 is default, unless you have modified the configuration).  The path will be “/sdk” and then you should add a username and password who can login to vCenter.

• I do not know what permissions this account needs in vCenter to read the license, but from a security perspective, I would try to limit it to only the permissions required.  I’ll take that as a to-do for myself.

Once the configuration is done, you’re ready to restart services and hopefully everything starts up with green lights all the way down the left-hand sidebar.  I found the installation very intuitive and simple to complete.  I was able to have vCenter Orchestrator up and running in just an hour or so.

Learning More

I have scheduled a couple of the out-of-box workflows to handle some weekly tasks in my environment.  It is fairly straight forward to do this, but I’m just getting my feet wet at this point.  Building a workflow seems daunting at this point, even if its just drag and drop.  So, I have pre-purchased and I would recommend Cody’s forthcoming book  to help you and I get a better handle on how to leverage vCenter Orchestrator.

I have, also, lamented in the past that the value of vSphere seems to be eroding, but I believe that a powerful workflow tool like Orchestrator could be a big boost to the value in many organizations.  It is up to customers, like myself, to leverage the weapons that VMware provides and bundles for free to increase the value that vSphere provides. 

Getting a few minutes to talk with Cody was one of the more useful conversations during my trip to VMworld.  I have found a great foundation of information through his blog that you will find helpful, too.  Check out all of his (free) resources on his blog at ProfessionalVMware.com.

Tonight, while trying to screen share with her at home (I can get to her over VPN when she’s in the office), I was forced to troubleshoot this nuisance.  After a few minutes of Google research, I came across a post on Apple discussion forums that pointed me to the Video menu in iChat.  Turns out, there are controls there to enable Audio, Video and Screen Sharing or to disable them if you don’t wish to advertise these services to other users in iChat.   I have included a screen shot below to show the options.  Turns out that my friend had inadvertently disabled Screen Sharing at some point and with a quick click, we were back in business and I was able to see her screen and help with her problem.

Local bursting is a fairly simple concept.  The CloudSystem a customer is delivered is built larger than the customer needs or pays for, and the additional capacity is available to the customer to consume on a pay-per-use, utility basis.  This is a very similar concept that has existed with HP SuperDome and Integrity lines (along with IBM’s OnDemand strategy) for a long time, but its now being applied to cloud technology.   But this concept allows for a customer to have additional local resources to consume without the need for additional capital expenses.

In addition to local bursting, HP is working to make a network of service providers that are compatible with CloudSystem through its CloudAgile service provider program.  These partners will include lots of different cloud providers and customers are not locked into a specific technology, such a vCloud, to choose from.  Savvis is a current HP CloudAgile partner, but others mentioned include SHI and Verizon (who is a vCloud provider).  HP has reiterated on several occasions that it is seeking to create an open cloud architecture which can interoperate with multiple and varied third party cloud providers.

Since bursting is one of the more promising concepts within the cloud and we took some time last week to talk about some use cases that would benefit from bursting:

• School photographers have a large spike in traffic during ‘yearbook’ season when they handle the majority of their business.
• College registration produces a peak amount of traffic for schools trying to get students into their desired classes for the coming semester.
• Rendering farms for movies would also be a good use case, because the majority of the time, render farms are not processing on a movie – it is only really required during large render sessions.
• Scholastic testing is also another seasons activity when users needs must be met and performance is key, but which outside of the season is not nearly as great of a computing load.
• Black Friday for ANY retail e-commerce vendor.

But there was one concept which also came up in our bursting conversations – and its an interesting one I’d like to reiterate here – and it is the issue of capacity with service providers.  Bursting and service providers are a new frontier for many companies, so knowing who can and cannot handle our capacity and needs is an interesting concept to think about.  I would think most service providers are not going to advertise their exact capacity (or lack of) for competitive reasons.  So, in those cases, how does a customer gauge whether or not a service provider can handle their workload?  Its a good question and I don’t have the answer, but I would love to hear what readers think.  One interesting point, is that because HP’s CloudSystem is multi-vendor public cloud, if one vendor cannot handle your load, customers have choice to move to another provider.   While this exists for VMware vCloud providers, too, HP is working so that customers can choose from non-vCloud providers as well.

We spent the week diving deep into the HP CloudSystem solution – viewing the workflows and automation that make it tick, learning about the products included and how they are used, and learning about directions for networking and storage for cloud.  Coming out of the event, I have a stronger understanding of how we could transition our organization towards a cloud and a better idea of the tangible benefits it would enable, something I have struggled to understand thus far.

I was fortunate to be with a diverse and intelligent group of bloggers for the event.  Each of us came from a different background and represented a large cross section of the customers HP services, from small business to enterprise and government resellers.  It left for lots of great conversations and debate about products, offerings, use cases and other details for the businesses we represented.  I’ll encourge you to follow these folks below and their blogs:

I thought it worthy to post about this since I used patch management as my example of how VMware eroding value from the vSphere suite by removing functionality between the version 4 and version 5 product lines.  In many ways, this eases the pain, though patch management does still come at an additional cost for an additional product with vCenter Protect Essentials.

VMware is clearly positioning the product for the small to medium business (SMB) space.  Billed as ‘a complete on-premise management system’, vCenter Protect Essentials will handle patch management and previous Update Manager users will gain a good bit of functionality not previously available to them, such as the ability to stage patches to occur, scanning hosts organized by their Active Directory structure (and assuming still by their VMware hierarchy), and additional alerting capabilities to administrators and users.  In addition to VMware guest systems, vCenter Protect Essentials appears to be able to scan and remediate physical systems through the use of agents, just as NetChk Protect did before.  For NetChk Protect customers, it appears that more integration with vCenter is found in the new product along with a small list of other enhancements.

VMware has a second level of vCenter Protect Essentials, named the Plus version, which includes antivirus protection using SunBelt VIPRE Enterprise Antivirus and basic configuration management features.  The configuration management features include the ability to download templates for regulatory audit baselines like PCI, SOX and HIPPA which can be compared against systems and then remediated.  I assume that this version includes less features than vCenter Configuration Manager, but as I said before, it is a product being positioned for the SMB space.

What is unknown today is whether the vCenter Protect Essentials product will work as Update Manager did using the same network ports to scan hosts and VM’s which are behind a firewall or if it will have a new security implementation.  For users who are familiar with NetChk Protect, I would assume it would function the same, but having no prior experience with NetChk, I cannot say, but the at least there is now a solution for the SMB’s where Configuration Manager did not fit due to cost or complexity.

I am not a VMware basher, just the opposite actually.  I serve as a primary VMware advocate in my company.   But, my company has not embraced the vCloud vision of VMware.   I am a VCP3 and VCP4 and hope to be a VCP5 in the near future.  I know their products well and use them on a daily basis, both at work (vSphere) and at home (Fusion).  But it is harder for me to make a technical or business case for their product.  The first issue is cost.  The second is the “good enough” factor, since we are not using some of the additional value they have added to their product in vSphere 4 and 5.

There are already good cases in the datacenter where all the advanced VMware features don’t matter, and in those cases my company has already adopted XenServer as a secondary hypervisor.  And XenServer works well, which becomes a problem.  We have proven its ability to run our workloads and consolidate servers.    In some cases, the applications we run on it were built with high availability and fail-over and the tried and true VMware features like clustering, HA and DRS do not matter, specifically our XenApp servers .

In other some ways, VMware is erroding the existing value of their vSphere product suite by pulling features its customers are using.  The primary reason I have heard to do this is because there is overlap with new products they have purchased or developed.  Guest patch management is an example of this.  Since their Configuration Management product handles patch management, a feature that has existed in vSphere for two generations, Update Manager is now being downgraded to only patch vSphere hosts.  But the kicker in this case is that Configuration Manager does much more than patch management and is priced as such.  We aren’t seeking the additional features and VMware has priced themselves out of the game for us.

VMware’s decision on patch management leaves companies with a big void to fill.  But no solution, including the VMware Configuration Manager, fills the void as seamlessly as the Update Manager product that once patched my systems.  Because we have firewalls in between our vCenter and hosts, Update Manager worked well because it used the same vCenter ports for patching.  Configuration Manager and other solutions do not, which is actually kind of a pain.

VMware has cast a vision of the vCloud and added API sets for storage, security and networking that help to pave the path to the cloud for companies.  In our case, we have not embraced the cloud vision and while we may in the future, today, the enhancements added to vSphere have not added real value to us.  Unless a company embraces VMware’s vision and adopts these technologies, the vSphere suite continues to erode value.

The cloud is a vision I have written about before and I stated then that it’s one that systems administration groups have little to do with influencing in organizations (see my original post here).  This is a particular challenge for VMware and its advocates.  It is, frankly, a problem that worries me as a VMware believer and administrator.  But, as the tides change – such as the transition from Netware to Active Directory, we as administrators move where we need to and adapt, like the chameleons that we are.  But I am also wondering what other VMware administrators are feeling?  There was a time my company used all the features in vSphere.  Has VMware left you to in a corner while they focus on the cloud?  Talk back to me…