Virtual Geek

Get ready for a Lightning Strike!

Feb 6th will be an exciting day!  The covers will come off EMC Project Lightning, something we’ve alluded to in 2011.  In fact, for those of you at VMworld, I did a demo of lightning integrated into vCenter in SPO3977 that got rave reviews (the next version of VSI – our vCenter plugin integrates with Lightning – pretty cool).

While PCIe-based flash hardware itself is becoming a commodity very fast (see great stuff from Micron, LSI – even Intel Ramsdale, and when these folks get in, expect volumes/commoditization to accelerate) – it’s been a bit of an internal joke… you see, whenever we previewed Lightning, we have always held up the prototype hardware at whatever state it has been in, because humans “get” new hardware in a way they don’t “get” new software. Something to do with being tactile and the reptilian brain methinks :-)

Ah – but commoditization is a good thing – commoditization = mass adoption :-)   Project Lightning is all about “how do we create value on top of PCIe-based Flash, which will be everywhere….

So, it should be no surprise that project Lighting – both in it’s initial GA version and in it’s roadmap and evolution is much, much more about software (coupled of course, kick-a$$ PCIe-based flash hardware).   I’ll do a deep dive blog post on Monday the 6th, but you can follow the big “unveil” and participate in the QnA by clicking on the below…   2012 is off with a BANG!  (wait till you see what we have in store for EMC World :-)

New EMC + vSphere Techbooks–get em while they’re hot!

The EMC VNX and VMware vSphere Techbook (this the reference text for any customers/partners/EMCers who use EMC VNX arrays with vSphere – which translates to a LOT of people) has been updated!  It is downloadable – so click the link below.  BTW, this is doc h8229 if you ever want to search by doc number.   Thank YOU, Jeff Purcell (the primary author)!

For those of you who want it in hardcopy, you can purchase it from the Vervante EMC Techbook store here.  It makes for a great nerd coffee table book :-)

(personally, I wouldn’t buy the hardcopy – we’re already working on the next rev – to capture the various things that are targeted for future vSphere revs – like autorestore as part of the SATP when the RR PSP is used – yeah!)

Late last year (Nov 21st –my birthday!) , the EMC Symmetrix techbook for vSphere also was updated – mandatory for any folks using EMC VMAX/VMAXe arrays with vSphere (also many, many folks) – BTW, this is doc h2529 if you ever want to search by doc number.   Thank YOU, Cody Hosterman and Drew Tonneson (the primary authors)!  Click on the below to download!

You can expect an updated Techbook soon for customers using SRM 5 with the latest SRDF SRA (which is one of the more sophisticated, but also more complex SRM/replication implementations).    We’re also working on an Isilon Techbook – targeted to be coincident with the next major ONE FS release which will open up Isilon for many more VMware-centric use cases.   The EMC VNXe is too simple to warrant a techbook :-)

Feedback is ALWAYS welcome.  I’m pushing for these books to be published in ebook formats, as well as posted as native HTML (will help with the always handy google query way of finding answers), but any and all other suggestions welcome!

EMC Presales–Update, Job Openings, and Reflecting on 2011

So – on Jan 24th – EMC announced our Q4 2011 financial results, and our 2012 outlook.   This isn’t the place for financial analysis (and I’m no financial analyst), EMC killed it.   It all starts with our customers, and our partners.   THANK YOU.   The fact that we’re making transformational changes while in this position of strength is a testament to the way we see the world.   

As we put the EMC Presales Manifesto (read it here: This I Believe: EMC Presales Manifesto) into action – there are some interesting EMC Presales (which I call “SE” roles – as that’s what they usually are) roles which just posted – and if you want to be part of the rollercoaster, read on…

Top VMware-related blogs voting–2012 edition!

Every year – Eric Siebert at vSphere-land does the authoritative survey amongst the VMware cognoscenti re: the best blogs out there.    You can see the 2011 results here.  Voting runs until 2/7 – so vote now! (click on the button below)

This is AT LEAST as important as voting in the US election :-)   (Can you imagine the debates if the top-bloggers did them – would be WAY more interesting than the mud-slingfests in politics – at least we would all learn something :-)

Please – vote.   I would of course love your vote, but have to say that as always, Duncan Epping (Yellow Bricks), Frank Denneman (frankdenneman.nl), Scott Lowe (blog.scottlowe.org) all had a great year.   Also – in my personal “breakout year” category is Andre Leibovici (myvirtualcloud.net) – always had IMO one of the most solid VDI-centric blogs out there, and did killer work this year.   

Going on in my favorites (and I’m sure I’m biased, but hey, this is my opinion – vote with yours!), Nick Weaver (Nickapedia) produced some killer content and tools this year.   I always dig Hany Michael (Hypervizor) – the diagram king, and William Lam (Virtually Ghetto) – the script king – so they are on my top 10.

There are more than I can count, including RTFM – Mike is always delightfully different in his views, Scott Drummond’s blog – always thought provoking, and many, many, many more.   The community makes the VMware world go around…

In 2011, a small sample of my own work I’m most proud of (not always the most popular):

1. The “Official Unofficial VMware/Storage 2011 survey” – huge 2000 person survey, crazy cool data
2. vStorage APIs for Array Integration - vSphere 5 Edition – I dig the fact that I see many folks (VMware folks, and other storage vendors) using the diagrams and powerpoints from this (which was also used in VMworld sessions).
3. Cisco Megalaunch – got a lot of feedback from Cisco folks/Cisco partners that this was a useful resource (and had in some cases more info than they were getting from official channels :-)
4. NFS changes in vSphere 5 – this is something that we showed at VMworld – will become more and more important as “scale out NAS” models become more mainstream over time….
5. URGENT: VAAI–Thin Provision Reclaim.... on hold + workaround – I dig this because it’s important (IMO) to always be transparent – the good, the bad, and the ugly.   This is an example of transparency, even when it’s ugly – and I think that’s important.

I do this because I love it – it is absolutely a labor of love :-)  Please vote!

Two upcoming webcasts I wouldn’t miss….

[UPDATE Jan 19, 2012 12:08pm – fixed broken link]

Some webcasts are… well… marketing.  Those I ignore.

Others are… well… priceless.

There are two doozies coming up – and if you’re thinking of doing things around these, great content, but also a great opportunity to talk to folks and ask questions.

1) Virtual Oracle Deployment Best Practices from EMC IT (Thursday: Jan 19th, 11am ET, 8am PT).   A no product discussion.   We’ve learned a LOT about virtualizing Oracle (apps and databases) in EMC IT over the last few years, and have some of the larger Oracle environments around.  I work and interact with the presenters when VMware/EMC meet to discuss how we use each other’s technologies (we do, very deeply, and on a “drink each other’s champagne” aka the nice version of “eat each other’s dogfood” – in other words we do it at a very accelerated rate).   As always, the title of the session, and content are secondary to me – it’s the people delivering it that matter most.  In this case, it’s Ramesh Razdan, Senior Director and EMC Distinguished Engineer, EMC and Darryl Smith, Senior Technologist, EMC.  Solid, Solid dudes.   Register HERE.

2) Best Practices for vSphere 5 and Isilon (Wednesday, Jan 25th, 11am ET, 8am PT).   Cool products, cool combo, good for specific use cases (big vCD deployments, tons of test/dev VMs, etc).   The presenters make it extra awesome if you ask me: James Walkenhorst from Isilon and the ALWAYS excellent Cormac Hogan (@vmwarestorage – follow him!)  Register by clicking on the below:

This I Believe: EMC Presales Manifesto…

Some big news today – I’m PUMPED, honored, inspired, humbled all in one little “emotion bundle”.   Starting now, I’m the leader for all of EMC Presales.

This is a group of some of the best folks I’ve ever had the pleasure of working along with – and I hope that they know that I’m one of them.  My goal is a simple one: 

• I believe that it is my duty to help everyone – in any role – by taking obstacles out of our way, simplifying our life, and providing solid support infrastructure (org, people, operations, finance, and systems and tools)
• I believe that for our customers, partners, technology partners – the technical experts that engage with them are one of the most important roles in helping them, and their value is in their technologist nature.  It’s just ONE part of what makes a good SE standout, but without that – they are missing something critical.    Think of it this way… it may sound corny, but I visualize the SE like a gunslinger in those old westerns.  Yes, honorable (always thinking of the customer).  Yes, a “white knight” (a positive force).  But the defining characteristic is that they are the fastest draw in the west – ergo their technical skills.   If they are a senior leader, sure, they get less keyboard time :-)   But, they hunger for it still, and when any moment presents itself – they seize it – note that it is diametrically opposed to being a bureaucrat.   Dealing with bureaucracy?  Sure – comes with the territory.  When you become a bureaucrat – poof, your value = 0.  If that ever happens to me, someone put me out of my misery.
• I believe that the roughly 3,400 people in EMC Presales (a variety of roles and capacities – ranging from Account Technical Consultants, to specialty folks called “STCs” around technologies, solutions and specific GTM things like our partner TCs and the TCs that support our SIs) are some of the best I know – but there’s always an opportunity to take something great and make it even better.
• I believe that there some specific things (mostly tools, systems, shared services – more on this later) that I can do to give them back time (which is precious) in the near term, and in exchange work on continuing to evolve our skills and transform our approaches.
• I believe that there is such a thing as a “culture” of presales.   In the same way that you can be a career customer/partner facing technologist (usually called an “SE”), those people have a certain way of “seeing the world”.   Likewise, it’s aligned with, but different than the way someone who is a career sales person sees the world, or how a career services person sees the world.   In the end – these different world views must come together in what matters the most – the customer and how THEY see the world.

Whenever there is a change – people want to know “what does this leader think?”   While I’m lucky to know many folks, there’s FAR more I don’t know (but look forward to meeting)…   So, I’ve codified what I believe about presales.   Half jokingly (but the other half dead seriously) – I’ve called it the "EMC Presales Manifesto”.

Read on to see the Manifesto, and see a video of Patrick Dennis and I targeted at the EMC Presales community (which includes, in my eyes, our EMC Partners).

VMware Partner Exchange and EMC (including bootcamp details)

Have heard from a lot of partners wondering about PEX and the EMC plan…   First of all – VMware Partner Exchange is the event of the year for VMware partners – and when it comes to what’s going on in the channel/integrator/partner community, that’s pretty well the center of the universe :-)   It’s Feb 11-16 at the Venetian in Las Vegas.   Click on the below to register (early bird registration ends this week):

At EMC, our channel business is growing like gangbusters (we’re talking about 50%+ year over year growth).   To put that in perspective – with the Dell/EMC divorce, more than $1B in revenues not only has moved to EMC’s channel partners, but it actually grew and grew substantially.  

That along with VNXe (CRN best storage product of the year – a cool “top 15 list” along with the Intel core i7, Mac OSX, Samsung Galaxy tablets, iPad2), and huge investments in our channel (BTW, CRN also named EMC company of the year in three categories), and huge expansions of VNX and Isilon channel GTM.

I just finished up the EMC leadership meeting (~400 EMCers in a few days of intimate discussion), and we are doubling down – 2012 will be the “year of the channel” at EMC (and that’s coming off a killer 2011!)

A little sidebar:

Ergo, thanks very much Dell.  While the divorce wasn't something we didn’t ask for, and certainly didn’t drive – well, it turned out to be a very good thing.  While we loved that partnership, and it was one of the best IT partnerships for more than a decade, you made a choice, and it turned out to be good for EMC and our partners.   How is it’s working for you?

So… for us, VMware PEX is one of the biggest events of the year, and we’ll be there with bells on.

Here’s the scoop when it comes to EMC/VMware:

• The EMC bootcamp will be all day on Monday the 13th (details should be on the VMware site by the end of this week).  This is THE place to be if you’re an VMware and EMC partner.   We’ll be:
• In the keynote (I’ll be there), we’ll be disclosing the 2012 roadmap, and our 2013 ambitions (competitors, you’re welcome to join – when you see, you’ll want to join :-)
• opening up the changes we’re making to make tools more open, and working on being easier to do business with every day.
• Sharing more virtual appliances (which everyone loves)
• Opening up the vLab to you all (this will blow you mind)
• Sharing new solutions around virtualizing mission critical apps, accelerating and simplifying EUC, accelerating the management portfolio (think of 2012 as the year of vCOPS IMO), and also vCD at your customers.
• For partners who are service providers also, we’ll be making announcements around doubling down on our already awesome SP program.
• We will be running a hands-on-lab during the whole week.  This is an opportunity to test out everything EMC and VMware – basically anything you want, but also talk to experts, engineering, vSpecialists, and share your thoughts.   It’s really cool – runs out of our vLab demo cloud in Durham, NC (which all runs on Vblock and vSphere)
• I (and the whole EMC team) want to hear what we’re doing wrong, and what we need to do better – it’s a great opportunity for us to listen, and to help you help your customers, and your business.

What more should we add… and I can’t wait to see you there!

Vblock Unified Infrastructure Manager/Operations v3.0 released!

BANG – that’s the sound of the start gun for 2012 – and you can expect a crazy year, filled to the brim with excitement, new tech, fun, and change galore….

I’m going to do a series of blog posts highlighting some of the new stuff… Here’s a second:

Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM) Operations v3.0 is released!

UIM has two parts – UIM Provisioning (UIM/P) and Operations (UIM/O).   Together – they make Vblock simple (and also unify all the APIs for a true converged infrastructure API model for northbound API integration with other frameworks and orchestration tools).

UIM/P got updated in late 2011 adding a couple much needed features: deprovisioning (needed for elasticity), simplified vApp deployment, demo mode, vCloud Director integration and more – if you want more on that (including a demo) – check this out here.  

UIM/O v3.0 expands this with awesome fault alerting, correlation, and root-cause analysis.   This is something we previewed at VMworld 2010 (again, seriously people, if you’re missing the EMC sessions, you’re missing a peek into the future! :-)  Hint, hint – VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) is right around the corner :-)

For VCE partners – like UIM/P – there’s a handy ability to use UIM/O in a “demo mode” if you don’t have your own Vblock handy.   Also like UIM/P – it’s 100% the same APIs, so you can even develop against just the vApp.

Check out this demonstration video to get an idea of what we’re talking about (pretty freakin’ cool!) Also, it’s a peek into some of the future of vCenter Operations’ future Root Cause Analysis capabilities (they share a lineage – the IP was part of the ADM portfolio – which built awesome relationships/dependencies – without agent requirements).

For those of you that want an offline high-rez version of the demo, download it here in WMV format, and here in MOV format.

Feedback welcome – and enjoy!!!

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator v5.1–released!

BANG – that’s the sound of the start gun for 2012 – and you can expect a crazy year, filled to the brim with excitement, new tech, fun, and change galore….

I’m going to do a series of blog posts highlighting some of the new stuff… Here’s the first:

Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) 5.1 is GA (and will be on powerlink on Jan 13th)

VSI is the awesome (and as always - free!) vCenter plugin for EMC customers.   It snaps right into vCenter, and exposes a ton of rich array features directly to the VMware admin.

Login to powerlink (http://powerlink.emc.com) and follow this bread-crumb trail (I’m going to try to make us start using the open communities more and more for this stuff in 2012):

In VSI 5.0 we added very rich access controls (customers who had Storage/VMware teams said the lack of robust access controls and needing to give the VMware admins full array credentials was a deal-breaker)… So… if there is a storage team – they can specifically control rights and partition the arrays such that the VMware admins have whatever delegated access they need), so how do we top that?   Ergo… what’s new in 5.1?

• Rich integration with Citrix XenDesktop!  This feature expands the rich VSI integration with VMware View to Citrix XD.  Here we leverage the fact that we can create VM-level snapshots at the array level to accelerate deployment, consume less storage, etc.   BTW – this same capability will be used in future vSphere releases as another VAAI NFS offload (“lazy NFS clone”), but you can leverage it now by using VSI (with both View and XD)
  • Simplify and create multiple desktop virtual machines
  • Register virtual machines w/ Citrix XenDesktop
  • Leverage storage efficiency to deploy desktops from a single master virtual machine
  • Store Master and Desktop virtual machines in NFS Datastore
  • Support for VNX NFS

• Rich new performance reporting!   This was one of the most requested features – and performance reporting is one of those things where a “little utility” can go a long way.  Sure, in things like Prosphere, and using Unisphere Analyzer, you can see a lot of detail, this is a quick (and handy) utiity right in vCenter where you can see vDisk, Datastore, and array stats in a single spot, and easily set up performance alerts.   Note: one important “not in there yet” is NFS performance reports – but expect to see that soon. 
  • Single pane of glass for VMware and Storage array metrics
  • •Visual warnings for VMs w/ high latency
  • •Context sensitive views for Datastore, VM and Host
  • •Support for VMFS Datastores on VMAX/VMAXe/VNX

You can see a demo of this here:

You can download this demonstration in MOV format here.

Enjoy – and feedback, as always, welcome – what more could we/should we add?

Holiday Wishes from the Virtual Geek household…

A little light silliness recorded by one of my daughters :-)

Here’s another peep into the house – Susan (my wife) chose to take my “Santa Chad” giveaway stuff to another level :-)

As you can see, while we take the holidays seriously at our house – man, I don’t take myself too seriously :-)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays all…

To all my EMC and VMware brothers and sisters, my vSpecialist team – thank you.  To all the readers - thank you.   Heck, to our respected competitors – thank you too.

To all the customers – THANK YOU most of all.

2011 was a great year for us at EMC, and I hope for all of you.  2012 will be filled with fun, surprises, killer new technologies (yes, that will melt faces), new friends, new hardships, new challenges.   Most blessed of all IMO – it will be filled with change.   Change makes life interesting… also – something to think about (a little maxim):

• Change is inevitable.
• Ergo the world will change around you – even if you stand still.
• So you only have two choices: try to keep things the same – or lead in making some changes.
• If you make some changes – you could win, you could lose, and you’ll definitely learn – so it’s better than 50% a win.   If you DON’T change – by definition, since the world is changing around you, you are more likely to lose than to win.

IMO – the key is to change, to adapt, to learn (from success and failure), but always hold on to who you are, be loyal to your friends, family, those who are loyal to you – and always hold true to your core values.

With that – I’m logging off for the holidays, and wish you and your friends/family a GREAT holiday, and time of reflection.