If you are on twitter, there is no doubt you saw a slew of “VMworld Sessions – time to vote” tweets that went out recently.  For those of you NOT on twitter, and you plan on attending VMworld 2012 – its time to vote  

It looks like there are a ton of solid sessions worthy of votes, and thanks to the Filter Button, you can search out for specific topics, or speakers.  Let me walk you through how that works down below.

In the mean time, I thought I’d call out a few of the sessions I’m a part of and would appreciate your vote on !!

• Session – 2050 – The Most Important Virtual Desktop Security Best Practices –there are 9 of them. 
• Outline:

This session will focus on the top ten virtual desktop security best practices using real-world customer deployments as well as demonstrations to show how to implement the practice using VMware tools such as vShield. We will also be discussing third party tools and solutions, such as HyTrust and RSA Technology as well as well as looking at new solutions like VMware’s Project Octopus as a more secure solution to Dropbox-like unsecure cloud solutions.

For each best practice, we will show:

· The Threat & What happens if you DON’T implement security

· The Best Practice

· Real-World example of how this practice protects against the threat

• Speakers:
• Erin Banks – @Banksek
• Me – @vTexan
• Session: 2559 – How Heritage Auctions (HA.Com) Leverages vCenter Operations for Total Infrastructure Monitoring across their enviornment during critical auctions.
• Outline:

This session will describe how an online auction business uses vC Ops to monitor their datacenter performance during critical auction sessions.  We will talk, and most importantly demonstrate how they are heavily leveraging the vC Ops Solution as well as it’s ability to utilize 3^rd party plugins to monitor everything from their Cisco UCS Servers and Directors, to their various EMC solutions and all the way down to certain environmental conditions in the data center.  We will demonstrate examples of infrastructure monitoring outside of traditional vC Ops implementations.  This will include live demos of VM performance, Storage Performance, Host hardware performance, route/switch information and data center environmentals.   We will also take you through a demonstration on how they utilize vC OPS to troubleshoot issues that come up during day to day operations.  Troubleshooting starting at the Application Layer and going through the Virtual Machine, into the ESXi Hosts, into the Physical network, into the storage arrays controllers and all the way to the drives.

• Speakers:
• Brian Carpenter – VP of IT for Heritage Auctions (@vtBrianC)
• Me (@vTexan)
• Session: 2893 – Tips and Tricks for Setting up you own low cost VMware vSphere Home Lab or Test/Dev Environment.   
• At the end of the session, we will be giving away Home Lab Equipment like an Iomega Home NAS solution to help get your home lab off the ground to some lucky winners !!
• Outline:
• This session will focus around an installation guide for building your very own VMware Home Lab.  We will talk through utilizing things like VMware Fusion/Workstation all the way up to using VMware ESXi running on dedicated servers or desktops.  Do you have a $500 or less budget? How about $1000? $2000? We have can show you how to best use those dollars to maximize your lab ! Not to mention, Live demo’s of the various lab equipment and costs per lab. We can show you solutions that meet that price point. We will also discuss lessons learned from the 4 panelist in building their home and test/dev environments.    We will talk thought home networking gotcha’s, will discuss Operating Systems Licensing and where to spend most of your money when designing the perfect home lab!!  We will also emphasis the importance of a solid network and active directory/DNS as the key to the success of your home lab.
• RoundTable Speakers:
• Kendrick Coleman (@KendrickColeman)
• Nick Weaver (@Lynxbat)
• Brain Carpenter (@vtBrianC)
• Rob Peglar (@Peglarr)
• me  (@vTexan)

There are a lot of other great presenters, and would encourage you to vote for them !!  In the mean time, if you need help figuring out how to vote – allow me to walk you through the process in my best “HowTo” Guide approach

1st – go to www.vmworld.com –

2nd -  log in.  If you’ve attended VMworld in the past, use the same credentials, if this will be your first time, create new credentials. 

3rd – To use the filter option – click “Filter Option”

4th – Pick one of the many ways to filter, in this case lets just do a search for Trogden (me ) – type it in, and then click submit.

5th – And here are the results. (Green is good ) I would great appreciate the votes !!

Good luck to all of those that submitted papers !!  Feel free to leave your session ID and topics in the comments sections !!  I’m going to be spending the next few days reviewing some of the other sessions and then I’ll vote !!

Thanks in advance if you choose one, or all three of my sessions !!

@vTexan

Whew…what a week !!  Crazy doesn’t even begin to explain how awesome this past week was.  This marked my 2nd EMC World and the first one that I wasn’t locked inside the Hands On Labs so I actually had the opportunity to sit in some of the sessions, chat with customers and partners and really get a good view of EMC World.  I thought I would take some time to document out some of the things that’s stood out the most. 

At EMC World 2011 the theme was “accelerating the Journey to Your Cloud” as well as “Cloud Meets big Data” and at EMC World 2012 it was “Transforming IT, Transforming Business and Transforming Yourself”.  I think the last count I saw was we had a little over 13,000 attendees and it felt every bit like 13,000 walking the halls of the Sands Expo center !!

One of the very coolest things about EMC World 2012 was the complete laser focus on the Social Media part of the event.  It was evident from the moment you picked up your name badge, if you had a twitter account, it was listed prominently on the badge.  This is a big deal for those of us that have embraced Social Media and twitter specifically.  The other thing is EMC TV captured most, if not all of the Keynotes and have made them freely available at EMCWorld.com.  I would encourage you to finish reading this blog and then head over to the site to check out !!

The first keynote I want to call out is Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger’s opening Keynote.  If you really want to get a great understanding of where EMC is going, this is the first thing you should watch ! – http://bcove.me/79xu8asw 

The next keynote I’d like to call out is Sanjay Mirchandani who is the CIO of EMC and probably one of the best CIO presenters I’ve seen.  I’ve actually never had an opportunity to hear him present on the EMC IT story and was really impressed with what our IT folks have been up to these last few years.  http://bcove.me/e1088w5u

His message was really geared towards how IT departments need to work on transforming themselves, sort of “future proofing” your skills as IT makes the move to more of a services model.  In one of his slides he spoke about the last 7 or 8 years IT has really been focused on virtualizing as much as possible.  In other words, trying to reduce the physical nature of IT.  It was a mind set of each application needs physical servers and moving away from that took some time and focus.  Some of the lessons learned during that time was to focus on moving the applications and then re-tool them.  In other words, don’t do to much “change” at the same time.  Move it to virtual, and then deal with it was their motto.  It wasn’t just about Server and Application virtualization, it was also about looking at the different ways IT was delivering to their end users.  If the last 8 years was focused on virtualization, the next few years is about transformation using orchestration and automation tools and solutions.  If you can only watch one of these sessions, I would recommend Sanjay’s !!

Other really cool information that flowed out during EMC World was the 42 various product announcements.  One of my favorites was the new VNX for vCenter Operations adapter.  For those of you that are familiar with vC OPS, you understand the value it brings to your virtual datacenter as well as the more information you can feed into it, the more valuable the monitoring tool can be.  In this case, we’ve moved what was a “Skunk Works” project, to a completely supported, and engineering backed up product.  Once again it shows the level of commitment EMC has with VMware and how important our integration is to our customers !!  For more information, check out the blog post over on VMware’s Site: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/05/tighter-integration-between-emc-vnx-storage-and-vmware-vcenter-operations-announced-today.html

Our brothers and sisters over at VCE had some nice announcements as well.   Jeramiah Dooley blogged about “VMAX 40K+Vblock = ((Powerful, Trusted, Smart) ^ More) – Risk” as well as “Vblock 300: Flexibility Without Risk” .  Both are great reads !!  As well as Aaron Delp over at his blog talking about: Announcing VCE’s Vblock Data Protection. 

Rob Peglar (@Peglarr)  – Office of the CTO for Isilon blog about his experience at EMC World here: http://www.isilon.com/what-wonderful-world

Fellow Texan, and all around rockstar Nick Weaver (@Lynxbat) practically stole EMC World with his latest killer work: Lex Parsimoniae : Cloud Provisioning with a Razor – it’s a killer project and just an awesome job by Nick. 

Not to be left out, Chuck Hollis (@ChuckHollis) once again published a slew of great information on some of releases and you can find them here:

• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/isilon-charting-the-changes.html
• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/atmos-charting-the-changes.html
• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/data-domain-and-avamar-charting-the-changes.html
• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/vplex-and-recoverpoint-charting-the-changes.html
• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/emc-databridge-a-new-way-to-think-about-it-infrastructure-reporting.html
• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/vnx-charting-the-changes.html
• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/vmax-charting-the-changes.html
• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/iomega-good-things-in-small-packages.html
• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/delivering-storage-as-a-managed-service-vmax-sp.html
• http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/05/simplification-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-the-new-esi.html

Last, but certainty not least was the killer Hands on Lab’s that have become the “Go to” thing at EMC and VMworld’s.  This year completely blew away last years numbers and @DaverDFW’s Unisphere for VMAX lab was the clear #1.  Last count, I think the lab as a whole delivered over 3500 labs.  Chad wrote about this on his site: EMC World vLabs- Check it out !! – these labs are now gone, but the hope is to eventually figure out how to deliver these at the various events EMC puts on year around.  Fingers crossed on that !!

So, that’s just a short overview of the coolness that was EMC World 2012.  As I pointed out above, all the keynotes and various information can be found at www.EMCWorld.Com and a special shout out to Jeremy Burton (Chief Marketing Officer) and his whole team in delivering a KILLER show !!

Hoepfully, I’ll see most of you at VMworld this year in San Francisco but if not, I’ll see you guys next year at EMC World !!

@vTexan

As more and more customers are virtualizing their datacenters and moving to automation and orchestration tools (Cloud), it’s becoming more and more clear that reporting, trending and monitoring tools are necessary if not mandatory!!. vCenter Operations (vC OPS)is that perfect solution.  What I REALLY like about vC OPS is their “Adapter Plugins” that expand it’s reach outside of the vSphere Environment and allows customers to bring in all sorts of third party devices.  In fact, at EMC World this week EMC launched the first fully supported vC OPS Adapter for the VNX product line.  You can read more about it here on VMware’s website: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/05/tighter-integration-between-emc-vnx-storage-and-vmware-vcenter-operations-announced-today.html  This is tied to a lot of work that Clint Kitson (www.vElemental.com) and Matt Cowger (http://vmsarefreeright.wordpress.com/ ) has done over the last year as a skunkworks project that took off once some of the EMC brass was able to see the value.  It only took a few moments before they were “All in” with moving forward.

If you are using vC OPS today, VMware wants to hear about it !!  They are looking for some of the most compelling uses of vC OPS in customers environments.  The top 2 most compelling stories will get a Ticket to VMworld 2012 (1 customer for USA and 1 customer for EMEA) you will also get to Co-present in session and to top if off, you’ll be treated to Dinner with the panelist.  2nd place prizes will be $500 Amex gift cards !!  Not too bad if you ask me !!  And I’m sure we can talk Duncan into tossing in a pair of autographed books while he’s at it   I’ll even buy the books for him and Frank (@FrankDenneman) to sign for you !!

I’m honored to be one of the judges along with David Davis (@davidmdavis), Eric Sloof (@esloof), Duncan (he needs no last name, @duncanYB), Marin Klaus (@mklausevm) and the MAN with the plan himself, Ben Scheerer (@BenScheerer and @vCenterOps).  By the way, if you aren’t following these people on twitter, you are CRAZY. 

Anyway, with all contests here is a few of the criteria that we are looking for:

Judges will consider entries for organizations based in NA / LATAM (for VMworld 2012) and EMEA (for VMworld EMEA) only

• 40% of judging score is based on originality of the most authentic, impactful and creative story.
• 20% of judging score is based on definition of value to your business in time savings (OPEX), capital saving (CAPEX), or even ability to avert / plan for impactful events occurring in your environment, or anything else.
• 20% on presentation of visuals / layout – e.g. use of custom dashboards, use of screenshot to display issues, videos
• 10% Unique uses of vC Ops – custom dashboards, adapters, etc..
• 10% A description of any evaluation done of other tools considered, or replacement of any existing management tools/methodologies
  

Lots more information can be found here: http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/vmware-vcops-story-contest-promo.html so make sure you read up on it and then get to work on your submission !! 

Submit your entry using the Online Form @ vmware.com/go/vcops-story between 12:00 am PDT, 5/13/2012 and 11:59:59 pm PDT, 7/11/2012.  So get going !!

I’m REALLY looking forward to seeing the submissions and I’m sure its going to be a tough decision so hurry up and get your entries in !!

@vTexan

Okay, before everyone piles on to me about this blog, I know for the vast majority of us “social media types” this is beyond 101 content.  This is not written for you   It’s written for this massive wave of new iPad users here at EMC (and partners)  that are trying to get their hands around keeping up with today’s conversation around “next generation datacenter” and “IT Transformation” – how about that for buzzy catch phrases – and the massive amount of change happening within IT.  I’ve been sitting in more then a few Quarterly Business Reviews, as well as sales training with sales teams and what I’m hearing and seeing is a sincere desire to read and try to absorb as much info and content as possible. Just like any other tradecraft, sales people work on honing their sales skills. This blog post is written specifically for them (and others that might find this useful).

My first assumption is you have an iPad/iPhone/Android/WindowsPhone/Blackberry, or some other tablet device and you probably starting to use it more and more for business reasons.  Don’t get me wrong, it has angry birds, HBOGO, and Facebook but you also have things like Evernote and Salesforce.com apps like Chatter etc that you use for business.  The next app you want to install is something called an RSS aggregator.   As you know, EMC sends out a ton of content, both marketing and blogs etc and our collective inbox fills up fast and it’s hard to keep up with everything.  Sometimes we create rules and folders with our hope that at some point we will read it all but we never do.  An RSS aggregator is simply a tool you can use to collect some of this information on your iPad to read at a later date.  For instance, I catch up on a lot of content on planes as well as when I’m laying around the couch on the weekends trying to get out of doing all the “Honey do’s” my wife has for me   This is usually the perfect time to catch up on a couple of blogs.

So, I use a combination of Google Reader (www.google.com/reader) which is what I use to manage my RSS subscriptions as well as an RSS reader on my iPad.  The net-net, when you subscribe to a blog, you are essentially agreeing that as they update and add content, it will be pushed to you or in my case, it’s pushed to google reader.  If you are new to all of this, just plow forward with a standard google reader account.  It’s actually tied to your google account you probably already have for gmail so this should be REALLY easy !!

I’m going to walk you through 2 things.  First is how to subscribe to a blog, and second is how to setup you iPad or device to read what you are subscribing to.  Feel free to skip the first part if you already know how to subscribe.

Lets use Chad Sakac’s VirtualGeek.Typepad.com as the test bed for your first subscription.  Let’s assume you already have a GMAIL or Google account.  Here are 2 different ways you can subscribe to a blog site.

1. Go to Chad’s blog and look on the left hand side of the window, you will see “Subscribe in a reader” link. – Click on it.

2. This will take you to a page that will look something like the picture below.  Click on “Add to google” (again, assuming you have a google account)

3. This takes you to another page – click on “Add to Google Reader” – you might not see this page unless you’ve already logged into Gmail or Google.  Feel free to log in and then you should see this screen.

4. At this point, you are done.  You have subscribed to Chad’s blog.  You can do this on pretty much every blog site, or website that offers this form of syndication.   Just look for the RSS logo on the site !!  Lets move on to another way to subscribe.

The other way to subscribe is within Google Reader itself.  let me walk you through that short process.  You might find this a lot easier when you are first setting up Google Reader.

1. log into to www.google.com/reader with your account information and you will see a RED Subscribe button.  Click on it:

2. Do a quick search for a blog, or persons name.  In my case, type in vTexan and click Add (this will actually do a search) with the results on the right hand side

3. It will then present you the results of your search and you can simple click on the subscribe link

4. Once you click on it, you will see it change to subscribe.

That was pretty easy and painless right !! 

So, now you have some choices.  What I like about Google Reader is it allows me to have 1 site that manages my RSS feeds and opens me up to opportunities to take advantage of really good RSS readers on the market today.  I use NewsRack for my iPad <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/newsrack/id288815275?mt=8> as my RSS reader of choice but I know a few people that really like FlipBoard < http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flipboard-your-social-news/id358801284?mt=8 > and I’m sure a few others will chime in about the ones they like as well.  In fact, I encourage my readers to post in the comments section. 

Let’s assume you are going down the path of using NewsRack to read your RSS feeds from.  Download it from the link above and then launch NewsRack on your iPad or iPhone/Tablet/Laptop etc.

1. On the iPad – click on the circle wheel thingy (technical term) on the bottom right hand side of the window.  It looks like this:

2. Next click on Sync Settings:

3. Next fill in your google reader/gmail credentials.

Once you have that all setup, you will see NewsRack start filling up with the content you subscribed to.  It’s that easy.  Now, each time you find yourself with a little free time, you can just click on NewsRack, it will sync up all the unread information and you can start catching up on the latest and greatest info.  By the way, Flipboard might interest you in that you can sync your Facebook, Twitter and various other content into it and it’s like flipping through a magazine.  The good news is with Google Reader, you can try out all sorts of RSS readers without having to spend the time subscribing in each one of them.  You just use your Google account and it does it all for you.  By the way, you can get RSS readers for just about anything OS, not to mention Outlook has this capability as well.

So, get out there and start subscribing to blogs !!  Again – specifically for the EMC’ers and our partners – a great first place to start is here: http://www.emc.com/social-emc/index.htm – click on the “all EMC Blogs” to get a good start.  I will tell you not all EMC Bloggers are listed, but like I said, it’s a good first start.  If you are looking for VMware content, check out http://blogs.vmware.com/ for a good list of bloggers that contribute.  On the left hand side of the page is the official VMware blog roll that you can pick and choose from.

Good luck and if you run into any issues, feel free to leave comments below !!

@vTexan

I’m not really sure where I first heard the term Stealth IT, but it seems I’m starting to see and hear about it more and more when talking with customers and prospects. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a term they use, but more around a description of some of the problems they are running into.  For instance, I see it a lot when speaking about End User Computing, but it can be tied to Application Development just as easy. 

So, what is Stealth IT?  It’s the combination of applications and end user devices like Dropbox and iPads that has started to eat away at IT departments relevancy within their own company as well as end users willingness to “go out on their own” to solve their issues.  In other words, IT isn’t able to adapt as quick as their end users need them to so end users are simply going elsewhere for these services.  

Now, this isn’t just an End User Computing issues, as you can imagine Application Developers and even Application Owners go through this same frustration.  For instance, think of the company you work at today. How long would it take you, or your IT organization to react to an application owner request for server resources to test a new software build?  Mentally walk through the process in your head:

• How many layers of requests does a typical end user need to go through to request IT resources keeping in mind your current “to do list”.
• How long do you realistically think it would take you to actually meet their requirements? 
• What happens if you don’t have the servers, or storage requirements to meet their needs? 

What we are starting to see is more and more developers doing their own thing and going out to Amazon, or other 3rd party providers and simply swiping their Amex card and having their environment ready to go in about an hour if not quicker.  This is another solid example of Stealth IT and another great example of what IT departments will need to start focusing on if they want to continue to be relevant inside their own company.

So why should companies and specifically IT organization care about these types of Stealth IT issues?  First and foremost, it becomes a HUGE security and legal risk.  Lets take Dropbox as a good example.  I’m sure your company “doesn’t support it” but my guess is your end users (or even you) still use it and that means corporate information is sitting in someone else cloud.  Keeping in mind, this is completely out of reach from IT and just because IT doesn’t bless it, doesn’t mean they are still not responsible when a legal hold order rolls down, or worse: a discovery request happens.  Lawyers are getting REALLY smart about all these various Stealth IT solutions in the market and CIO’s, CFO’s and even CEO’s can get themselves into a lot of hot water if they don’t get their hands around it ASAP. Same thing from an application developer perspective.  Most AppDev guys like to play with real information, so that means they are uploading company information into someone else cloud.  What happens if they leave?  How does IT lock down their access? Better yet how does IT even know about it?

So, while Stealth IT might not be a big issue today in your environment (and I would certainly argue that it is a big issue) you can see the trend happening in your own company.  While I agree some of this has a lot to do with current application limitations around flexibility, at some point IT has to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they are doing everything they can be doing to be as reactive as possible to their internal customers.  If we don’t reflect from time to time, internal IT will start to loose more and more relevancy and that’s never a good thing !!

Out of curiosity, what other Stealth IT examples do you see out in the market today?

I’m EXTREMLY excited to announce that TrainSignal.com is now an official sponsor of the vTexan.com blog site.  If you’ve been an avid reader of my blog, or follow me on Twitter you know I’m a HUGE fan of David Davis (Twitter: @DavidMDavis ) and the folks over at TrainSignal.Com.  I’ve had the extreme pleasure of reviewing some of their material over the last couple of years and always learned a ton.  Their attention to detail, and level of competence is second to none. 

As you know, I spend a lot of time and energy speaking to customers and prospects about Virtual Desktops.  Most of the time they are very early in the process and want to start collecting as much reference material as possible.  I usually give them a slew of blog posts, but I also encourage them to seek out professional training.  TrainSignal.com is the one I probably speak to the most.  Let’s take their VMware View 5 Essentials Training solution.  It’s 15 Videos, and over 7 hours of content that take you from soup to nuts on how to get up to speed on View 5.  They take you through the following:

• Lab Setup
• View Components and Licensing
• Installing View 5
• Configuring your first Virtual Desktop
• Parent Image Best Practices
• Composer Linked Clones
• Persistent Disk design
• What it takes to maintain your desktops pools
• User Profiles and Data – probably one of the BIGGEST things you want to get your hands around as you roll VDI.  User Profiles and make or break your View POC.
• Fun things around how to setup printing
• How to ThinApp
• This is a step by step guide on how to package your applications for ThinApp
• They also have modules on Monitoring, Troubleshooting and even upgrading View 5.

As you can see, if you are just dipping your toes into VMware View 5, you just can’t go wrong with their training modules.  Also, maybe you are on the fence with VMware View vs Citrix XenDesktop, they have over 12 hours of of training on XenDesktop 5 and they also have over 14 hours on XenApp 6 !!

By the way, they also have VMware vSphere 5 training, so if you are new to VMware, this is a great place to start.  They also cover Cisco (want to get your CCNA?), Microsoft (Hyper-V etc), Exchange, ForeFront, SQL,  Systems Center and the list goes on. 

Again, I would like to sincerely thank TrainSignal for sponsoring my blog, and I’m looking forward to reviewing more of their content and I know exactly the one I’m going to jump into next.  They just released VMware vCloud Essentials and I seem to be asked a lot about this lately.  If you are not familiar with vCloud, you really should look into it !! 

 @vTexan

Some of you may have noticed a slow down on the blogging the last month. It has nothing to do with lacking ideas for content, and everything to do with a new role I’ve taken on here at EMC. A couple of weeks ago I moved into a vSpecialist Manager role covering the Commercial West Division. Basically this is from Texas, up towards Iowa and over to Seattle and back around to Texas.  Ya, BIG GEO !! 

Normally when things like this happen, you’ve had a chance to backfill for the role you are leaving, but in this case things moved pretty fast and we needed managerial coverage quickly so I moved into a dual role. Needless to say, it’s been a CRAZY last few weeks and my passion for blogging had to take a quick hibernation (to steal a tweet from Duncan). BUT I’M BACK!!

With this new role comes new fun around looking for good people to bring into EMC. It feels like I’m going to be spending a lot of my time on just recruiting and finding great people. The GREAT news is the team I’m managing are all rockstars which makes my job as a manager WAY easier !! At this point, I’m just trying not to screw anything up !!

Back to recruiting. Guess what, WE NEED GOOD PEOPLE !! Not just our vSpecialist teams, we have openings for Technical Consultants (Pre-Sales – Customer Facing Systems Engineers) for the division I cover as well. NOT to mention, even if we don’t have a current opening in a specific geography, we always need to keep a bench of people we can bring into EMC when openings happen and that can happen at a drop of a hat. I usually chalk this up to just straight up networking.  I’m a firm believer that the great jobs are the ones you don’t often see posted, but hear about through your networking endeavors like theses!!

So I get asked a lot about what a vSpecialist is, and what does it take to be one. For the first question, we wear many different hats, but most of them have VMware+EMC on them somewhere. We help our customers understand the value of EMC in their VMware environment, and not just from a storage perspective. We talk Backup, Replication, Security, End User Computing (VDI as an example) specific to EMC products. The real fun stuff is that we also do a lot of discussions and architectures around taking virtual datacenters and helping customers understand how to transform them into their own Private Cloud (Automation/Orchestration/Repeatability etc) . We also work closely with the EMC Pre-Sales and Post-SalesTechnical team to make sure they are up to speed on the ever changing virtualization landscape. In addition, we do the same thing for the VMware field teams and our reseller partner brothers and sisters. We do these with lots of focus around architecting, and a lot of hands on training with them.

First things first, having a VCP or VCAP or years and years of hands on experience is a good place to start, but does not guarantee you will be a good fit for this role.   What I think sometimes gets lost in what people see in our team is that the vSpecialist role is a Pre-Sales role. In other words, at the end of the day, we are a customer-focused group that helps our field sales teams during sales campaigns. We do this by helping differentiate EMC Solutions in customer accounts that have made a significant focus on VMware moving forward. There is an expectation of understanding that at the end of the day, we are all responsible for helping drive EMC to be the best in industry. The vSpecialist team also does a lot of evangelizing which means you have to have a TON of energy and willingness to stand up in large groups of people to present all sorts of interesting content. It requires you to have an overwhelming desire to read, absorb, seek out information in an effort to build your knowledge base of solutions that can help customers.  We live by the motto of “teach, don’t impress” and we have a genuine desire to share our knowledge freely with anyone that is willing to listen or wants to learn.  

On TOP of it all, you have to be capable of shifting topics, products, cities, states, countries at a drop of the hat !! By the way, I’m not saying travel is crazy, but it certainly can be from time to time. It really does depend on the geography you would be covering.  I can tell you it’s the most rewarding, and exciting, and stressful jobs I’ve had in my career.  I doubt you would find a vSpecialist (past or present) that didn’t say the same thing. 

By the way, if you don’t feel like you have the VMware background necessary to be a vSpecialists, an equally passionate and outgoing group is our Pre-Sales Technical Consultants (TC’s).  The fundamental  DNA for each of our teams isn’t really all that different.  One of big things we have in common with the TC’s is both of our groups are not shy or reserved!!   We tend to have strong opinions and are not afraid to speak up and share them with others. 

So, if you feel like this is in your wheelhouse, I would encourage you to send your resume to me at tommy.trogden@emc.com I’ll look them over and forward them to the right people.  Right now, I’m looking for Houston and want/need to build a bench in the California Bay Area (San Fran, Santa Clara, San Jose etc) and maybe Phoenix. That doesn’t mean other vSpecialist managers don’t have open headcounts or bench requests. I’ll ask them to leave their request in the comments area. I’ll also encourage the TC managers to do this as well.

Have a GREAT Day !!

@vTexan

WOW, I’m so excited about the recent results at vSphere-Land.com rankings of Virtualization bloggers.  If you are not familiar with this, Eric Siebert over at vSphere-land.com started this a couple of years ago and this was my first year to be included in the voting. He posted the position of all 187 bloggers that were able to get their names on his list.  Over 1200 votes came in (not all for me ) !!  This is not a comprehensive list of virtualization bloggers, it’s really a list of those that registered with his site but as you can see it’s a LONG list !! 

The number 1 site, and it comes as ZERO surprise is Duncan Epping’s Yellow-Bricks.Com – it’s the GOTO site for all things VMware Technical !!!

This year Eric also added a few new categories which was really cool. 

He added:

• Favorite Storage Blog (#1 =VirtualGeek.typepad.com)
• Favorite Cloud Computing Blog ( Hypervizor.com )
• Favorite End User Computing (VDI) Blog (Brian Madden)
• Favorite News/Information Website (vSphere-Land.com)
• Favorite Scripting Blog (Virtu-Al.net )
• Favorite Podcast (vChat )
• Favorite Official VMware Blog (VMTN Communities)
• Best Videos used in a Blog (NTPro-nl)
• Favorite New Blog  (HandsOnVirtualization.com )
• Favorite Independent Blogger. (NTPro.NL)

While my hope was to crack the top 25 in the overall, vTexan.com came in at a respectable #30 spot out of #187 bloggers.  What was even more exciting was that vTexan.com ranked Top #10 on Storage Bloggers and #3 End User Computing Blogs.  I’m pretty happy !! 

I’d like to thank all of you that voted for the site, I REALLY appreciate it.  vTexan.com has been a real labor of love filled with lots of late nights and weekends putting the content together.  While my motivation is not things like these, it is a great validation of the hardwork that goes into it.   I’d also like to thank Eric and TrainSignal for pulling this all together.  VERY COOL !!

Thanks !!

@vTexan

Hopefully you have followed along with my other blog posts around the FREE cool vSphere Plugins EMC Offers.  In the first blog post I took you through the process of downloading and installing our Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) Storage Viewer plugin (version 5.1) that was recently released in Jan 2012.  One of my favorite features of that release was the real-time performance graphing both from a datastore perspective, as well as the ability to drill down into the VM and see real time IOPS and Response Time information.  I recently used it to help a customer troubleshoot some performance problems.  It was neat watching the response time go from 100′s of Milliseconds to under 2 with a couple of tweaks on the array. 

The next blog post was the foundation for which this particular blog post is being built on.  In the VSI – Unified Storage Management (VSI-USM) post I took you step by step through the download, install and setting up of the plugin.  I thought now I would take you through some of the features of it. 

The VSI-USM plugin is packed with cool features and one of them I’m going to walk you through now is the VMware View 5 integration.  If you recall back to my first blog post on the VSI, these plugins are really geared towards the VMware/Storage hybrid admin (but not limited to those types of roles) and this plugin isn’t any different.  In this case, we can be even more specific to VMware View/Storage Admin role. 

Before we get too deep, lets cover a few concepts we need to understand before we provision our first desktop (or VM) with this vCenter plugin.

First concept you need to understand is Fast Clones, vs. Full Clones.  This is the basis of which we will deploy our desktops (or even servers if you want).  Fast Clone is a NAS feature that creates a file-based snapshot of a VM that maintains a relationship with it’s parent VM.  A full clone is a complete and independent copy of a virtual machine.  Notice, I didn’t say desktop   That means you can clone servers (linux or windows) as well as desktops.

Let me be clear, this does not have to be JUST for desktops.  This can really be for any vSphere VM you happen to have.  The next part is specific to View.

The second concept is VMware View specific and it has to do with pools. The Pool concept is what drives the way we setup desktops and provision users to these desktops and there are a few different types of pools.  Chris Wahl (@ChrisWahl – WahlNetwork.com) has done an AWESOME infographic of the breakdown of the pools that is a must “print and hang from your cube” type of drawing.  For the VSI-USM feature it’s specifically geared towards “Manual Pools”.  Manual pools are typically provisioned from existing desktop sources and can be VM’s that are managed by vCenter Server, running on VMware Servers or another virtualization platform as well as physical computers and blade PC’s.  In this case we are going to use a Windows 7 desktop VM template that you would create very similar to a Windows 2008 server VM template.  In the template you will need to have installed the VMware View Desktop Agent.  Also, unless you are running servers or PC’s with Teradici Hardware, you will be limited to RDP sessions instead of the preferred PCoIP protocol.  I’ll show you in the provisioning process where you can specific PCoIP or RDP.

That’s enough of the concepts for now, I’ll make notes throughout the guide on other concepts and if I missed anything, please feel free to leave a comment with your questions.

So let’s get started.  Oh ya, and new to vTexan.com HowTo Guides is a video of how this all works   Be nice, it’s my first one – no voice over but you should be able to follow along easy enough.

Here is the screen shot by screen shot process, as well as more detail information below.

1. First log into your vSphere Client and go to Home, Solutions and VSI plugin and select Unified Storage Management and click Add

2.  Select Enter Storage System or Connection Broker Credentials and then click next.

3. From this screen you will get an idea as to some of the integrations we have.  For this blog post, lets select VMware View Manager and then click next.

4. Enter in the credentials for your VMware View Broker and then click Finish.

5. Notice your View brokers IP address is added to the list.

Now lets go have some fun. 

1. Lets go deploy those IT Helpdesk desktops.  Click on Home and then go to VM’s and Templates. 

2. Select the Windows Desktop template you want to use.  Remember, it needs to have the VMware View Desktop agent already installed.  Right click on the template, choose EMC, Unified Storage and you can choose between Full Clones or Fast Clones. 

3. Choose the destination  (host, cluster, resource pool) you would like these desktops created on.

4. First thing you will notice is the number of desktops it can create. This is determined by the number or CPU cores on the selected destination.  By default, the max number of VM’s per core is 12.  You can select the number of VM’s as well as the clone Name.  In this case I went with IT_Helpdesk and I checked the box for the leading zeroes as well as the number of zeros I wanted.  The preview box shows you what the first desktop name would look like.  The Customization Specification is pretty self explanatory.  If you don’t have one created, simple go to Home:Customization Specifications Manager and create one.  You will have to cancel out of this process to do that.  The last step is asking you if you want to integrate this with your View Connection Broker.  As that implies, you can choose not to.  In that case, you would be creating 5 virtual machines.   Lets click next after selecting VMware View integration.

5. Since we did select View integration, this screen asks you to pick the View Server as well as if you want to create a net-new Pool or add these desktops into another pool.  In this case, I chose a New Pool (ignore the screen shot, I was simply showing you the drop down menu)

6. Since we chose to create a new pool, this is the place we name the pool.  This is very much like what you would see if you were creating a Pool in View Administrator. 

7.Finally we can specify a few of the Pool settings.  This again is very similar to some of the choices you get when deploying pools from View Administrator. Notice that I’ve kept the default display protocol to Microsoft RDP.  That’s because Manual Pools only support PCoIP when you use Teradici PCoIP hardware in the physical computers, or blade PC’s.  When you are done, simply click Finish.

8. Once you click finish, you will see the following warning based on the fact that we chose Fast Cloning.  This is because Fast Clones use read/write snapshots of the master VM image.  That’s pretty thin already Click Yes.

9. Watch it go ! 

10. You can head over to View Administrator and see how the VSI-USM is “talking” and updating the View Database with the desktop information.  I just love seeing these all integrate together !  Open up View Admin and click on Pools.  If you had it already open, just hit the refresh symbol on the screen to the right of the window.

11. You can also select Desktops to see them as well.

There you have it.  A step by step guide on how to setup the VMware View 5 integration for the VSI-USM plugin EASY PEASY !  As I mentioned these plugins are free and can be VERY useful in managing your vSphere and EMC environment ! Stay tuned for future blog posts on other features of this great plugin.

thanks

@vTexan

Hopefully you had a chance to read my last blog post on how to setup and install the Virtual Storage Integrator – Storage Viewer plugin for vCenter.  If not, you will want to go back and review it before moving on to this next plugin.  You can certainly install these independently of each other but there were some great features and benefits of the plugin that you might want to take advantage of.  The next plugin I’m going to take you through is our VSI – Unified Storage Management.  Again, this is a FREE FREE FREE plugin

I’m going to actually create a couple of blog posts around this one plugin because frankly, it just has a TON of great features that would require a very very long blog post to cover.  In a nut shell, the Unified Storage Management (USM) plugin can provision NFS, VMFS Datastores, RDM Volumes in addition to array-based compression and array-based cloning of Virtual Machine in NFS.  The cloning feature does both Full Clones (or Copies) and Fast Clones (snaps) of VMDK files.  It also has access into VMware View as well as in USM 5.1 they added in Citrix XenDesktop control.  VERY COOL.

In my opinion, this plugin is really geared towards the blended Storage/VMware admin that would spend time managing both (Storage and VMware) environments.  It also has a tool called Access Control Utility that is focused on those companies that have split duties between Storage and VMware.  In other words, you have a dedicated Storage Admin, and you have a dedicated VMware admin and they don’t share credentials.  In this case, the Storage Admin can create Access Control profiles for the VMware Admins, specifying the EMC Storage Systems(VNX, VMAX etc),  that the Admin will have access into.  This could include things like, RAID groups and Storage Pools that will be available to them.  You can read all about all of these features, functions etc in the EMC VSI for VMware vSphere Unified Storage Management Product Guide (version 5.1).

My hope is to cover as many of these as I can but it will not be everything.  In this blog post I thought I would focus in on downloading and installing the USM   I’ll then post a couple of more blogs around the VNX integration, as well as VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop integration.  I’ll probably also toss in something around the Access Control Utility and anything else that jumps to mind   For now, let’s look at the all the components you will need to download to get this working. 

The first thing you want to grab is the USM Product Guide and the bits themselves.  The Product Guide is found on Powerlink, under – Support – Technical Documentation and Advisories – Software T-Z – Documentation – Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) – Virtual Storage Integrator for vSphere – Installation Configuration.  Ya, I know – that’s a lot of clicking !!  But it’s the journey not the destination right?   Anyway, grab the VSI for VMware vSphere: Unified Storage Management Product Guide (3rd group down).  Grab that guide and start flipping through Chapter 2, as you make your way over to download the bits.

You can find the software on PowerLink under Support- Software Downloads and Licenses – Downloads T-Z – Virtual Storage Integrator.  Scroll down to VSI Unified Storage Management and grab the ZIP file with the date of Jan 13, 2012.  It should be the 5.1 version of the USM.  As it implies, that is a zip’d up file that has the following 3 files listed:

If you were flipping through Chapter 2, you would have noticed little messages like this in the text:

That’s their subtle way of telling you that if you want some of the cool VNX features, you also need to download the Navisphere Secure CLI and you will also see a request for Unisphere CLI.  The Unisphere CLI is mostly geared towards the VNXe platform.  If you don’t have one, don’t worry about it.  Since we are looking at this from a VNX perspective, and will be using it to show off the features, you want to head over to (you guessed – long list of clicks)  Support – Software Downloads and Licensing – Downloads J-0 – Navisphere Server Software and grab the Windows Navisphere Server Software 7.31 executable dated Jan 11, 2012.  If you have a VNXe, then just go to SoftwareDownloads –T – Z -  Unishphere Server Software Downloads and grab the software for it.

On Page 18 of the guide it takes you screen shot by screen shot through the install but just in case you don’t like to read them, here is the process:

Installing NAVI CLI

1. Click on the NaviCLI-Win-32-x86-en_us-7.31.30.0.90-1.exe file

2. Just click Next

3. Click Next again

4. To keep from having to enter in the credentials each time, this will create a security file that’s encrypted. 

5.  This setups the level of security you want for the Certificate.

6.Verify all the requests and then hit Install

7.Watch it go !!

8.Click DONE.  Lets move on to installing the USM now.

The next step in this install is to actually install the USM plugin.  Make sure you have vSphere Client closed on the computer you are setting this up on. 

1.I’m assuming you have already unzipped the file, so just click on the EMC-VSI-USM-5.1 executable.

2. It’s going to start the unpacking process and preparing to be installed.

3.First thing it does is yells at us about not having the Unishphere CLI installed.  We skipped that since I wasn’t going to show any VNXe stuff, but if you installed it you wouldn’t be seeing this message.  If you eventually want to add it, it’s not big deal just download, and run it and the USM will see it.  Easy Peasy.

4. Now lets click Next

5. Accept the License Agreement

6. go ahead and click Install

7. Watch it go

8. Click finish and we are done !!

9. Now, lets open up the vSphere Client, log into vCenter and go to our plugin.  You will now see the Unified Storage Management option.  Click on it.

10. First thing I noticed is that my VNX showed up.  This was brought over from our VSI-Storage Viewer install I did in my last blog post.  But we still need to edit it.

11. Click on the VNX and select Edit

12. Make sure both blocks are selected – when I did this install, File was already selected but not block.  Click next

13.Enter your VNX credentials.  If you don’t remember, just open up Unisphere and you will see the IP address of the SP’s and Control station

14. The next page asks you for the Control Station info, also you will see a box for Configuring the DHSM.  Check that box and then click Next.

15. This is where you create the DHSM account.  The net-net is the DHSM account is used for NAS CIFS/NFS authentication mostly for things like this plugin, or other EMC products that might need to communicate with the Control station of the VNX to do tasks etc.    Once you enter in this info, just click Finish. 

16. If you look down to the tasks area in your vSphere Client – you will see that it starts the editing process of the plugin.  When it’s done, you will see the status change to Complete.

While I have you attention, lets go see what sorts of stuff we can add to our USM plugin. 

1.You should be back at the following screen (if not, get to it) and click the Add button.

2. Next click on the “Enter Storage System or Connection Broker Credentials” and click next.

3. Here is a list of things that USM can manage/control etc.  Notice that you can add more EMC storage systems (if you have more than 1).  You will also notice that the EMC VNXe is gray’d out, that’s because we didn’t install the Unisphere CLI program.  Once you install it, that will be selectable.  Also you will see VMware View Manager and XenDesktop Controller.  Those are future blogs so check back soon on how to set that up and what sort of features and functions you can get out of them.

So that’s it for the installation and setup steps for Navisphere CLI and USM.  Like I said above, the next blog post will take you through what you can do with everything we setup in USM.

Thanks,

@vTexan