VMworld 2009: VMware-EMC Super Session (SS5140)

This super-session was presented by myself and Steve Herrod from VMware (thank you Steve!)

The topics covered included what EMC was doing with VMware around the topics of security, management, data protection, and storage – along with integrated solutions.   We wanted to cover both the things that are available today, but also share the thinking and strategy that is driving where we are going.   There are some REALLY cool tidbits in the session (we can’t share everything as stuff that’s far out has variability) around the vStorage APIs for Array Integration.   

I also showed the upcoming enhancements on the Celerra and NFS datastores we were demonstrating in the booth.  These include VM-level snapshot/clone functions and VM-level and Datastore-Level VMDK data reduction techniques integrated in vCenter.   Early testing is suggesting a ~40% reduction in space used on top of the effect of thin provisioning.   Will be a nice bonus for EMC Celerra customers!

On that note - one central theme was that efficiency applies in several dimensions – and that the most significant impact is when they are leveraged holistically.   This is a principle that is important to me, and I’m glad to see it’s EMC’s world view.  There is no single technological silver bullet, it’s about the application together of many.

We also highlighted some customer examples, our testing results with 10GbE and FCoE solutions we are shipping, and quotes on how EMC customers are saving money and power, increasing availability, THANK YOU David and Andrew – was great to have you there, and thank you once again for being EMC and VMware customers!

Was a great session – loads of fun, and packed – the super-session room holds about 1000 people.

Thanks for coming!!!

(forgive the shaky cam, and the incomplete video – I will be getting the final production video from VMware, and will update this post with it when I get it).

Download the presentation in PDF format here:

Demonstrations:

1) SECURITY: RSA integration in the VMware View Manager, and showing how data loss prevention can deliver more data leakage security in the client-virtualization use case, ensuring that content which meets specific policies cannot be printed, removed, emailed.   This is just one example of RSA integration with VMware – another (VMSafe integration extending vShield zones directly with additional DLP policy and also the Nexus 1000v) was presented in the VMware/Cisco/EMC super-session (SS5240)

Download high resolution in WMV or MOV format.

2) MANAGEMENT: EMC Ionix Server Configuration Manager being used to manage configuration compliance and remediation for VMs, and ESX servers, integrated with vCenter.   This takes the idea of ESX host profiles to a whole other level – including all sorts of detailed configuration control.   For ESX servers, this is done via vCenter SDK integration.  Currently for VM-level operations, we use an agent, but at VMworld at the EMC Ionix booth we were showing prototypes where this need can be eliminated using various API integrations and use of powershell… VERY cool!

Download high resolution in WMV or MOV format.

3) STORAGE: Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST).   Solid state flash disk technology is revolutionizing the storage business – they have the same enterprise-class duty cycles, life – but deliver up to 30x the IOPs of the fastest magnetic media – and do it with a much smaller power envelope.   At the same time – as SATA drives get larger and larger capacities, a mix of both will be needed for the foreseeable future.   The question is – how can you leverage this to be an order-of-magnitude more efficient in every dimension (performance, cost, power, capacity, flexibility) – well – our view is that it will need to be fully automated.     Later in the session – Steve and I discussed how we’re planning to use this along with vStorage APIs of the future to deliver very fine-grained DRS (performance optimization) and DPM (spin-down) driven automatically based on the vApp policy and metadata.

Download high resolution in WMV or MOV format.

4) STORAGE: VM-Aware storage.   Our long-term goal is to make storage invisible – in fact, the thing that we think will provide value and differentiation is the DEGREE of invisibility that infrastructure can provide (ergo automated, policy-based action).   This is the “help people get out of the plumbing business”.   This doesn’t translate to commoditization – it translates to transformation.    BUT – this will take some time.  The first step is transparency, which EMC is delivering now with VM-Aware Navisphere, VM-Aware Recoverpoint, and the EMC Storage Viewer vCenter plugin (all free – VM-Aware Navisphere is a feature of FLARE 29, VM-Aware Recoverpoint is in Recoverpoint 3.2, and EMC Storage Viewer is freely available on Powerlink, as shown here) .   This demonstration showed a customer use case and how these tools can help understand, isolate, and deal with a storage performance issue.

Download high resolution in WMV or MOV format.

Comments

[David]

Thank you Chad for providing such a great place for us customers to interact with EMC and Vmware. All of the sessions we great except that one Netapp one I stumbled in on :) j/k. It was great to finally meet you after talking on here for months. I am very excited to see what is coming down the road and hope to leverage many of those things in my companys new Datacenter. Thanks again!