Virtual Geek

“Happy Holiday” Blog post – Virtual Geek Out!

All – 2010 was a great year – incredible learning, personal and professional growth, high-intensity action, and loads of fun.  Met many new friends.   Had my mind blown, and re-assembled many times – I love it!   We got new customers big and small.

Father Christmas Inc moves to Private Cloud with a Complete EMC Solution

 

I’m taking a few days off to spend with my loved ones, enjoy the season, and reflect a bit.

 

Thank YOU for your readership, comments, dialog.  Frankly, I never expected as much goodness to come from the blog as I’ve experienced.  I’m very humbled, and very thankful.

 

Since everyone seems to be doing it… My 2011 predictions?

1. It will be very exciting :-)   I’m excited about the stuff I KNOW is coming (which will all be huge), and I’m even more excited about the stuff I have no idea about – surprises rock.
2. There’s probably more M&A action to expect.   It’s not just about R&D, and it’s not just about M&A – continued success needs both (not just for EMC, but everyone)
3. There will be more “Chad’s World” episodes.   The 2nd one is in the bag, and I has fun surprises.
4. We’ll all continue to become more and more fed up with the word “cloud”, while simultaneously continuing to exploit, leverage it – however you choose to define “it”.   I know how VMware defines it, I know how EMC defines it – and I know customers dig it.
5. Since information will continue to grow like mad… the corollary is an easy wager.    Object storage will grow.  NAS storage will grow.   Block storage will grow.   Pure software that “transmogrifies” DAS into shared storage models will grow.   They’ll grow at varying rates.   Things that help you manage that will continue to be huge.
6. Protocol passionistas will continue to be wrong – just like they always have been.
7. Competitors will continue to compete.  There will be good days (honorable competition) and bad days (twitpisses and other useless, debasing activities).  I resolve to try my best to make it the most of the former, and resist my hardest from contributing or getting sucked into to the later.
8. VMware will have bugs & work arounds, tips and tricks and will come out with some crazy new cool stuff.
9. EMC will will have bugs & work arounds, tips and tricks, and come out with some crazy new cool stuff.
10. Those sets of things will be crazy integrated, and you’ll be able to read about it on Virtual Geek :-)

Here’s a silly (but still kinda funny) holiday message from the vSpecialist technical team leaders from around the globe (from top left) – Wade O’Harrow (Global), Keith Coughlin (Americas), Bertrand Lalanne (EMEA), Scott Drummonds (APJ), and myself.  Gang – I depend on you tremendously – thank you for your efforts!

 

 

To all – Happy Holidays… And my wishes of peace, prosperity and private clouds!

 

What Isilon means from my viewpoint…

I’m going to stay silent until the Isilon deal closes – as people have seen/learnt over the last year, these things aren’t done until they are done, so this will be my only post on it for a while.  

So… note – I wrote this on Nov 15th, right after the deal was public, but before it closed. 

So…

1. For what it’s worth – I’ve been a big supporter of Isilon in the EMC family through the M&A dance.  I think it’s an important category (very scalable scale-out NAS – categories where SONAS, Ibrix, Exanet and others play) – and one that Isilon are clearly very, very good at, and one that frankly, EMC and other NAS leaders on their own were not that good at.   Now they have more resources for engineering and go-to-market (ADDED Dec 21st - just look at this list of job openings!!)
2. There is a VMware angle to scale-out, extreme performance – aka “Big Data NAS”.  That angle falls into “some today, but even more over time” (more on this below)
3. This means EMC has great portfolio answers for:
   1. scale-out block (VMAX)
   2. scale out NAS (Isilon)
   3. scale-out object (Atmos)
   4. Best in breed inline dedupe for backup (Data Domain)
   5. These capabilities that are second-to-none.  They compliment “mainstream Unified Storage”  (with more exciting news on that front soon enough)
4. In my opinion, we will see that for a long time (perhaps perpetually), there will “mainstream Unified Storage” and “Big Data Transactional storage” as separate swim lanes..   To help understand this, think about it these two ways:
   • Many customers want a “swiss-army knife” when it comes to storage.  
     • They want something:
       • very feature rich
       • very available
       • very flexible
       • Supporting every multi-protocol (FC/FCoE/iSCSI/NFS/CIFS, with object as a bonus)
       • Supporting a performance envelope of many GBps of bandwidth and from thousands to hundreds of thousands of IOps.
     • Those requirements can be very well met with “traditional storage” non-scale out models.   They are also requirements  EMC supports very well with EMC Unified Storage today.  This is an area where we’re going to continue to innovate in.  While we need to find ways to leverage TONS of CPU cores in the commodity hardware we use in EMC Unified platforms, it’s not fundamentally about “scale-out”.  
     • Anything that adds complexity, cost unnecessarily can throw the “storage brains/ports/cache vs. IOps/GB” ratios out of whack.   EMC Unified does what the majority of the “Classic Swiss Army Knife enterprise storage requirements” very, very well TODAY, and it’s only going to get better. 
     • Many of those requirements are things that Isilon dreams of doing today.   
   • But,  sometimes a customer knows that they will have a “Big Data” problem from the get go.  
     • These are characterized by:
       • extreme scale-out transactional behavior and designs. 
       • In NAS land we’re talking 10PB or more, many tens of GBps (or 100s of Gbps), 100+ nodes – all delivering extreme performance, balancing cache/metadata/data/ports across every node.
       • Scale-out models require a different approach to resiliency – big failures can only partially affect overall system envelopes.
       • Similar (but not the same) requirements exist in scale-out block and object models. 
     • EMC Unified (and many of it’s competitors) dream of doing some of the things Isilon, VMAX, and Atmos do today.   

Long and short - expect to continue to see more and more EMC innovation, growth, development (both organic and M&A if that’s the right thing to do) down both categories from EMC:

1. “Simple, Efficient, Unified”
2. “Scale-Out Big Data”

Now – a little more detail on two areas that need more detail (VMware and scale-out NAS, Unified vs. scale-out)… Read on if interested…

Chad’s World – World Debut….

It’s so ridiculous, it’s cringe-worthy :-)

Click on the below to see the pilot episode of “Chad’s World” with my friend and colleague (and head vSpecialist) Wade O’Harrow.

 

• First, while I have an ego (doesn’t everyone?)… It isn’t SO big that I suggested this idea :-)  Any ego that I DID have is now gone of course after watching it!   It is a lot of fun though…
• Second, the second episode is in the can, so while we can’t guarantee a 3rd, I hope you like it… I actually like the 2nd episode more.   There’s some CRAZY cool stuff in that one.  This one is geared around the latest VMAX stuff, the 2nd one is geared around… well… stuff no one has seen yet…
• Third, in the second episode, we had a customer join in, which was awesome.   If you’re a customer who would like to be on Chad’s World – let me know!!!   You’ll need to sign an NDA (we really do record them well before the stuff is GA), but the upside is you get to see a lot of cool stuff behind the scenes!

If you’re interested in the high-bitrate, and full-length MP3 theme song (recorded with my vSpecialist family), you can download it here.

What a crazy gig I have… I work like mad, but it’s an absolute blast!

Understanding vSphere Disaster Recovery/Avoidance options

Wrapping up all the blog posts in one place, and including a webcast and powerpoint on the topic.

Phew – that was a lot of work, right in the middle of the 2011 planning cycle :-)

The blog series is: “Understanding vSphere Disaster Avoidance/Recovery” – discussing a broad topic: state of the union of vSphere non-disruptive disaster avoidance and disaster recovery solutions, and how they interact (because it ain’t easy to do both together when you dive in deep).

• Read Post I: Discusses the 4 key solution categories in this space.  Read it here.
• Read Post II: Discusses one of solution (stretched vSphere cluster and VPLEX) and gory failure scenarios in detail.  Read it here.
• Read Post III: Discusses what’s going on in this space (and where EMC R&D efforts are centered).  Read it here.

You can watch a recorded 1hr webcast on the topic:

The presentation I used in the webcast, as always, available in raw PPT format.  I find this helps people get more reuse from the content and all the links – yes, I’m sure our competition uses it.  I tend to worry a lot less about “the other guy” than I do about making sure we’re doing the right thing for our customers and partners.

Thanks – and I sincerely hope this blog post helps folks digest a topic that in a sales campaign is made to sound really, really simple, but in practice has many layers to it.  It can work, and work great – but I want people to understand exactly HOW and what to expect.

As always – THANK YOU, and courteous comments welcome!

Understanding vSphere Disaster Recovery/Avoidance options – Part III (areas of development)

This is part 3 of a 3 part blog post.   The first one categorized various “disaster avoidance + disaster recovery” solutions.   The second examined more closely one of the solutions (stretched vSphere clusters) and also the implications on the storage (and touched on the network) layers.    That second post also discussed the gory details of EMC VPLEX in those use cases.

The 3rd post will talk about where the R&D and product development is taking us in the world of Disaster Avoidance and Disaster Recovery. 

BTW – thank you to many on the EMC and VMware teams who have given great input on post I and II.

I’d strongly suggest starting with “Post I” – which you can read here, and “Post II’ – which you can read here.

OK – are you back?

So – what are we (without divulging any material details :-) thinking and spending a lot of time?

Understanding vSphere Disaster Recovery/Avoidance options – Part II (understanding EMC VPLEX partition and VM HA)

This is part 2 of a 3 part blog post.   The first one categorized various “disaster avoidance + disaster recovery” solutions.   The 3rd post will talk about where the R&D and product development is taking us in the world of Disaster Avoidance and Disaster Recovery. 

BTW – thank you to many on the EMC and VMware teams who have given great input on post I and II.

I’d strongly suggest starting with “Post I” – which you can read here.  

OK – are you back?

While my personal favorites from Post I lead you to either decide you want either:

• Simplest solution, cleanest support model, best DR testing, and best RPO/RTO across the broadest set of failure conditions (it’s hard to argue with that list)– and therefore pick “solution 3” – the “classic Site Recovery Manager” solution.

OR

• if you HAVE to have non-disruptive workload mobility, but want a flexible solution, offering both non-disruptive workload mobility and disaster recovery, you need to accept more complexity.   SRM is OUT because non-disruptive vMotion demands a single vCenter domain (with ANYONE’S storage model). 

REMEMBER – CHOOSE WISELY HERE.  Yes, SRM by definition means that it’s disruptive, but many, many customers use SRM for a highly automated, highly testable (though disruptive) mass workload mobility tool – migrating many many VMs between datacenters.

If you have given up on SRM because it’s got to be nondisruptive - that in turn demands that you are willing and able to sign up for the extra complexity of scripting and solution maintenance.   If you’re in this category anyway, I would personally recommend  “solution 2” – the “multiple separate VMware clusters” approach.  That’s covered in this KB article.

… But, I can’t deny the interest people have in “solution 1” – the “single stretched VMware cluster” in spite of all the downsides I pointed out in Post I (strongly suggesting I’m wrong :-).  

Let’s EXAMINE why people dig “solution 1 – Stretched HA clusters” (remember – all these have pros and cons):

• Sometimes, customers don’t have a second site, but rather a single campus.   In that case, you’re often accepting that if it’s a total site disaster, you’re SOL – but “building” disasters are possible.
• While site partitions are certainly more frequent than site disasters, they are a lot more infrequent than host or path failures.  If that’s the case, this solution gets you something pretty good – host/path failures redistribute loads between sites as VM HA response kicks in.
• Versus SRM, VM HA this provides host-level (and potentially with VM-level monitoring – fully automated restart and granularity of restart (i.e. it is on a per host/VM basis not a full recovery plan being executed).  Note that while OK for this level of granularity, “fully automated” tends to be a bit more dangerous when you’re talking about a full site disaster – hence the “operator hits the ‘declare disaster’” model of SRM.

So – this post dives into the topic of Solution 1 – Stretched VM HA clusters more specifically.   The topic, including tested and supported behavior in all sorts of failure modes (in this case with EMC VPLEX) is covered in this KB article.

The post will cover not only the VM HA topics, but will also deal specifically on the topic of EMC VPLEX, the partition state, and what it means to vSphere VM HA behavior.   These are inextricably linked, and if you are not using EMC VPLEX, I would strongly suggest reaching out to your storage vendor and looking for similar info.  

The cue that you’re looking at the right docs as opposed to marketing is that the discussion includes the “not so nice” parts, and is filled with technical stuff :-)

Then let’s dive into it – read on.

Santa Chad – hoping to see you on the Thursday Webcast

We have the first ten winners of the IX2 from last week’s “Best Practices for Deploying Desktop Virtualization” webcast.  

If you won from the drawing, you should have gotten an email notification – and enjoy the iomega IX2 – a nice little home NAS unit, super simple, super feature rich.

Remember – EMC/VMware webcasts are every Thursday starting at 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 GMT.

We’ll be giving away another 10 IX2s – a great holiday gift – at this weeks, which will be a “Chad’s Choice” episode, discussing Disaster Recovery and Disaster Avoidance, and how they intersect/overlap/differ – in agonizing, long-winded, demo-tastic Chad style – wee!

Register here!

View 4.5 on Cisco UCS, EMC Unified Storage - CVD

Last week, a Cisco Validated Design doc was posted covering how to deploy VMware View 4.5 on EMC Unified storage (part of the Cisco VXI initiative). You can read it here:

This is a great doc, and if you’re interested in just technology, are a Cisco and EMC customer looking to virtualize clients, and have no interest in business topics, you can stop reading here :-)

In view of the constant debates about stack models, this is a little instructive as an example.   If you want to know more about what I mean, read on.

EMC Webcasts in Dec – including “Chad’s Choice” (w prizes!)

Remember folks – every week (with rare exceptions), every Thursday, for 1 hour starting at 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 GMT, it’s EMC/Virtualization webcast time.   Same bat-time, same bat-channel. 

How to Accelerate Desktop Virtualization in the Enterprise
Thursday, December 2, 2010 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 GMT
Find out how you can gain control over existing chaotic and complex client computing infrastructures, while improving desktop security.    Sadly, I failed to get this post up in time, so you missed this one live, but like all the webcasts – they are recorded for replay…

• Hosts: Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group; Raj Mallempati Director, Enterprise Desktop Product Marketing, VMware; and Chris Carrier, Director, Technical Marketing, EMC

Best Practices for Deploying Desktop Virtualization
Thursday, December 9, 2010 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 GMT
Learn how organizations have successfully implemented desktop virtualization to create a more efficient environment and discover the benefits they have experienced.  

Stark and his mad team are really incredible when it comes to VDI and client skillz.   Amazingly, EMC Consulting is one of the largest Microsoft partners on Win 7 deployments.   Attend, hear experiences from customer deployments, and try to stump the chump (he ain’t no chump!)

• Host: Dave Stark, Virtualization Competency Lead, Application Infrastructure Service Line, EMC Consulting

I’ll make this interesting…  I’ll give away 10 Iomega IX2s randomly to folks that register and attend this session.

Chad’s Choice - Virtually Any Virtualization Topic!
Thursday, December 16, 2010 - 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 16:00 GMT
Learn about the latest virtualization topics from Chad Sakac, VP VMware Technology Alliance, EMC. Get key updates on new technologies, hear honest answers to your most demanding questions, and see intriguing technical demos.

I freak out the webcast team by whipping up the content for my webcast at the last minute based on whatever the topic burning up the airwaves is at the moment, and winging it, often to disastrous results :-)

But – this time, I’m thinking it should be on the topic of Disaster Avoidance and Disaster recovery – an open dialog on the topic based on the blog series (have posted part 1 of 3, parts 2 and 3 are still furiously being constructed).   What are other topics you’re interested in?

I’ll make this interesting…  I’ll give away 10 Iomega IX2s randomly to folks that register and attend this session.

Register for the December VMware series now

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“Because life IS orthogonal” – this is going to be interesting…

Well – here’s something that WILL achieve the goal of making me look like an idiot – which is of course part of the fun :-)

We thought the idea of an episodic “Chad’s World” would be a fun way to talk about new tech, and I’ll never pass up an opportunity to do something ridiculous…   Yes, I know how patently silly the idea is, and believe me, I’m not letting it go to my head.  When you see it, you’ll understand why…like I said…I’m an idiot :-)

Here’s the teaser…  

That last frame is a reminder… “Never challenge the film crew to find and emphasize the frame that makes one look the most goofy – they WILL do it” :-)

It is really fun to do to:

• I can’t believe the set they built – there are embedded details all over, and yeah, it’s kinda like my real basement :-)
• The “Cyclon VMAX” stuff posted earlier was the Symm engineering team and Dave Robertson rigging up the Symmetrix to talk in one of the episodes.  We had all kinds of lightbars, with all sorts of patterns – was fun…   In the end, it was the ACTUAL production lightbar that VMAXes use with a little jiggery-pokery on the ASIC that controls it :-)
• The stuff we’re demoing is really mind-blowingly cool stuff.    There are things no one in the public world has seen yet. 
• The theme song is what we were recording in the blog post here.   The lyrics and music are a Nick Weaver, Fred Nix and Patchwerk studios creation, with many of the “Chadisms” that people make fun of me for built in :-)  We thought it would be fun to have a lot of the team participate directly – so the voices are those of many vSpecialists, who, except for Weaver, are frankly pretty weak on musical skillz :-)

It’s all in good fun.   We’ve recorded a couple episodes themed around big news, and will keep on trucking as long as it’s funny, entertaining and educational – which I hope is a long time.

You’ll see the first episode very soon on December 19th, and the second one early in the new year.   We’ll be constantly inviting customers on the show – so if you’re interested, ping me, comment here, or watch “Chad’s World”!

See you there!

P.S….

orthogonal adj

1. (Mathematics) relating to, consisting of, or involving right angles; perpendicular

2. (Mathematics) Maths

a.  (of a pair of vectors) having a defined scalar product equal to zero

b.  (of a pair of functions) having a defined product equal to zero

3. (Chadism) Something Chad Sakac says when he’s trying - in his longwinded, pedantically verbose way – to describe multiple things that are related topics, but independent in every way, like storage efficiency technologies (see example halfway through this post here)