Mike D’s Blog

Yesterday was time for celebration on the VMware Cloud team – we finally have a product. Well, we’ve had the technology for the product for some time and have been very busy building clouds with it around the world but yesterday we actually hit GA for VMware vCloud Director.

As you can see from some of the blog posts starting to show up we had a really good time as a group last night. Boy, I’m feeling it this morning. Now the real work begins. Unlike what Simon Crosby thinks, there are a lot of VMware powered clouds. And also unlike what Simon is saying it’s not there to lock you in but rather to give you choice. You no longer have to make a decision to go and get stuck in some Uber Cloud run by a bookstore company. Now you can choose where you want to run your public cloud services based on real business decision such as existing relationships with the providers, the lowest cost, the best geographic location, or even compliance support for your industry. That’s the real power of the vCloud Ecosystem is the choice you get on where you want to run public cloud services and how. Of course it doesn’t hurt that all of these environments are 100% compatible with what you’re running in-house today (unless you’re that 2% of the world running on Xen or Hyper-V).

Like I said, now the fun begins because the cat’s out of the bag on what VMware has to offer and I’m sure people are going to be calling a lot if for nothing else than to explore the offering a little more. That brings me to the part of the post where I beg. PLEASE, if you are a smart person or know a smart person and you’re looking to join the tip of the cloud spear then contact me or go to the VMware job site and apply for a position on my team. I look for 3 main skills to help build the cloud:

1) Networking
2) Storage
3) Programming (Java preferably)

With over 1,100 providers already signed up to build clouds the team can use all of the help it can get. Anywhere in the world is good for location but on the top of my list right now is APAC (specifically Japan, Singapore, and China) and EMEA (northern or southern Europe doesn’t matter). You will travel a good bit (maybe 30 – 50%). You will have a great time at VMware. You will work hard but have a great time doing it. The team already reads like the who’s who in the virtualization world. Basically if Chad Sakac hasn’t already snatched them up then I’ve got them on my team. And since Chad and I work closely together all the time it’s sort of one large virtual team anyways.

Enough rambling. I’m sure everyone is just waking up and getting ready for the 3rd day of VMworld so I’ll stop here. If you happen to be awake today I’ll be in the following places if you want to come say “hi” or chat:

10 am – noon – The Lab Room (Moscone West)

noon – 1 pm – Speaking: Networking Best Practices in the Cloud (Moscone West 2006)

2 – 3 pm – Secret underground meeting with some strategic partners

5:30 – 7:30 pm – Office of the CTO Party

7:30 – 10 pm – VMworld Party

See you around VMworld!

Tags: vcloud

This year as in years past we’re running the VMworld Labs again. This year there are 30 different hands on labs that you can go through. There will also be various deep dives on some of the labs presented throughout the conference. It should be a really good experience to get your hands on software that you may be researching to use, don’t have the equipment to setup yourself, or something that you’re just interested in playing with.

The lab setup all runs on a cloud infrastructure built by VMware specific for the labs. The labs themselves consist of several different VMs. For example, in my vCloud API lab I have a total of 7 VMs running just to mimic the various setups and pieces of software that you’ll be testing. To help with the performance we like to “pre-populate” a certain number of these setups in the cloud so users don’t have to wait for the VMs to deploy and startup.

The VMworld Lab Survey is designed to judge the interest in each of the labs so we can figure out a starting point for the pre-population of the labs. The “pre-pop” numbers get tuned over the course of the week as we see which labs really are getting used. It’s a rather slick interface to do this.

Anyhow, go and take the VMworld Labs Survey and vote for your top 10 labs that you think you would take at VMworld and help us make VMworld Labs the best experience you could ever hope for.

Tags: VMworld

For a long time I’ve told people that if they show me an app then I’ll show them how it can be virtualized. Yes, I’m a little bigoted I guess working for VMware but I do believe there’s not one x86-based workload out there that can’t be virtualized today. To help me prove that point there are 2 great guys that got together to write a book on virtualizing Tier 1 workloads.

This new book written by Charles A. Windom and Hemant Gaidhani just got published last week and it’s available at Amazon. Hemant Gaidhani says: Looks good and worth all the efforts. Click ‘Look Inside’ at Amazon to get sneak preview.

Working with VMware vSphere 4, this book shows you how to virtualize Microsoft applications that require high CPU and high I/O and/or are critical applications for business operations—“Tier 1”applications. With authors who are not only insiders at VMware but who also have developed best practices for multi-tier applications for VMware environments, this book will guide you step-by-step in virtualizing the latest versions of Exchange Server, SQL Server, SharePoint Server, Active Directory, Windows Server, Internet Information Server, and Remote Desktop Services. The authors cover critical topics: reasons why to virtualize the application, considerations to be made when virtualizing the application, setting up a Proof-of-Concept of the application, storage, high availability, and monitoring. Material is organized such that readers can choose which chapters to read, depending on which applications they are considering to virtualize.

Tags: book, VMware

For those of you that can’t quite get to VMworld this year you still may like to watch the general session keynotes. There will be two of them this year as in years past.

The first is with Paul Maritz, VMware CEO. Paul always gives an excellent talk on what’s really happening in the world and what you can and should do about it.

The second is with Steve Herrod, VMware CTO. Steve always gets to talk about the fun, geeky things so make sure you also tune into his talk.

You can register for either session here.

Paul’s talk: Tuesday, August 31 – 9:00 am PT

Steve’s talk: Thursday, September 2 – 9:00 am PT

Tags: events, VMworld

This year there are a TON of labs at VMworld. Right now we’re set to offer an even 30 hands-on labs at VMworld where you can play with nearly every product VMware offers. There will be plenty of seats this year as well – over 450. We’ll also have extended hours at the labs.

The reason I’m writing this post is to let you know about the vCloud API lab that I’m the captain of. There’s been a lot of talk and activity around the first cloud API submitted to the DMTF for standardization. This lab is your chance to get your hands dirty with the API. You don’t have to be a programmer to get through the lab so everyone’s welcome.

Of course if you are a developer then there’s a lot more than just the vCloud API lab to go through. There are 4 different API labs so you can learn how to programmatically work with all of the VMware products. What’s more is we also have a technology exchange for developers running concurrently with VMworld. It’s sort of a mini-conference within a conference with sessions strictly for developers.

To find out more about VMworld or to register so you can get in the labs just go to the main VMworld website.

To find out more about the Technology Exchange for Developers see their site.

Here’s a full listing of the hands-on API labs that will be at VMworld. As you can see, we have some heavy hitters as captains of the labs.

LAB16 – VMware vCloud™ API

The VMware vCloud™ API is the key to VMware’s story around federation and ecosystem with the cloud. In this lab we will introduce you to the API and what it can do. You will use real world scenarios to explore the API and figure out when and how to consume the API with several different programming languages. If you are building a cloud then eventually you will need to know about the VMware vCloud™ API and this lab will get you ready for that. No prior programming experience is required although you will definitely benefit from general programming concept knowledge (methods, functions, etc).

Lab Captain: Mike Dipetrillo, and Mike Haines

LAB26 – VMware vSphere™ PowerCLI

This lab will provide hands on training for scripting a VMware environment. The goal is to provide all the tools needed to automate, integrate, and extend VMware vCenter™ for your environment. Attendees will use the Microsoft PowerShell based PowerCLI for scripting VMware vCenter™ and ESX. They’ll walk away from the lab with a better understanding of VMware Infrastructure, resources for using the toolkit, and a variety of scripts for performing common administrative tasks. Exercises will cover performing tasks based on VM attributes, performing actions on many VMs at a time, and exporting performance data. This lab does not require programming or scripting experience.

Lab Captain: Alton Yu

LAB27 – VMware vSphere™ Web Services SDK – C# (.Net Developers rejoice)

This lab will provide hands on training for using the C# SDK in a VMware vSphere™ environment. The goal is to provide an introduction to the key concepts in using the SDK to automate and extend VMware vSphere™ functionality. Attendees will use the SDK to connect and perform tasks against VMware vCenter™ and ESX. They’ll walk away from the lab with a better understanding of VMware vSphere™, resources for using the API for performing common administrative tasks as well as extending the product functionality. Exercises will cover performing tasks based on VM attributes, performing actions on many VMs at a time, and exporting performance data etc. This lab does require some scripting/programming experience.

Lab Captain: Alket Memushaj

LAB28 – VMware vSphere™ Web Services SDK – Java

This lab will provide hands on training for scripting a VMware environment. The goal is to provide all the tools needed to automate, integrate, and extend VMware vCenter™ for your environment. Attendees will use the Java Web Services API against VMware vCenter™ and ESX. They’ll walk away from the lab with a better understanding of VMware Infrastructure and resources for using the API while performing common administrative tasks. Exercises will cover automation based on VM attributes, bulk actions on multiple VMs, and querying performance data. This lab does not require programming or scripting experience.

Lab Captain: Gilbert Lau

Tags: VMworld

The VMware Express demo truck is coming to Atlanta for a couple of stops in a couple of weeks. For those of you that want to see the latest demos of virtualization, remote desktops, mobile technology, or cloud then you should come and stop by the truck. It’s a rolling demo environment that’s completely decked out.

The current schedule has it coming by Dave and Buster’s in Marietta from 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm on Monday, August 16. It makes another stop the next day at Perimeter Mall from 11:00 am – 2:00 pm.

Both of these times are perfect for getting out of work for a long lunch run. I’m going to try and stop by both areas to see who’s around if my schedule stays free those two days (here’s hoping).

For the full schedule or to register make sure to go to the VMware Express tour site.

Tags: VMware

VMware has just opened up a survey to find out about what you think about cloud. And here’s the good news – they’ll give you a free cup of Joe to help you stay awake through the survey. In all seriousness this is your chance to influence what VMware is doing in the cloud space. Tell them what you want, what your pain points are, etc. Here’s more about the curvey with the link.

To gather your feedback, we’ve created a quick public cloud survey: http://bit.ly/publiccloudsurvey. Our survey asks why you chose your provider, the type of workloads you’re running, if you use intermediaries with your cloud solution, and what you perceive as the biggest benefits or concerns when it comes to cloud.

The survey only takes about 10-15 minutes to complete, and the first 100 participants receive a $5 Starbucks gift card in the mail. Please note, this survey is open to ALL public cloud users, not just VMware customers.

Tags: Cloud, VMware

That title should get some people’s attention. So why do I start off by offending everyone? Blame it on Microsoft.

I recently came across a rather funny and curious ad on-line. Actually someone sent it to me via email. Apparently Microsoft has launched a campaign to get rid of IE6 – it’s nearly 10 year old web browser. It turns out that not everyone is upgrading to the newer IE8 (or even IE7). First, here’s the ad:

I have to give a big thumbs up to whoever came up with this ad. So how does all of this lead to lazy developers? It’s simple. A little while ago I went through the task of creating a web portal for a cloud project. I decided to use a tool called Django to build this portal. Django is awesome if you haven’t had the chance to use it. Everything is built on templates and Python. It also heavily uses CSS to create the web pages. Even my blog here heavily uses CSS to build up the pages. One of the many problems with CSS is the horrible adherence to the spec by Microsoft in all of its browsers. Try to align something to float left and IE6 will work. IE7 completely bombs out. IE8 requires some magical wrapper code. All this to achieve the same thing. It turns out that IE6 actually sticks the closest to the code. Instead of looking at the incoming header to figure out what browser is doing the request and sending back a different CSS for each of them I simply return CSS that works with IE6 (and every other browser on the market) and breaks with IE7 and IE8. Does that make me a lazy developer? Absolutely.

So who’s to blame here really? Is it me not willing to maintain 3 sets of the same CSS file with subtle differences to get newer Microsoft browsers to work? Or is it Microsoft and their complete lack of a standard CSS implementation in their newer browsers? I guess both could be to blame but it sure is a little of the pot calling the kettle black when Microsoft runs an ad forcing me to upgrade to a newer version of IE.

And where does all of this play into the cloud you ask? Well, one of the first things and the hardest things you’ll hit in your cloud project is the portal. And if you’re like most shops with a mix of different Operating Systems and browsers you’ll soon see how much of a pain IE can really be. You’ll soon have to come across the decision of whether or not you want to be a lazy developer too and stick with “9 year old milk” or whether you have enough time on your hands to make sure you work with the “new milk”. It will be interesting to see the frustrating path that people go down.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d point out the rather funny ad and then complain a little on the really horrible incentive to upgrade to a newer browser – getting all of my programs to work with it. Personally I think I’ll grow a taste for the sour milk or go to the fridge and get some juice (any other browser except IE).

Tags: Programming, software

Recently I was up at the Charlotte VMUG which was a HUGE and very well organized event. David Davis from Train Signal was there and in the audience as I talked all about cloud. He recorded the talk and you can see the video below. NOTE: This is *not* the official VMware talk but one that I put together to disseminate information and keep the audience engaged. You’ll figure that out quickly as you start to watch the talk.

Enjoy!

Tags: Cloud, video, vmug

A lot of people keep asking what I’m up to and why I’m so quiet all of the time. I’ve been telling you all that I’ve been super busy building VMware based public clouds. Well, one of my customers just broke their silence so I thought I’d give you a pointer on the types of environments I’ve been working in.

Orange Business Services (think France Telecom) has just announced their cloud intentions. It’s a very exciting project that builds on top of the cloud service they already have launched with VMware. This is one of the largest telcos in the world that all of our enterprise customers will be able to seamlessly federate to using common technologies, support, and formats. That’s a really big thing. Enterprise customers keep telling us over and over again that they want to use their existing tools and technologies to manage resources whether they are in the cloud or not. Since OBS is building a vCloud based cloud offering Enterprise customers will get just that – seemless federation using their existing tools.

Anyhow, I thought I would point out that yes, we are building clouds and yes we’re building a lot of them. You should be able to figure that out by all of the job postings we’ve been putting up and by the 200,000+ miles I’ve flown since January this year. Now I just wish I could talk about all of our other projects that we’ve done. Rest assured if it’s a launched public cloud and it’s not Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Rackspace then it’s a VMware powered cloud. And heck 2 of those 4 are even on the move. If you want to know more about VMware cloud technology and why everyone is basing their cloud services on it then make sure to go and read up.

Until the next announcement….

Tags: Cloud, VMware

This past week I was resetting the cloud lab that I maintain at VMware. We have several storage systems on the back end to test out with our cloud reference architecture that I’m building. One of the arrays we have is a NetApp FAS-3170. Since we were using NetApp on the back end I decided to download one of the two plug-ins available from NetApp for use in VMware vCenter Server. They have an array mapping utility as well as the RCU (Rapid Clone Utility) plug-in. Both can be downloaded using your NetApp NOW account.

The plug-in I used was the one that maps out all of the storage and allows you to do some rudimentary configuration of the system. It will show you all of the controllers in use by the storage connected to your ESX hosts and the settings for those mapped LUNs.

There are some published best practices on setting up NetApp arrays for use with VMware vSphere. What I really like about this utility is it will scan the hosts and tell you which ones aren’t following those best practices and then allow you to fix all of that with a simple button. Of course it still requires the hosts to be restarted before the changes take effect but you don’t have to go drilling down through menus to try and figure out where the settings are and set them. This is particularly useful when you have several hosts.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d point out these rather useful utilities. If you haven’t installed them then go and get them now. They are both free and will help you out immensely. For those using other arrays such as EMC there are a bunch of plug-ins for those setups as well. Enjoy!

Tags: netapp, VMware

I recently listened to a demo done by a software vendor that was running a cloud based service. One of the questions that came up was around how the end user verifies that their data is safe. It wasn’t the question of being safe from hackers but rather the cloud vendor’s own admins. This started a huge internal debate on the VMware cloud team on how, when, and why you should audit your administrator’s activities.

There are probably several answers to this question and I would be really interested to get some comments on how people look over their admins (or don’t) in their own environments. My personal answer to this is if you don’t trust someone that has all the root passwords and a key card to your physical datacenter then you have much bigger issues at hand versus making sure they aren’t touching people’s data.

Still internal issues do pop up. I remember an incedent when I worked for the Department of Revenue in the state of Georgia many years ago. Turns out some of the people on the security team were running a “credit cleaning” business. For a certain sum they would log in and clean up your credit record since the state holds a lot of power to do so. Of course after several months of this they were escorted out of the building one day by the FBI. But how did these people get caught? It wasn’t anything too high tech. They simply got greedy, put out ads, and one of the ads turned up on the GBI (the state FBI) bulletin board. Funny how things work.

Like I said, there are many software packages on the market to audit everything that anyone does, but doesn’t someone also maintain those software packages? Isn’t it usually the same people that have admin access to other systems like the security team? How do you stop something at the very top?

Needless to say this is something my team will be thinking about and building into the cloud architectures that we build. Just thought I’d bring it up and start a conversation to see what other people think can be done for this issue.

Tags: Cloud, Security

This news is big. Just 5 days ago I was talking about how important license mobility is in the cloud environment. Today, VMware and Novell announced that VMware will offer full support from VMware GSS no less for SUSE Linux. You can call VMware’s toll-free number and get support for the OS and the virtualization environment in one stop. What’s even better is this announcement also makes it so you can transfer your SUSE environments from your enterprise to a VMware powered cloud without having to worry about licensing constraints. That’s huge on all accounts.

As part of this partnership VMware will also begin to standardize the appliances we’re shipping on SUSE Linux. Previously a lot of the appliances that went out the door were on CentOS because of the rather generous redistribution rights. With the new VMware-SUSE partnership we can now standardize on a more main-stream Linux distribution that’s supported throughout the enterprise.

Good news all around. I just hope we continue the push with other Linux vendors that are out there or they at least follow suit with the license mobility aspect of this announcement. You can read more about the announcement on the VMware News site.

Tags: Licensing, Linux, Support

I’ve been working with several customers around the world on building out their cloud offerings lately. One thing that you’ll find as you build out the cloud is that you will start to leverage APIs and SDKs you probably have never had to use before. This goes along with one of the 3 main skills I talked about in an earlier post. What you may not know is that VMware actually offers full support for development using the APIs and SDKs.

The VMware support site has a full write-up on the fairly new program. Regular VMware vSphere support provides support for the installation of the APIs only. If you have questions about what API to use, how to use it, or why it’s not behaving properly then the new program is for you. You can add this program to your existing support contract by contacting your sales representative or partner.

I’m really happy that VMware is finally offering support for the SDKs and APIs and it’s just in time for everyone to go out and start building your own clouds. I hope you find this program useful.

Tags: Programming, Support, VMware

One of the 3 cloud killers is licensing. The others are comfort and compliance in case you’re wondering. More on that later. Licensing is the one that’s most often overlooked by most people implementing or consuming the cloud today. People often confuse a serial number with a license and think that just because they put a valid serial number in they’re ok. The truth is much different than that. In reality most of the times a license is an agreement or a piece of paper and “licensing” a piece of software is often referred to as “assignment”. The act of assigning a license is usually as complicated as pointing to a server or a piece of software with your finger and saying “you are now assigned a license”. Yup, that’s about all it takes. What you might not realize is these licenses are actually governed by many carefully crafted legal documents that tell you in really small print what you’re allowed or not allowed to do with that license. Sometimes these are EULAs (End-User License Agreements) and often those EULAs refer back to some other legal documents with even more terms and conditions. Now how many of us actually go off and read all of those terms and conditions? I thought I wouldn’t see many hands there.

So why did I just go on a rant about all of this license assignment? Simple, it’s because most people are probably breaking a lot of these agreements when using the cloud. Before I proceed any further I want to stipulate something:

• I am not a lawyer or pretend to be one
• These are my own opinions and do not reflect my employer’s thoughts
• This is not legal advice of any manner
• You should always consult the vendor of the license on the proper ways to consume their licensing

OK. With that said, let’s continue with an example of Microsoft. I bring them up because Amazon and Microsoft announced a pilot to allow the migration of licenses from the enterprise to the cloud a while back. Yes, both are competitors to VMware but what they announced is very important. Before the announcement if you wanted to take a Windows VM that you were running in house and move it to the cloud then it would cause all sorts of problems for the service provider and their licensing compliance. Today, the only legal way to license a VM if you are a service provider is either the outsourced model or the pay per VM model. In the outsourced model the service provider is required to dedicate the hardware that a customer’s Windows VM lands on only to that customer. Think of dedicated hosting if you will. Only that customer can use that hardware. This sort of kills scalability in the cloud. The other way is for the service provider to own the license and then lease it to the customer on a monthly basis. Then the service provider can use all of their shared infrastructure together to host multiple customers. Of course this is bad for the customer that has an ELA with Microsoft because they now have to essentially pay for their licenses again without the ability to leverage their ELA.

So what did Amazon and Microsoft do? They are now allowing customers to take their existing licenses under ELA and migrate those licenses to the cloud for use. The other benefit is the customer can do this while the service provider still gets to use shared infrastructure. It’s a win-win and knocks down a major hurdle to cloud adoption. There are all sorts of requirements to be met and caveats to this plan so make sure you go and read the announcement which has all the details around pricing and terms and such.

I’m sure we’ll start to see many other vendors start to change their licensing policies. Only you, the consumer of these licenses can put the necessary pressure on your vendors to make this happen so reach out to your favorite ISV and get them to start thinking about how they will allow the mobility of licenses to the cloud.

Tags: amazon, Cloud, Licensing, Microsoft