Virtual Geek

Get your SDS here (form to access ScaleIO)

Lots of cool new tech to play with when it comes to software-defined storage models.

Recall - SD* is about:

• Decoupled control and data planes (for compute/network/storage) - and control planes (which control policy) that are pure software.    The control plane abstraction enables abstraction, pooling, automation.  It's what ESX does for compute, NSX does for network, ViPR does for storage.
• Data planes (in storage land - these are the things that persist data and offer data services) that increasingly - wherever they can - are implemented as pure software (and therefore offer different deployment models - software + COTS or Software/Hardware appliances).
• Everything being driven programmatically via APIs.

Things like VSAN from VMware (great for all-VMware use cases), or EMC ScaleIO (targets larger scales - up to 100, even 1000's of nodes - and multiple different use cases - including VMware) are examples of #2.  

I'm seeing more, and more customers (including some big ones - see AT&T's view here - which is focused on SDN, but trust me, they are applying the same pressure on the storage domain) that want software + bring your own hardware models - which is exciting!

• EMC Scale IO is currently GA (v1.0) - and the 1.2 beta (more data services, specifically snapshots, native windows support on top of linux) is open!  You get access via this application form.    APPLY!!!!
• VSAN is also in a public beta, and VMware has stated a "1H 2014" target.  You get access via this application form. 

…   And, we are counting down the hours to the ViPR GA date (which will be the industry's first software-only, open, accessible, extensible storage control plane).

What does this mean? "EMC Becomes a VMware Authorized Consultant (VAC)"

Welcome to 2009!

We've been working on this for a long time - and it's just the beginning, with lots of work through 2009.   If you didn't see it - here's the PR:

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/090106/ne55718.html?.v=1

Here was my pre-new year hint at this - and I think impressive (the graphs continue that way through the new year).   We've been building this for a while.

I bounce between nerd posts and business posts (my job has a foot planted in both worlds).   Read on for a bit of unofficial (but from the heart) questions and my answers.

Some pretty fascinating statistics

First of all - happy Thanksgiving to my American colleagues!

Second, some crazy stats.   Read on if you're interested....

What's the relationship between VMware vCloud and EMC Atmos?

First, it's useful to understand where they are not related.   Atmos is NOT a vCloud. 

vCloud is an initiative.   vCloud defines a set of standards for compute objects (VMs using the OVF standard), and APIs (using REST/SOAP) to manage VMs running in a cloud compute model,  APIs to communicate SLA requirements to the underlying layers (vApp - which applies similar logic to internal clouds), structures to get VMs in and out of the cloud, and the security requirements to make that model work.  A lot of really, really cool stuff.   It's primary benefit is that it makes the same objects that are your primary compute management model (Virtual Machines) transparently and natively run in a hosted model - which bypasses the barriers that stop certain workloads from being SaaS-able (or at least really hard to make work that way).   It also makes the distributed, dynamic datacenter expand past the walls of the datacenter itself (for example - for spot or seasonal workloads).

Atmos is a product.   Atmos' design goal is to be the best design for storing information in the cloud use case - cloud-optimized storage (COS).   The use case contains by definition several design implications.   It implies:

• many-petabyte (even exabyte) scaling and a cost model to match (which in turn demanded a scale-out storage model using low-cost storage).
• object counts in the billions  
• multi-tenancy
• global namespace
• a wide variety of access methods (REST/SOAP and more traditional CIFS/NFS/IFS)
• most importantly - an object-based management and information distribution model.

We've been working hard on this for a while - and in fact have been shipping this since June quietly.   It's definitely something new so we took our traditionally conservative model of product deployment (internally we do a "phased product release" process for all major products) and applied it to our innovative new idea, which is why you might have heard of "Maui" before.

Could Atmos be used for internal vClouds (i.e. customers deploying their own VMware Infrastructure with a vCloud inspired access and management model)?  Sure.   But, at the same time, customers however need to understand it's design goal is for internet scale, and internet-connected access to information.   

So - where is the intersection?   The intersection is a shared long-term view and goals.   Both EMC and VMware view this cloud model - both for computing and for storing information as a new emerging force in IT.   VMware is working to make a standard compute container model that makes clouds applicable to any workload - unchanged.    EMC is trying to make storing information for cloud use cases simpler and lower the bar for new entrants into this market.    We think that Atmos is the ideal platform for storing the information accessed  by cloud compute layers - including, we're confident, partners who plan on building those based on the vCloud model.   But, of course, when you have two large vendors like EMC and VMware working together, you can expect to hear more from us on this topic soon enough.

Read on if you want to understand Atmos better....

VMworld 2008 - EMC Wrap-up - Part II

Ok, here's the final wrap-up (a month late :-)  - I FINALLY got the video of our keynote - it's below in it's entirety.   For the ultimate "being there" experience (HA!), watch the video with the slides at the same time (the camera work was wierd, no slides behind us, they were off to the sides).   But, kinda neat regardless.   I liked the "how many folks here..." bits at the beginning, and you can see some of the physical demonstrations we did with the CX4 and the iomega StorCenter ix2 (our $329 NFS server/iSCSI target)

UPDATE (Feb 2, 2009) - The SS4200E is a fine choice, and so is the ix2.   If you can wait a little bit... I would hold on.   iSCSI work is in the lifeline codebase, but still pushing to make it available in all the platforms - which have varying CPUs, and varying iSCSI performance.   for now, consider the shipping SS4200E and ix2 as NAS-only until I give a firm update.   There are other reasons also to wait for about 1 month....

If you're wondering what that big tattoo on my hand is... no, I'm not that cool :-)   It's a big "I love VMware" temporary tattoo.

I also cleaned up the PDF (export of the straight PPT was a bit mangled due to powerpoint builds, and the one on the VMworld site is pretty weak quality), consider this the one to use if you want to look at it.   It's useful to look at this as you watch the video (see note above).

Read on for details....

Congratulations VMware!

On a solid Q3 in tough times.  

Its a hard fact of being a public company that you work on a quarterly clock, and need to continually prove yourself against the continuously rising expectations of the market.

VMware brothers and sisters, take some time to celebrate before returning to the grind.   I have one more day before we announce - I'll let you know if I'm celebrating with you tomorrow :-)

These results are a testament to customer value - more now than ever as people make prioritization choices in the hard light of the macro-economic conditions.

VMworld 2008 - EMC Wrap-up - Part I

It's been a bit, I know (one thing I do suck at with this blogging thing is "time to market" :-)  Have been slammed - we had our EMC Technical Consultant/Solution Architect (and other various pre-sales technical roles) conference last week in Orlando, and I needed to show off some more distant future things....   Excuses, excuses.

I've gotten lots of requests for all the EMC sessions, including the keynote.   I've attached them in the body of this post (video of keynote will be posted shortly)

Quick observations:

• I think Paul Maritz did a great job on his keynote.   He summed up VMware's vision (VDC-OS for the internal cloud, vCloud for a federated external cloud, and vClient for the desktop dilemma).   Analysts hammered him the next day - but it was a weird bit of feedback: "right on message, what customers want, clear, and very differentiated.   BUT delivering on the vision will take a couple of years, and more SG & A expenses."   I don't know what to say to this.   VMware is way ahead of their competition - but you always need to innovate to stay ahead of the pack.   I think they were damned if they do, damned if they don't.   Had they just announced VMware.Next (whatever the next VI iteration will finally be called) - they would have been slammed for being tactical, that "hypervisors are a commodity" and lack of vision.    BTW - Joe Tucci got up in front of our thousands of pre-sales technical folks from around the world last week, and outlined EMC's vision of the future last week - and suffice it to say we see the world similarly, we're holding hands, and we're working together as partners to make it happen - and VMware continues to be firmly independent because we know that vision of the world requires them to be independent. 

I'm no analyst, but what stood out to me was simple - every customer I talked to at the show loved VMware, loved the technology, and were investing for the future.   That strikes me as a very, very good sign for VMware's long term prospects.  

• The hands-on-labs were good.    I did the Virtual Datacenter tech preview, the vClient tech preview along with others, but gave up my seat to customers.   Heck, I've got all the betas in the basement lab anyway :-)   It would have been good in the SRM hands-on to do a actual failover, and demonstrate how to do a failback.  This can be done (though not automated yet) in v1.0
• The whole  vClient tech preview convinced me of something... While NetApp, NEC, and EMC were each trying outdoing each other to demo VDI at scale (BTW - NEC won - with 12K clients :-), the VMware View Manager (formerly known as VDM 3.0) and VMware View Composer (formerly known as SVI) are simpler.   Also, as much as there is an economic challenge with storage (solved via deduplication or writeable snapshot technologies) with VDI, the technical challenge (particularly at scale) is so much more...   EMC did demonstrated (forgive the lack of a voice over, this video shows the scaling point, how the ESX clusters were configured, how many VC instances were needed, and the cluster utilization before workload applied) 10K clients, at a 100:1 storage savings (5 VMs per source LUN, 100 snapshots off every source), but the other reality (beyond "wow, look at this scale!") is that the process of update, management, pooling, even using Dan's award-winning PowerVDI script (and this doesn't take away from how cool that is) - it's just more complex, particularly in the ongoing "lifecycle" of the desktops.   I think the reality is that VMware themselves are in a better position to resolve this than us as the storage vendor.   The round 1 exercise was worthwhile - we learned a ton about scaling up the vClient use case (all aspects, ESX, vCenter, storage, network).   We're updating the solution lab as we speak to View Manager and View Composer, and neat unannounced technology from EMC for the user data for solution testing round 2.   We also want to bring Cisco as the 3rd leg from day one - there are loads of stuff in the vClient side that have to do with LAN and WAN optimization and compression.
• I won't speak for any other vendors, but I was pretty happy with the traffic at the booth - lots of customers, lots of good questions and dialog.   I think these events (while exhausting) are a great opportunity for direct customer/vendor communication - trust me when I say that we're listening!
• I was very happy with our joint VMware/Cisco/EMC keynote.   It was packed, standing room only - I think we would have been right around 1000 people.   I attended most of the platinum sponsor keynotes, and I think we had the largest attendence, with NetApp a close second.   The others (HP, Dell, IBM) were embarassingly empty.   I don't know what the deal is there.... I thought the IBM one was pretty good, for example.  In part II of this post, I'll post the video recording itself of the KN EMC session (VMware still hasn't gotten it to me) - but it exceeded my expectations, that's for sure.  I wasn't sure originally how well the 3-party model would work (1 hour is not a lot of time for a lot of content), but I think it worked well.   At the beginning, I started by asking how many people were EMC customers, then Cisco customers, then VMware customers.   It was awesome - nearly 100% to every questions - which affirmed why I decided to share our Platinum spot in the first place.   Our customers want to see what their trusted partners are doing TOGETHER to solve their challenges.   I'll say again what I said in the session: THANK YOU for being customers.   You make our world go around.
• I was very proud of the EMC team's execution to support the event.   For those that wonder, it takes a gargantuan amount of work to pull something like that off - and that's just the platinum sponsor side - 9 speaking sessions, a booth with 8 stations and a constant theatre schedule, customer 1:1 etc.   VMware themselves - well, hats off to the team (I can speak for EMC during EMCworld - and that's 10K people, not 14K).  A special thank you to Chris Carrier and Cathy Cushman on my team - wouldn't have happened without you.    

 

• To give you a couple of views into the behind the scenes madness:
• imagine shipping 13 CX3s, 4CX4s, 2 DMX 4-950s, and 3 NS40FCs to the event (some to Palo Alto for staging a couple months beforehand).  That's measured in TONS.   Of course - when things are frantic (and shipped in racks!) some arrived with significant damage from all the transit.   I got some panicked calls from the VMware folks for the gear supporting a couple HOLs and the VMware booth on Friday before the show.   A big thank you to the local Nevada EMC customer support team, who swapped out damaged parts in well under the 4hr MTTR.   I think it's fair to say that the VMware team was amazed when an hour after discovering damaged LCC cards, the replacement parts showed up on the scene.
• Without being too unkind about it - some of you may have noticed... well... inconsistent VMware naming in some of the sessions :-)   The new VMware branding and framework was being updated short days before the event.   Upside?   I think they really nailed it.   A good framework to have broader discussions with customers and between VMware and partners like EMC.   It ain't (just) about the Hypervisor.  But - the downside - core content was undergoing significant changes up to minutes before the sessions.
• We got the vStorage API-enabled builds of... VMware.Next (I can't wait until I can call it something - it's a PITA)..  (not the vStorage APIs for multipathing enabled build - we've had that for a while) on Wednesday before the show, and pulled off demonstrations (I think only EMC and Dell/EqualLogic were doing any vStorage API demos at VMworld - correct me if I'm wrong) days later.   Great EMC effort from our platform engineering teams and also Scott Dougherty (one of our field VMware technical specialists) - thank you all!

There are something's I think we could have done better, and as the team starts planning for VMworld Europe 2009 (Feb in Cannes - my goodness, that's right around the corner!), we're working on it.   What do you think we could have done better?   I really want to know!

All the late night evenings before VMworld paid off, and all the late night evenings celebrating with colleagues, customers, and competitors were loads of fun.  

Ok - for those of you looking for the EMC sessions read on - and if you have ANY questions on one of the sessions, don't hesitate to comment!

So, what does vStorage really mean?

(UPDATED 092308 - 19:53 EST to note that the VMware Backup Framework falls in scope)

Pretty big day here at VMworld, meeting lots of people I know only online - which is great.   My photo is in the about section of the blog, and if you'd like to meet me, I'd love to meet you!

So - the VDC-OS is the big news, let me fill you in on one part of it - vStorage.

vStorage has been something that VMware and EMC have been working together on for a long time, in fact, before it was called vStorage (which was recent) - it used to be called VMAS a name only engineers would like.  In fact, we've been working on this from almost right after the original acquisition before the program even existed formally.

vStorage is pretty broad: It's 2 very new VMware things, and 2 VMware features

• vStorage API for Multipathing
  • This was the first idea from eons ago.  Customers know the pain VMware multipathing can be - setting up static paths, manual "load balancing" by rotating primary paths, and no automated path discovery.... you know what I'm talking about.... But we needed to find a way that we could get PowerPath, which is the far and away the leader in this space, into the vmkernel, but still make it open for others to also innovate with VMware.  It so happens of course that EMC are the ones way out in front here.
  • So, while native multipathing (NMP) continues to get better (round robin will likely soon no longer be experimental), but this gives EMC customer another option - an option which is a quantum leap in multipathing/failover/scale and availability for block storage
  • It's also an avenue to deliver the other stuff PowerPath customers love in the physical world (path-based encryption, accelerated data migration)
  • It's also simple, and easy to use and install.   It just works, like the best technology does.
  • BTW - we're accepting beta sites now, and it's going to be HUGE for any VMware/EMC customers.

See this quantum leap in multipathing action here:

download a hi-rez version here.

• vStorage APIs
  • Acceleration via storage offloads using SCSI driver primitives (we're demoing this in our booth and in the VMware/EMC/Cisco Keynote) - think "I/O" dedupe (not to be confused with Storage Dedupe).  This can have a HUGE impact on storage network utilization - much more efficient, and very important for lower bandwidth storage networks like 1Gbps iSCSI.
  • Thin Provisioning Integration
  • While NetApp, EMC, and Dell/EqualLogic are all shipping Snapshot VC integration today (we're demoing Replication Manager in our booth and in the VMware/EMC/Cisco Keynote, and you can also see a demo of this here), vStorage will make this more transparent, but adds somthing REALLY cool - the ESX server tells the array what BLOCKS makeup a VM, so svmotion can be offloaded to the array as an alternative to the file-copy method now, snapshots can potentially be done on VMs even for block devices.  Again, this uses SCSI driver primitives

See this the "I/O dedupe" in action here:

download a hi-rez version here.

Also as part of this, some things that have existed before are getting clarified.

• SRM's SRAs are getting positioned more clearly now as vStorage APIs for Site Recovery Manager (since they are in effect, APIs for VMware/Storage integration)
• VCB is more correctly positioned not as an VMware product per se, but as a API framework for backup vendors - becoming the vStorage Backup Framework
• vStorage Virtual Appliances now formalizes a program around VMware Ready appliances that perform storage-related functions.
  • Celerra VSA freely available – iSCSI, NFS - public and free!
  • Avamar Virtual Edition – shipping for 1 year

Cool stuff we've been working on to help customers, I'm glad to share the news!

UPDATED - 9/13/2009 - What we're demoing at VMworld - details!

Some days, my head feels like it's going to spin right off :-)  Thank goodness I love my job!   I'm personally working on some of the last-minute demos - there's some really cool stuff that's under embargo until Wednesday - but suffice it it will be cool!  

My colleague Nick Triantos from NetApp did a good post on what Netapp will be doing, here: http://blogs.netapp.com/storage_nuts_n_bolts/2008/09/netapp-vmworld.html?cid=130026414#comment-130026414

I have to confess, it got my blood boiling a little bit - he accuses EMC of being "All Marketing" and that they will be the largest vendor there.    Please, look at my record, I've been kind, even handed, even complimentary to NetApp, but come on Nick, is that condescending tone necessary?     Tar ME with the marketing brush?!?

Did you know that while we're mud slinging (well, at least I'm getting mud slung at me) that the Large Hadron Collider fired up today?   Man, it's inspiring, and a reminder that this competitive stuff is SO petty.  I'm also pretty inspired by the SVVP "other shoe dropping" with formal ESX 3.5u2 qual getting done.

Ok, so we have a marketing gimmick (the car!!!), sure but heck, it's Vegas :-)   I like to think of us as "All technical, and some fun too"

You'd think that with all this back and forth - it's all we do (well for me - it's 8:51pm, and I've been working all day - so this is a diversion :-)

I will tell you this, it's going to be technical, we're demoing like mad, and there are some MIND BLOWING things there.

We're in booth 500, and I look forward to seeing you there.   What you can expect to see:

• Demonstrating Oracle 11g and SAP with instant/backup recovery and Site Recovery Manager all in action together  (BTW - thank you all who have been so interested in the Oracle piece that it got oversubscribed and we've been asked by VMware to schedule a second session on EA1961)
• Demonstrating Exchange 2007 Joint VMware/EMC reference architecture including VSS backup/restore, CCR and LCR use cases
• How all our management tools (Storage, Network, Application Dependency and VMware Best Practice compliance analysis) integrate with the VI 2.5 SDK and ESX CIM APIs - TODAY.   Our view is that customer need to start virtualizing tier 1 apps - and we want to help - with the joint best practices and with tools to ensure you get applicaiton-level SLAs.
• Replication Manager for VMware - instant VM or datastore backup/restore - integrated with the VI and ESX APIs for nice simple point in time consistency.   As a company that's not as good at marketing as others, we quietly actually shipped this BEFORE ANYONE ELSE.   It wasn't pre-launched, it shipped in June.   Here's  a quick look if you want to see what it does.   BTW - this is a single tool that does this for application integration Exchange 2003 and 2007/SQL Server/Oracle and now VMware, and across all EMC's platforms.   Here's a demo....

• VDI - great to hear that NetApp hit 5K clients. We just broke 10K :-)  UPDATE: I regret phrasing this sentence this way - it comes across as snide and as condescending.   I let frustration get the better of me.   NetApp has no intrinsic scaling limit that I know of, I only know what we can do.   BTW - that's what this standing lab in Santa Clara is there for - for EMC and VMware to jointly prove these out at scales (target of 40K clients).    BTW, we're also doing this at 500, and 1000 client cases.   It's not a chest-beating exercise - customers come in all shapes and sizes, and we're trying to help prove out how this works for them all, it was triggered by the World Bank which asked for us to show how this would work for 20K clients.      We have a similar (but different - each with advantages and disadvantages) approach as NetApp - mass scale with consumption of one, both how we do this today, and also how we do it with VMware tomorrow.    We will be sharing all our performance scaling data, and experiences.   THIS IS BLEEDING EDGE.   Anyone who tries to tell you that this is all figured out is not giving you the whole truth.  Anyone who just shows you the array side of the equation is flat-out dangerous.   When you push this far,  and all boot simultaneously, sometimes VC gets into a weird state on some of the VMs.  Its fun, and continues to be fun.   BTW - here's a cool screenshot (count up the VMs - there's actually 10,994)

UPDATE: Folks, the NetApp side has made some comments that in their view we're not being clear here: http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualstorageguy/    Vaughn is a good guy, so I'm going to take the personal slag (ouch - used car salesman) in stride.   We are replicating the LUN objects in this case, and they are the unit of replication.   If you will have more than roughly 200 VDI VMs per cluster, you need to have several VMs per LUN.   The PowerVDI tool automates this.   These ratios mean it's more accuate to say "you will invariably achieve 100:1 space savings, and may achieve more depending on the scaling goal". (the ratio of source VMs per source LUN needs to be higher at higher scales, and therefore 100:1 is the worst case model).   There is NOTHING intrinsically wrong with NetApp's approach, there is NOTHING intrinsically wrong with EMC's approach.   Each have advantages and disadvantages, and are a function of each vendor trying to solve the customer problem.  The ratio of LUNs to VMs is not 1:1.   We don't do this because we love block - while we can take 96 filesystem snapshots, only 16 of those are writeable, so this approach is better for EMC customers. Just setting the technical record straight.

 

 

• Here are some datapoints from the VDI testing to date:
  • there are limits to how fast ESX and VC can register vms (hostd dies) and how many you can spawn simultaneously - discover the what we've done jointly with VMware on this!
  • XP Booting causes 4000  IOs spread over 20 seconds.   That is 200 IOPS per Client Sustained during the boot….   Multiply that times 100 for a server…… 20,000 IOPS.    Or multiply it out to a moderate environment of 1000 desktops.     200,000 IOPS all directed at the Array.    How much hits the backend vs cache effect?   What is the client experience?  Come and find out!  (BTW this will be a big topic in session PO3824 - "Storage Solutions for Enterprise Consolidation with VMware")
  • BTW - Congratulations Dan for coming in 3rd in VMware's PowerShell contest for the PowerVDI tool we created for this.   The quote was great: "Here's what Lee Holmes, author of the Windows PowerShell Cookbook had to say about it: "Automates a very complex scale-out task, and combines a lot of technology (VMWare, Putty, AD, etc) into a single PowerShell task. Offers interactive use, unattended scripting. For high-scale clusters, this would be an enormous time-saver. This script really demonstrates the super-glue nature of PowerShell."   Dan, you'll laugh man, but a large NetApp customer asked me for the script... wait until we unveil what's coming next!   For those of you wanting this script, note that we've posted it openly for all.
• Deduplication, and simple file-level recovery for Windows/Linux VMs
• NFS and iSCSI deployment best practices
• Joint EMC/VMware Remote/Branch Office solution
• Several of our Partners (Agilsys, Fusionstorm, ICI and others) will be present in the booth to show their integrated solutions.
• We will be demonstrating several things I can't even allude to as they are under an embargo until the event.

We will have 70 people at the event, including myself, but also our engineering teams directly - including Bala Ganeshan and Sheetal Kochavara who are the engineering folks who maintain our DMX and CX best practices, along with our Field VMware Specialists (all VCPs from around the world.  

I don't know what any other vendors are sending equipment wise, but I've sent 13 CX3s, 4 CX4s, 3 NS20s and 2 DMX4-950s.   Those will be in lots of places where you can use them, including the hands-on labs, and in various booths.

I can wait to talk to YOU, and of course with our competitive brothers and sisters!

Oh, and our keynote  (where all are welcome!) is KN EMC on Wednesday at 11:00-12:00. It is a joint VMware/Cisco/EMC session discussing best practices for designing the next generation datacenter with Scott Davis from VMware and Ed Bugnion from Cisco.    It's three nerds on stage - a recipe for trouble!      I asked to do a show release to show what we're doing at the event, but our PR folks told me that unless a senior exec is doing the Keynote (like Dave Hitz is for NetApp - and they did a press release), we don't do those.  I'm just a technical guy, so I don't qualify :-)

Just to show the ridiculousness of it all, NetApp's press event got scheduled at the same time as our keynote.   We intentionally moved ours to avoid conflicting with theirs because we know some people will want to go to both.   I'm going to keep pushing the kind agenda, because I don't think pettiness helps any of us.

Nick says:

"For NetApp this will be the largest event of the year and like everybody else we've been preparing for it for some time now. This year, by far, we'll have the largest presence in the show and we'll be ready to showcase various technologies that solve some very real and hard to solve business problems."

UPDATE: Nick has made a fair clarification of his intent  of the statement, and I trust him in his clarification.

Nick - looking forward to meeting you there and getting to know you.   This is our biggest event of the year also, a bit bigger than EMC World which had 10K customers.   I don't know if we'll have the largest presence at the show, but I can tell you that you are not in a position to make that statement that you will be until after the show ends, right?   Statements that are not true?   I call that Marketing.

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.

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OK, I can't help being a bit petty.

Remember the whole brouhaha about the IDC data back here?  

So, on Sept 8th, Goldman Sachs released their annual survey analyzing IT spending - the "Independent Insight"  here's how THEY describe it.

"This is the 42nd issue in our IT Spending Survey series. Our survey panel is made up of 100 managers with strategic decision-making authority at multinational Fortune 1000 companies."

Ok - so note (I don't want to misrepresent!) note that this is FT1000 (we're doing excellent in all segments - but I don't want to imply anything about other segments, take it what it is, no more, no less)

First, for my VMware brothers and sisters - congrats:

"VMware’s incumbent position at the top of the rankings demonstrates that server virtualization momentum remains alive and well."  (Microsoft - watch out for the wrath of Nick, showing Live Migration when Hyper-V R2 is scheduled for a 2011 release is called Marketing)

Nice to see EMC Software (which excludes VMware) also in the gainer column - our management tools are flying off the shelves, in some part due to their integration with the VI SDK and ESX CIM APIs.

I liked this, of course:

Does that look like it agrees with the IDC data from earlier to you?   Look also at who went up and who went down.

Oh, and then here's this hot off the presses too: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS21411908   The NAS numbers and growth numbers are stunning.

LET ME BE CLEAR: I THINK NO CUSTOMER SHOULD PICK A SOLUTION PURELY BECAUSE OTHERS DO.   Every customer should pick solutions that work for them.   What I am saying is you can't produce those results and outgrowing those that are smaller, and do it across categories if you're not doing something right for your customers.   To believe otherwise is to shrug off reality, and to become one of those "extremeophiles".

Look, I want us to focus on helping the customer.   Nick - I'm good with that if you are - sincerely......

I will be in some NetApp sessions (and in VMware labs, and in other sessions I'm interested in).   I will not heckle - though of course you guys are welcome to in my session (leave my colleagues alone).   I'm respectful and want to learn from you and with you.   But I won't take mudslinging at EMC lying down - in the same way that you guys shouldn't (and don't) when we do it.

ESX 3.5 Update 2 Bug, Express Patch, and Quick Thoughts

Ugh - yesterday was a tough day.   My team is a global team, and the phone started ringing and emails started pouring in as soon as clock ticked over to Aug 12th in Australia.    The only reason I haven't posted earlier was I was up to my eyeballs.

The issue is in this KB here   While it was rough on me as a VMware partner and as EMC as a VMware customer (you can see from my other posts we have thousands of ESX servers, and while production goes through a change control process and is on 3.0.2 and 3.5u1, our solutions validation and demonstration labs update as fast as possible) - people at VMware are in agony.

I don't want to write a big post on this - great ones have been written at some of my favorite places - here, here (Alessandro at his hyperbolic best), and here.

Before you go any further, get the express patches here, and you can see Paul Maritz's comments here.  

I think a lot of people in the blogosphere are extremophiles, defined this way:

""An extremophile is an organism that thrives in and may even require physically or geochemically extreme conditions that are detrimental to the majority of life on Earth."

Many of the comments on VMTN just break your spirit a bit until you harden yourself.    Anger/frustration are reasonable, but anonymous posters and fan-boys, I have little patience or respect for you (though I doubt you care)   Strong feelings are good - passion is good, but don't hide if you feel strongly about your position, and you think it's reasonable.

I'm getting hardened to it a bit - along with Intel, Cisco, Microsoft and other big players, EMC get's a lot of flak from these kind of folks - people want the small guy to beat the big guy, and revel in it, and like slinging mud.

VMware is a weird exception - they are the 800 pound gorilla of their space, but it happened so fast they maintain the "startup" halo around them.   This inevitably changes as growth happens, they solidify themselves as a key in the new IT infrastructure space, and new startups work the david/goliath story humans love.

Here's one person's opinion - no more, no less.

1. This sort of happens to all companies - great/weak, small/large.   I'm not blasé about it, it's a terrible thing.   The real test is how the organization deals with it - are they open, transparent, fast to fix, and afterwards, do they improve their process?
2. If it happens with ANY frequency, regardless of the company, there are serious problems - we are all only as good as our products.
3. The way to reduce the risk to your IT infrastructure from this if it really is inevitable is to implement change control.   A classic example is that Enginuity is currently at 5773, but DMXes ship with 5772 code for now.  The same holds true with all our platforms - there's a window we called a PPR - "Phased Product Release".    Even long established processes, we've STILL been hit (there was a similar date-based bug in the Kerberos code used by our CIFS server a while ago).   Customers implement their own version control on top of what we do.    The only reason customers hasn't been behaving that way with VMware has been that their software quality has been SO good.

Let's look at this case:

1. VMware has clearly been open, transparent, and clearly aggressive with their fix, which was made available late in the same day.
2. This is a first for VMware.   A bad first no doubt, but still a first.   The question is whether the first of more to come, or an isolated incident.   While I may be biased, I think they deserve the benefit of the doubt based on their history of quality.
3. Every customer needs to apply good IT best practices on change control of all parts of their mission-critical infrastructure - VI is no different, and arguably one of the most important ones to do this with - because, like core network switches and storage infrastructure - it's hyper-consolidated.

What was your experience, and what are your thoughts?   Extremophiles welcome, but rationalists desired :-)