I came across an interesting site today for an event called “Shutdown Day“.
Shutdown Day announces the Annual 2009 Campaign. Just like in years past, Shutdown Day 2009 calls on every net obsessed, computer–addicted individual to SHUT DOWN their computers for 24 hours on May 2, 2009 and do something else!
New, Shutdown Day 2009 will be promoting several organizations that help young people suffering from computer addiction. A bunch of events are also organized for May 2, 2009, so stay tuned and watch this space.
I find this to be an interesting concept. Personally on May 2, I’ll be on vacation in a place where I get no cell reception and my wife would throw my laptop into the ocean if I start using it. But what about the rest of you? Do you have what it takes to shut stuff down for a day? I think it would help everyone to spread this around. It may actually help some of our fellow geek friends save their marriage. What are your thoughts about shutting down for a day?
So you’ve recovered from rolling on the floor laughing at the launch video for vSphere. You know, the one with the engineers running around the world with the gold CD. I thought it was awesome. You also finished reading my pumped up blog post to convince you to upgrade to vSphere. What’s next. Well, now it’s time to do some planning and see what’s involved in this new major release. Thank goodness we have some awesome SEs in the company and one of them created a whole bunch of upgrade videos to walk you through the process. There’s even an entire site dedicated to the upgrade process. You can start your training with the first of the videos below. Enjoy!
Step-by-Step Migration Videos
Part 1 of 4 VMware VirtualCenter Management Components
Part 2 of 4 VMware ESX Host Migration Methods
Part 3 of 4 Virtual Machine Upgrades (VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware)
It’s probably been one of the worst kept secrets in IT but now the news is officially out. Today, VMware is launching the next generation of their products – collectively called vSphere. vSphere is comprised of the stuff you already know (VMware ESX Server and VMware Virtual Center) plus new and existing management products. All of that together is vSphere.
vSphere is a major launch for VMware and lays the foundation for the next generation of how companies do computing. It builds on top of everything customers already have and gives them even more power. It also provides the foundation to build internal and external clouds. There are three main take-aways from today’s launch event that you should know about:
If you’re a current customer then go out and upgrade NOW. There are so many things that have been put into this product at the direct request of customers that you should start taking advantage of these things today. The upgrade is fairly painless and the features you get with this release will help you get back even more of your precious time.
VMware vSphere is the best value for money for every customer segment.
The competition debate is over. Pricing was the only argument for the competition. With the new packages, VMware delivers the best value and best ROI at every pricepoint, starting from free all the way to $3500/CPU, from small customers all the way to global enterprises.
1) Upgrade NOW!!! If you are a current enterprise customer, you get 30% better consolidation, 50% additional storage savings, 20% additional power savings just by upgrading to 4.0. And to top it all, you get amazing new capabilities – Fault Tolerance for mainframe-class availability, automatic security zoning for apps, blazing performance for Tier 1 apps, etc. No extra charge – it is all free. The business value could not be more compelling.
2) VMware is delivering the best value for the money for all customers.
For SMB – The SMB value proposition is unique. VMware is delivering Enterprise-class, ‘Always-On’ IT without requiring enterprise-class, expensive IT staff at prices SMB can afford. In addition to savings on servers, memory and power, VMware is enabling 50% storage savings through built-in capabilities like thin provisioning that SMB could never previously afford. VMware is delivering virtualization manageability starting at as little as $165/CPU. VMware has also taken the Virtual Infrastructure Standard SKU which was oriented at the enterprise with its performance and high availability and are now offering the same capabilities for $1500. No one else offers the combination of savings, ‘always-on IT’, manageability, performance that VMware does.
For mid-market and commercial customers, vSphere Advanced is the new SKU and it offers a groundbreaking combination of consolidation, high availability, security and management at mid-market prices. Advanced SKU provides Fault Tolerance, security zones, one-click data protection and of course VMotion, all integrated with best-in-class virtualization management. When you combine these capabilities with the 30% additional consolidation ratio and 50% storage savings, you get a solution that is not only unrivalled but a fantastic value.
The bottom line is, folks – VMware has the best product at every pricepoint for every customer, whether you are enterprise or mid-market or small.
3) VMware is blowing away the competition and extending their lead in terms of unique vision for the future as well as unique capabilities for the present.
VMware has the strategic message and vision for large customers, i.e. enabling them to transform their datacenters into highly efficient, agile private clouds. VMware also has a unique and compelling offer to SMB, i.e. enterprise-class, ‘always-on IT’ at SMB affordability.
VMware offers the best economic value at every pricepoint. VMware is already the leader in cost per application virtualized. VMware is extending on their lead by delivering amazing new savings to customers – 30% more consolidation, 50% storage savings, 20% power savings.
If the competition wants a feature comparison, bring it on!! VMware is delivering groundbreaking new capabilities for both large and small customers – VMotion is old news folks; it’s about Fault Tolerance, it’s about application security, it’s about integrated data protection, integrated power management, it’s about Storage VMotion, it’s about DRS and many new capabilities.
If you’re out there wondering about if Microsoft or Citrix is catching up then you can end that conversation right now, once and for all, with the vSphere release. VMware has dramatically distanced themselves from the competition. The competition debate is over.
So don’t wait another minute. Go check out the new vSphere release today. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
This is one of the more interesting videos I’ve seen lately. It’s a short 2 minute 30 second clip that shows the inside of the Facebook datacenter but more importantly talks about the tasks they’re up against like having to store 2,000 photos a second or 40 billion a month. All that with a handful of engineers. It’s pretty incredible actually. Enjoy the video.
I’d like to officially add another person to my list of those that “get” cloud. Congratulations to Dave Malcom, CTO of Surgient. I know what you’re going to say, “why are you giving props to the competition?” Well, at this point in cloud computing’s development those who understand what’s going on need to band together to push this concept forward – especially when you have companies like Oracle running in the complete opposite direction of cloud. So what did Dave say that made me perk up and write a post? Simple, he wrote the truth in plain english. Go here to read the post and then come back for comments.
Dave lays out 5 characteristics for cloud computing. Here’s my color commentary on each:
From rPath comes a really neat little video on cloud computing. I agree with pretty much everything in it and think you’ll find it useful as well. Enjoy!
Did you ever wonder what it took to build a datacenter? There’s an interesting company out there called Digital Reality Trust. They build and retrofit datacenter for a living. Their retrofit service is pretty interesting. They basically take an existing building and convert it into a datacenter. They took some pictures of the progression of one of their most recent projects and it’s interesting to see what happens when. They’ve got the retrofit down to a science. This one took just 26 weeks and came in under budget. Not bad for something that usually takes at least twice as long for most companies.
If you’re looking for a new datacenter I suggest checking these guys out. Go and see the entire progress here.
iCloud has just started offering free desktops from their cloud based service. You heard that right – a free desktop that you can login to from anywhere. It also comes with free storage (3 GB worth). Here are some of the specs:
Access to your friends, files and digital life on any computer
3 GB free storage space to safely store documents, photos and music online
30 free applications such as Office, Mail, Music, Video, IM, Sharing, Games, Collaboration and Development tools
20 free widgets
Free backup to provide secure storage, including WedDav
Zero installation, icloud runs in your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser
I logged in this morning with my free account and it’s pretty nice. At least it looks that way on the surface. If you can get around the little bit of sluggish performance, the reliance on IE (Firefox is only experimental), and the fact that you can’t logout then things run pretty well. Some interesting apps are included that might make this thing actually usable. That’s the big question though – would you use this as your primary machine all the time?
Here’s a challenge. Someone go and give up their machine at home and only use iCloud for a full 15 days. Do whatever you would normally do. Report back here with your findings. Were you able to really get everything done? How did you get all your data up there? How did you get the photos off your camera and into the desktop? It’s things like this that I think everyone would really be interested in hearing. So there it is. If anyone is up to the challenge then I have a $25 iTunes card for the first to respond to the challenge. I guess that’s sort of humorous since iTunes won’t run in iCloud. Anyhow, the offer still stands.
I’d also be interested in anyone else’s experience on what they liked or didn’t like about the offering. Like I said, it has some good things going for it. I just wonder if consumers will stick with it.
Allowing 3rd parties to write plug-ins for VMware vCenter was one of the best things I think we’ve ever done. One of the companies that’s taken advantage of this with some really cool and very useful tools is EMC. There are now 3 really great plug-ins for EMC users. I’ll link to the man himself (Chad Sakac) for full write-ups. Here’s a recap of the plug-ins below. All of these are free.
1) EMC Storage Viewer – This little gem allows some really great views all the way down into the array that’s underneath you hosts. Here’s a short video.
And here’s where you can grab it. Don’t forget the great whitepaper that goes along with it.
2) EMC Celera SRM Failback Tool – This one is awesome. If you’ve failed your environment over using VMware SRM then this tool will help you configure the storage to fail back to the original site. You can grab it here.
3) EMC Celera VDI Deployment – This will let you create a single VM on a share and then it will automatically clone that share out a bunch of times and automatically register the VMs in vCenter. Really nice way to scale out a bunch of VMs for VDI. It’s also available here.
Enjoy all of the new tools brought to you by our parent company, EMC.
For anyone that reads this blog they know I love using PowerShell with VMware. Microsoft hits home runs every once in a while. They did it with Windows XP. They did it again with PowerShell. What a beautiful scripting language.
One of the all time gurus of VMware and PowerShell is Hal Rottenberg. Now Hal has a new book coming out and it’s time to click on over and pre-order your copy today. If you’re using VMware and have ever needed to script anything then you’ll want this book. Go get it now.
In my previous post I talked about how the Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM) is VMware’s play in the SaaS space. Good news. VAM has been reved to v2. There’s new stuff for users and vendors alike.
As the VAM continues to be the industry’s leading destination for virtual appliances, we want to better serve our ISV partners and end users in their efforts around virtual appliance creation, identification, evaluation and deployment. As the VAM continues to be the industry’s leading destination for virtual appliances, VMware wants to better serve their ISV partners and end users in their efforts around virtual appliance creation, identification, evaluation and deployment. Here are some of the new features for both groups.
Get ready for the launch event of the year. On April 21, VMware will launch the next evolution of virtualization and cloud computing. Anyone is welcome to attend this momentous occasion. Click the picture below for more details.
Just some highlights of what VMware is launching.
Saves enough energy to power Denmark for 10 days
Frees up enough storage to host 50 times the current volume of photos on Facebook
Offers 4 times more memory per virtual machine
Handles 8,900 transactions per second in a virtual machine
Handles 3 times eBay’s daily traffic on a single server
Supports 4 times more operating systems than the competition
Now that is truly revolutionary and shows why VMware is powering the cloud generation.
Where does VMware and SaaS intersect? The Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM) is the answer. VAM has been around for some time now – over 2 years by my recollection. VAM started as a place for people who built virtual appliances to put them up on the web for others to download. VMware was the first company with such a site and is still the largest such repository.
Virtual Appliances are pre-built virtual machines with an operating system and application stack ready to go. Appliances vary greatly in what they’re used for and how “pretty” they are. There’s everything from IBM software stacks to pre-built virtual storage nodes to something as simple as a web browser. All you have to do to use one is download it and open it. This is why I say this is where VMware and SaaS intersect.
SaaS is usually talked about in reference to someone like a Salesforce.com. In the Salesforce model you log into a website, fill out a form, and an instance of the software is created for you – no installs necessary. Appliances are very similar. You log into VAM, find your appliance and download it, and your instance is ready to run. That’s the play for VMware in the SaaS space and it’s a strong one. The great thing about appliance is they’re easy to build and they work with any application you have to make it SaaS enabled.
Do you want to get started converting your applications to a SaaS model? It’s easy. Just get your apps loaded into a VM. You can use something like the free VMware Converter to do that. Next, download and use the free VMware Studio to convert those VMs into virtual appliances. Presto! You have service enabled your application. Wasn’t that easy?
As you can see, VMware plays in more than just the IaaS stack. In the future I’ll shed some light on how VMware impacts the PaaS stack.
For those that haven’t heard VMware’s overall cloud strategy there’s a 2 part series that Chuck Hollis wrote up from the EMC Strategy Forum that took place back in mid-March. The two articles are worth a read. The first is here. The second is here. You’ll get a good idea of where we’re going. If you’d like to see how EMC fits in then go all the way to the beginning of the series and follow along.
I get stopped a lot at conferences and events and asked about storage layouts. I’m not sure why that is but there’s one common thread I’ve seen through all of these conversations – people really try and overcomplicate things. Usually someone is trying to over engineer a solution because that’s what you had to do in the physical world. Well, actually you didn’t need to do it in the physical world but for some reason every person I talk to thinks that their account has the biggest, meanest apps that require all of this complicated tuning in order to make run. Truth be told I’ve run into very few of those types of apps.
To make a long story short I ran across a post by Chad Sakac recently on dispelling some of the myths around VMFS. Stuff like number of VMs per volume, size of volume, and the biggest one – whether or not to use NFS. Chad goes into some great detail on all of these points and more. His most recent blog post is definitely worth a read. Actually his whole blog is worth a read but for this post I really want you to go and read the VMFS information to build your knowledgebase. I think you’ll find that keeping it simple and going with a lot of defaults makes things perform and scale well.
I work for VMware as a Principal Systems Engineer. The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by VMware and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of VMware. This is my blog - not a VMware blog.
Title:Presentation Zen
Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery Author: Garr Reynolds ISBN 10: 0-321-52565-5
This is my second read about creating great presentations. I love this book because it has sample after sample of really nice presentations and describes why they are great. For more good reads visit the Good Reads page.
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