Virtual Geek

A Canadian CAN make it to the medal podium!

Thank you all who voted – the tally is in, and I’m very honored to be held in this company in the #3 spot!

http://vsphere-land.com/news/and-the-winners-of-the-vmware-top-blog-are.html

To Duncan, Scott, Eric, Mike, Rich, Jason, Gabe, and MikeD – congratulations also, I do indeed look at you as my friends and colleagues.

To all who voted, thank you!   It’s a labor of love, and I love the dialog – please continue, and if there are things you want to see discussed, please let me know!

Live, from Cisco Live 2009

It’s been a busy 3 days, after 3 panels (one on what VMware/Cisco/EMC are doing for service providers, one for customers, and an open panel (VMware, Cisco, EMC, Oracle, Emerson, APC, NetApp and Panduit)– which was a gas around the “Next Gen Datacenter”.   I got to poke the Oracle guy (in a nice friendly respectful way) around their VMware support policy.

Great team effort to support the event – both before and at the show itself.   On top of the overall show team, there are a few folks worth calling out for a pat on the back:

1) Martin Glynn – pulled out the stops to provide overwhelming equipment for the show.  In the Datacenter of the Future area, there were all the things that EMC does, including two V-Max arrays.   We had the same in our booth, and also in the Intel booth.   It was literally TONS of gear – and was everywhere.   Martin – you were a big part of getting a lot of V-Max in front of a lot of people for real hands on.

2) Hariharan (Hari) Harikannan – was the man behind huge chunks of the VCE  demo in Padmesree Warrior’s day 2 keynote.   You wouldn’t believe the last minute gyrations and effort if I spelt them all out here, but anyone who has supported an event knows how that goes down :-)

If you’re interested to get a feel of the event, see what was on the expo floor, and the demo from the day 2 technical keynote – at least from one person’s perspective, read on!

Why FCoE? Why not just NAS and iSCSI?

Scott Lowe recently wrote a good post on FCoE, and his thoughts here.   The comments of his readers are comments I’ve heard from others as well, so I posted a response in the comments, but I think Scott and I don’t have the same readership (and perhaps those that do may not read the comments)

This is an important dialog, IMHO, and I thought the my response was worth posting, as I’ve gotten loads of questions like this also.

If you’re interested in this thread – suggest reading Scott’s posts and the comments.  If you want to see my take, read on….

VMware/EMC Summer Webcast Series

We’re doing these webcasts with the product folks on vSphere and EMC topics – a great opportunity to see/learn/ask/give feedback.

Every thursday – 11am EST.

Are there topics YOU want to see, demos you want to experience, or people you want to hear from?  Post them!

Chris – you did a GREAT job on this video, man – I was laughing out loud!

 

A great new VMware View/Cisco UCS/V-Max whitepaper

The team in Santa Clara pumped this one out furiously over the last little while – it’s got great content.

Here are a couple of highlights:

• We showed we could support 640 desktops on four half-width UCS blades, each configured with 96GB of RAM.   That’s 160 users per blade, and almost 4x what we did with the previous generation of this work on older generation Dell M600 blades.
• This time, the workload included not only office apps, but also Outlook – very difficult to generate a workload in this use case (Loadgen is designed to stress the Exchange server environment, not the client) – we’re trying with each iteration to make the VDI use case workload generation more “real world”
• The V-Max wasn’t huffing and puffing.
• This config could scale up linearly due to vSphere, UCS, and V-Max scaling models.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/App_Networking/vdiucswp.html

More to come, we’re starting on new stuff coming from VMware, adding EFDs into the mix, and more.

Virtualize Everything!

We’re running a webcast series for the slightly more laid back summer months, in run up to the full extravaganza that will be VMworld.

Join us every Thursday at 11am ET for a new EMC Solutions for VMware webcast.

To view all EMC Solutions for VMware webcasts:

• Visit: http://www.emc.com/events
• Select Event Type: EMC Live webcast
• Enter Search: VMware

First few up to bat:

Jul 02, 09
Backup and Recovery for VMware Infrastructure – Driving Costs Out of Your Virtual Environment (how do you backup more, for less $, faster – and recover files in VMs, VMs, and sites?)

Jul 09, 09
EMC and VMware—Building Your Internal Cloud (this is focused on management tools for VMware environments)

Jul 15, 09
Maximize the Benefits of Virtualization with Optimized VMware Backup (how do you tweak your backup strategy in VMware environments)

Jul 23, 09
Complete Disaster Recovery with EMC and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
(Deploying Site Recovery Manager, configuring, using, and automating failback)

Help Get a Canadian on the Medal Podium

Eric Siebert (man behind vSphere-land)  has long maintained one of the most popular meta-pages containing useful VMware content the VMware Launchpad (now vLaunchpad – like all things VMware, it needed that extra “v” for “zazz”).   Check it out here.

This year, he’s using a public poll to determine rankings of the most popular blogs out there – here: http://vsphere-land.com/news/heres-your-chance-to-pick-the-top-vmware-blogs.html

I was amazed when I got on the list last year.  This site is a pure labor of love, and my wife thinks I’m nuts (she laughed out loud last night over father’s day dinner when I said that I started a twitter account).

So – if you enjoy the post, if you get value out of it – I would love it if you would vote for VirtualGeek on the pool.

For those of you that don’t “get” the Canadian ethos (and joke) – we always come in 4th in Olympic competition – almost never on the podium.  As a collective nation say “oh well, they achieved a personal best, and those people with their gold, silver and bronze were excellent compeititors.”   I’m very proud to be a Canadian, and it’s where I decided to raise my family – but that polite nature can be turned to a negative purpose…

Screw that!   Help me get into the medal position!

(but even I would vote Duncan Epping @ Yellow-Bricks as #1 :-)

VMware I/O queues, “micro-bursting”, and multipathing

Was in Singapore this last week and was talking with the VMware SEs and Cisco SEs there – sharing best practices, tools, and “dos and don’ts”.   There was an interesting discussion/whiteboard around the topic of storage network design around FC/FCoE (though this applies to iSCSI as well).   The Cisco folks made some really interesting analogies with VoIP and TP “micro-bursting” that I thought were awesome and I wanted to share.

It’s also the reason why there is so much discussion around LUN queues and queue management in vSphere.   It’s not just EMC with PowerPath/VE, but I’ve heard 3Par start to talk about “adaptive queuing”, and last week Dell/EqualLogic announced their own addition to the Pluggable Storage Architecture.   It’s all about the vStorage APIs, baby :-)  

It’s apropos based on the recent discussion over queuing and comparisons of NFS and block-based storage options here.

Lastly, it’s also a topic of discussion based a recent post here on the topic of whether MPPs like PowerPath/VE are there to help “legacy” arrays and whether “virtualized”  arrays get any benefit from more host-side sophistication.   I’ve also heard the implication that NMP + Round Robin + ALUA are good enough in all cases – if you choose the right array :-)

Vaughn and I tend to agree a LOT – and we do, much more than we disagree.   We both are super into VMware, which means there’s a lot of things we share.  But there are times when we disagree – and this is one of them.

But this isn’t about EMC or Netapp, and isn’t personal, it’s core technical fundamentals – and apply to all storage vendors.   If you want to understand and learn more – read on!

VMworld 2009 – Save a few $$ and find out what EMC is doing

It’s that time of year again!  VMworld 2009 rapidly approaches – August 31st-September 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.   For fun, we recorded this little gag video :-)

If you haven’t registered yet – if you register here, (post a comment for the secret discount code!) there’s a discount! 

If you’re an EMC customer and willing to share your story with other customers, while we have customers coming already for the sessions, I’ll always try for more!  you can get my email from the “about” page – drop me a line!

We’re furiously working through the logistics – which for a show like this are massive.

1. Last week we put in the order for about $20M of  EMC equipment to support the event – the HOL, as well as the EMC and VMware booths.   There will be all of EMC’s goodness – ranging from large scale V-Max configurations, CX4s, NS-960s, Recoverpoint, all working with Cisco Nexus and UCS gear and supporting vSphere and other VMware software.
2. There are announcements GALORE – many treats in store for our customers.   Clearly – I can’t talk about that now, but I think you will all be very happy!
3. In the EMC booth, there will be:
   • tons of hands on with engineering and product management.  It’s a great opportunity to see, test drive, and give feedback directly to those folks that build the solutions for you.  
   • We’ll have a whole bunch on 10GbE and FCoE – two technologies who’s time is now, including live performance workloads.
   • We’ll be giving away lots of goodies – including iomega ix2’s and also a grand prize at the end of the show
4. We recently found out what sessions we submitted were approved.  There are 12 VMware/EMC sessions so far.  The agenda tool isn’t live yet, but wanted to put these on people’s radar screen.

Of course I’ll be there, and we’ll have some early copies of Mastering vSphere 4 (Scott Lowe’s book, I authored the storage chapter), and I’d love to meet YOU!

For more detailed info on the sessions – read on….

I really, really want to know….

UPDATED – June 11th, 11:47pm EST – fixed survey..

 

Based on some discussion with the product teams, I wanted to get the “voice of the customer” on a couple topics.   If you fill out this very short survey – you can help steer some interesting dialogs!