Back in December, VMware launched the VMware Script-O-Mania contest. The goal of the Script-O-Mania contest is to help our wider community adopt ESXi by providing useful, fun and powerful scripts to manage the ESXi platform. But this isn’t just fun and games – there’s real prizes!
1st Prize $2,500
2nd Prize $1,000
3rd Prize $500
So polish off those scripting skills and get coding. The contest ends on March 15, 2010. You can find full details and submit your entry here.
In 2008, VMware launched the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP). This program allows service providers to pay for VMware licenses on a per VM per month usage basis. This aligns better with the monthly charges that service providers give to their customers and reduces the upfront Capex spend for service providers.
Today VSPP has over 700 service providers in the program. That’s a pretty large presence. What’s more is that nearly all of these service providers are in the middle of adding VMware-powered cloud service to their existing managed hosting environments. That is the power of the VMware vCloud initiative – choice of several hundred different providers to get you exactly what you need and compatibility between all of those various cloud providers.
For more information on the new milestone of VSPP read this press release. For more information on VSPP go here.
Previously I have talked a bit about OVF and how great it is for the industry. VMware’s implementation of OVF is called vApp and it’s fully OVF 1.0 compliant. The tool used for creating vApps is called VMware Studio and it can be found here.
The new version of VMware Studio (2.0) is now in beta. One of my favorite features of VMware Studio 2.0 is the Eclipse plug-in. Now developers can develop their apps, test them out locally with VMware Workstation, and then build them into a vApp and inject that vApp directly to a VMware Virtual Infrastructure or vSphere environment or even a VMware powered cloud. The ability to go straight from the development environment through to the cloud from within your IDE is pretty powerful – especially with how popular the cloud is for a development platform. Just another way that VMware is showing its leadership in the cloud space.
Here are some more highlights of VMware Studio 2.0 beta:
Build vApps and virtual appliances (with in-guest OS and application components) compatible with VMware Infrastructure, VMware vSphere 4.0 and vCloud.
Use an Eclipse plug-in version in addition to the stand-alone form factor. A Web Console and Command Line Interface are also furnished.
Ability to accept existing Studio-created VM builds as input
Support for Windows 2003 and 2008 Server as guest operating systems in addition to major linux distros.
ISV partners:
Author and build virtual appliances optimized for VMware Infrastructure and VMware vSphere 4.0: Support for OVF 1.0 and 0.9
Publish patches to update deployed virtual appliances
Extensible in-guest management framework
Automatic Dependency resolution (static)
Support for 32 bit and 64 bit versions of SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 and 5.3, CentOS 5.2 and 5.3, Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 as guest operating systems
Studio 2.0 also provides general purpose features enhancements in provisioning and user experience
VMware ESX Server, VMware ESXi, VMware Server 2.0, 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.0.6 and VMware Workstation 6.5.1 enabled as provisioning engines
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.
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’ve been catching up on some work and blog reading and ran across an interesting post from Scott Drummonds – one of the most knowledgeable people on performance benchmarking I know. In his most recent post Scott tackles the issue of performance in SQL. This is something that comes up at nearly every customer account I talk to. In nearly every case where I investigate the performance issue it’s due to some sort of misconfiguration. Sometimes the misconfiguration is on the VMware side. More often than not it’s on the SQL side. For some reason people just think SQL is this big hog of resources and the only way to make it run fast and scale is to throw more raw resources at it. Very few people actually take the time to really understand the transactions going to the database, the underlying storage, or any of the other variables that could impact performance of a database transaction.
In his post, Scott goes through some of the simple things you can do to tune VMware for the best database performance possible. For an even more detailed checklist you should read up on the best practice checklist in the VMware Communities. Hopefully between these two nuggets of information you can finally lay to rest the topic of SQL performance.
Today, Microsoft announced that it will buy VMware for $2.5 Billion in a combined stock and cash transaction. This news really came as a shock to me. I was here when EMC bought us and was shocked then. Over time it grew on me and now I really love our parent company. Now though I’m not so sure I’m happy. It’s Microsoft after all. Look at my previous employers – Inktomi (competed on the search side of the house), Novell (enough said), VMware (enough said). I’m also an avid Apple fan. I guess I’ll have to give that up. This really has me going nuts at the moment.
I guess in the end it makes some sense. Paul takes the company home to his roots. Still, Microsoft? I never thought I’d see the day. If the economy wasn’t so bad I’d probably look for another job. Anything is better than going to work for Evilcorp. Decisions, decisions, decisions.
Well, if you’ve read this far down then you’re either out buying VMware stock like mad, crying like a baby, or checking your calendar to see if it’s April 1st. Good that it’s the later. Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! And no, I don’t think we’ll ever see the day where this post is real.
P.S. I won’t be posting anything else today for fear that people might think it’s a joke.
It was a busy week last week in Cannes. I had a great time meeting everyone and talking about the exciting stuff that VMware is doing in the cloud space. It was especially nice to see all of the great cloud demos during Steve Herrod’s keynote on Wednesday. The keynote really showed off what VMware and our partners are doing in the cloud space. It also showed off the power of the VMware vCloud API. If you’re interested in the vCloud API then now is the time to visit the cloud site and register for the beta program (it’s over to the right) which will be launching soon. There’s a short survey to walk through and then you’ll be notified when the beta goes live. Until then you can stop back by here where I’ll continue to dive into the VMware cloud offerings and blog about the details.
Now it’s back to catching up on all of the exciting things I saw last week at VMworld and post them on this blog.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about SQL Server running in a VM and how disk writes were assured to happen in contradiction to a poorly written article on SQL Solutions. After working with VMware Engineering there’s now a KB article that talks about how and when I/O writes happen with different VMware products. Below is the full text of the KB article. You can also find the source here.
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.
General Housekeeping
Frequency of Updates
I try and write something new 1-2 times per week. I'll update more when I'm in the office and possibly less when I'm out and traveling. If there's something you'd really like me to hear my thoughts on then just email me.
Comments and Feedback
Anyone is free to comment. I will not filter or delete any comments unless they are obvious spam or flames. When commenting, any information you can share about who you are, how to contact you, what you do for a living, etc. would very much be appreciated. Let's keep the discussions live and interactive.
