TL;DR takeaway: As of yesterday, innovators are forbidden to release new products or services for their customers.  Sorry.  Too late.

And that’s very convenient for Microsoft, especially when it comes to cloud computing and virtual infrastructure.  I mean, if you look at some of the crazy things they were trying to do in order to be relevant in the past, such as peddle enormous cloud “appliances” that nobody wanted.  But it’s fine, because they killed that off just prior to the cutoff date.

And oh, speaking of flailing cloud strategies… lucky for the Azure team that they kind of almost finally have their IaaS offering sorted out in 2013 with the VM Role.  I mean Azure VMs.  Or is that in beta — a.k.a. “Preview” — still?  We’ve all lost track.

That article also does a lot of bragging about experience running public cloud services, for good reason — they have amassed broad expertise in dealing with issues such as SSL certificate expiration, air conditioner firmware upgrade failures, and leap year glitches.  Huge competitive advantage, for sure.

For some, I would imagine that rebooting the cloud every Patch Tuesday really is “good enough” — others prefer a more reliable foundation than Microsoft Windows.

Don’t “Go Turbo” on us, Microsoft…

Related posts:

1. Missing: System Center 2012 Hybrid Cloud
2. Microsoft seeks to stem Azure exodus with huge appliance
3. Unboxing the Cloud
4. OpSource Cloud Experience — Connecting

Related posts:

1. Microsoft seeks to stem Azure exodus with huge appliance
2. Unboxing the Cloud
3. Missing: “Private Clouds” at the MMS 2012 Hosted Cloud Pavilion
4. System Center 2012 — “Now it’s a cloud!”

Please vote for VCritical today as one of your top 10 favorites, and note that since the scoring is weighted, a higher rank is much more valuable than a lower one.

Supporter Celebration!

I would like to thank everyone that chooses to support VCritical this year.  If you decide to vote, please leave a comment below to let me know.  If VCritical breaks into the top 10, I will give away an iPad Mini to one random supporter as a way of saying thanks.

Related posts:

1. VCritical in the top vDozen at vSphere-land
2. Vote VCritical — for change
3. vLaunchPad: Lucky number thirteen!
4. First year of VCritical

What I meant to say, was:

Yo dawg, Veeam heard you like clouds so they put a cloud in your backup so you can back up to the cloud while you back up your cloud.

Hey, Veeam is also giving away a Samsung Galaxy Tab on February 14th – sign up!

Related posts:

1. Pimp My Hypervisor
2. Missing: “Private Clouds” at the MMS 2012 Hosted Cloud Pavilion
3. Unboxing the Cloud
4. System Center 2012 — “Now it’s a cloud!”

What do you think — is Windows NT an iPad killer?

Related posts:

1. The Million Hypervisor March
2. Windows Server 2008 R2 — Windows 7?
3. System Center 2012 “Ready Now”; More Lies Ahead
4. Upgrading your management platform from the entry-level edition

One Hyper-V 3.0 feature is called Shared-nothing live migration. It allows administrators to migrate a virtual machine (VM) from one physical server with direct attached storage to another physical server with direct attached server.

It requires no clustering or shared storage between both servers as just a small connection such as a Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) cable will suffice resulting in zero down time.

For the cargo company that operates in 180 airports around the world, security and zero downtime were key criteria.

Both Hyper-V and vSphere allow administrators to place virtual disks on local storage or on a shared SAN.  VMs using local disks are essentially pinned to one physical host and cannot be migrated to accommodate events like shifting resource requirements or host maintenance.  Enter “shared-nothing live migration” — an interesting new enhancement found in the most recent releases from both Microsoft and VMware which allows administrators to move a VM and storage in a single operation.

Just the thing for environments that require zero downtime, right?  Not exactly.

Important workloads with high uptime requirements need to be protected from physical host failures.  HA is responsible for restarting failed VMs on surviving hosts, but this is only effective when VM disks are still available — on shared storage.  Virtual disks residing on local storage will remain offline until the physical host is brought back online.

It’s that simple.  Being able to migrate a VM and storage together is a feature with interesting use cases — none of which have to do with application availability and local storage.

For those interested in all the gory details, check out this excellent technical paper on VMware vSphere 5.1 vMotion.

Related posts:

1. Hyper-V 3 Offers Unlimited Live Migrations — Kind of
2. Live Migration “significantly more complicated”
3. VMware vMotion: Over 5 Times Faster Than Hyper-V Live Migration
4. On Quick Storage Migration in R2

Perhaps you are a technology professional who has not had a chance to serve on the front lines of virtualization but would like to know what the key considerations are when planning and implementing the industry-leading vSphere virtual infrastructure solution.  Maybe you have been stuck in a position trudging along with a competing virtualization platform that is based on a legacy general-purpose operating system, looking for a great primer to quickly get up to speed on VMware vSphere concepts and terminology —  and a chance to see how straightforward things are when purpose built for cloud infrastructure.

I recently had the opportunity to review the new book on VMware vSphere 5 by Eric Maillé and René-François Mennecier entitled Building a Virtual Datacenter.  It covers a lot of ground and would be very good resource for those ramping up on VMware technologies.  With a foreword by Chad Sakac, you know it’s legit.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: VMware VI and vSphere SDK
2. Book Review: Maximum vSphere
3. Book Review: Automating vSphere with vCenter Orchestrator [Giveaway!]
4. System Center 2012 — “Now it’s a cloud!”

Over three years ago, VMware and partners demonstrated a solution to the SR-IOV/vMotion issue — by temporarily switching from passthrough to emulation mode it was possible to migrate a VM from one host to another.  This innovation can be seen in the following demonstration:

Now, you may be asking why VMware never shipped this feature if it existed over three years ago.  I’m not privvy to any specific details on the topic, but it would be sensible to say that decisions to release features are made based on priorities such as customer value.  Although hardware with SR-IOV support is now becoming widely available, the customer use cases are still very much at the edges.  Consider this: if a workload is so latency-sensitive that SR-IOV is truly required, how acceptable is it to impact service levels while I/O is rerouted during this migration period?

While this feature isn’t part of a shipping product from VMware, I’d argue that vSphere had it before Hyper-V for all intents and purposes.  Especially considering the weight Microsoft gives to the capabilities of their pre-release software.

Happy New Year!

Related posts:

1. On Quick Storage Migration in R2
2. vMotion Performance on VROOM! Videos
3. Hyper-V 3 Offers Unlimited Live Migrations — Kind of
4. VMware vMotion: Over 5 Times Faster Than Hyper-V Live Migration

There seems to be some confusion as to whether or not this applies to vSphere 5.0 or if the move was a sinister plan to force all customers to upgrade to the latest release, recently-announced version 5.1.

It’s simple: there is no more vRAM entitlement in any version of vSphere — not in 5.1 and not in 5.0.

In the VMware vSphere 5 Licensing, Pricing, and Packaging document, the FAQ section makes it very clear:

Q: Does the new VMware vSphere 5 licensing model – per-CPU
without limitation on the number of VMs, cores or amount
of physical RAM – apply to both vSphere 5.0 and vSphere 5.1?

A: Yes. The VMware vSphere 5 licensing model applies to both
vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 customers.

VMware vSphere 5.1 is an awesome product, but you are not forced to immediately upgrade in order to enjoy the benefits of this recent change.

Related posts:

1. Upgrading VMs to vSphere virtual hardware
2. We Fear Change
3. VMware vCenter Server Appliance and vRAM Reporting
4. Price Commitment for Windows Server Workloads

What FT is good for, however, is protecting critical workloads that do not have sufficient redundancy capabilities out of the box, such as a legacy application that fulfills a crucial role but was never architected for failover, or a next-generation workload still in early phases that lacks the robustness that comes with maturity.

Consider Hadoop.  Doing interesting things with massive amounts of information is in the foreground these days, and Hadoop is the de facto standard when it comes to analysis of big data.  Hadoop, designed to process jobs in a distributed fashion, is tolerant of compute node failures within a cluster, but a couple of the management components of Hadoop have not yet reached the same level of resiliency as the data processing nodes and remain single points of failure.  A scenario like this is a perfect match for VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance, so it should be no surprise the the VMware Performance Team has recently published a study characterizing the scale of such a solution.

It’s clear that despite one of the popular objections to FT — single vCPU support — the feature fills a significant gap and critically enhances overall reliability of a distributed system, thereby contributing to the uptime of hundreds of compute nodes.  And for those wishing for FT VMs with multiple CPUs, the SMP FT technology was previewed and demonstrated in a session at VMworld 2012.

Although it’s not widely known, fault tolerance is expected to be available in Windows Hyper-V someday.  Don’t just take my word for it, check out this announcement to learn more about the “need” for fault tolerant Windows servers.

Evidently, the Hyper-V team has been “jealous” of this amazing zero-downtime vSphere advantage for years, so it’s no wonder that they pre-announced the capability for their own product well ahead of availability.  You’ll know that they are getting close to finally providing FT capabilities when they cease to criticize VMware FT.

As with private cloud, just because Microsoft talks about something, doesn’t mean it exists.

Related posts:

1. NIC Teaming Update: Hyper-V Still Cloudy as Ever
2. 3 CPUs and 12GB RAM is the New Tier-1 App
3. Exclusive: Hyper-V 2013 Product Roadmap
4. How to see if Quick Migration is right for your workload