Virtual Geek

And now – something just AWESOME for small VMware shops….

So – with all the back and forth in the blog-o-sphere recently, and with VMworld next week - it’s made me take stock of the last year….

• We launched our updated Enterprise platform – for very large scale internal and external clouds at customers and service providers building private cloud structures for cloud compute models on top of VMware – EMC Symmetrix V-Max.   Delivered.   100’s of units have shipped and are in production.
• We launched and shipped our Cloud Optimized Storage for customers and and service providers – EMC Atmos.  A new architecture for a new set of needs:  
• Data Presentation models using REST/SOAP.
• Something that natively does object storage and multi-tenancy.
• Price point needs to be a FRACTION of traditional enterprise storage architectures.  There is a place for traditional scale-out block and scale-out NAS in this new storage use case – but if anyone thinks those can compete with Amazon S3 (on function or price), personally, I think they are missing something.  
• Policy (like and object distribution) occurs at an OBJECT level – not at a LUN or filesystem level
• BTW – Atmos is proving quite successful (these “do something different” things always entail risk).   Hundreds of PB have shipped, and it is in use around the world at customers.   People are building Atmos support into their applications, which is the ultimate example of success.
• EMC Ionix has started to integrate our management portfolio – which we’ve been constructing focusing on the transition from “classic physical application infrastructure stacks” to “100% virtual environments” to “build and operate like a cloud” to (eventually) “federate between internal and external clouds).   Some big stuff to see next week on this topic.
• We expanded our deduplication strategy – with the addition of our first production storage dedupe (Celerra NAS – with lots to do, and more coming on that front), the leading source-based deduplication (EMC Avamar) – and now also the clear market leader in target based deduplication (Data Domain).   When it comes to doing more with less – we’ve been doing it for a while, and you can see we’re doubling down there.
• Most recently, we’ve updated our mid-range – in that space, ease of use, flexibility, efficiency and delivering VMware integration are the things we’ve heard are really important, and we’ve delivered end to end 10GbE iSCSI and NAS support, and VM-Awareness by integrating EMC CLARiiON Navisphere, Replication Manager and Recoverpoint directly with the vCenter APIs – adding to the extensive list of vCenter plugins we’ve made available for VMware admins.   

As always here at Virtualgeek – there’s never an implication that we have it “uniquely” figured out.   We have strengths and weaknesses at EMC – galore.   More broadly, my experience is that in EMC is that we recognize that we’re never “there” – always working to head in the right direction.   We can, should and WILL be making continued investments to make our products more integrated, and simpler to use.

You’ll see lots more on all those fronts (some of it next week @ VMworld :-)

So… Stopping my ramble, who’s left for this quarter’s update? 

Well – the SMB and consumer, of course :-)

Today – the first “fully designed from the ground up as part of the EMC family” iomega device is available.   This unit has some nice industrial design finally (the older ix2 and ix4’s had a look only an engineer could like).

 

Want the high notes?

1. 4 drive desktop unit – 2, 4, and 8TB configurations – starting at under $650.
2. Super-simple and easy to use – with all the EMC Lifeline goodness including drive and fan spin-down, RAID 1/10/5
3. Formal CIFS, NFS and iSCSI support – and on the VMware HCL day 1 for both iSCSI and NFS on vSphere 4 (see that here).  BTW – it also is on the Microsoft HCL for W2K3 and W2K8 iSCSI initiator.
4. Dual GbE interfaces – crazy at this price point, but this means link aggregation and network HA.
5. Remote Replication capability.  Wow.   Yes, this begs the obvious question, and we’re working on it.   SRM needs remote replication and snapshots/clones to work – we’re getting the key pre-requisites – and are indeed working on it – but not yet…).
6. Other things that matter to small businesses (strong Active Directory support, SMTP, email alerts, remote management, print server and USB storage expansion)
7. Other things that matter to consumers (“One Click” remote or local backup, nice mgmt LCD, Retrospect included, Mozy support, Apple iTunes and Time Machine support, uPnP, native BitTorrent support, for the paranoid – can connect 5 external video cameras directly, and more…)

For those of you who have latched on to the VMware support, I also want to highlight two whitepapers:

This is for the desktop units: Iomega StorCenter Pro NAS ix4 and ix2 with VMware ESX Server 3.5

This is for the rack-mount units: USING IOMEGA STORCENTER PRO ix4-200r NAS SERVER WITH VMWARE ESX

I’m pretty sure that these are the only “VMware storage best practices” for storage devices in the <$1000 price band :-)

It’s AWESOME :-)   BTW – I dropped a hint on our giveaway at VMworld – so here you have it.   We will have 3 Segways for the big “once a day” draw, but we also have 3 of the 4TB units each day for people who register at the booth.

There will also be a one-time 25% discount coupon at the booth for people who want one but don’t win.   I’ll also be giving one away in SS5140 – if you’re there, you might get it!

I think this will likely be my last “pre VMworld post” – looking forward to seeing you there!

VMworld – V-Max – powered up and ready to go!

Latest from the VMworld floor

just awesome…

Important note for all EMC CLARiiON Customers using iSCSI and vSphere

UPDATE (May 22nd, 2010): At EMC World 2010, FLARE 30 was announced, which amongst many (MANY!) new features, also has some fixes – one of which fixes this underlying behavior.  You can read about it at this post here.

I got a little tired of a couple lightweight (aka less technical) posts (important, but still..) – so here’s one that’s an important technical “gotta know” if you’re using the combination of EMC CLARiiON (any FLARE rev), iSCSI and vSphere.

So – there is a core issue that is not generally as well known as it should be.   BTW – if you don’t want to read it (though you should if you are in that group – which many of you are) – this is being covered in one of my sessions (TA2467 – Wed 11-12) and a great session by Andy Banta and John Hall from VMware (TA3264 - Wednesday at 4-5:30pm)

If you’re not at VMworld, or want to understand this immediately (you should if you’re using CLARiiON/iSCSI/vSphere) – read on…

Available NOW - VM-Aware Storage, Local and Remote Replication and fluid 10GbE upgrades.

So – yesterday was the official launch of a lot for our Midrange storage customers.    I’m pumped, as a lot of the things our customers have been asking about (nice way of saying “demanding”), and also highlights our focus on this virtualized datacenter use cases.

This video is me winging it (“one take Chad” :-) – summarizing everything I think is cool about what we’ve announced (and GAed!)

Read on for more details!

Going to VMworld? Looking for a fantastic career?

Folks – slammed now, so don’t have to much time to post (will have two technical ones this week – one on the CLARiiON announcement from today, and another neato one :-) but – wanted to get this out to readers:

We are actively recruiting at VMworld.

EMC continues to grow (thank you customers!) and the conflux of the things that the type of people who attend VMworld are focused on – well – they are the sweet spot.

Specifically – on my team we have open roles all over the Americas (Canada, US, Latin America), and several open slots in the UK and Germany.

We’re looking for people with a weird (delightful and unique!) blend of skills and personality.

Some folks are of a technical bent, and what we are looking for are:

• strong VMware technical background
• strong storage and networking background
• customer facing pre-sales and post-sales types
• a passion for what they do

Some folks are of a sales/business bent, and what we are looking for:

• Experience with positioning technology solutions in the VMware/storage/networking space
• customer facing and selling skills.
• business acumen and experience with dealing with senior IT and sales leadership
• a passion for what they do

Beyond this, we’re ALWAYS on the lookout for great technical pre-sales people – in my experience – these are some of the most difficult roles to fill.

In any case – people who thrive at EMC put the customer first, aren’t quiet wallflowers, love technology, like to have fun, like to win – and win the right way.   Most of all, they are outgoing and passionate.

If this sounds like you….  Come by the EMC booth – grab someone wearing a blue shirt (there are 270 of them at VMworld, so you can find us) – and say “I want to talk about working at EMC!”

more specifically on who to track down…. for the:

• America’s nerd (speaking as a fellow nerd) roles – you’re looking for Wade O’Harrow or Wade’s team - Jeff Thomas (west coast), Scott Dougherty (central), Keith Coughlin (east coast), Aaron Chaisson (mid-market and channel).
• Americas’s sales/business – you’re looking for Matt Conway
• Europe – you’re looking for Mukesh Sharma or Joachim Weber

An AWESOME peek behind the scenes of getting hardware ready for VMworld 2009

UPDATED: 8/20/2009 – 6:39pm EST: caption correction

If you haven’t seen it – this is totally worth checking out.

It’s been a MASSIVE effort on the VMware GETO team, with huge amounts of Cisco and EMC gear to support the Hands-on-Labs, the Best of vSphere sessions, and the Sunday vSphere hands on.

This has got to be the BIGGEST sandbox going on right now :-)   Has been a huge labor of love by the GETO team, and to the on-site EMC team supporting them as we work through all the stuff you expect (and don’t expect) with something like this – my hat is OFF to you, and while there is still tons to do, a week to make sure shines (through all the unexpected bumps) and look forward to celebrating together!

You can follow the whole thing here: http://www.winkflash.com/photo/public.aspx?u=vmware-geto

But – these are my favorite pictures… read on…

Sharepoint and VMware…. The sheer volume….

As we get down to the wire with VMworld (I can’t believe I signed up for 5 sessions!), something came up I thought was funny (and useful enough to share).

The VMware team doing EA2526 - SharePoint vSphere Best Practices (Thursday at 1130 AM – 1:00 PM) reached out and asked if there were updated reference archictecture docs and test results since we did the same joint session in VMworld 2009 Europe. 

(personally – I think the EA tracks are some of the best – really good, really practical guidance on deploying mission critical apps on VMware)

So, I looked, and check out what comes from the filter: of “technical docs, covering Sharepoint and VMware, published after february”.

The solutions validation teams – my hat’s off to you – this shows the insane amount of work you’re doing.   If you’re a customer – there is great info to leverage.

Reference Architecture: EMC Virtual Infrastructure for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server - Enabled by EMC Celerra, VMware HA, and DRS using iSCSI
This Reference Architecture describes the installation, configuration, and integration of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 with VMware ESX 3.5, EMC Celerra, VMware High Availability, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler. Date:  May 28, 2009

Reference Architecture: EMC Virtual Infrastructure for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server - Enabled by EMC Celerra and Celerra Replicator using NFS
This Reference Architecture describes the installation, configuration, and integration of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 enabled by VMware ESX 3.5, Celerra Replicator, Celerra NDMP, and the EMC NetWorker Module for Microsoft Applications. Date:  May 28, 2009

White Paper: EMC Virtual Infrastructure for Microsoft Applications—Data Center Solution Enabled by EMC Symmetrix V-Max and VMware vSphere 4 — Applied Technology
This white paper presents best practices and validated test results for a virtualized deployment, enabling customers to capitalize on the immediate benefits by implementing an architecture leveraging EMC Symmetrix V-Max storage and VMware vSphere 4. Date:  May 14, 2009

Reference Architecture: EMC Virtual Infrastructure for Microsoft Applications – Data Center Enabled by EMC Symmetrix V-Max and VMware ESX 3.5
This Reference Architecture describes a scalable, fully integrated virtualized Microsoft data center incorporating Microsoft SharePoint 2007, SQL Server 2008, and Exchange 2007. The EMC Symmetrix V-Max storage array is leveraged to address storage and consolidation, and VMware ESX 3.5 provides the virtualization mechanism. Date:  April 14, 2009

White Paper: EMC Virtual Infrastructure for Microsoft Applications - Data Center Enabled by EMC Symmetrix V-Max and VMware ESX 3.5 - Applied Technology
This white paper presents best practices and validated test results for a virtualization-enabled platform deployment, enabling customers to capitalize on the immediate benefits by implementing a VMware virtual infrastructure and EMC Symmetrix V-Max storage. Date:  April 14, 2009

Some great upcoming EMC/VMware/RSA webcasts…

working late on a whole whackload of VMworld stuff – if I survive, this will be the best one for me ever!

Just saw a whole series of excellent webcast topics.   Register if you’re interested!

You can register here.

VMware View Composer and Storage Deduplication (Aug. 20, 2009)
Presenter: Aaron Chaisson, Senior VMware Specialist, EMC
Discover how Virtual Desktop solutions extend real total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits more broadly by driving down the costs of managing and maintaining a traditional corporate desktop infrastructure. Hear how you can most effectively achieve these goals by leveraging VMware View Composer and ThinApp in conjunction with EMC deduplication and unified storage technologies.

Securing the Virtual Data Center with RSA, The Security Division of EMC (Aug. 27, 2009)
Presenter: John McDonald, Security Evangelist, RSA, The Security Division of EMC
Hear an outline of the common security risks in virtual environments, and learn practical security guidelines that mitigate these risks. And, find out how the VMware infrastructure itself will ultimately be leveraged to deliver security in a pervasive, persistent, and scalable manner.

Consulting Expertise for the Virtual Data Center
Thursday, September 3, 2009 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET
Presenter: Ted Newman, CTO, Infrastructure Consulting Practice, EMC Consulting
Presenter: Martin Snellgrove, Practice Director, Infrastructure Consulting Practice, EMC Consulting
Join experts from EMC Consulting to learn best practices to address your enterprise-class virtual data center challenges. Find out how you can achieve more cost-effective and responsive infrastructure, stronger business support for virtualization investments, and more flexible and agile IT operations.

Infrastructure Architectures Purpose-Built for the Virtual Data Center
Thursday, September 10, 2009 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET
Presenter: Chris Carrier, Director of Marketing, EMC
Find out how to increase utilization of networking, server, and storage assets, as well as maximize information infrastructure operational efficiency for all leading application environments. Learn how to seamlessly move information throughout the data center across heterogeneous infrastructure—while applications remain online.

The Virtual Data Center - Driving Costs Out of Your SAP Systems Landscape
Thursday, September 17, 2009 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET
Presenter: Jim Whalen, SAP Global Practice Manager, EMC
Presenter: Joachim Rahmfeld, Senior Business Development Manager, Global SAP Alliance, VMware
Learn how to combine the strengths of EMC and VMware to achieve the highest service levels, dramatically lower costs, and unprecedented flexibility. Discover how to transform your SAP operations, increase efficiency and responsiveness through end-to-end management, and maximize the benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and service-oriented infrastructure (SOI).

Securing VMware Environments with RSA
Thursday, September 24, 2009 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET
Presenter: Nirav Mehta, Secure Infrastructure Product Manager, RSA, Security Division of EMC
Find out how RSA can help you realize the benefits of virtualization—without compromising security. Learn more about the specific RSA technologies that are used to secure VMware environments. And, discover how to improve enterprise-wide information security.

Interested in how fast 10GbE and NFS datastores can be in vSphere 4?

UPDATED (8/26/2009 – 6:34pm PST) – Correction and clarification…

For detail – come to SS5140, or come to the EMC booth at VMworld where this (along with 10GbE iSCSI, and we’re working furiously on FCoE results also) will be there live (presuming it survives shipping) and you can see for yourself, and talk to the people who ran the tests.   There will be 10GbE stuff in the VMware booth also.  

I will of course, post all the gory details after VMworld, along with the session recording.

But – here’s the initial (and unofficial results)

• 30 VMs on 6 ESX 4 hosts
• single 10GbE port each hosts
• 3 ports 6 ports on a Celerra NS960 (3 active datamovers, each with one two 10GbE interfaces)
• 30 NFS datastores
• Admittedly a VERY artificial IOmeter workload – 100% sequential read, 1MB IO size.

Yup – that’s the 3 6 10GbE interfaces being driven at an aggregate throughput of over 30Gbps (IOmeter chart scale is wonky – will be showing esxtop and array stats – they seem more accurate).  BTW, if you’re curious, we were able to drive a single VM, single datastore, single link pair of GbE links, single Celerra NS960 datamover at 10Gbps rates also.

clarification: if it’s not clear – I’m not claiming this amount of throughput from a single ESX host – this is the aggregate.   We saw about 5Gbps as the max from a single vSphere ESX 4 host.   We’re now doing oodles of 10GbE work (FCoE, iSCSI, NFS) – lots more data and detail to come.

 

Thank you Eric H!