Virtual Geek

Tools Webcast, and October Calendar….

So – this three part blog series on tools (Hyperic/vCOPS here, Analyzer Helper here, and Project Orion here) has been linked to an upcoming webcast – this Thursday at 11am ET in fact.

I am a big fan of a good tool.  It’s as true in IT as it is in home repair – there’s something oh-so-satisfying about the application of just the right tool that makes a complex, difficult task instead simple and easy – like butta :-)

These three tools are some of the ones that I think are the most cool, and we’ll be discussing them on this webcast.   We’ll also cover a bunch of other great utilities for people who work with EMC kit in VMware environments.

LIke all tools – they have immediate use, but also useful 2nd and 3rd order uses…

1. The Hyperic/vCOPS one integrates VNX file performance stats into vCenter Operations – but in reality, it’s a method which is generally applicable – could be used to bring in any objects into Hyperic (and therefore into vCenter Operations.   Note that Clint has already created a series of tools around other stuff, like Avamar, that could be imported using this technique.
2. Analyzer Helper can be used for health reports – but is also one of the best sizing, recommendation tools for existing customers looking to refresh.  It’s also a killer performance diagnosis tool for any CLARiiON, Celerra or VNX customer.
3. Project Orion is the ultimate “goop” tool – doesn’t really do anything per se, but at the same time does something awesome – makes writing any tool across EMC’s whole portfolio simpler and easier, and also makes “snaping in” new platforms to existing northbound API integration…

As a friendly reminder – the EMC/VMware webcast series goes on every week on Thursday at 11am ET (8am PT, 16:00 BST).   We have some great ones coming up in October.  If you’re not at VMworld Europe, I’d highly recommend them…

• Backup and Recovery Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5: Discover best practices for protecting your VMware vSphere 5 environments.
• Virtualizing SAP: Q&A with Experts from SAP, VMware, and EMC: Join our panel of experts from SAP, VMware, & EMC, as they share views on virtualizing SAP landscapes.
• EMC and Cisco: Solutions for Your VMware View Environment: Learn how EMC & Cisco solutions for VMware View let you store, manage, protect, and analyze information with more agility, trust, and cost-efficiency.
• AeroSpec: Virtualizing with EMC VNXe and VMware: Leverage VNXe affordability, ease of use & advanced features to improve efficiency, data availability, and performance, while reducing data redundancy and operational costs.

Click on the below to register for the tools webcast this Thursday!   Some of the developers will be there – so also a great opportunity to give direct feeback….

Fun with completely not supported, pre-alpha EMC tools: Part 3

Ok – this is saving (IMO) the best for last…

One of the things that makes me most happy about my job is meetings, planning, and budgeting… NOT.

In all seriousness – those are necessary evils. What DOES make me happy is working with my team, my fellow EMCers and EMC partners, with customers and with engineering. I’m really lucky to get exposed to a lot of ideas, a lot of technologies, and am surrounded by a lot of people who are constantly coming up with cool – and frankly FUN – ideas.

This is the third of a 3 part series on this topic. Each one will “out” a killer tool. Each of them will grow over time. Each of them is free. For now, all of them are not supported (and in one case not even in circulation).

I will be providing a pile of “Santa Chad” awards to people who innovate on top of the two of these ideas. Think iPads, Iomega PX4s, and VNXe 3300s. Remember, it COULD be throwaway work – since they are not supported products per se. But those of you that know me – there’s always methods to my madness :-)

The first one: “Hyperic/vCenter Operations/EMC VNX NFS Uber Mashup” is here.

The second one: “Beta of Analyzer Helper” is here.

This is the third one: “Project Orion”:

EMC’s greatest strength is an incredible breadth of portfolio and a “string of pearls” acquisition model.  We’re incredibly diverse as a company.   This diversity includes great technologies in the very independent, separate parts of the broader business (think VMware, think RSA, think Iomega, think Greenplum – not to imply these very different examples are similar except that they are a reflection of the broader, more diverse strategic view).

That technology diversity is also true in the more “classic” parts of EMC – Storage and Backup.  It’s a strength.  After all – when a customer needs the storage equivalent of a tactical nuke – they want/need something designed for purpose, like a VMAX or Isilon.  When they need a swiss-army knife, they want need a general purpose platform – like VNX.   When they need backup – the insane growth in purpose-built backup appliances like Data Domain and Avamar speaks to customer demand.

BUT – like all strengths – this is also a weakness.   It introduces complexity in building tools, in integrating with other partners (like Microsoft, SAP, VMware) – where we need to do it several times, and the other folks need to do it once or twice.  It makes scripting and automation harder to maintain.  Beyond that – it makes our GTM more complex (less about technology, more about business) – how do we scale how we support customers?  How do we best enable a channel – but the business thing is a discussion for another post.

Back to the technical question…  We’ve been working hard on the topic of “reduction of complexity where possible, embrace where it’s not possible” for the last few years:

1. In some cases where reducing complexity demands merged kernels, smaller footprint most – we started there (see more here).   We’ve shipped, and will continue to innovate down this path.
2. In other cases reducing complexity demanded merged management models most – we started there (see more here). We’ve shipped, and will continue to innovate down this path.

But even with simplified VNXe/VNX models – what about broader API-level unification across EMC?

So – a team started work on this not so long ago

Read on to see how this works, and where you can use it yourself….

 

Fun with completely not supported, pre-alpha EMC tools: Part 2

One of the things that makes me most happy about my job is meetings, planning, and budgeting… NOT.

In all seriousness – those are necessary evils. What DOES make me happy is working with my team, my fellow EMCers and EMC partners, with customers and with engineering. I’m really lucky to get exposed to a lot of ideas, a lot of technologies, and am surrounded by a lot of people who are constantly coming up with cool – and frankly FUN – ideas.

This is the second of a 3 part series on this topic. Each one will “out” a killer tool. Each of them will grow over time. Each of them is free. For now, all of them are not supported (and in one case not even in circulation).

I will be providing a pile of “Santa Chad” awards to people who innovate on top of the two of these ideas. Think iPads, Iomega PX4s, and VNXe 3300s. Remember, it COULD be throwaway work – since they are not supported products per se. But those of you that know me – there’s always methods to my madness :-)

The first one was “Hyperic/vCenter Operations/EMC VNX NFS Uber Mashup” here.

This is the second one: “Beta of Analyzer Helper”:

The majority of EMC customers either use EMC Unified/VNX platforms, or VMAX primary storage platforms (with legions of Avamar, Data Domain, Isilon, Centera, etc, etc).   For midrange requirements – EMC’s primary "go to” platform is the VNX.  It’s an example of of the “swiss army knife” storage category – does everything under the sun relatively well in all ways.

So – in a VNX, filesystem functions are handled by file blades running VNX Operating Environment (OE) File code, and the block functions are handled by storage processor blades running VNX OE block code.

In the previous post in the series, the tools for providing very rich performance data on the VNX OE File layer of the stack were shown.   BTW – if you don’t like it in Hyperic/vCOPS, Clint has shown how you can just throw any data gathered via powershell into a general vCenter plugin here. (powershell is the basis of a lot of really powerful stuff).   Remember – start with his seminal post on Powershell here.

But – what if you want an insane drill-down into the VNX OE block components?  What if you need to know how each IO ends up on the backend?  What if you need to know about the exact utilization of every single component from the IO ports on the storage processors all the way down to the bottom?

That’s what the Analyzer Helper (AH) tool really shines.  I’ve kind of broken the title of the post – as this is actually a tool in a formal beta stage now.  

Read on to understand more, to find out where/how to get it, and to see the results it produced on the data from one of the VNX 7500’s that supported the VMworld HoL (a real-world case).

Fun with completely not supported, pre-alpha EMC tools: Part 1

[UPDATE: Sept 23rd, 9:16 – fixed community links]

One of the things that makes me most happy about my job is meetings, planning, and budgeting… NOT.

In all seriousness – those are necessary evils.  What DOES make me happy is working with my team, my fellow EMCers and EMC partners, with customers and with engineering.   I’m really lucky to get exposed to a lot of ideas, a lot of technologies, and am surrounded by a lot of people who are constantly coming up with cool – and frankly FUN – ideas.

This is the first of a 3 part series on this topic.  Each one will “out” a killer tool.   Each of them will grow over time.  Each of them is free.  For now, all of them are not supported (and in one case not even in circulation).

I will be providing a pile of “Santa Chad” awards to people who innovate on top of the two of these ideas.  Think iPads, Iomega PX4s, and VNXe 3300s.    Remember, it COULD be throwaway work – since they are not supported products per se.   But those of you that know me – there’s always methods to my madness :-)

The first one: “Hyperic/vCenter Operations/EMC VNX NFS Uber Mashup” 

This was a bit of “out of the box” thinking by vSpecialist Clint Kitson in the run-up to VMworld 2011.   He wanted to solve the problem of having simple and immediate visibility into the VNX NFS performance data – and do it in a cool way, a way that would nicely integrate with how the VMware HoL folks were using to monitor the whole operation – vCenter Operations.

Read on to see how this works, and where you can use it yourself….

VMworld 2011 content: SPO3977–Next Generation Backup and Storage for VMware

This session was on the topic of what are the 2nd and 3rd order effects on backup and storage architectures that VMware is driving.  

I was frankly a little shocked at how many people came to the session (401) – hope you all found it interesting!

It discussed both the near term (state of the art VADP, CBT and other backup topics – and also state of the art on VAAI, VASA, and other storage topics), but more interestingly the long term – discussing questions like:

• What will be the effect of cloud and multitenancy on backup – and what’s needed for “Backup-as-a-service”
• What is the state of the art around VMware-integration in storage, and VM-awareness?  What’s next?  (think beyond the current “integrate UIs” and “vCenter plugins” a-la Tintri or what EMC VNX/VMAX do today) – this is all about the topic in VSP3205 (which I’ll be doing a blog post on after VMworld Copenhagen)
• What is the effect on “traditional storage clusters” (think VNX, NetApp FAS, HP EVA, Nexenta, etc) vs. “scale out models” (think VMAX, 3PAR for block and things like Isilon for NAS).
• What are the latency challenges inherent in “loosely coupled” distributed storage systems (both file and object) – and what are we doing about it?
• What are the challenges with NAS scale-out models with VMware (ergo the NFSv3 limitations) – how will this change over time
• What’s next re host-side Flash – and how will that change things?
• What’s next re: storage/server hybrid models?

Thanks all who attended and gave feedback.  While CLEARLY an EMC session, as always I try to be as balanced as I can be – though on this one, since I’m so close to the VMware/EMC efforts, I think it’s probably a little more biased than others.

Read on for a copy of the deck, and the recording of the session!

VMworld 2011 content: BCO2479 - Understanding vSphere Stretched Clusters, Disaster Recovery, and Planned Workload Mobility

[UPDATED – 11/7/2011, 1:39pm] – updated to fix broken link, and updated for Copenhagen content that also refers to new vSphere Metro Stretched Cluster (which you can read about here: New VMware HCL category- vSphere Metro Stretched Cluster), and also embedded a recording of the session in Copenhagen.

Presented by Lee Dilworth (“Mr. SRM” at VMware – though forgets more about non-SRM disaster avoidance and disaster recovery in a day than most humans learn in a lifetime :-) and I.   The purpose of this session was to cover the state of the art when it comes to SRM and stretched clusters.  This is a topic that Lee and I (and Scott Lowe too) get hit with over, and over… and over.    The key is that for now there are a set of “mutually exclusive design decisions”, and people tend to “mash things up” in their minds as these are related ideas.

Think of the set of “disaster avoidance” and “disaster recovery” solutions as a Venn diagram – overlapping, but not the same.

The session was very popular – each time having about as many people there as the EMC super session (which had more attendees than all the other supersessions – though they were all lightly attended IMO), and was repeated twice – with the second one being recorded (available for VMworld attendees).  It will also be presented at VMworld 2011 in Copenhagen if you are there.

HINT: BTW – stay tuned in this space.  There is another shoe that will drop that was not quite ready in time for VMworld – if you were in the session, or watch the recording, you might see Lee and I tapdance around it a little bit.

Read on for the session feedback and content!

VMworld 2011 content: BCA2320 VMware vSphere 5: Best Practice for Oracle RAC Virtualization

This session was focused on Oracle and vSphere.  Yup – best practices, not only on performance and availability, but discussions around licensing and support.

The presentation was delivered by Jeff Browning and Sam Lucido who are responsible (as the proverbial “tribal shaman and chieftain” of our virtual tribe of Oracle super-fans within and beyond the walls of EMC) here at EMC for the “Everything Oracle at EMC” community – ground zero for all sorts of awesome Oracle/EMC content.   BTW – there are similar “Everything ___ at EMC” communities – WIDE OPEN (to the public at large – customers, partners, EMCers – anyone!), filled with content/tools/tricks for SAP and Microsoft, and of course, VMware.

The session was very popular.  Read on for more (including access to all the content, and the session results)

VMworld 2011 content: EMC Super Session SUP1006

As I finish all the VMworld 2011 Las Vegas wrap-up (and put the finishing touches on VMworld 2011 Copenhagen), I want to post as much of the VMworld 2011 where EMC participated (so customers, EMC partners and EMCers can leverage it).

Here is the EMC Super Session – presented by Pat Gelsinger our President and COO, and fellow nerd :-)

Pat covers the macros trends that are disrupting everyone, and what we’re doing about it.   There are many customer examples throughout – thank you to the folks at Columbia Sportswear, Health Quest, OfficeMax and Alcon/Novartis who joined us in the session (and of course thank you for being joint VMware/EMC customers!).

You can watch the session here:

(you can also download the video if you want by clicking here).

You can also download the presentation by clicking on the below:

VNX and VNXe updates and VAAI hotfixes

So this week (9/13 is today’s date) EMC has made generally available two important software updates, and an important VAAI hotfix.

The VNX has gotten major updates to both block (iSCSI/FC/FCoE) and NAS functionality, including critical VAAI and VASA support, the VNXe has gotten some material fixes and new features, and there is an important hotfix VMware customers using VMAX should know about.   Read on for more!

“Best job ever” is open for candidates….

We are looking for a VP, VMware Technology Partner Management candidate.

EMC couldn’t pry me away from VMware with 1,000 wild horses.  It’s in my blood, what I’m passionate about, and what I get out of bed every day doing (as you can see from all the VMworld stuff).  That said, I’m also being asked for more – to help EMC around our go-to-market with Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.   The vSpecialist team is doing awesome, and while I will always be it’s spiritual leader (and tribemember), it’s almost self-sustaining at this time.

On the other hand, the VMware/EMC alliance model has myself and Sheryl Chamberlain at it’s heart, and that’s not enough.

So… our engineering/alliance model needs a small, steady state “EMC partner engineering team” located in Palo Alto.  This team does a lot of the “decoding” between the various engineering teams on on both the EMC and VMware side of things.

I the KEY hire here is what we’re calling the “VMware Technology Partner Management leader”.   Here’s what we’re talking about:

1. It’s a VP-level role
2. Will immediately start with 4 direct reports, growing rapidly to 8.
3. They must be bay-area based, and be willing to do 30% travel.
4. The key (and the hardest part) – they need to have connections and mojo with the VMware engineering/CTO teams from a architecture/roadmap/product engineering/management standpoint
5. They need to be able to straddle the line between the nerd world (which I say with love) and the go-to-market world (which I also say with love).

It’s a great gig – high influence, high impact, high visibility within EMC, and also VMware.   The candidate interview schedule is a who’s who of VMware and EMC – heck interviewing and NOT getting selected will still open up a world of opportunities.   Ideal candidates might be someone who left VMware for a startup that is going sideways, but all types are welcome.  Just know that if you don’t have a strong engineering/technical executive leadership background, with a stronger than normal understanding of partnerships and GTM, it’s not going to be a fit.

If you think you know this person, or are this person – please contact me.