Virtual Geek

New Cisco Validated Design for XenDesktop on VNX for 5000 users

This new 5000-user CVD joins the VSPEX CVDs for both VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop in smaller increments – and also CVDs for general purpose cloud use cases based on Hyper-V and VMware.

BTW – you can of course use this to scale up even further in building blocks.

Mike Brennan, the Cisco guy who was one the folks leading this effort comments on his findings through the experience in his blog here.  It’s pretty amazing.   5000 users, up and running in 30 minutes.  The EMC VNX7500 in the test was used in a “unified way” – using block storage for UCS boot, and as part of a large pool for PVS boot vDisks, but also using NFS for PVS Write Caching.   EMC FAST Cache was used liberally to ensure a nice low-latency envelope all the way up to 39 UCS B230 M2 blades for the full 5000 user ramp up test.

Click on the below to download the PDF (warning – it’s a pretty hefty 20MB doc – like all CVDs it is very detailed, which is part of the charm!)

vSphere DR/HA: Stretched Cluster or SRM–which is better/simpler/cheaper?

Sigh.  This remains one of those frustrating things me.   Inevitably, someone binary says “SRM!”, or “vMSC!”.   Often (not always), it happens to coincide with:

• the only thing they sell.
• the only thing they know.

I don’t want to blow it out of proportion – but there were a couple things that popped up that made me want to poke at this again.

The answer is “it depends”.  Each solution has key things to know.   While I would agree that increasingly I’m finding customers wanting “active-active datacenter” models using stretched clusters (VPLEX and vMSC), simple DR using SRM remains the most common answer – for MOST (though it has downsides too), and some customers use BOTH.   EACH require the architect of the solution to REALLY think things through.

Read on for two internal emails I’ll censor only lightly, and the answer (at least my opinion).

EMC Partners–our internal kickoff content–OPEN FOR YOU!

Those of you that know me, know that I truly, fundamentally believe in the power of openness and transparency.  You also know that I’m a fan of a simple rule, a simple axiom that leads to good partnering:

“Anything that is available for EMC internally, I think should be open to our EMC Velocity Partners”

I’m not claiming I’m Gandhi here :-)   This statement to me is a statement of the blindingly obvious.   2012 was a year of a lot of learning for me – the power of the bully pulpit when you are a leader is you CANNOT reach down and affect directly, but you can set tone, and guide direction – and man, it can move a lot.

• We opened our SE conference to partners (BTW – 2013 will be open too!   Details coming soon – will overlap with EMC World 2013)
• We opened up all our quarterly training to partner via the “backstage pass” – Q1 training is up!  Our partners now get it the same time – and same content – as our internal folks do.  This means our partners can ramp up on EMC technology before anyone other than us – and they do it at the exact same time as us.
• We opened up our “Godzilla” bootcamps to our partners – and in 2013, we’re running the “Appzilla” sessions – and will do the same.
• We opened up our Presales Advisory Council to select partners and EMCers – where they get direct feedback on everything
• We opened up our vLab and Workload Profile Assessment tools.

There’s still a lot to do – I’m tackling the broader tools agenda now – tools like the Installed Base and Support tools.    As we update our core configuration and quoting tools, am pushing hard to eliminate “partner quoting tools” – I think the partners and EMC internally should use the SAME TOOL.  This is tough – but we’re making progress.

The best part?  When other people take up the mantle, share the belief, and just start to do it themselves.   That’s the beginning of a movement :-)

That just happened.

The team responsible for corp communications decided to make most of our internal Sales Kickoff videos available to Velocity partners.  This is the core communication we use internally to our field.  You can see directly what the leaders in EMC tell our own people.  

We know the partners are busy, so we edited them down to mainly 30 minutes or less – but not based on “secret info”.  We also considered the relevancy of the Business Unit content and included the most relevant BU videos for partners.
 
In total, this gives partners access to:

• 5 Global Executive Keynotes
• 3 Global Customer Stories
• 3 BU breakouts (1 for BRS and 2 for Mid Market)

Click on the button below to get it on edutube!

 

Let this virus continue to sweep through EMC and the vendor community – and infect us all!   Feedback, as always – welcome!

Oppa EMC Style!

Here by popular (infamous perhaps – it’s pretty bad :-) demand… “Oppa EMC Style” from the 2013 EMC Kickoff.

Click below to watch some bad dancing (on my part) – the rest of the team was sharp and hit their mark :-)

People sometimes ask “when do we do this?” and “who are these people?”

The answer – they are all hardworking EMCers like all of us out there!

This was recorded in the waning hours of Q4 in late, late December (was the last thing I did before flying home for the holidays), after the bulk of the SE work starts to wrapup.   In fact, it takes about 9 hours to record, and I was popping in and out to meet with customers and various folks at Cisco as we recorded it at the EMC campus in Santa Clara.

The folks in the video represent a cross-section of EMCers – great, smart, hardworking people.   We try to not make this represent “somebody”, but more “everybody” – a cross section of the great technical folks at EMC that work with customers.

• Heather Boegemann – a MidTier Specialist SE.   In the shot above, she is on the left (to my right).   Heather is one of the smartest folks I know – passionate about VMware, knows EMC’s “MidTier” (not a great name) platforms – VNX and Isilon inside out.
• Jay Cuthrell – member of the Office of the CTO at VCE.  He’s the guy during the “backwards dance” with Fred and I during the “car scene”.  He knows Vblock like nobodies business, and works and travels around the globe to meet with customers like mad.
• Nga Nguyen – Nga heads up our application specialists for the central division in the US.  She joined EMC from Microsoft, and is furiously passionate about the fact (which I agree with) that no one buys infrastructure for infrastructure, they do it to support apps – ergo, it’s all about the application.  Brilliant, hardworking, and passionate.  in the shot above, she’s on the right (to my left).
• John Lockyer – the tall dude in the “Greenplum” “big data!” bit.   Also part of the Office of the CTO at VCE.   John – you rock!
• Fred Nix – part of the Global SE team – works on training, enablement.  He’s the guy who says “giddy up” in the video (and a lot in general) :-).   Fred is a core force in our updated onboarding and associate programs, to get new EMCers into the culture, the spirit, the principles of the EMC Presales Manifesto.  He’s also the “minister of fun” – and does a lot (with many others of course) behind the scenes for the SE conference at EMC World.
• Jeff Thomas – Jeff (“JT”) leads the BRS specialist SEs that focus on virtualization and VMware.   Not only smart, hardworking, but I’ve grown to understand him as a great leader too – steady, balanced.   Anyone who has enjoyed the hands-on labs at EMC World over the last 2 years – thank JT :-)  He’s also lead the EMC efforts to support the VMworld hands on labs for the last 3 years.
• Stephen Hunt – Stephen is a vSpecialist that came from the Smarts side of EMC’s technology portfolio.  Smart, flexible, doing a lot behind the scenes on our work around management and orchestration.
• Eoin O’Keefe – a member of the Global Solutions Center team in the EMC Solutions Group.  One of my favorite moments was that during set changes, he’s logged into an older EMC NS array rebuilding the platform via the Control Station manually… and he can dance :-)  I can do the former, but clearly not the latter :-)

Fred Nix is the the creative start behind these sort of things for the most part.   He writes up the lyrics and then he goes to a recording studio (which is really awesome fun) called Patchwerk.   Now, Fred has a great relationship with the folks there – so he does it on the cheap after everyone else closes down (it’s usually 11pm-1am ish).  We’ve also got a great “backscratching” relationship – they needed storage for all the audio and video editing – a great set of Iomega kit helps them get their creative work done :-)   Thanks Fred!

For the recording – one of the most creative dudes I’ve ever met - EMCer Greg Gotts – who is the mind behind all the awesome and funny videos EMC folks see, and the mind-blowing videos at EMC World helps, and Bruce Hamady and crew (both also are key for Chad’s World – episode 16 is up!) do all the recording and editing.

It’s done on a shoestring budget, after everyone does their day jobs, and most importantly – on a spirit of EMC fun :-)   I hope you enjoy!

PS – it’s hard work on your quads :-)

EMC Storage Analytics is now GA!

At VMworld 2012 in Oct we showed something we were working on called “EMC Storage Analytics” aka “ESA”.   This used to be called Storage Analytics Suite – but that could be confused with other stuff.

What is it?

1. It provides rich analytics for everything from the VM down to the most basic storage element.
2. VNX connectors for vCenter Operations.   These are more than just basic API goop – they contain the relationships between collected attributes – which is critical for the “analytics” part.
3. A version of vCenter Operations targeted at the storage administrator developed by VMware and OEMed by EMC.

A neato background story: this project came from the team that runs the VNX business walking through the VMworld 2011 lab, where the VNX that was supporting big chunks was instrumented via vCOPS and a home-brewed connector.   They immediately saw the value and wanted to move to productize it.

Here’s the customer view – in Chad’s World Episode 16!

HINT: A ridonkulous video coming up soon :-)

A couple comments to help understand – after the break…

Even YET MORE free stuff! (This time OpenStack goodies for EMC customers)

Folks – a barrage of free goodies…   This latest one is OpenStack related.

Back in mid december, EMC joined the Openstack Foundation.  Chuck did a post on it here that’s worth a read.

I knew that there would be some skepticism that it was just a political stunt based on our close partnership with VMware, so I didn’t mention it until we could demonstrate we were contributing code to OpenStack.  

BTW – people are waking up to the fact that VMware can partner with OpenStack (with vCenter Automation Center, with Nicira as point examples) while simultaneously competing (vCloud Suite).   Ditto with EMC – clearly OpenStack Swift and Atmos compete to a degree.  I continuously scratch my head when people can’t wrap their brains around the IT industries’ nature for coopetition – it’s been that way for a LONG time.  You cannot structure the future, you cannot structure innovation – and those are the drivers of the IT industry.  

Specifically what is now out, are the set of Cinder volume drivers (really a plugin more than a driver) for VMAX and VNX.  There is already a Isilon iSCSI Cinder plugin written by a 3rd party, and we’re looking at it now too.   OpenStack is very block-centric right now, though we and others like NetApp are trying to change that.  Click on the below to get the code snippet from Github. 

For those of you that want it in a development release – it isn’t in Folsom (which was closed prior to this).  It’s in the G2 coordinated contribution to the main trunk of Grizzly dev release.  [updated 1/11/2013 2:05pm ET – thank Brian Cook] – If you want to see more about the G3 checkin to Grizzly, you can see it here.  You’ll also note Nova VMware work, and also Atmos Glance adapters – again, highlighting we’re working away on it…  http://status.openstack.org/release/

The big picture we’re working on (and you’ll hear more about this through the year – there’s been a LOT of work for the last while around how we do this more generally) is this space of “standardized, abstracted control and data planes for storage”.   To give you a hint of how things move along – this is part of the evolution of “Project Orion” (which folded into a bigger Project Bourne) that I showed way back at the end of 2011 here.

In this picture, the pile of plugins could be harmonized in a funky way (and plugin to VMware’ SDS plans, Hyper-V, OpenStack looking upwards, but also to not only EMC, but others, including commodity storage) looking downward.   EXPECT MORE HERE :-)

Yet MORE stuff–FREE! EMC Storage Integrator

EMC Storage Integrator (ESI) does for the Microsoft world what VSI does for vSphere (completely native integration, and across the EMC portfolio).  LIke VSI, it’s free.

Version 2.1 is out and adds platforms, but also adds full blown Powershell support and SCOM 2012 integration!

Oh… did I mention, it’s FREE!   Click on the below to see more, get info, and access to the bits…

More, and still free to play, learn, try! Prosphere 1.7 is out….

Pure heads up – EMC Prosphere 1.7 is now GA… We’ve updated the “Learn, Play, Try” page on the community (click on the below to get right there), and my friend and colleague Tommy Trogden (the always awesome vTexan) has updated his experiences with getting it installed here.   HAVE FUN!

vCloud 5.1 Suite Home Lab–circa 2013

Those of you that know me know that my deepest, darkest fear is becoming a talking head, a bureaucrat, or that most evil of corporate types – the politician.

In my work life as I move into more and more senior roles at EMC – some of that stuff comes with the territory, but god help me if it comes to define me.   I find that maintaining the necessary pace for work (and a work life balance of a sort) requires a “sprint/rest… sprint/rest” pattern.   This was coaching I got once from a great mentor and coach here at EMC – Frank Hauck.

For me – during “rest” periods, I get back to a zen-like state by playing with technology, learning new stuff, and getting my hands dirty building stuff.   That and a little more exercise :-)

Over the Christmas holidays, after the kiddies opened their presents, I opened one of mine – or to be more precise – a present to myself :-)   A little binge at NewEgg to refresh the home lab.    After the break – I’ve documented the parts and process.   For those of you interested in building your own home labs, you may get something out of this.

Goodbye 2012, Welcome 2013–Happy New Year!

(Jan 2nd, 9:05am ET: edited after break)

Dear readers – thank you for all your contributions through 2012, and I wish you a happy New Year for your family!

In the spirit of transparency to the world – if you’re interested – read on past the break for my message to my team internally to EMC (with only tiny bits of editing to keep customer names confidential).

Again – thank you, and see you in 2013!   First post will be the new home lab build….