You may have noticed that my blog rate dropped a lot and I put that down to having 2 lovely children in 2 years and moving jobs in that time as well.

I have promised myself that I will up my blog rate again over the next few months and try to add value on my areas of knowledge around VMware, NetApp and Cisco UCS.

Once again I’m proud to be seen with such luminaries as those that have also won the award and it pushes me on to maintain the work-rate.

Cheers

Paul

It has taken a lot of hard work to get to this point in the 9 months I have worked with the team, but it has all been worth it.

Well done to all of my colleagues at ANS Group.

An essential addition to any infrastructure running both VMware & NetApp it allows guaranteed crash consistent versions of Virtual Machines to be replicated to secondary sights.

New functionality and enhancements include:

• Singe file restore (SFR)
• A single wizard for creating manual and scheduled backup jobs
• New backup job options:
  • The ability to include independent disks
  • The ability to exclude specified datastores
  • The ability to trigger prebackup or postbackup scripts per backup job (the scripts must be in the server/scripts folder on the SMVI server before you can select them in the SnapManager 2.0 for Virtual Infrastructure user interface)
• An advanced find option to search for specific backup jobs:
  • Most recent backup (default)
  • Backups within a specified time period
  • Backups that include VMware snapshots
• New restore granularity option (besides SFR):
  • VMDKs

So a lot going on here and certainly worth the wait.  You can grab a copy now from the NOW site.

#1 – TA01 – Managing VMware With PowerShell
#2 – DV02 – VDI versus Terminal Services
#3 – AP02 – Best Practices for Deploying Sharepoint/MOSS 2007 on VMware Infrastructure
#4 – AP11 – Performance Best Practices
#5 – DC21 – VMware – Standardised Platform Provisioning
#6 – AP01 – Best Practice for Successfully Virtualising Active Directory
#7 – DV07 – Server & Storage Sizing for VMware View
#8 – AP05 – SQL Server Performance on VMware: est Practices, Recommendations, Tuning & Troubleshooting
#9 – TA11 – Best Practices to Increase Availability & Throughput for the Future of VMware
#10 – TP12 – Consolidation of Performance Sensitive Applications

I managed to see most of these, but missed a few, so I will be getting in there if I can.  Check this photo here to see what is repeated when and where.

I can highly recommend Brian Madden’s presentation (#2) as I saw it first time round and it was great.

Some excellent stuff, particularly the demos from Bruce & jerry Chen.

vCompute

Stephen outlined that in the upcoming version of VMware – vSphere – a single VM has been able to achieve 23,000 total DB transactions per seconds – 250mbmb/sec of disks I/O, which equates to 510 disks spindles to saturate the I/O.  Pretty impressive and as Paul Maritz said yesterday and Stephen reiterated today – “No excuses not to run databases in a VM”

Also an area that has been seen as a weak point for VMware is web workload.  This can now scale so well that VMs have been tested and can scale up to the equivalent of serving 3bn page hits a day  – eBay ‘only’ gets 1bn!

vStorage

Thin provisioning will utilise the vStorage API and can fit straight into the alarms system in vCenter to alert the admins/storage admins as to when thin provisioning thresholds are about to be breached.

vNetwork

Distributed Switch – Allows single confiugration for all hosts and maintains state
Nexus 1000v – brings visitbility at the per VM level, lots more Cisco related functionality and management can be completed by networking team and takes the onus away from the VMware admin team.

Green Credentials

On the green side vSphere will take advantage of CPU related power saving functionality as well as IPMI using DPM.  When using DPM 50% power savings were made when comparing a cluster to it without DPM enabled.  There’s a video of this section of the keynote here.

Fault Tolerance

Fault Tolerance gets particular mention here and the difference between HA & FT were discussed:

HA – restarts a VM on a different hosts, but causes outages whilst the VM is powered up and the VM is in a crash consistent state

FT – lock-steps a VM with a shadow VM of itself on a different ESX Server – it also reproduces another copy onto another ESX Server to ensure it is still protected even while the original ESX Host is down

VMsafe gets briefly mentioned in the context of vSpere & the VMware ecosystem becoming almost completely policy driven in the future.

vCenter

Linked mode was also discussed and a demo also executed by a guy called Bruce.  You can view the video here.  This now means that you can managed 10 VirutalCenters from a single VI Client GUI.

An enhanced search capability has been added that runs across the whole VMware estate.

Host profiles also got discussed, again with a demo by Bruce. You can view the video here.

vCenter Linux Virtual Appliance was announced and met with whoops of delight from the crowd, who seem to ooze their Open Source credentials whenever possible.

Then Jerry Chen came out alongside Stephen and talked about a couple of cool developments.  For which I have videos:

MVP – Mobile Virtualisation Platform
PCoIP – software implementation of PC over IP to be incorporated into VMware View

Jerry Chen’s section was excellent, so check out the official VMware video of the keynote here, when it becomes available.

Jessica promised me 5 seconds of fame and that’s about all I got.  You may notice that I am rather polished   well that may have something to do with the fact that I made an appearance on GMTV last year as I left last years Wimbledon tournament after working there.  For that appearance I managed to get in a little dance, but no such dancing for VMware.

I won’t rehash everything from the presentation because you can read the crux of most of the discussions here.  However, I will say that the main points were that VDI is not ready to take on TS at the moment, but if the forthcoming promised features materialise then it soon could be.

If you don’t already subscribe to Brian’s blog you really should here.

Also keep your eyes peeled on Brian’s site as he promised to dig up an old post from Ron Oglesby that discussed VDI back in 2006.  He wanted people to check out the comments section for some wild comments on VDI from die-hard TS heads.  I think it is this post, but I might wrong so check his site anyway.

The best things often are the simplest and this tool is not complicated, but it just did exactly what most SMB businesses want from a backup solution and that is to work, without having to go to another vendor.

A few of the highlights as I saw:

• All managed through an extension to the vCenter Server GUI and completely integrated in a seamless way
• Destination volumes are encryptable
• SAN based backups
• ESX host integrated VCB
• Retention of backups is completely based on policies
  • Few – 7 most recent backups
  • Medium – 7 most recent backups, but kept for longer
  • Many – 15 most recent backups for a similar period to medium
  • Custom – Whatever you want them to be
• Schedule driven
• Multiple jobs can be run at once
• Restore jobs can run alongside backup jobs simultaneously
• Exclusions can be applied
• Restore rehearsal can restore a VM backup without overwriting the original
• Data-deduplication of backups is achieved by only backing up changes after the first full backup
• VSS leveraged using VMware Tools in Windows Virtual Machines

File level backups will be in the final release according to one of the VMware guys manning the lab and the documentation also alluded to this functionality.

I might be wrong, but it looked like it was all being driven by another CentOS JeOS Virtual Appliance, so VMware are staying true to their assertion that the future of software is through dedicated appliances!

Start as you mean to go on.

Check out the picture I took today of all the equipment being used to power the hands-on labs.

I must say I got a little tingle.