VMware Global Alliances Blog

Posted by Jay Workman
HP Alliance Marketing
Director

HP Discover 2012 is just around the corner and as a major sponsor, VMware, will be showcasing our breath of solutions with HP. Las Vegas the week of June 4^th will definitely be the place to be if you want to learn how virtualization and cloud computing solutions from VMware running on HP Converged Infrastructure can take your business to the next level.

Make plans to visit the VMware booth (#406) to learn how you can securely manage your cloud, virtualize your business critical applications, enable secure access for remote workers from virtually any device, save ongoing OpEx with Hybrid Clouds and much more! You’ll also be able to sit in on various booth theater presentations and we’ll have VMware experts on-hand to answer your questions about our joint solutions with HP! Sit in on any three of the VMware business or technical sessions listed below and you’ll be entered into a drawing for one of three new Apple iPad’s to be given away at the show. Details are in your conference attendee bag or available at the VMware booth!

VMware Sessions:

Follow @VMwareEvents on Twitter to receive news and information live from the show floor. We look forward to seeing you at HP Discover 2012 in June!

Posted by Rob Smoot
Sr. Director, Product
Marketing

At EMC World this week, VMware and EMC announced a joint solution that extends vCenter Operations Manager to provide a single view of virtualized infrastructures built on VMware vSphere and EMC VNX series storage. I’m pretty excited about our partnership with EMC and wanted to let our customer community know what we’re doing and why.

First, the why. What problem are we trying to solve? Think of the traditional division of responsibilities between server and storage administrators. Today’s virtualized environments are so dynamic that split decision-making leads to poor performance, capacity planning, and utilization. The reason is obvious: neither group has all the necessary information about the infrastructure and they can’t effectively coordinate their activities fast enough to meet service levels—or the expectations of users. Plus, troubleshooting across siloes is a time-consuming, frustrating nightmare. What’s needed is a unified approach.

And that’s just what this solution provides. The secret is the new EMC VNX Connector for vCenter Operations that feeds VNS storage metrics and customized dashboards into vCenter Operations Manager. This rich stream of information, combined with vSphere deep integration, gives vCenter Operations Manager complete visibility and understanding of the full virtual environment—servers, network and storage.  A good fit for any size enterprise that uses VNX storage, the solution scales up for large cloud environments that are especially dynamic and difficult to manage.

vCenter Operations Manager offers a number of features that help administrators stay in control.  They receive notifications of issues and can take steps to keep the infrastructure running at optimal capacity and efficiency—before problems occur. Customizable dashboards continuously update health, risk, and efficiency scores, providing end-to-end visibility into virtualized environments and cloud operations.  Troubleshooting gets easier, too, because vCenter Operations Manager delivers actionable performance analysis that accelerates the resolution of performance and capacity problems.

But what distinguishes vCenter Operations Manager from other management tools is how it implements proactive monitoring.  It actually has self-learning capabilities—powered by a rich set of patented algorithms—that learn the behavior of the infrastructure and set dynamic thresholds accurately. That means far fewer false messages and more reliable information for decision-making.

vCenter Operations Manager is continuously updated to show current scores for health, risk, and efficiency.

There’s a lot more that I could say, but here’s the bottom line: VMware vCenter Operations manager, with EMC VNX Connector for vCenter Operations, delivers full cross-domain visibility and eliminates operational silos across the virtual and physical infrastructure for VNX-based environments. And that translates directly into rapid problem resolution, optimal resource utilization and superior end-to-end performance.  A future blog will talk about real-world uses. Meanwhile, post your thoughts and questions about the joint EMC-VMware announcement.

Posted by Justin Murray
Systems Engineer

Like everyone else on the planet today, software professionals—developers, QA testers, and group managers—are asking themselves, “How is the cloud going to affect my work?” On the one hand, developers are always looking for better ways to develop, test and integrate code, and they can see how moving certain tasks to the cloud could make their lives easier. At the same time, they need complete control over their rapidly changing code throughout the entire development phase, and question whether cloud-based tools will constrain them. After all, when it comes to the developer’s desktop, freedom of choice is paramount.

Managers share many of their concerns, but also know that strong controls on the iterative check-in/check-out, integration, and testing processes at the back-end are essential to creating a tested, working product. Their wish list is to have the latest tools for development combined with rock-solid version control at the team level.  One company is giving developers and QA testers—and their managers—a great reason to take a hard look at the cloud.  CloudOne, a VMware partner, now offers the IBM Rational tools in a hosted or cloud-based model.

I recently chatted with CEO John McDonald about CloudOne’s hosted offering of IBM Rational ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Team Concert.  Here are highlights of our conversation.

Posted by John McDonald
CEO, CloudOne

Ramp Up Faster with Lower Investment Costs

First, I asked John a basic question: Suppose I’m spinning up a software group and plan to use ClearCase ClearQuest, or Team Concert in my development environment. Why would I choose CloudOne? 

For starters, development groups can benefit from the same economics that are driving enterprises to cloud-based CRM, ERP, and other applications—pay as you go (and grow).  Start with a small Rational environment and scale as you add staff.  Pay a monthly fee instead of investing in server and storage capacity that you might not need for months—or ever. The business model is compelling.

CloudOne also gets you up and running much, much faster—no delays for buying, installing, configuring and deploying servers and software.  You don’t have to devote scarce staff resources to maintaining hardware or installing patches or the million-and-one tasks required to manage a Rational environment.  CloudOne does all that so you can spend your time developing software.

Securing the Crown Jewels

John was once a software manager at IBM, so he knows first-hand the number one concern of development teams: security.  After all, source code is the organization’s crown jewels and managers are understandably reluctant to trust it to someone else.

CloudOne has a unique and effective response, what they call an isolated occupancy service model.  By privatizing the data stream at every layer, they can deploy a secure virtual private cloud (VPC)—in their terminology, an Island.  There’s only one client per Island, so there’s essentially zero chance of anyone compromising their information.  Plus, they use leading-edge WAN technology to ensure a high level of performance. That’s a big part of CloudOne’s success—make it secure, make it perform, and keep the implementation details out of the way.

Making Headway—And Leveraging VMware Technology

Look under the hood of CloudOne and you’ll find VMware vSphere virtualization software and vCenter management tools.  VMware technology allows data center managers to rapidly provision virtual machines for ClearCase and ClearQuest and reclaim those resources quickly when they are no longer needed. It also gives CloudOne maximum flexibility to allocate computing and storage as needed and offers a high level of security.

CloudOne is gaining traction—McDonald’s, Fidelity, and Boeing are customers. Some analysts predict that, in just a few years, hosted applications will generate more revenue than their on-premises counterparts.  That remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt that the cloud is transforming software development. In fact, I’ll be writing soon about new CloudOne innovations for the developer desktop.  You can also learn more about CloudOne’s SaaS approach to delivering Rational software by downloading this white paper.

In the meantime, tell us about your experiences with cloud-based software development---good, bad, or indifferent.

To read more about the business benefits that a customer gained by implementing their Rational environment on the cloud  have a look at this paper.

View all

Share your VMware Instagram experience at EMC World, and win a prize! From May 21-24^th at EMC World in Las Vegas, drop by VMware booth #201 to pick up your “VMware +_______” paddle, which is shown above.

See the instructions on the back of the paddle and upload your photos to VMwares Instagram page – it’s easy! Please be sure to upload using the hashtags #EMCworld and #VMwarePlus, so we can seed your photos into the VMware at EMC World + Instagram page. Three prizes will be awarded for the most creative #VMwarePlus photos.

You can still participate even if you can’t attend EMC World! Since we are collecting all of the #EMCworld photos you can check out the sights of the conference as they unfold in real-time on the VMware Instagram page.

Not an Instagram user?  Just download the app to your smartphone for free. Click here for Andriod users or here for iPhone users to get started.

In the comments section of this post, please let us know how your experience was with #VMwarePlus and if you have any questions.

Be sure to follow @VMwareEvents and @VMware_Partners for more information during the conference.

Posted by Andre Kemp
Principal - SAP Business
Practice, Americas

In a post last week, Elliot Fliesler alluded to some exiting news that we would soon share around our SAP partnership. And where better to finally unveil that news than at Sapphire Now 2012 and here on our alliances blog?  It’s now official: SAP has validated its Sybase High Performance OLTP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) Database on VMware cloud infrastructure.

This validation announcement is notable for a number of reasons:

• It assures customers and prospects running SAPSybase ASE databases as virtual machines that they can achieve high-performance results that match their physical infrastructure.
• It enables customers and prospects to stop worrying about virtualizing business-critical applications—including their most important databases.
• It signals the beginning of further testing by VMware and SAP to support the virtualization of other key SAP products, such as SAP Sybase IQ, Replication Server and SQL Anywhere on VMware cloud infrastructure.

 Commentary from the Show

One of the reasons I enjoy coming to Sapphire every year is to hear firsthand how customers are currently using and prospects are thinking about using our joint solutions and services. Yesterday, I co-presented a session (2307) with one of our customers, Fonterra. This $16B (NZD) dairy company virtualized its entire SAP landscape in 2010 and is now deploying automated disaster recovery on the VMware vSphere^® platform.

From Fonterra and other attendees, I have learned that the launch of vSphere 5 has really done more to unlock the potential value of SAP landscapes. For example, customers virtualizing their SAP landscape with VMware solutions are benefitting from enhanced business agility. They also are able to provide superior service levels and improve asset turnover while lowering TCO.

More customers today are moving from server consolidation (the IT Production phase that begins the VMware Journey) into virtualizing business-critical applications (phase two or the Business Production phase). What this tells us is that a greater number and a wider variety of customers—enterprises and small and midsize businesses (SMBs)—are embracing IT transformation. They are all moving ahead with us on the journey from virtualization to cloud computing and IT as a service—at their own pace.

As I gather new insights from customers during the many meetings that I’m participating in this week, I’m reminded about how far we have come with virtualization and cloud infrastructure. At first, our products helped technical customers to overcome IT challenges and save money. Now, there is tremendous demand from CIOs and line-of-business stakeholders for more extensive services and solutions that move their business applications to a virtualized and cloud environment that solves real business issues. In this way, we are helping to transform enterprises, and this makes me look forward to working even more closely with SAP on solutions that are yet to come. Let us know how virtualizing SAP has made a difference to your business, in the comments section below.

Photo: A packed VMware theatre session at the booth yesterday.

Posted by Dana Vickey
EMC Alliance Marketing
Director

Whether you are just beginning your journey to your Cloud—or well on your way to IT as a service, see how EMC and VMware help customers transform their business and IT. It’s all at EMC World 2012 on May 21-24^th.

Hear Paul Maritz, VMware CEO, speak about the forces shaping Cloud Computing and the next generation IT at his keynote on Tuesday, May 22^nd at 8:30AM.

Learn more about EMC and VMware’s joint solutions that can help accelerate your journey to the cloud. Here is just one solution that VMware will be demoing and discussing at EMC World – End User Computing.

Support Your Transformation into the Post-PC Era with End User Computing

To give end users more freedom while IT maintains control, we recently announced unified solutions for the post-PC era. For example, with the newly available VMware View 5.1, your organization can build on the most effective virtualized desktop infrastructure to further end-user computing goals:

• Simplify – Transform end-user assets from computing silos into centralized managed IT services

• Manage – Create a single, central point for IT to manage end-user access to IT services across the public and private cloud—with control over when an end user has access and at what level of security
  
  
• Connect – Better connect end users to IT services and to other end users with the freedom to choose the best device, application and service to accomplish a task

At EMC World 2012, we’ll show and tell you more about this vision and our journey stages to support them. Join Scott Davis, VMware end-user computing CTO, for his session on VMware View Deployment Architecture Optimizations. Visit the VMware booth for theater presentations about “What’s New in VMware View 5.1.”

And, just for fun, show us your world. Stop by VMware’s booth #201, and grab a paddle to capture images with VMware. Upload to Instagram using  #VMwarePlus and #EMCworld to see your post.VMware will create a collage with all of the images taken and highlight some fun and interesting ones. Keep an eye out on this blog or follow @VMwareEvents for more information.

Looking forward to seeing you at the conference next week.

Posted by Travis Nisbett
Hosting.com, Sr. Product
Manager

There’s a very common saying – disaster happens. Actually, that’s not the saying, but it is close enough. And disasters come in a variety of flavors – everything from people making mistakes to horrible disasters like hurricanes.  In any case, when something happens, you want to be ready for it and be able to continue moving forward. That’s true in our personal lives, and it’s true in the business world.

Drivers have auto insurance for that very reason. Insurance provides the funds necessary to continue to be able to repair a vehicle after an accident. Hopefully, insurance is something you won’t ever need.But it provides peace of mind in the meantime. In some locales, regulatory compliance means that you must carry insurance.

Hosting.com has been working with VMware to provide insurance in the form of Disaster Recovery services to our customers. These services provide organizations with the ability to operate mission-critical business solutions quickly after a disaster interrupts operation. Historically, when a disaster occurred, it took a great deal of time, energy, and resources (both human and capital) to get those business systems back up and running. In addition, there are intangible costs such as loss of reputation and brand equity, as well as impacts on customer satisfaction. Thanks to Cloud Replication, a service for disaster recovery that utilizes VMware’s SRM 5 solution, companies can now have replacement systems operational in a very short period of time (often less than 15 minutes) with very little data loss.

Hopefully, a disaster doesn’t happen and you won’t need to implement the disaster recovery.  But what about that peace of mind? Cloud Replication from Hosting.com includes non-disruptive testing capabilities so that you can test your disaster recovery plans at your leisure - according to a set schedule or whenever your systems change. And just like the situation where some government agencies mandate auto insurance to remain in compliance, some oversight organizations require disaster recovery planning and testing of such plans to remain in compliance.

The Hosting.com Customer Portal makes such testing quick and easy. A single mouse click on the “Test” button starts a test. This causes no interruption to the production system. And the results of the test are readily accessible in a report that shows all recovery steps and their success or failure (see screenshot below). That provides the peace of mind that IT managers want and need.

The following chart provides a picture of the test output in the Hosting.com customer portal. As you can see, this provides a clear illustration of the test results that can be utilized to ensure RTO / RPO targets are being met and also to provide to third parties for compliance purposes.

Cloud Replication from Hosting.com provides disaster recovery services that used to be available only to the largest organizations. The fact is all companies  run mission-critical applications and need a cost-effective way to protect their data. Cloud replication is a fast, secure, and affordable insurance policy.

For more information on Hosting.com’s cloud-based disaster recovery solutions, please register here for the DR to the Cloud webinar on May 17th featuring experts from VMware and Hosting.com or watch the video below from the Hosting.com Cloud Replication webpage.

Posted by Calvin Zito
Social Media Strategist,
HP Storage

We all know about all the great benefits provided by VMware server virtualization. Most people who have implemented vSphere know about some of the storage challenges that you really have to pay attention to when architecting your infrastructure. 

Challenges, we don’t need no stinkin’ challenges!

Eric Siebert, my fellow vExpert at HP, joined me for a podcast to talk about some of those challenges and the technology in HP 3PAR Utility Storage that not only makes it ideal for VMware environments but how HP is able to offer our Get Virtual Guarantee. This is a new program that guarantees customers moving to HP 3PAR from legacy storage will double their VM density. Eric and I also talk about what that means. Here’s a YouTube version of the podcast I did with Eric:

You can download this podcast by doing a right-click and "Save as" here. You can find all of my podcasts at http://bit.ly/ATSB-podcasts OR you can download all of my podcasts from iTunes by clicking here - it will open iTunes and allow you to download all of my recent podcasts. If you have any issues with this second link, paste this into your browser: itpc://recordings.talkshoe.com/rss69339.xml. "itpc" is a special format that opens iTunes and lets you download the podcasts from iTunes.

Want to learn more?

I sure hope so – I’ve known about this program for a few months and have been excited to start talking about it. Here are several resources to learn more:

• Check out my Storify article on the Get Virtual Guarantee Note that Storify doesn’t support Internet Explorer – so use another browser
• I have a blog post on my Around the Storage Block blog that gives more details
• We have a Get Virtual Guarantee website that includes the terms & conditions of the program, program brochure, customer stories, and an analyst white paper focusing on VM density.
• You can find my blog at www.hp.com/storage/blog, follow me on Twitter as @HPStorageGuy  and Eric as @ericsiebert

Posted by Chris Gebhardt
NetApp, Desktop
Virtualization Architect

Today VMware announced the release of VMware View 5.1.  View 5.1 has many new and improved advanced storage features that will help increase storage performance and scale.  In this blog post I will discuss some of the new and noteworthy storage related features.

One of the new technologies in VMware View 5.1 is the View Storage Accelerator (formally known as Content Based Read Cache or CBRC).  This technology helps reduce the amount of data needing to be read from a storage controller during simultaneous read activities such as a boot storm after maintenance or HA event.  With View Storage Accelerator, up to 2GB of memory is allocated from the ESXi host to be used as a host based read cache. Ultimately this helps VMware View environments perform better and scale during boot storm events.  Now you may ask, well what about NetApp and the use of Virtual Storage Tiering, doesn't that solve the boot storm problem. Well yea it absolutely does, but using View Storage Accelerator in conjunction with NetApp’s Virtual Storage Tiering allows customers to scale their View deployments even further, driving down the cost, boosting the performance and ultimately improving the End User Computing experience. 

Here is how it is configured:

1. First log into the VMware View Administrator console.
2. Select View Configuration on the left hand side.
3. Select Servers under View Configuration
4. If you already have a vCenter Server configure click the vCenter Server and click Edit…
5. Here the Edit vCenter Server dialogue box will appear.  Click on the Host Caching tab.
6. In the Host Cache Settings you can enable and disable host caching, change the default host caching size, and override individual host cache sizes.
   
   
   
   
7. After you enable host caching, you can then create your desktop pool.  When you create an automated pool the Advanced Storage Options portion of the Add Pool wizard will appear.
8. Here you will be able to enable host caching on a per pool basis.
   
   
   
   
9. You can also choose if you want to cache just OS disks or OS and persistent disks.
   
   
   
   
10. And also choose what days not to regenerate the cache.  For example, you may not want to regenerate the cache during normal business hours.

The second technology, which I have been waiting for a really long time and am incredibly excited about, is the View Composer API Integration. This VCAI primitive is currently in a Tech Preview status and it allows VMware View to automate the creation of NetApp Zero Cost clones (FlexClone) within the VMware View interface.  In the past, customers had to choose between NetApp clones with VSC provisioning and cloning in manual pools or VMware View Clones in Automated Pools.  There are benefits and drawbacks to both methods.  On one hand the NetApp clones are created at the hardware level (not using copy on write snapshots) and are pre-deduplicated. This method creates desktops that have superb scalability but to create NetApp clones requires two tools: the NetApp Virtual Storage Console and VMware View Administrator.  On the other hand, VMware View Clones in Automated Pools provide excellent management workflows and automation but rely on hypervisor snapshots as underlying the cloning mechanism, which if improperly designed can result in scaling issues. (Note: Proper design refers to the use of technologies that reduce the amount of write IO to the delta file.  Technologies like profile/persona management (User Data Disks) and end user home directories are examples of such technologies that remove IO and allow VMware Linked cones to scale.)

VCAI leverages NetApp’s native cloning capability – without requiring VSC - to improve desktop scalability and provisioning times in View Composer.

Here is a brief demo of how this cloning works. 

Today the View Composer API Integrations are available as a Technology Preview when using VMware View 5.1, vSphere 5.0, the ESXi VIB for VCAI and NFS on NetApp Data ONTAP 8.1 Cluster Mode.

Some other storage related features worth noting: Customizable View Composer disposable disk driver letter and support up to 32 (increased from 8) host in a cluster when using Network Attached Storage (NFS).

Also a shameless plug for one of my favorite works…

If you are interested in reading more on VMware View workloads, my colleague, Chad Morganstern, and I have done a considerable amount of work to try to better understand the lifecycle of a Virtual Desktop and how Virtual Storage Tiering can boost performance, allowing customers to size for steady state. https://communities.netapp.com/community/netapp-blogs/virtualization/blog/2011/09/06/netapp-and-vmware-view-5000-seat-performance-report

Posted by Vittorio Viarengo
VP, Desktop Product
Marketing

There is no doubt about it, the post-PC era is here. More than a million mobile devices ship everyday, and end-users are bringing these personal devices with new applications into the enterprise—whether IT teams like it or not. We understand this new reality. That’s why our end-user computing vision focuses on giving end users freedom, while allowing IT to maintain control.

A key element of our strategy in building the enterprise platform for the post-PC era is to bring legacy applications forward using desktop virtualization. Yet, one of our biggest challenges was how to handle unified communications in the virtual desktop. I’m pleased to say that together with Cisco, we’ve solved this issue.

Cisco and VMware have partnered to provide desktop delivery as a service with the rich multimedia experience end users expect and the control IT requires. I recently caught up with Jeff Platon, senior director of engineering at Cisco, to hear about how customers are using our combined solution.

Cisco VXI with VMware View minimizes the cost of infrastructure and improves ROI without sacrificing performance, according to a recent Principled Technologies Test Report.

To support enterprises embracing our joint solution on their journey to greater end-user productivity and IT agility, a new Cisco Validated Design is available for Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure 2.5 Implementing VMware View 5.

Together with Cisco, we continue to tighten our integrations to maximize the value of our solutions. Post a comment letting us know how our joint solutions are working for you.