Jun 01
Dec 10
VMworld Europe 2009 is just around the corner. VMware has just opened the public call for participation/papers. If you have something to share then please go and sign up now. There’s even a handy paper explaining the whole process. If there’s something you’d like to hear me spout on about then feel free to shoot me an email on the topic. I’ve already submitted several papers as part of the internal call for papers.
It’s looking like we’re going to have another successful event this year. I just hope I don’t end up with a 4 month stomach virus like I did after last year’s event!
Dec 06
Well, looks like DNS is now working again. Now the real work begins. I’ll be moving all of the old content and comments over to this blog. That might take some time since the two blogs do things completely differently. I’m also working on a new design that should go into effect over the next few days. Last part is getting Feedburner redirected and getting some new content up. So much work. Please bear with me as I think everyone will like the new content and the new site once it’s up.
Remember, if you need to get to the old content you can still go to http://mikedatl.typepad.com.
Tags: General
Oct 16
From time to time I have thoughts on technology in general or some of my other passions such as aviation. Those topics really don’t fit here on the virtualization related blog so I started a new one over at http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/thoughts. Feel free to visit it and see what I’m thinking about outside of the virtualization space. Most of it will probably be technology related- topics such as Twitter and blogging will be the first up. All right, enough of the personal stuff…back to virtualization.
Oct 15
HP and AMD in Canada are putting on a virtualization chat this coming Thursday, October 16 from 1 – 4 pm Eastern Time. HP, AMD, Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware (myself) will be on-line to answer any questions you have about virtualization. Feel free to stop by on-line and get your questions answered. Go here to register and join the chat!
Oct 13
There are a handful of mainstream bloggers in the virtualization space that really “get it”. Brian Madden is in that handful. Sure, every once in a while I think he’s in left field but hey, maybe that’s where you have to play to catch a ball. It always takes different views of the world to make it go round.
Brian had a recent post on vClient – VMware’s upcoming bare-metal client hypervisor. This was announced at VMworld so no one is spilling the beans. Make sure to go read Brian’s article in full here. The main point that I think he hits on that vClient solves is the underlying OS in a VDI deployment.
“This is the exact problem that a Type 1 bare-metal client hypervisor can solve. In this scenario, there’s only one OS to manage.”
I’ve heard this question over and over again from clients – how do I manage the underlying OS on the client device in a VDI environment. You still have to patch the thing and license it and virus scan it. I’ve seen a lot of customers trying to turn their PCs into thin clients using a Linux install. There are other 3rd party solutions out there as well such as ThinLaunch. VMware’s vision is to simply have this built in as part of the hardware. This lets you take the main job of the operating system (abstracting the hardware from the Apps) out of the picture. If you have a truly universal abstraction layer in place then you get to what I call the “I don’t care” state. You don’t care what client is out there. You don’t care what OS is running where. You simply have an application with some data that you want to get to the client. Now you can truly write your app once to run in a VM and deploy it anywhere. That was the promise of Java and .Net that can now be realized with the help of virtual machines.
So to sum it up vClient is really about “I don’t care”. Remember those 3 words – you’ll hear them a lot more from me as time goes along and I explain some other VMworld announcements.
Oct 09
It’s not often that I simply link to another article without providing some color commentary of my own. This one’s different. All I can say is RIGHT ON!! Go read the full article here. Snippet below to wet your appetite.
“Case in point, Microsoft’s current “VMware is too expensive!” campaign. Remember these ad campaigns from VMworld? Now frequent readers will know I’ve been critical of the total cost of virtual platforms, especially those from VMware, since day one. Yeah, they’re freakin’ expensive, and not always worth the dough. But the truth is that VMware has a product to actually sell, and if a customer has a true need for features like DRS, vMotion, and HA, well then VMware has that product to offer.”
Oct 09
Some of my colleagues put together a great post on “debunking the myths of memory overcommit” as I like to call it. These myths come from our competitors trying to spin the fact that they don’t have the ability to oversubscribe memory in their systems. Well, to be fair, Citrix has added a balloon driver to XenServer 5 but more on that later. It’s a very good post and shows the true value of the technology. Go read it now.
Even with great information like this out there I still see a lot of people balking at memory overcommitment like it’s some voodoo witch magic that’s going to do nothing but cause huge headaches. This is a myth primarily produced by the rest of the virtualization industry that is missing this key core feature of virtualization. This leads us to the question – is resource overcommitment bad?
Tags: VMware
Oct 02
As I have mentioned before in previous posts on this blog and comments on other blogs I really haven’t seen many issues installing VMware ESXi on various hardware platforms as others have seen out there. Maybe I got lucky when I went and picked out my inexpensive hardware for the lab. Who knows. I’ve had a lot of people ask me about my configuration so here it is in detail. Note: This is what I used to put together the lab I run at the house. This may or may not be what you want for production. I’m sure everyone knows all the caveats around support and such when you build your own servers. With that out of the way here’s the specs.
Tags: VMware
Oct 02
Lori MacVitte over at DevCentral posted an interesting article on virtual server sprawl. I’ve seen this topic come up over and over again on panels, in the press, on blogs, and in customer conversations. What’s virtual server sprawl? It’s the theory (or fact) that because virtual machines are so easy to create that once you virtualize your servers will start to multiply like rabbits. I’m here to tell you there’s a lot of fact behind that statement. After doing virtualization for 6 1/2 years here at VMware I don’t think I’ve seen one customer reduce their server count ever. Sure, they’ve gotten rid of a lot of physical hardware. I guess you could call those servers. However, I’ve never seen the actual server count (OS/App stack) go down. Usually it starts to ramp up rather quickly. There are various reasons for this.
Tags: VMware
Oct 01
Earlier this year VMware released the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit (for Windows). This was a new PowerShell interface for VMware Infrastructure 3. I’m a big fan of the power and simplicity of PowerShell so I thought I’d try to create something with the script and show it off during my talk at VMworld on Deploying VMware in a Microsoft Shop. The question is what do I create? Well, there has been some great debate of Microsoft’s Quick Migration and VMware’s VMotion and are they equal or not, do they solve the same problems, etc. This post isn’t to go back into that debate. One of the things that was also brought up over and over again in the debate was the fact that Quick Migration was free and came with Hyper-V since it was based on Microsoft Clustering whereas VMware VMotion was only available in the most expensive Enterprise SKU of VMware Infrastructure. So there it was – I need to create Quick Migration for the lower priced and free VMware solutions. I went off, built my little script, and showed it off at VMworld. There was a GREAT response to it so I’m posting it here for others to use or improve upon however you see fit.
Tags: API, powershell, VMware
Sep 29
Amrit Williams, the CTO of BigFix, has an interesting blog on all sorts of topics. Recently he posted about some of the myths in virtualization. This sparked a very interesting conversation between Amrit and myself. I agree with the myths he brings about but felt some of them really should be busted rather than confirmed. At any rate it’s worth a read to see the different viewpoints for sure. Go here and make sure to read the comments.
Thanks, Amrit for being open and opinionated!
Sep 28
I recently had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on virtualization at iCoast in Ft Lauderdale. Myself, Mick Hollison from Citrix, Rene Alamo from Microsoft, and Jay Kruemcke from IBM talked to a packed room about virtualization. What was interesting to me is Rene kept saying Hyper-V was “the Windows you know and love”. I say it’s interesting not because I’ve never heard it said before (it’s Microsoft’s main point to customers these days) but rather because Microsoft is still going down that road. Actually what shocks me even more is the mindless nodding of heads in the audience as if they’re stuck in some borg trance. Time to snap out of the Microsoft trance people. Hyper-V is anything but the Windows you know and love.
Recently the competitive team from VMware did a run down of some basic virtualization tasks between VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V. I don’t think the results will shock you. When watching the videos pay close attention to the actual commands being typed on the Hyper-V side. I’m pretty good with the command line in Windows and yet all of these commands are net new for Server Core in Windows Server 2008. This isn’t the Windows I grew up with. Heck, I’m a MCSE and I still don’t recognize that stuff. So much for “using my existing skill sets” – another phrase Microsoft likes to tell their customers.
The point is, if you’re going to do virtualization at all then you’re going to need to learn new skill sets. You’re going to have to learn what’s actually happening with your workloads and how to troubleshoot them. I know, there are a few out there that actually do know that, but the masses generally have no clue what their workloads actually do or how they do it. Trust me, I get the calls to help troubleshoot the problems. There are new commands to learn as well. Server Core and Hyper-V weren’t around before. You don’t have existing skill sets with these technologies. Yo have to learn new stuff. So it’s time to debunk this myth: The Windows You Know and Love – BUSTED.
DISCLAIMER: I work for VMware as a Systems Engineer. I have worked in the virtualization industry for over 6 years. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent views of my employer or of anyone else. This blog is written on my own time and with my own energy. I am not commenting in this blog on behalf of my employer or anyone else. If you would like official statements about VMware you can contact my employer’s PR firm. I always welcome and encourage open and constructive conversations and will not block any comments from appearing on this blog other than obvious SPAM or threatening hate mail.
Tags: hyper-v
Sep 24
A few posts ago I was replying to some FUD from a new competitor of VMware’s called Marathon. You can read the first post and second post on the blog. These two posts generated a lot of comments. A few of the comments were from a poster called TopGun. In his first comment he leaves the following at the end:
“And I agree with the previous poster, my site was one of those that were done do to the license “foul up”. Not sure I’d want to trust my most critical apps to this software, especially version 1.0.”
I want to say it really is bad that people got screwed up by what’s called the “time bomb”. If TopGun were an actual customer I would feel even worse. The only problem is he’s not a customer. He works for Stratus – another VMware FT competitor (sort of).
Tags: VMware
Sep 23
I’ve been working a lot lately with some people from Veeam on a demo for my Deploying VMware in a Microsoft Shop session. Veeam recently acquired nWorks who makes this great plug-in for Microsoft Systems Center so it can see VMware environments. Alec King from Veeam put together a great demo of what is possible with the plug-in. I’ve included that demo below.
You can learn more about the plug-in by visiting Veeam’s site here. While you’re there you might just want to look at all of the other great stuff they have for a VMware environment. They’re one of my favorite technology partners. What’s really been amazing to me is how these guys were everywhere at VMworld last week. They were on my room key for the Venetian. They were mentioned in the partner day keynote. They had a session during partner day. They were actually in a lot of sessions throughout the week. And they had a great booth. Definitely an interesting company to keep an eye on.
