Mike D’s Blog

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

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

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’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 coolest sites I’ve seen in a long time in the VMware Labs site. I’m really surprised how many people I meet don’t know this site exists. Think of Google labs and you’ll start to understand the type of things posted to this site – internal side projects that are just so cool we can’t keep them internal anymore.

There are several really great, free utilities on the site. One of my personal favorites is Onyx. Ever want to repeat something that you do in the vCenter Client over and over again with the Powershell CLI but don’t know how to write Powershell? Go ahead and install this utility in-band between the client and the vCenter server and then do some operations. Onyx will capture the network packets, inspect the API calls being made, and then translate it all into Powershell commands for you. Pretty awesome. I wish I had something like this for just about any tool I used on a regular basis.

The fun doesn’t stop there. For cell phone junkies there’s also a cell phone client to vCenter. It’s still a work in progress but already it’s proven pretty useful for getting into things in my lab. Of course now that I have my iPad I’m going to have to sit down and make a client for that device as well. I just need to find out where the extra 38 hours in the day went to get to it.

Well, I hope you find this site useful. It will be interesting to see what else our developers come up with to drop up on the site. I know I’ll be watching.

Tags: labs, sites, VMware

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.

Tags: client, vclient, VMware

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?

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Tags: VMware

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.

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Tags: VMware

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.

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Tags: VMware

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.

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Tags: API, powershell, VMware

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!

Tags: myths, VMware

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).

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Tags: VMware

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.

VMworld Veeam Demo

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.

Tags: VMware, VMworld