vCloud Director is here.. With EMC UIM right behind it.

Phew – I hate tap-dancing around things, and I’ve been saying “project Redwood” for too long.  I’m glad the name got changed to vCloud Director – “vCloud Service Director” was a mouthful (note that the builds right before VMworld still have the old name).

EMC Ionix UIM v2.0 also is entering the Beta phase.  Original goal (crazy aggressive) was to ship synchronously, but we missed that by a narrow margin.  UIM v2.0 will GA soon. 

They are linked ideas – making the virtual and physical layers (for vCloud Director and UIM respectively) more fluid, self-provisioned, and service catalog oriented.   The last part is very important.

We were thinking a lot about how to show this, and decided that a live onstage compare/contrast of configuring the components of a Vblock (Cisco UCS, EMC Storage, vSphere) with a Vblock managed by UIM v2, and then show a comparison of the “old way” of managing infrastructure as seperate entities, with no infrastructure-level service catalog (similar idea of what vCloud Director does for the next layer up in the stack)

The demo in the VMware/EMC keynote was awesome!!!

The demonstration here doesn’t have the same visceral effect of seeing the “oldey timey way” and the “new coolness way” side by side with the guys driving on stage – but if you watch the recording of the EMC supersession, you’ll get the critical gist of it.

You can download this demo in high resolution WMV, MOV formats.

UIM as a product is moving at lightspeed – the product team has a fire under them I love.  They are like the Blues Brothers on a mission from God :-)   UIMv2, even at GA won’t deliver the service catalog across all Vblocks, but end-to-end provisioning for VMFS storage in Vblocks 1 (and I’m fingers crossed that we get Vblock 0 at the same time from a support perspective).   UIM will rapidly get Vblock 2 coverage and NFS as well.  

Things are moving fast here at EMC in support of our shared vision with VMware and Cisco :-)

Comments

[Hilary Swanson]

Hi Chad... didn't have time to catch up with you at EMC World but wanted to let you know that for sales/vSpecialists that want to UIM 2.0 and vCloud Director to their customers with canned or customer data, we can show it to them TODAY! Please reach out if we can help to [email protected].

[Wen Yu]

Hi Chad, just watched the video -dont quite see the integration into vcloud director...quick question about the UIM 2.0 -- does it automatically create the provider vDC and tie it to corresponding SLA based datastore that just got provisioned? will it orchestrate vshield edge deployment to each org as an option?

[Mark Janvier]

Hi Chad,
I think you forgot the hyperlinks to the download versions of the videos.
I fully understand being VMworld time, probably to much beer, not enough hours of sleep, ... :):).
But it would be nice to have the videos anyway.

Thanks in advance,
Mark Janvier - EMC TC

[Amine]

Hello Chad,
As Wen Yu said, I've just watched the video and I don't really see how UIM and vCloud really integrate. I see a succession of two video and no links between them.

[Mike Shea]

Would be nice for Chad to answer the questions from Wen and Amine.

- mike at netapp

[Chad Sakac]

Mike, will do :-) A little backlogged due to VMworld, all these posts, and clearing 1000 spam comments :-)

[Chad Sakac]

@Wen Yu, @Amine, @Mike

Thanks for asking! First of all - note that I was very clear (reread the post if you aren't sure): "They are linked ideas":

1) vCloud Director provides an END USER portal focused on VIRTUAL MACHINE service-oriented provisioning and orchestration..

Likewise (just replace the CAPS words)...

2) UIM provides an INFRASTRUCTURE ADMINISTRATOR portal focused on PHYSICAL RESOURCE service-oriented provisioning and orchestration.

In the demonstration, UIMv2 doesn't auto-populate the vCenter database (which in turn results in the resources showing up in vCloud Director). Through the betas, customer feedback has been that that's OK.

Cloud operational models (at both enterprises building private clouds and service providers building public clouds) typically merge the traditional "server/network/storage admin" function into a single function "cloud infrastructure administrator", but they exist alongside the "virtual layer/presentation administrator".

That's actually how we demoed it on stage live so people could understand what we were talking about.

That's not to say we're stopping there :-)

We've already prototyped that simple additional step of adding the services provisioned (whether it's a full vSphere cluster, expansion of hosts in a cluster, or the addition of additional datastore capacity/performance) automatically. Right now it's done via a powershell script, but we are formalizing the vCO model for that.

Now, Wen's question also asked about deploying vShield Edge.

Wen, while various orchestration tools can automate just about anything (think NewScale, VMware Orchestrator, BMC Atrium, etc), deploying VDCs is something that vCloud Director does. Of course, vCloud Director also automates the provisioning of vShield Edge, Zone, and App as needed in various deployment use cases.

As a VMware partner, EMC designed UIM to ensure that it didn't tromple and overlap with vCloud director, but simply support it.

I'm assuming you're the Wen Yu who is the VMware NetApp Sr. technical alliance partner manager right?. Reach out to Bill Shelton @ VMware and ask just how many dialogs we've had to make sure that there was no conflict between UIM and vCloud director and that we integrate and align (but not duplicate). Ask him the same about NewScale.

That's not to say that the other models (uber orchestrator of orchestrators) don't have a fit, and it's always up to the customer.

UIMv2.0 actually has a rich API itself (abstracting all the underlying "giblet APIs" from EMC/Cisco into an integrated API set. In that way, it's also analagous to vCloud Director - which takes all the underlying vCenter APIs and abstracts it all into the vCloud API set. Some customers have chosen to use those "uber orchestrators" in addition to UIM and vCD using those APIs.

BUT - for many customers, vCloud Director + Vblock + UIMv2.0 = "vCloud in a box with a bow around it" simple, easy, and ready to rumble.

There's still a lot to continue though - UIM needs to add NFS orchestration, Vblock 2 support, and other things, but of course those are coming quickly!

Thanks for the question!

[Chad Sakac]

@Mark - sorry about that, was backlogged, the high-rez downloads are now posted.

[Wen Yu]

Thanks for the thorough answers Chad! It was great seeing you on market street the other day :-P

I am certainly not arguing against the model of workflow/portal separation of physical resource provisioning & virtual resource provisioning - i just thought it'd be nice to orchestrate provisioning of physical resources and virtual resources in one place (UIM/vCO/BMC Atrium/etc), and then alert end consumers of resources when the necessary org vDC, org network, vApps are all in place(either in the form of URL to the vCD portal or list of IP addresses to RDP/ssh to the VMs) - hence the question of whether UIM invokes vCloud API to provide the next level of automation in orchestration virtualization resource provisioning...now another question for you: do you see end consumer of resources wanting the flexibility to deploy vApps on their own through some kind of self service portal OR they just want to access the end results of provisioning? ultimate question is do end users really need to know the new layer of abstraction?

as to your point of orchestrator of orchestrator - yes indeed, people will have their preferences. BMC/CA/vCO/NewScale type solutions need to have adapters built for orchestrating of new abstraction layer introduced by vCD - less API calls to make + more effective provisioning & compatibility w/ the broader SP ecosystem = win for customer by offering them choices.

with the many dialogs you had w/ Bill's team I was under the impression that UIM would invoke vCloud APIs to automate further; but I guess that's coming later as you had indicated...and you bet i'll reach out to Bill - he owes me couple answers to more integration ideas :-))

[Eric]

Hi all

I’m a vShield beginner and I need some help.

For 2 given customers using an overlapping IP subnet to assign their VMs, is it possible to configure 2 Vshield zones based on the same IP Subnet via VShield Manager ?

How is the isolation performed between the 2 customers.

Best Regards.
Eric