Mike D’s Blog

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
• Infrastructure enhancements in the GUI and builds

The public Beta is accessible now from http://www.vmware.com/appliances/learn/vmware_studio.html.

It seems every time I’m in an account and finish talking about VMware’s cloud strategy and ecosystem Oracle comes up as a discussion point. Customers ask why Oracle seems to be going in the complete opposite direction of their strategic directions and cloud in general. I don’t have a good answer for that one other than to agree with them. Take the announcement from earlier last week that Oracle is killing off Virtual Iron shortly after the acquisition. It’s yet another virtualization technology they bought and have subsequently killed (SUN xVM being the other). This is just one of the many reasons customers are seeing SUN running against their strategic directions (virtualization is somewhat crucial to getting the cloud going). You add in Oracle’s licensing practices and disjointed vision and you can see the puzzle pieces falling into place. Meanwhile you have people like VMware, Intel, Cisco, and EMC (VICE) all aligning with customers’ strategic vision and taking them on the path to better days.

OK. So maybe you have to be in sales to really understand the humor in this one. Still, in this economy this is only getting worse. Enjoy the humor post and I promise to start blogging more about cloud soon. I just got back from 18 days in EMEA talking to a lot of our hosting partners that are now getting into the cloud game. Exciting times!

On April 27, the DMTF launched the Open Cloud Standards Incubator. The goal as described by the DMTF press release is as follows:

The work of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator will focus on ways to facilitate operations between private clouds within enterprises and other private, public, or hybrid clouds by improving the interoperability between platforms through open cloud resource management standards. The group also aims to develop specifications to enable cloud service portability and provide management consistency across cloud and enterprise platforms.

The Open Cloud Standards Incubator was formed as part of the DMTF Standards Incubation process, which enables like-minded DMTF members to work together and produce informational specifications that can later be fast-tracked through the standards development process. The incubation process is designed to foster and expedite open, collaborative, exploratory technical work that complements the DMTF mission to lead the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards.

Winston Bumpus, current President of the DMTF and fellow VMware employee has blogged a lot about cloud and the need for standards. His latest blog entry continues to highlight this push for VMware and the industry at large. VMware has had a lot of success in collaborating with others in the industry through the DMTF. The first successful example of that is the OVF (Open Virtualization Format). I’m sure the incubator project will yield similar (if not better) results.

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

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:

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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.

From Hal’s site on why to buy it.

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