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Cloud Real-Estate: Build vs. Rent

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This past month I had an opportunity to present a couple of sessions at the South Florida VMUG User Conference on behalf of VMware. The VMUG leadership and RoundTower put on a terrific conference that drew ~450 attendees and ~40 vendors in the Exchange.

My second session of the day was titled “Cloud Real Estate: Build vs. Rent.” No, this session wasn’t about foreclosures or how to short sale your cloud. Instead, this session was focused on the three models to consume a VMware vCloud.

So, lets dive it a talk about the theme for this prevention.

Across the industry, IT organizations struggle to keep up with the traditional “reactive-mode” that has characterized the delivery model for decades. No matters the size of the organization, there is intense pressure to quickly deliver the infrastructure and services needed to acceleration business innovation. When organizations are unable to respond with speed and agility innovation is stifled, opportunities are lost and catalysts for ungoverned “shadow-IT” operations take form. Each of these produce quantifiable business risk that is untenable.

Even while many of these IT organizations realize that they must address becoming a strategic business enabler rather that an impediment to innovation there is confusion about how to best deploy and consume a cloud. They are turning to their strategic, trusted vendors to guide them on their path.

VMware, for example, has been building clouds over the past three years. We started with some of the biggest names in cloud services. As a result, we can provide customers several options that are interoperable, flexible and provide assured controls.

There are three way to consume a VMware vCloud in a comprehensive model:

  • The Private Cloud ~ On Premise, Built with VMware vCloud Suite
  • The Partner Cloud ~ VMware vCloud Partner Ecosystem
  • VMware vCloud Hybrid Service ~ VMware Branded and Operated Cloud Coming in 2013

This model provides organizations the ability to the flexibility, security and assurance for all business workloads. Think of it way, you can Build, Rent and/or Integrate your business into the Hybrid Cloud.

This model breaks up the supply’s of infrastructure resources from the demand generated by your business or the market. Infrastructure resources ~ compute, storage and network ~ are delivered with security and compliance controls. Business workloads are encapsulated in virtual machines with standard configurations.

Behind the veil is a common platform, a common management and a common security model provided through VMware technology. It’s the same technology stack that is used to build the on-premise private cloud, the partner based public cloud and our own cloud service in a consistent and flexible manner ~ the vCloud Suite.

“Commodity” public cloud service certainly offer extremely fast access to resources but not necessarily with performance, security and hybrid workload portability.

So, the characteristics of the enterprise hybrid cloud delivers the best of both worlds:

  • Agility ~ Simple, on-demand provisioning and scaling of cloud resources with predictable, consistent SLAs.
  • Trust ~ Standards based security for workloads and users with assured compliance.
  • Extension ~ Bridge the on-premise private cloud outside of your own datacenter to a globally consistent service that is compatible with your business’s workloads with little-to-zero change.

As mentioned prior, the key is the technology stack. VMware believes that the underpinning architecture for the cloud, especially the Hybrid Cloud, is the Software-Defined Data Center (“SDDC”.)

VMware is extending the cloud with the technology stack that provides a common platform, common management, common orchestration and automation, common security and unified security ~ plus a single support call.

So, why the drive to the the hybrid cloud model?

Simply put, there is an chasm that has grown between the business and IT. The business requires speed, agility and the ability to innovate to be competitive in their markets. IT on the other hand is clearly focused on maintaining a reliable, secure infrastructure. IT needs to change their role from managers technology to a strategic enablers of business services while business workloads modernize to consume the full potential of the cloud.

From a top-down perspective, embracing the hybrid cloud provides the business the agility they need to be competitive. Allowing the business to deploy application workloads anywhere.

From a bottom-up perspective, It is able to provide agility to the business, but in an environment that they can operated with assure security, governance and compliance standards.

It’s a win-win situation for the business and for IT. And only one that VMware can deliver.

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The preceding is a re-post from Ryan Johnson’s blog, 10:30 AM.

Hidden benefits of virtualisation – reboot time and the impact on server availability and regular operations

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By guest blogger, Christian Wickham, Technical Account Manager, South Australia and Northern Territory, and Local Government and Councils in Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales at VMware Australia and New Zealand

Hidden benefits of virtualisation – reboot time and the impact on server availability and regular operations

Within VMware we are often focussing on the latest and greatest features and capabilities offered by all our newest software. Of course, we are always driving forward and the next version’s enhancements and benefits are forefront of our minds – but there are still some people out there who are just starting on their virtualisation journey, or have taught themselves how to use VMware products and are missing out on some of the many benefits. The advantages offered by our premium versions of vSphere, such as Enterprise Plus and the vCloud Suite editions, offer exceptional advances for businesses and enterprises, but some smaller businesses are unable to afford these editions – particularly at the start.

Some benefits of virtualisation, particularly with vSphere, are inherent and included in all versions – and deliver significant savings in both money and time. In this series, I will outline some of the simple benefits that are often not highlighted to new users of virtualisation, but well known to (most) existing users.

How long does it take you to boot up a server? I don’t just mean the time it takes to start Windows or Linux, I mean the time it takes the hardware to begin starting Windows. Next time you reboot a physical server, go and time it – you won’t realise how long it really takes.

You need to consider that server manufacturers rarely produce every single component within their chassis. The big OEM hardware vendors of HP / IBM / Dell / Cisco / Fujitsu all purchase components from other ODM manufacturers like Broadcom, LSI, Emulex, Intel and many others. The OEMs may re-badge or rename the devices, but they are still independent hardware underneath.

When a physical server boots up from cold (that is, not a reboot), then it will perform various system checks such as scanning RAM for faults, scanning the PCI bus for devices and then loading it’s BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). Depending on the hardware manufacturer, this might then progress to initialising on-motherboard sensors such as; temperature sensors, fan speed sensors, embedded and out of band management (for example; HP’s iLO, Dell’s iDRAC, IBM’s RSA). After this, devices connected to the PCI bus will then initialise, not just add-in cards but also on motherboard components. As I mentioned above, these often are manufactured by independent vendors, they frequently will have their own ‘advertising’ or declaring their product name and version / copyright details, and also importantly, offer a chance for the user to press a key combination to allow access to an embedded management interface or configuration menu. To give the person accessing these systems time to press the key combination, a delay is put in to the startup sequence – this is frustratingly quick when you want to use it, and frustratingly slow the other 99% of the time when you don’t need to use it! If you have a server with multiple add-in cards or embedded resources, 5-10 seconds per device can really add up.

After all of this, only then does the server start to boot up Windows (or Linux). From a cold boot, I have seen servers take 45 minutes. From a warm boot (that is, a reset or reboot from a server that was running), it can be shorter, although I have seen this take nearly 20 minutes. All this before it even starts to do anything “useful”. Don’t be tricked by being able to ping a physical server – remember that WOL (Wake On LAN) will have an IP address and respond even when a server is “off”.

In steps virtualisation. With a virtual machine, there are no ODMs and no hardware devices to initialise, no copyright announcements and delays to press a key combination. In fact, with vSphere there is an option on each virtual machine to delay the boot up sequence (and one to enter the BIOS setup screen) before starting Windows/Linux. By default of course this is set to zero milliseconds in vSphere. Think of this for each time you apply a Windows update or make a change to Windows settings that requires a reboot. If you have ten servers you need to reboot, this could be saving you 200 minutes a month of just sitting there and watching a server begin to boot – may not sound like much, but when your staff are doing this out of hours (after all, a reboot is taking a server offline), it all adds up.

But wait, there’s more! Not just some steak knives, but other virtualisation benefits that speed up boot time. Remember all those independent hardware components in most servers? Well, each one needs its own drivers to let the operating system be able to use them, its own management software to allow you to configure or monitor them – and as the devices are often manufactured by differing vendors, they will often be independent and need their own resources, even if they are re-badged to match the label on the front of the server. So, whilst your operating system is booting, part of the process is to load all this software into memory, some of it may be unloaded again, but it all goes to further delay boot time.

Unfortunately this step is often forgotten by people when they perform a physical to virtual conversion (P2V) with software such as VMware Converter. Companies may end up with a virtual server that is slower to boot than similarly configured VMs, and it’s because the physical hardware drivers are still installed and loading – then failing as the device is not present and then unloading. I have seen that as soon as these devices, drivers and management tools are uninstalled, the VM starts (and runs) faster.

So – how long does it take a virtual machine to boot in vSphere? In my lab, a bare Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine boots (from powered off to the Ctrl-Alt-Del prompt) in 28 seconds, using SATA 7200 RPM disks on an NFS datastore. With SAS or a Solid State Disk, this would be even faster.

So, consider the savings in time for your server administrators for Windows patch Tuesday. Consider the savings in productivity when a Windows server has a problem and needs to be rebooted during the work day. Consider the savings in overtime and out of hours work needed to perform maintenance or other tasks that need a reboot. Although I am not recommending this approach, some of my customers are happy to reboot less critical servers during the day because it happens so fast that users don’t notice. When servers reboot themselves and no-one notices, then you need to ensure that systems are monitored and administrators are alerted to outages.

If you have a very small number of servers in your site and have thought that this rules out virtualisation, consider the savings in reboot time as a factor. I have customers running an ESXi host in a branch office where there is only one VM running. The reboot time for the VM is fast, faster than if it was installed directly onto the server. There are many other benefits (such as hardware abstraction, portability, snapshots etc) but that is for another time…

For clusters enabled with vSphere HA (which is available on all licenses above the basic ‘Essentials’ or the free edition), during a host outage, VMs that were on the unavailable host will automatically be started on surviving hosts just as quickly – although depending upon the installed application(s) and configuration of the server where it might attempt to do disk checks or application recovery or consistency checks.

Factor this in to your considerations of using other technologies such as Microsoft Failover Clustering when calculating uptime capabilities;

  • Do a test on a VM that you need to maximise uptime for – I will use the example of a Microsoft SQL server on Windows
  • Power on the VM from cold, whilst at the same time attempting connection to the SQL service with a client – you should get a result of a clean boot time.
  • Now take a SQL cluster and perform a ‘move resource’ action on the resource group – time how long between losing connection with a SQL client and the service returning.
  • At this stage, you can evaluate if it is quicker to boot up a SQL server or to stop and then restart SQL services on another node within a Failover SQL cluster.
  • You can also time how long it takes to simply restart a service on a running server – if you choose one with some dependencies, sometimes this itself can be slower than a reboot (which, ironically, includes starting the same service!).
  • Go a bit further and do an unexpected reboot on a running SQL server – in vSphere this is done with the “Reset” option to perform a power cycle. Time how long it takes to boot and recover so that a SQL client can connect. This test can be risky for data, so don’t do this on a production system, and ensure you have recoverable backups of any data!
  • Then perform the same with a SQL failover cluster node – perform a power cycle of the node that is running a SQL instance, time how long before the SQL service responds on another node. Don’t do this through the Cluster Manager, but instead force a failure in another way such as a power cycle – Microsoft Failover Clustering performs “LooksAlive” checks every 5 seconds and the “IsAlive” check is every 30 seconds – it takes around 10 seconds before the Microsoft Failover Cluster will start to do it’s failover actions.

It goes without saying that this is a test and one way to provide an evaluation in your own environment of the relative benefits of VMware HA against other products such as Microsoft Failover Clustering. Your own experience will vary depending on your application and it’s configuration – particularly when databases are large or have transactions outstanding, that’s why figures here cannot be taken as accurate.

In my testing, a Clustered SQL Node failure took 37 seconds to return to service after a failure. In a similar test of a non-clustered SQL server using just HA, it was 43 seconds before it returned to service. I must stress that the SQL servers were not 100% identical and not under load and the test database was benign and basic, and the timing was subject to my reaction time to start and stop – but this is an indication for you to consider. My once-off test showed only 6 seconds of improvement in recovery time by using MSCS over vSphere HA – and although I am experienced with setting up MSCS and SQL clusters, I left all settings at default and did not perform any tuning.

Your business may demand “zero downtime” for their application, and software vendors may recommend products such as Microsoft Failover Clustering, but when you are armed with the facts from your environment related to the capabilities offered by VMware HA against more complicated (and fragile) alternatives, you can save a lot of money and heartache in simply using the built in capabilities – VMware HA is, after all, enabled just with a single check box.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/partners/oracle/Oracle_Databases_on_VMware_-_High_Availability_Guidelines.pdf

 

Introducing VMware vCenter™ Support Assistant™ 5.1

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Back in September we started a Beta Program for the VMware vCenter Support Assistant with our VMware TAM Program customers and we later extended the program to the public with great community response.

Today, VMware is very pleased to announce that VMware vCenter Support Assistant 5.1 is now generally available to the public.

VMware vCenter Support Assistant 5.1 is a free, downloadable plug-in for VMware vCenter Server. It provides an easy-to-use, secure, one-stop shop both for creating and managing support requests and generating and uploading logs. It is deployed as a virtual appliance and integrates with VMware vCenter Server as a plug-in that can be accessed using either the VMware vSphere Client or the VMware vSphere Web Client.

Check out this short Demo!

OK you say? Where are the goods? Jump right in with these links, or read on for a more in-depth introduction.

Figure 1: VMware vCenter Support Assistant Conceptual View.

Easily open or view the status of any existing support request, add comments, reply to support engineer queries, and attach diagnostic information or other files such as screenshots. It also includes a VMware Knowledge Base search capability, which enables you to resolve common issues more rapidly. The vCenter Support Assistant plug-in helps you gather diagnostic information up front from your vSphere environment that VMware Technical Support finds most useful.

You can also use VMware vCenter Support Assistant to file support requests for any product that you already have support entitlement for whether that entitlement is by subscription, or paid for incident packs. With just a few clicks, VMware vCenter Support Assistant can directly generate log support bundles from the following products:

VMware vCenter Server

  • 5.1*
  • 5.0*
  • 4.1

* Includes both VMware vCenter Server for Windows and the VMware vCenter Server Appliance.

VMware vSphere (ESX or ESXi)

  • 5.1
  • 5.0
  • 4.1

NOTES: Access to public Internet is not required for the VMware vCenter Server, but is required for the VMware vCenter Support Assistant virtual appliance and the vSphere Client. Refer to the System Requirements.

All files are sent securely using SSL.

Since log files may contain sensitive, confidential or personal information, VMware vCenter Support Assistant provides the optional capability to scrub logs prior to submission.

Technical Guide

The following guide is depicted using the VMware vSphere Client; however, VMware vCenter Support Assistant plug-in also works with VMware vSphere Web Client introduced in VMware vSphere 5.1

Accessing VMware vCenter Support Assistant

Once deployed and registered, VMware vCenter Support Assistant will appear under the Solutions and Applications in the Home tab in the vSphere Client. The Support Assistant plug-in will also appear under “Classic Solutions” in the VMware Web Client.

Figure 2: VMware vCenter Support Assistant in Solutions and Applications.

Once VMware vCenter Support Assistant is selected, the solution will present a login screen. This login screen allows you the user to access My VMware directly from the solution, create a case, review or update a case, and attach diagnostics or other attachments.

Figure 3: Login to My VMware.

Once logged in, the user will have the option to View or Create a Technical Support Request through VMware vCenter Support Assistant. Creating a New Technical Support Case. Let’s take a moment to create a new Technical Support Request by selecting “Create a New SR.” Once you login, you will be checked against your entitlements and allowed to open a Service Request against all the eligible products. You can also review and update a Support Request and attach log support bundles or other attachments.

Figure 4: View or Create a Technical Support Request.

After selecting the option to create a new Technical Support Request, the user is prompted to select the account associated with their My VMware account as well as the product related to the issue.

Figure 5: Select Account and Product.

Once the account and product are selected, the user is prompted to describe the problem. Suggested KB Articles, will appear for the user as they do on My VMware.

Figure 6: Describe the Problem and Suggest Resources.

Next, the user is prompted to provide the severity level based on business impact, category, detailed description, etc. in the Contact and Support Request Details.

Figure 7: Contact and Support Request Details.

Once the creation of the Technical Support Request is completed the user receives a on-screen confirmation with a case number.

Figure 8: Create Support Request Confirmation

Uploading Diagnostics

After the new Technical Support Request is created, the user is prompted to either upload or finish the task. It is highly recommended that the user collects and uploads the diagnostics immediately and attaches them to the case to expedite support. So, let’s select “Yes – Upload” from the Create Support Request Confirmation to initiate the collection from the desired hosts.

Figure 9: Select Hosts.

Next, the user is prompted to select the System Logs desired for the diagnostics bundle as well as the option to collect performance data.

Figure 10: Select System Logs and Performance Data Option.

Once the user has selected the hosts and system logs, they are asked to confirm and initiate the upload procedure. This upload is run in the background and all transfers are sent via HTTPS to VMware from the VMware vCenter Support Assistant virtual appliance.

Figure 11: Confirm and Initiate Upload.

Once the user selects to start the collection and upload, the following dialogue is presented. This dialogue presents the status of the collection request for the support request. User can close this dialogue window by clicking the “X” on the window top right, but the collection and upload will continue as a background process, which we will show in a moment. If the dialogue remains open and the collection and upload complete, the user will be prompted with a completion status dialogue.

Figure 12: Log Collection Progress.

The collection and upload progress can also be checked by selecting “Upload Activity” in the top right navigation. This will display the status, start and end date/time on all recorded uploads.

Figure 13: Upload Activity.

Viewing Technical Support Requests

Let’s take moment to view and update an existing Technical Support Request by selecting “View / Modify Existing SR” from VMware vCenter Support Assistant solution home screen.

Figure 14: View or Create a Technical Support Request.

After selecting “View / Modify Existing SR” the user is displayed a list of Technical Support Requests linked to their My VMware account. Notice that Support Request 12217135709 created earlier is listed and highlighted. The user is able to view the details of the case, initiate a diagnostics collection and add attachments to cases with ease.

Figure 15: Select Support Request.Get Details, Collect/Upload Diagnostics and Add Attachments.

By selecting “Details” the user is able to view the details of the case as well as add additional comments directly from VMware vCenter Support Assistant.

Cool Feature – Notice that VMware vCenter Support Assistant adds a comment to the case notes confirming the upload of the diagnostics to VMware.

Figure 16: Support Request Details.

By selecting “Upload Attachment” after selecting a case from the Select Support Case screen, the user can provide additional information to the engineers, such as screenshots, diagrams or other logs.

Figure 17: Add Attachments.

 

 

TAM Presentation at vForum Sydney 2012

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Sydney vForum 2012 was a great success. This is the 4th vForum I have attended as an employee of VMware and I look forward to this annual event every year. The chance to meet our customers in such a great environment and spent 2 days just talking VMware for me is an excellent experience. This year I was given the opportunity to do a presentation at the event. The presentation was also scheduled as part of the new All Access Pass (AAP) stream which meant that it was for paying customers only.

The session time unfortunately was not a good one for me and I suspect that this was due to scheduling requirements with so many sessions and thousands of deleggates to cater for. The actual session however went very well. I had around 15 people in the session. While this might not sound like a lot it is more than I expected to get at this time of the day, as I mentioned the session was not at a convenient time, and also the specific nature of the session.

I presented the session focusing on 3 areas. Firstly an introduction to the TAM and the TAM program, the specifics of the program and the different types of offerings available. I then moved into a section focusing on one of the deliverables that are available as a TAM customer which is a customised report that is done for the customer on a regular basis. This report highlights many of the functions and services that we do as a TAM for our customers so was particularly interesting to show. The final part of the session was to put this all together and highlight the value a TAM brings to your organisation and why you might consider joining the program.

I was very pleased with this session and the participation and attendance and I hope that those that did attend got something out of it. I am certainly looking forward to next year when hopefully I get to present again to our valued customers.

TAM Day Brisbane 2012 Wrap Up

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Each year in Brisbane, Australia we host an event for our TAM customers to present to them the newest VMware solutions and thank them from the TAM program. This year we had another fantastic event in Brisbane with all of our customers represented. The participants were all kept well fed and hydrated with coffee, tea and cold drinks throughout the day as well as a fantastic lunch and chocolates and sweets to keep the sugar levels up.

When the event was over we asked our customers to rate the event and we had the highest rating we have received in the 4 years of running this event a 4.69 out of 5 rating which we are very proud of. We also gave a way a bunch of prizes including a seat on a VMware course, an iPad, a VMware T-Shirt and a movie gift voucher, all of which were enthusiastically received.

I look forward to the event again next year, thanks to all the presenters, our sponsors for the venue and of course our TAM customers, without you, well I wouldn’t have a job :)

Neil Isserow – TAM (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia)

Event Pictures: https://www.icloud.com/journal/#4;CAEQARoQMWh_KLMbpOBuPyIquTfrnw;53AB1285-0C9F-4B30-8A3A-28E786CA8D22

Introducing the VMware vCenter Support Assistant Beta

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Sign-up and request access to the VMware vCenter Support Assistant beta program.

OVERVIEW

The VMware vCenter Support Assistant streamlines access and saves you time and effort by integrating the creation of VMware Technical Support Requests and the attachment of support diagnostic information within a single application.

You can also use the VMware vCenter Support Assistant to file support requests for any product that you already have support entitlement for – whether that entitlement is via subscription, or paid‐for incident packs

The VMware vCenter Support Assistant is deployed as a virtual appliance and Integrates with VMware vCenter Server as a plug‐in that can be accessed using either the VMware vSphere Client or the VMware vSphere Web Client. The Support Assistant allows the user to collect and upload diagnostic information from both the VMware vCenter Server and vSphere hosts, in addition to creating and viewing existing Technical Support Requests.


Figure 1: VMware vCenter Support Assistant Conceptual View

SUPPORTED PRODUCTS

VMware vCenter Server: 5.1*, 5.0* and 4.1
VMware vSphere: 5.1, 5.0 and 4.1 (ESX/ESXi)

* Includes both VMware vCenter Server for Windows and the VMware vCenter Server Appliance.

NOTE: Internet access is not required for the VMware vCenter Server, but required for the VMware vCenter Support Assistant virtual appliance and vSphere Client. All files are sent using HTTPS.

Support Assistant can also help you to track and manage your existing Technical Support Requests. Easily view the status of any existing Support Request, add comments, reply to support engineer queries, and select further diagnostic information or other files to upload, such as screenshots.

THE BETA PROGRAM

What is the Beta Program?

The beta program is a highly‐valued way for VMware to get direct feedback from customers on our products and systems. In return, customers are able to experience our products before they are released publicly, and have the opportunity to shape the GA product and future roadmap.

How do I participate?

Sign-up and request access to the VMware vCenter Support Assistant beta program.

Shortly after you notify us of your interest in participating, you will receive an invite to a private “Support Assistant Beta Community”. Please note that invitations can take up to 24 hours to be processed.

Both the product download and installation instructions will be available once you log in to this private community.

What should I do with the Beta Product?

Simply use Support Assistant to file your technical support requests, instead of calling in or using my.vmware.com. Explore the capabilities for generating and attaching diagnostic information and attaching other files, such as screenshots.

TECHNICAL PREVIEW

The following preview is depicted using the VMware vSphere Client; however, the VMware vCenter Support Assistant plugin-in also works with the VMware vSphere Web Client introduced in VMware vSphere 5.1.

Accessing the VMware vCenter Support Assistant

Once deployed and registered, the VMware vCenter Support Assistant will appear under the Solutions and Applications in the VMware vSphere Client.

Figure 2: VMware vCenter Support Assistant in Solutions and Applications

Once the VMware vCenter Support Assistant is selected, the solution will present a login screen. This login screen allows you the user to access My VMware directly from the solution, create a case, review or update a case and attach diagnostics or other attachements.

Figure 3: Login to My VMware

Once you are logged, the user will have the option to View or Create a Technical Support Request through the VMware vCenter Support Assistant.

Creating a New Technical Support Case

Let’s take moment to create a new Technical Support Request by selecting “Create a New SR.”

Figure 4: View or Create a Technical Support Request

After selecting the option to create a new Technical Support Request, the user is prompted to select the account associated with their My VMware account as well as the product related to the issue.

Figure 5: Select Account and Product

Once the account and product are selected, the user is prompted to describe the problem . Suggested Resources, such as KB Articles, will appear for the user as they do on My VMware.

Figure 6: Describe the Problem and Suggested Resources

Next, the user is prompted to provide the severity level based on business impact, category, detailed description, etc in the Contact and Support Request Details.

Figure 7: Contact and Support Request Details.

Once the creation of the Technical Support Request is completed the user receives a on-screen confirmation with the case number.


Figure 8: Create Support Request Confirmation

Uploading Diagnostics

After the new Technical Support Request is created, the user is prompted to either upload or finish the task. It is highly recommended that the user collection and upload the diagnostics immediately and attach them to the case to expedite support.

So, let’s select “Yes – Upload” from the Create Support Request Confirmation to initiated the collection from the desired hosts.

Figure 9: Select Hosts

Next, the user is prompted to select the System Logs desired for the diagnostics bundle as well as the option to collect performance data.

Figure 10: Select System Logs and Performance Data Option

Once the user has selected the hosts and system logs, they are asked to confirm and initiate the upload procedures. This upload is run in the background and all transfers are sent via HTTPS to VMware from the VMware vCenter Support Assistant virtual appliance.

Figure 11: Confirm and Initiate Upload

Once the user selects to start the collection and upload the following dialogue is presented. This dialogue presents the status of the collection request for the support request. This dialogue can be closed with the “X” and the collection and upload will continue as a background process, which we will show in a moment.  If the dialogue remains open and collection and upload complete, the user will be prompted with a completion status dialogue.

Figure 12: Log Collection Progress

The collection and upload progress can also be checked by selecting “Upload Activity” in the top right navigation. This will display the status, start and end date/time on all recorded uploads.

Figure 13: Upload Activity

Viewing Technical Support Requests 

Let’s take moment to view and update an existing Technical Support Request by selecting “View / Modify Existing SR” from the VMware vCenter Support Assistant solution home screen.

Figure 14: View or Create a Technical Support Request

After selecting ”View / Modify Existing SR” the user is displayed a list of Technical Support Requests linked to their My VMware account. Notice that Support Request 12217135709 created earlier is listed and highlighted. The user is able to view the details of the case, initiated a diagnostics collection and add attachements to cases with ease.

Figure 15: Select Support Request. Get Details, Collect/Upload Diagnostics and Add Attachements.

By selecting “Details” the user is able to view the details of the case as well as add additional comments directly from the VMware vCenter Support Assistant.

Cool Feature - Notice that the VMware vCenter Support Assistant adds a comment to the case notes confirming the upload of the diagnostics to VMware.

Figure 16: Support Request Details

By selecting “Upload Attachement” after selecting a case from the Select Support Case screen, the user can provide additional information to the engineers, such as, screenshots, diagrams or other logs.

Figure 17: Add Attachements

We encourage our VMware TAM Program customers to contact your Technical Account Manager and join the beta program to experience this streamlined support and provide your valuable feedback on the solution capabilities.

Oracle Workloads and the Total Cost of Ownership

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VMware has recently participated in development of a Total Cost of Ownership tool that produces a quick estimate of the licensing and support savings that could result from virtualizing your Oracle databases on VMware vSphere.

We’ve seen customers’ virtualization progress stall when it comes to virtualization of Oracle workloads. This could be due to lack of support from an organization’s DBA’s, or simply a sense that the risk of virtualizing these workloads exceeds the potential benefits.  These issues can be overcome by showing the cost of running non-consolidated databases on physical servers.  Oracle costs ~$23,500 per core to license on Intel CPUs.  Annual support adds another ~$10,000 per core every year.  While the license fee may be significantly discounted, service rarely is.

With these kind ofnumbers, eliminating even a few servers licensed for Oracle through consolidation can turn into big savings for an organization.  Even for customers with an “all you can eat” Oracle ELA, managing the rapid growth of Oracle servers can be very valuable when renewal comes around.  These savings could be used for more strategic, business differentiating initiatives rather than maintaining the status quo year over year.

The Total Cost of Ownership tool is designed to serve as a discovery aid prior to a VMware Professional Services engagement. The tool defines and presents the significant savings available when virtualizing Oracle workloads on VMware vSphere. The results will lead to an Oracle-focused Licensing Assessment to define detailed savings and how to achieve them, paid for by the savings opportunity.

As your strategic advisor, your VMware Technical Account Manager can assist you with a first-pass estimate of savings available from consolidating your Oracle workloads on VMware vSphere. If the numbers from that estimate are compelling to you and your organization, your VMware Technical Account Manager can assist you in engaging VMware Professional Services for the next lap of the journey.

If you’d like to learn more about VMware’s Oracle Total Cost of Ownership tool and the Oracle-focused Licensing Assessment, contact your Technical Account Manager.

VMworld 2012 – Day Three Recap

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Day three of VMworld 2012 continued with an the breakout sessions. The VMware TAM Program’s TAM Customer Central continued to provide exclusive access to VMware product managers and experts, in-depth technical deep dives and discussions, product road maps, technical previews, demos and more for our program customers.

The day ended with the VMworld 2012 Party of course. This year’s party incorporated three different events.

  • The Sports Lab - This lab had 10 larger than life screens showing the Sports games from the week, pool tables, foosball, air hockey and all of your other favorite Sports Bar Games.
  • The Hi Tech Lab - This lab had the latest and coolest video gaming.
  • The Music Lab -  The VMware band, Elastic Sky opened the night up for the double-header rock concert that ended with the closing act of the party – Jon Bon Jovi and The Kings of Suburbia!
VMworld 2012 Party

Photo compliments of Scott Sauer, VMware Senior Systems Engineer

VMworld 2012 Top 10 Sessions

The Top 10 Sessions for VMworld 2012 have been chosen by our conference attendees and this year we’ve made the presentations and videos publicly available to everyone!

NET2207: VMware vSphere Distributed Switch—Technical Deep Dive
Speaker: Jason Nash, Varrow

While the VMware vSphere® Distributed Switch has been around since vSphere 4, vSphere 4.1 and 5.0 have added a number of enhancements. This session will provide a technical deep dive into the vSphere Distributed Switch, including design and deployment considerations, configuration, migration steps, tuning and troubleshooting. Special attention will be paid to migrating an existing production environment from the standard vSwitch to the vSphere Distributed Switch with little or no disruption. Extended features such as network I/O control, network resource pools, and load-based teaming will be discussed in depth, with use cases and recommendations given. Finally, methods and tools for troubleshooting network connectivity and performance problems will also be highlighted. A live lab environment will be included, making for a very interactive session.

STO2980: vSphere 5 Storage Best Practices
Speakers: Chad Sakac, EMC Corporation, Vaughn Stewart, NetApp

Storage industry experts will discuss a number of best practices for connecting vSphere 5 to SAN & NAS storage platforms with a focus on performance, availability and manageability.

VSP1168: Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure
Speakers: David Hill, VMware Inc, Aidan Dalgleish, VMware Inc, Rawlinson Rivera, VMware Inc, Duncan Epping, VMware Inc, Chris Colotti, VMware Inc.

This session will discuss the various design considerations when architecting the foundation for every solid cloud environment: VMware vSphere® 5.0. We will start with sizing and scaling and end with some operational guidance. Different examples will be used to show the impact design considerations can have on the availability of your services.

VSP1800: vSphere Performance Best Practices
Speaker: Peter Boone, VMware Inc.

In this GSS Customer Support Day session attendees will be given an overview of the most common performance problems in vSphere environments today.

VSP2825: DRS: Advanced Concepts, Best Practices and Future Directions
Speakers: Ajay Gulati, VMware Inc, Aashish Parikh, VMware Inc

VMware DRS is one of the flagship features of VMware vSphere that provides efficient and zero-touch management of resources in virtual environments. It helps users with the automatic initial placement and load-balancing of VMs on ESX hosts based on VM demands and host capacities while respecting user-specified constraints and resource controls. In this session, Aashish Parikh and Ajay Gulati from the DRS engineering team will present an insider’s view of key concepts, specific use cases and advanced options. Learn about important resource pool recipes and become a power-user; keep your VMs happy by discovering the importance of VM resource entitlements; learn to avoid common pitfalls and effectively load-balance your clusters with new, advanced features and more. Finally, this session will give you a sneak peek into DRS labs to check out some bleeding-edge features under consideration that add new functionality and address customer pain-points.

VSP1683: VMware vSphere Cluster Resource Pools Best Practices
Speakers: Rawlinson Rivera, VMware Inc, Frank Denneman, VMware Inc

In this session Frank Denneman and Rawlinson Rivera will cover and explain in great detail what to consider when using resource pool inside a VMware vSphere® cluster. Introducing the concept of resource pools can affect virtual machine performance and overall resource management in virtual infrastructures. Join Frank and Rawlinson and discover both common pitfalls and best practices of resource pool design. This session is a must for anyone implementing resource pools who wants to maximize their cluster and vSphere resource designs.

STO1430: Tracking Down Storage Performance Issues: A Customer’s Perspective
Speakers: Keith Aasen, NetApp, Scott Elliott, Christie Digital

With a VMware vSphere® implementation in several sites across four countries and three continents, Christie was well underway with its virtualization journey. The company had selected NetApp as its storage solution and had successfully grown the infrastructure to over 500 virtual machines, with many more planned for upcoming projects. However, as the numbers of virtual machines grew in the main office in Canada, strange errors started to appear. At first they were rare and very intermittent, but then began to grown at an alarming rate of frequency and intensity. Disk latencies skyrocketed to thousands of milliseconds, multiple applications unexpectedly failed over to recovery sites or crashed altogether, in-process transactions were lost, and the stability of both the storage and vSphere was called into question. Several projects were temporarily suspended until the storage issues could be resolved, including the VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager™ implementation and storage-array virtual machine backup projects. Tracking down the problem, however, proved to be difficult. Initial troubleshooting efforts were unsuccessful in pinpointing the issue, and even falsely flagged some of the symptoms as being the root problem. Leveraging expertise from NetApp, and using different packages from third-party software venders, we gradually identified and correct issues. Every issue we identified and rectified gave us further insight into addressing the remaining issues. In the end, we discovered that it was no one of the several “suboptimal” configurations that were responsible for the performance issues but rather their collective influence, which placed significant stress on the storage subsystem.

EUC1305: What’s New and What’s Next for VMware View
Speakers: Lebin Cheng, VMware Inc, Sunil Satnur, VMware Inc, Narasimha Krishnakumar, VMware Inc

In the past, challenges such as up-front infrastructure acquisition costs, especially cost of shared storage, and management complexity have limited the adoption of an enterprise-wide VDI strategy. Help is on it’s way. In this session, we will first review what’s new in the latest VMware View 5.1 release including the numerous storage performance optimization features and large scale deployment enhancement tools to help enhance the TCO of VDI. We will then drill down to review upcoming storage solutions particularly useful in enhancing the performance of VDI while drastically reduce the infrastructure cost. By learning what’s new and what’s next in View, customers and partners are provided with the information and confidence they need to continue to expand the adoption of VDI.

VSP1232: Avoiding the 19 Biggest HA & DRS Configuration Mistakes
Speaker: Greg Shields, Concentrated Technology

Back for a second year, vExpert Greg Shields updates his top-rated, standing-room-only, save-your-kiester HA and DRS session for 2012. This one’s not to miss. Everyone thinks HA and DRS are awesome technologies. But make a mistake in configuring either, and they’ll crash your virtual infrastructure faster than you ever imagined. In his consulting travels, Greg has collected 19 of the biggest HA and DRS mistakes that’ll kill your datacenter. Join him and discover how your VMware vSphere® cluster might be dangerously misconfigured and where exactly to adjust its settings for guaranteed protection. Join Greg and justify your VMworld attendance in just a single session. You’ll get the immediately-useable HA and DRS guidance that’ll have you remoting your systems from here to verify Greg’s mistakes aren’t also yours.

VMworld 2012 and the Women of Virtual Infrastructure

Watch the VMworldTV Day Three Recap

Catch a recap of the the third day and more of VMworld 2012 with VMworldTV. Check out VMworldTV for more awesome VMworld 2012 videos.

More announcements are sure to come during VMworld 2012 – follow us @VMwareTAM Twitter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Google+ for to-the-minute updates!

VMworld 2012 – Day Two Recap

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On the second day of VMworld 2012 Steve Herrod, VMware’s Chief Technology Officer, discussed our vision and advancements in End-User Computing. In essence, organizations are moving away from managing physical devices and towards managing and securing a user’s corporate identity, corporate applications and business data. This has been known as the ‘post PC era‘. However, the connotation of ‘post PC’ doesn’t mean ‘no PC’, but instead it means ’not just a PC’.

In fact, people use multiple devices including desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones throughout their day. They seek unified, synchronize access on all their devices. This means that business apps and data are available in the most optimal and seamless way possible, safely and securely delivered to all your devices, no matter where you happen to be working from or from what device.

Herrod discussed the progress that we’ve made on our path to this multi-device workspace by giving a technical preview of the industry’s first integrated platform for the mobile, multi-device workspace – the VMware Horizon Suite. He shared many of its exciting capabilities that provide self-service access to all apps and data across devices including mobile-centric containers for management and security.

Herrod demonstrated how VMware is broadening of our portfolio, delivering both Windows as a Service for the multi-device world and Windows image management solutions for the Mobile workforce with the combination of VMware View and Wanova Mirage to enable customers to transform the legacy Windows desktop for the cloud era. Herrod also provided technical previews of a “User Interface Virtualization” that will transform numerous aspects of Windows desktop and application interfaces into a rich tablet friendly user experience in addition to a managed mobile workspace for both iOS and Android devices.

Let’s dive into the announcement and technical previews…

Horizon Suite: The Platform for the Mobile Workforce

The VMware Horizon Suite will bring together technologies from Project Octopus, Project AppBlast, ThinApp, VMware Horizon Application Manager and VMware Horizon Mobile into an integrated management platform for the mobile workforce. The VMware Horizon Suite will provide a flexible platform that uniquely combines the principles of identity, context and policy to separate personal and business workspaces, enable consistent access to applications and data across any personal device.

Through a central web management console, the Horizon Application Manager will allow organizations to customize a service catalog for all company data and applications. The technolgy will understand a user’s attributes and environment (device, location and connectivity level) and enforce policies across applications, data and desktops. This will allow IT to deliver View Desktops, Windows, Android, iOS, Web ThinApp’d, SaaS and even published XenApp applications in a single workspace and give end-users self-service access to applications and data from anywhere.

Vittorio Viarengo, Vice President of End User Computing shared a sneak peak of the VMware Horizon Application Manager interface. Check it out below.

Horizon Suite alpha will also allow end-users to securely access and share their data and files from any device through Horizon Data, formerly known as Project Octopus.

The VMware Horizon Suite will also feature the HTML remoting technologies that we demoed last year as part of Project AppBlast. In this first release the solution will use the HTML remoting protocol to give user access to their View desktops from any HTML5 compatible browser.

Providing dual persona (work and personal) functionality is the future of mobile computing, where users and IT both get what they need through a managed mobile workspace that securely delivering apps, files and data. Horizon Mobile which is extending its reach beyond Android to iOS devices, providing policy-based management and security for collections of corporate resources on both iOS and Android devices. Horizon Mobile features are designed to enable policy specification, implementation, enforcement & remediation for the mobile workspace.

Policies *only* apply when a user accesses corporate content. You will also see how we protect data. Data is protected at rest with encryption, data is protected in transit, and data access is controlled so only work apps can access enterprise data. In fact, unmodified, native iOS apps can be added to the workspace and they will automatically inherit the security policies defined – all without compromising usability and maintaining native look and feel.

Project App Shift

There was also a technical preview of a User Interface Virtualization (a.k.a. Project AppShift) technology. A primary use case for VDI and application remoting is delivering Windows desktops and applications to non-Windows tablet devices in a multi-device workspace. No matter how good the remote graphics protocol is, trying to use a point and click interface on a gesture oriented tablet can be a frustrating user experience. VMware is advancing a unique technology that we refer to as “User Interface Virtualization.” With this technology approach, we’re able to transform numerous aspects of Windows desktop and application interfaces into a rich tablet friendly user experience. Like other virtualization technologies, our approach is completely transparent to existing Windows applications.

Watch the VMworldTV Day Two Recap

Catch a recap of the the second day and more of VMworld 2012 with VMworldTV. Check out VMworldTV for more awesome VMworld 2012 videos.

Did you miss the general session. Watch it here.

More announcements are sure to come during VMworld 2012 – follow us @VMwareTAM Twitter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Google+ for to-the-minute updates!

 

VMworld 2012 – Day One Recap

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The 9th annual VMworld launched with at literal bang during the VMworld 2012 opening General Session on Monday morning. Many announcements were made and we’d like to provide all of our readers with a recap of the announcements, releases and updates.

But first…

VMworld 2012 TAM Customer Central

The first day of the inaugural VMworld 2012 TAM Customer Central was a resounding success. This new and exclusive TAM Customer-Only room was designed to ensure that TAM Customers have the best possible experience during the conference. On Monday customers had exclusive access to VMware product managers and experts for in-depth technical deep dives and discussions, product road maps, technical previews, demos and more.

Some of the topics that were covered included: Trusted Cloud Controls, VMware vSphere 5.1 Technical Deepdive and a Cloud Infrastructure Roundtable.

Today we continue with, as one customer said, the “The Shadows Sessions of Awesomeness” that include:

  • 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM – Cloud Services Roundtable
    Amit Gupta, Senior Product Manager, Cloud Services
  • 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM – VMware vSphere Roundtable
    Yatin Patil, Product Manager, VMware vSphere
  • 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM – Cloud Infrastructure Roundtable
    Jim Senicka, Group Manager, Infrastructure Product Marketing
  • 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM – VMware Horizon Roundtable
    Mehul Patel, Director, Product Management
  • 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM – Log Aggregation, Management and Analytics Roundtable
    Spiros Xanthos, Director, Research and Development – Log Management and Analytics
    Mahesh Ramachandran, Group Product Manager
  • 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM – Enterprise Management Roundtable
    Kit Colbert, Principal Engineer
  • 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM – Improving Access to Technical Support
    Simon Yu, Product Marketing Manager, Infrastructure
  • 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM – Oracle Support, Licensing, Best Practices and Total Cost of Ownership on VMware vSphere
  • 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM – VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Demo
    Eric Rider, Staff Engineer (UI/UX Architect)
    Justin Smith, Senior MTS Engineer

If you haven’t come by VMworld 2012 TAM Customer Central – you are missing an incredible and exclusive opportunity to engage with our product managers, engineers and experts. Come by today through Thursday!

Now, on to the announcements…

VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 – Delivering the Software-Defined Datacenter

Perhaps one of the more exciting announcements made today at VMworld, Paul Maritz, Pat Gelsinger and Steve Herrod unveiled the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 – the first solution to deliver the software-defined datacenter. The VMware vCloud suite integrates virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio into a single SKU, in order to simplify the adoption of cloud era technologies.

The VMware vCloud Suite to simplify IT operations and deliver the best SLAs for all of your applications. Now, you can build a complete infrastructure-as-a-service cloud and operationalize your VMware environment, becoming more responsive to business.

vCloud Suite is part of the complete VMware cloud solution, a comprehensive set of technology, services intellectual property, and skills enhancements based on real-world deployment experience. The integrated offering includes everything you need to build (technology and architecture), operate (processes and control) and staff (people and organization) a cloud environment while measuring the improvements (IT business management) of cloud computing.

Paul Maritz shared during VMworld, “VMware and its partners are taking a bold step toward simplifying IT, offering customers everything they need to build, operate and manage their cloud environments. The VMware vCloud Suite delivers the software-defined datacenter – the architecture for implementing cloud computing.”

As Steve Herrod mentioned, available in three flavors of Standard, Advanced and Enterprise editions, the vCloud Suite includes:

  • VMware vSphere 5.1 — Enhance IT agility, reduce costs and improve service availability. vSphere is at the heart of the Software-Defined Datacenter, designed to deliver the peak of automation, flexibility and optimized efficiency for every application.
  • VMware vCloud Director 5.1— Orchestrate the provisioning of Software-Defined Datacenter services to deliver complete virtual datacenters for easy consumption in minutes. Fundamentally simplify infrastructure provisioning and enable IT to move at the speed of business.
  • VMware vCloud Connector — Extend your cloud with vCloud Connector 1.5. View, operate on and transfer your computing resources across vSphere and vCloud Director in your private cloud environment, as well as public clouds from vCloud Service Providers. New Advanced 2.0 functionality will improve public cloud extensibility.
  • VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0 — Dramatically simplify performance, capacity and configuration management tasks to get more out of your virtual and cloud infrastructure. Proactively manage vSphere, gaining a real-time understanding of issues and risks before they impact end users.
  • VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1 — Enable simple and reliable business continuity for all of your applications. Eliminate the need for a dedicated failover site for disaster recovery (DR) with VMware DR to the Cloud services.
  • VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 — Virtualize and create agile, extensible, secure logical networks that meet the performance and scale requirements of virtualized applications. Use VXLAN to drive agility for software-defined networking.
  • VMware vFabric Application Director — Improve DevOps collaboration with closed-loop application provision and monitoring of multi-tier application service catalogs. Use standard components to deploy and manage applications quickly. Decouple application and infrastructure management to facilitate cloud deployments. Understand cloud-based application performance from the user perspective.

During the Day One VMworld 2012 General Session, several notable blogs posts from the Office of the CTO and new Technical Whitepapers for the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 were released:

VMware Office of the CTO

  • The Software-Defined Datacenter meets VMworld by Dr. Steve Herrod
    Dr. Herrod focuses on the software-defined datacenter (SDDC). A software-defined datacenter is where all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of this datacenter is entirely automated by software. He disscuses the VMware vCloud Suite technologies available today and in the future such as Software-Defined Compute, Software-Defined Storage & Availability, Software-Defined Networking & Security, Management and Multi-Cloud.

  • Software-Defined Networking and Security by Allwyn Sequeira
    Sequeira discusses the key attributes of software-defined networking (SDN)  and security (SDsec) the announcements from VMware on the networking and security front. 

Technical Whitepapers on VMware vCloud Suite 5.1

  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – vSphere 5.1 is VMware’s latest release of its industry-leading virtualization platform. This paper describes the new features and enhancements contained in this release
  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Performance – VMware vSphere 5.1 continues to enhance the performance features and capabilities of the vSphere® platform making it the most robust and highest-performing cloud platform. vSphere 5.1 supports even larger virtual machines and physical hosts to accommodate even the most demanding of workloads. vSphere 5.1 also introduces several new features that reduce latency and increases throughput for network, storage and compute. This paper outlines many of these new vSphere 5.1 performance enhancements.
  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Platform – VMware vSphere 5.1 introduces many new features and enhancements that further extend the core capabilities of the ESXi platform. This white paper discusses the various platform enhancements found in vSphere ESXi 5.1.
  • What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 – Networking – This paper will cover new features and enhancements around Operational improvements, monitoring and troubleshooting enhancements, and improved scalability and extensibility of the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) platform.
  • Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection – VMware vSphere Data Protection is a simple-to-deploy, disk-based backup and recovery solution for VMware virtual machines. This technical note provides an introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection.
  • Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication – vSphere Replication is a powerful new capability of the vSphere platform to enable virtual machines to be replicated to another location within a cluster or even between clusters. This paper introduces the technology, as well as showing the means by which a virtual machine can easily be both protected and recovered through the vSphere Web Client.
  • VMware vSphere 5.1 vMotion Architecture, Performance and Best Practices – A series of tests were conducted at VMware Performance labs to investigate and compare the performance implications of vSphere 5.1 vMotion over the proven vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies in various scenarios including the migration of a database server and an in-memory application. In addition, live migration tests were performed over metro area network scenarios.
  • VXLAN Performance Evaluation on VMware vSphere 5.1 – Virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) is a network encapsulation mechanism that enables virtual machines to be deployed on any physical host, regardless of the host’s network configuration. This paper evaluates VXLAN performance to demonstrate that vSphere 5.1 is readily able to host network-intensive applications on VXLAN without a significant drop in performance.
  • Impact of Enhanced vMotion Compatibility on Application Performance – VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) enhances the scope of vMotion by making ESXi hosts with different CPU technologies compatible for vMotion. In this paper, we quantify the performance impact of EVC mode on a diverse set of applications. We study workloads from database, Java, multimedia, and encryption categories and report the results.
  • Storage I/O Performance on VMware vSphere 5.1 over 16 Gigabit Fibre Channel – Fibre Channel (FC) interconnect speed has increased to 16 gigabits per second (Gbps). To take full advantage of this enhancement, VMware vSphere 5.1 has added support for the 16Gb FC host bus adapter (HBA). This white paper illustrates the improvements in storage I/O throughput that vSphere gains when using a 16Gb FC HBA instead of an 8Gb FC HBA. In addition, this paper looks at the CPU efficiency of the vSphere host when handling the increased storage I/O.

Role Based Technical Training and Certification

VMware announced 8 new certifications, a new Cloud Certification Solution Track,  and a complete update to VMware’s Certification Program that aligns with the practitioner roles required for an IT organization’s success in the cloud era.  The VMware certifications are shifting to a role-based framework to align with both a)  the roles that companies need to effectively design, operate, and evolve their cloud environment, and b) the key technology solution areas that support the evolution to the cloud.

New Certification Solution Track

In addition, the VMware training curriculum is shifting to a role based approach, with courses aligned to roles and technology tracks, and learning paths to help practitioners identify what courses will prepare them both to be successful in their real-world roles and to achieve VMware certification status.

Check out the VMware Learning Paths and work with your Technical Account Manager to help you plan your organizations education roadmap.

  • Engineer: The Engineer ensures the stability, integrity, and operation efficiency of the in-house information systems that support core organizational functions by monitoring, maintaining, supporting, and optimizing all networked software and associated operating systems. The Engineer applies communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills to identify, communicate, and resolve issues in to maximize IT systems investments.
  • Administrator: The Administrator designs, installs, administers, and optimizes company servers and related components to achieve high performance of the various business applications supported by tuning the servers. This includes ensuring the availability of client/server applications, configuring all new implementations, and developing processes and procedures for ongoing management of the server environment. Where applicable, the Administrator assists in overseeing the physical security, integrity, and safety of the data center/server farm.
  • Architect: The Architect strategically designs and implements in-house information systems and networked software architectures that support core organizational functions, and assures their high availability. The Architect gains organizational commitment for all systems and software plans, evaluates and selects all technologies, and provides technical leadership across the organization, from strategic decision making down to project level planning.
  • Developer: The Developer identifies, defines and models the application requirements, translates the software requirements into workable programming code, then maintains and develops programs for use in the business. The Developer defines the data structures and distribution to satisfy the application solution ensuring the needs of the organization. The Developer prepares deliverables to support the development and deployment of the solution, such as application guides and test plans which is achieved by staying current on the latest application development frameworks, best practices, testing techniques and deployment scenarios.
  • Governance/Operations: The Governance/Operator role defines the intricacies of people, policy, process and product interactions that deliver true IT as a service. People-Governance includes defining job roles, skills, training plans, organization and charter. Policy-Governance defines policies around job roles and the IT components affected. Process-Governance identifies processes that support KPIs and how the policy ripples through to the processes. Product-Governance identifies what products are involved, their implementation structure, the process roles t, and what value they deliver.

Additional Announcements

VMware vSphere 5.1 for SMBs

VMware has also announced vSphere 5.1 solutions to help SMBs simplify and protect IT – with industry-leading virtualization, business continuity and automated management. With the release of vSphere 5.1, VMware will also significantly extend the capabilities of vSphere Essentials Plus to include:

New Cloud Ops Education, Transformation and Advisory Services 

The new Cloud Ops Intellectual Property (IP) and advisory, transformation and education services was designed to help transition IT to a new operating model for cloud computing – to accelerate the delivery of new business value and innovation. Cloud Ops and the Cloud Ops Forum (also announced today) address how to build, operate, staff and measure a cloud environment to maximize business innovation and efficiency.

EMC and VMware Partner to Deliver vSphere Data Protection

Built on EMC Avamar deduplication backup software technology, the new VMware vSphere Data Protection solution is now available in place of vSphere Data Recovery – providing a more cost-effective, reliable and easy-to-use solution to protect VMware environments.

T-Systems Becomes the Latest VMware vCloud Datacenter Partner

T-Systems has joined forces with VMware to provide customers with easier, quicker and more manageable access to the cloud, with AutoScout24 and Actum/G2 already reaping the benefits of this strategic partnership.

According to Mathew Lodge, “T-Systems will broaden its VMware expertise by adding this cloud service offering to its existing and highly capable VMware consulting and integration practice, giving customers outstanding options for their cloud deployments.”

Watch the VMworldTV Day One Recap

Catch a recap of the the first day of VMworld 2012 with VMworldTV

More announcements are sure to come during VMworld 2012 – follow us @VMwareTAM Twitter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Google+ for to-the-minute updates!

 

 

 

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