The week after VMworld is probably even more chaotic than VMworld itself. Not only are you digesting all the new ideas/concepts/thoughts you brought home from VMworld you will also need to pick up all the presents(work) they left waiting for you. On PlanetV12n it was also a busy week. Some cool, really cool, write-ups of VMworld and some great non-VMworld related articles. Although it’s a top 5 The first two have two entries each. Mainly because my post and Massimo’s post are related. Here we go:

• Massimo Re Ferre’ – VMware, SpringSource and What’s Not Appropriate to Say – The (Potential) Value of Blogging for Your Career
  When I heard about VMware and SpringSource, all of a sudden I realized
  the world is changing for all of us virtualization geeks. First and
  foremost those that have only been bothering about low level
  infrastructure virtualization details – such as VMotion
  compatibilities, cluster configurations, storage integrations and so
  forth – will have a hard time keeping up with what’s going on in the
  industry. Virtualization vendors are “moving up the stack” very quickly
  so you’d better start familiarizing with concepts and technologies
  around Development Frameworks, Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
  and stuff like that. Not the sort of things Systems Engineers (aka
  infrastructure people) paid too much attention to – until now.
• Duncan Epping – Another year has passed by & VMworld 2009 Linkage
  I can’t remember I ever had so many people congratulating me with my
  birthday. (Okay it was on twitter but still…) Usually with my birthday
  coming up I take some time to look back at the past year.
  Coincidentally a couple of weeks ago John Troyer asked me to do a
  presentation at VMworld about blogging and where it can lead to.
  Because of my overbooked agenda (VMworld preperations, VCDX Panels and
  two projects) I did not have any time to prepare it but it is something
  that kept me busy the last week. Especially after seeing Jason Boche’s
  presentation at the vExpert Session at VMworld I started thinking about
  it again. I had some time on my hands, as I took the day off on my
  birthday, and decided to look back and try to convince you why voicing
  your opinion/views and sharing knowledge is important for your personal
  development and career.
• Joshua Townsend – ESXTOP Batch Mode & Windows Perfmon
  I needed to grab some stats from my ESX hosts for off-line analysis so I fired up my trusty ESXTOP intent on using batch mode to capture a .csv formatted output. I started to manually select the counters I was interested in while working in ESXTOP interactive mode (you can save your selected counters to the esxtop configuration file with the ‘w’ command) and thought that there must be a better way. I found that better way in the VMware Performance Community: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-3930. There is now a -a switch that can be used to include ALL performance counters. I’m sold.
• Alan Renouf – vTip – A VMware Expert updating your VI
  Jason Boche has recently announced his vCalendar which is a great daily calendar with tip for each day, there is also a blog widget and netvibes or Google widget for this too, so my script takes these wonderful daily tips and adds them to a place we all visit on a daily basis…. The Virtual Infrastructure Client.
• Gabrie van Zanten – I had a dream…
  VMware is still the most innovative company in the field of
  virtualization and is still that step ahead of its competitors.
  Therefore VMware remains the number one choice for the most demanding
  workloads. Demanding not necessarily in performance, but mainly in
  security, availability and flexibility.

What a week and where do I even begin. For those who have been living under a rock just one word: VMworld. I have met so many people who I have been talking to for a while, and also a lot of people who just came up to me and complimented me on yellow-bricks.com or just wanted to introduce themselves. Thanks everyone for making this an excellent week. Making a top 5 is almost impossible though. The amount of blogs(250+) added over the last 7 days is so insane that I almost had to randomly pick 5. But of course I did not pick them randomly. Here they are, surprisingly most of them have to do with VMworld:

• Rich Brambley – VMworld 2009 Virtual Infrastructure Design – Lab Manager vPODS Enable Conference Cloud
  If you are like me you probably would have loved to get the opportunity to use the vSphere client to connect to a vCenter server managing that entire virtual infrastructure (VI). Although I did not get to do just that, I did get the opportunity to do the next best thing – talk to the manager of the team that does. My VMworld ended by talking to Randy Keener, Group Manager of VMware’s GETO team (Global Engineering Technical Operations). Keener explained to me some of the VMworld 2009 virtual infrastructure design details that VI administrators would be interested to know.
• Rick Scherer – My VMware VCDX Defense Experience
  While most of my readers were already home with their families, or packing up and checking out of their hotel rooms on the way to the airport, I was getting ready for probably the most important 2 hours of my technical career.

  So here we are, Friday at 7:15am – a few minutes to grab some food and collect my nerves before I enter room Foothill D at the SF Marriott. To my luck, I enter the lobby of the Mission Steak restaurant and guess who’s there….the entire VMware Certification team, including panel members for my VCDX. There goes collecting my nerves.

• Justin Emmerson – VMworld session DV2363 – CVP Tech Deep Dive
  In Direct Assignment, technologies like Intel VT-D or other software
  techniques are used to pass through a physical device (such as a video
  card) directly into the VM. This has some advantages such as lower
  overhead, and if you’re running Windows in your VM then all you need is
  a set of Windows drivers, which are easy to find. Passthrough is also
  much easier to program…
• Joep Piscaer – VMworld ‘09 – Long Distance VMotion (TA3105)
  The main challenge to get VMotion working between datacenters isn’t
  with the VMotion technology itself, but with the adaptations to shared
  storage and networking. Because a virtual machine being VMotioned
  cannot have it’s IP address changed, some challenges exist with the
  network spanning across datacenters. You’ll need stretched VLAN’s, a
  flat network with same subnet and broadcast domain at both locations.
• Scott Lowe – VMware vCloud Event with Paul Maritz
  Moving away from choice to application compatibility, Paul Maritz again
  refers to the formal announcement of the vCloud API. The vCloud API is
  actually a series of APIs that are being/have been submitted to
  standards organizations (as I mentioned in the keynote coverage, I
  believe it was submitted to the DMTF). SpringSource takes the stage to
  talk about what they do and then perform a demo (a live demo?) of their
  products and technologies. The demo shows off SpringSource and
  CloudFoundry deploying applications to an external cloud.

By Joe Andrews, Group Manager, Product Marketing at VMware

In today’s economic environment, it’s no wonder why virtualization technology remains at the top of many IT priority project lists.  Companies that have deployed virtualization solutions have reported cost savings of more than 50% of their infrastructure costs; 60-80% utilization for their x86 servers (up from 5-15% in non-virtualized environments); 85% improvement in recovery time in unplanned downtime; the ability to provision new applications in minutes instead of days or weeks.

So why are so many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) still sitting on the sidelines when it comes to virtualization? It could be a number of reasons.  Virtualization may seem primarily suited to large datacenters.  It may be perceived as too expensive or hard to manage.  Whatever the reason, SMBs may be surprised to learn about the other benefits of virtualization that may not be so well known.  Here are just a few:

1)    You get time back in your day. What if you had more time to spend on supporting the business and less time doing mundane, repetitive tasks?  Virtualization can help IT staff spend less time provisioning servers or applying patches so that more time can be spent enabling new business initiatives.

2)    You can get disaster recovery without breaking the bank.  By consolidating servers, IT staff can use the extra capacity to build a replication site without spending thousands of dollars in extra hardware. 

3)    Applications run better. The conventional x86 computing model, with applications tied to physical servers is too rigid and fragmented to efficiently support today’s complex and dynamic applications.  As a result, companies are forced to spend 70% of their IT budgets to manage existing applications and less than 30% is allocated to truly innovating for the business.  This ratio is even more stifling for SMBs that have an IT staff or 1 or 2 people.  Virtualization unlocks these applications’ ties to physical hardware to allow for improved uptime and SLAs, better flexibility and improved performance.

4)    You can get better management. Spending time managing infrastructure gets even more cumbersome as it grows in size and complexity.  Virtualization gives SMBs the ability to manage their infrastructure in a centralized way.  Why is this good?  Centralized IT management lets you view and operate your environment from a single pane of glass and automate resource intensive operations across disparate hardware, operating system and software application environments while reducing the chances of human error.

5)    You can get more out of your hardware. Everybody in the pool!  Because virtualization breaks the legacy “one application to one server” model, infrastructure resources can be pooled to get significantly higher resource utilization. SMBs get improved agility to accommodate increased business demands on IT without having to buy more hardware. SMBs can use hardware that’s been freed up through consolidation for activities that normally could not be accommodated due to lack of budget.

6)    You can get more life out of your applications. Separating the application and OS from the hardware and encapsulating into a virtual machine container enables you to run legacy applications longer on newer hardware and get extended life out of your previous IT investments. 

7)    You can secure your data better. Virtualization separates the OS and applications from the server hardware, shrinking the foot print and vulnerable attack area to lessen the threat from viruses and other security breaches. 

8)    You can get improved business continuity. Virtualization can help SMBs eliminate planned downtime and give them the ability recover quickly from unplanned outages, and have the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no service interruption.

9)    You can save the Earth’s energy. Virtualization means fewer servers and fewer servers mean lower power and cooling costs and space requirements.  Energy savings are estimated at $500 to $600 per server per year.

10)    And yes, you can cut costs! Of course, you can cut capital costs through server consolidation, but more importantly you can cut the operational costs that come with just maintaining your business.  Virtualization allows SMBs to get the power to energize their business while saving money—the time is now to get off the sidelines.

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It’s been such a strange week. On Tuesday I headed to VMware HQ, Palo Alto, to conduct multiple VCDX interviews. Actually this was the first time we had people from outside of VMware presenting and defending. Of course I can’t comment on the outcome, but I must say that overall I was pleased… very pleased about the level of expertise that was shown. During the week I also met several people I wanted to for a long time, including Mr Planet V12n himself John Troyer. It was a great week and there’s another great week ahead of us: VMworld. That is not what this post is about. This post is about this weeks top 5, euuuh make it 3 cause 99% of the article were news articles this week, here we go:

• Eric Gray – The VMware ESXi 4 64MB Hypervisor Challenge
  In a previous article, I answered the question: If VMware ESXi 4 is so small, why is it so big? It’s quite clear now that the disk footprint of VMware ESXi 4 is less than 60MB. But to really drive the point home, I wanted to demonstrate that VMware ESXi 4 could boot and run from a tiny 64MB flash device, so I asked Olivier Cremel, the inventor of ESXi, if that was feasible. He said it was — and gave me advice on how to set it up. This article shows you how.
• Scott Lowe – Thinking Out Loud: HP Flex-10 Design Considerations
  The number of uplinks doesn’t matter anymore, because bandwidth is
  controlled in the Flex-10 configuration. You want 1.5Gbps for VMotion?
  Fine, no problem. You want 500Mbps for the Service Console? Fine, no
  problem. You want 8Gbps for IP-based storage traffic? Fine, no problem.
  As long as it all adds up to 10Gbps, architects can subdivide the
  bandwidth however they desire. So the number of uplinks, from a
  bandwidth perspective, is no longer applicable.
• Chad Sakac – Important note for all EMC CLARiiON Customers using iSCSI and vSphere
  You can ABSOLUTELY drive simultaneous interfaces against a single
  target when using NMP Round Robin or PowerPath/VE and an EMC CLARiiON
  and the vSphere 4 software initiator.  BUT there is one CLARiiON issue
  (this is really a bug, IMHO – and one that we’re fixing, so the the
  below is a workaround – but a workaround that you could leave for as
  long as you want – there’s not really a general downside).

Healthcare industry participants: see the list below of all the healthcare-related sessions at VMworld. It’s a big conference with a plethora of rich technical content – and some of these sessions are not as easy to find as they should be. Search on the following titles or session ID numbers on the VMworld Schedule Builder for more information and to add these sessions to your schedule.

Tuesday
10:00 a.m.: DV2672 Cerner Millennium deployed in a VMware View environment
10:00 a.m. TA2646 Creative Solutions: How Florida Hospital virtualized AIX and Mastered SAN Replication for DR
6:00 p.m.: EA1820 Virtualizing Critical Healthcare Applications

Wednesday
10:00 a.m. DV1667 Norton Healthcare Desktop
11:30 a.m. DV1788 The 4 C’s of Desktop Virtualization for Healthcare: Costs, Clients, Continuity, and Compliance
3:00 p.m. VM5420 Using Lab Manager in a Regulated Healthcare Environment

Thursday
9:30 a.m.VM2648 Managing Compliance in Virtual Environments
11:30 a.m. DV2782 Application and Desktop Virtualization
1:30 p.m. EA3940 Cerner Millennium Scalability when deployed on VMware vSphere and Intel Nehalem

To keep up with VMware-related news for healthcare IT, follow VMwareHIT on Twitter, hosted by Frank Nydam and other members of the VMware healthcare team.

Here’s to a productive, fun VMworld conference for all –
VMware’s Healthcare Team

Here’s a great resource to keep in mind as you’re planning your vSphere 4.0 deployment: “Reference Implementation: Clustering vCenter Server 4.0 Using Microsoft Cluster Services”. The tech note provides detailed steps for setting up a fresh installation of vCenter Server 4.0 in a MSCS environment, as well as upgrading an existing vCenter cluster setup on MSCS to vCenter Server 4.0. While this particular document shows the setup of a reference implementation using VMs for the cluster nodes, other variations would certainly also be valid.

 For those of you who are already familiar with the procedure used to set up vCenter Server 2.5 with MSCS, I wanted to highlight how the procedure has changed with vCenter Server 4.0. With the release of vCenter Server 4.0, one of the main differences is that vCenter Server roles are now stored in Microsoft Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) instances. During the MSCS setup process, you can simply use ADAM replication to replicate the roles from node 1 to node 2.

 Of course, using MSCS is just one of many ways to protect your vCenter management platform. If you’re looking for something that’s easier to install and configure, vCenter Server Heartbeat has no hardware configuration dependencies and automatically detects standard VMware vCenter Server components upon installation for instant monitoring and protection. If you’re going to VMworld, be sure to add the 2-hour instructor-led “Lab 6 VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat” and “VM2674 VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat Best Practices” to your schedule. The breakout session will highlight a number of customer examples focused on VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat deployments, and give you insight into how you can protect other important solutions like Site Recovery Manager or View.

- From Catherine Fan in VMware Product Management.

The VMworld buzz starts in earnest. Today we announced that – no surprise to anyone that has been paying attention – vSphere is a hit. 21,000 new customers chose VMware in the first half of this year, and vSphere 4 has been downloaded 350,000 times since it was launched 13 weeks ago. We also ran a poll on our website, and 75% of the folks who responded said they’d be upgrading over the next 6 months. (That’s not a scientific survey, but it’s in general agreement with Eric Siebert’s vSphere-Land poll, where 67% of the respondents said they’d be upgrading their production environments to vSphere within 6 months.)

I think our press releases are actually really well-written — they usually have quite useful information in them and a minimum “global, leading, market-leading” marketing speak. For this release, I particularly like the customer quotes, including the virtualization blogosphere’s own Lone Sysadmin, Bob Plankers. (Bob will be at VMworld this year and a judge in the SearchServerVirtualization‘s Best of VMworld 2009 award. If you run into him, say hi and tell him you read his press release quote.)

“As a result of upgrading to VMware vSphere 4, the museum has saved
$200,000 AUD on hardware procurement costs since migrating from VMware
Infrastructure 3. We’ve also reduced our power requirements by 33
percent and have achieved a server consolidation ratio of 12:1,” said
Dan Collins, manager of information technology at Powerhouse Museum.
“VMware vSphere 4 has also dramatically improved our infrastructure
responsiveness and flexibility, and most importantly enhanced our
recoverability of systems and information.”…

“After seeing the benefits of virtualizing our infrastructure
applications, we wanted to move our SQL database into the virtualized
environment,” said Roy K. Turner, server systems engineer, Frederick
Memorial Hospital.  “The improved performance and enhanced reliability
in VMware vSphere 4 have been invaluable in exceeding our SLAs and
preventing revenue loss from our mission-critical applications.  VMware
Fault Tolerance further improves uptime for our most critical
applications by providing zero-downtime recovery from hardware
failures, while VMware Data Recovery helps us easily back up and
protect our critical data.”

“With VMware, we’ve found that we can roll out new services much
faster, as well as increase the reliability of existing services, while
cutting the costs of doing both,” said Bob Plankers, technical
architect, University of Wisconsin – Madison. “With VMware vSphere 4,
our infrastructure management becomes much simpler through the use of
new VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch and Host Profiles. VMware
vSphere 4 also increased the amount of I/O, memory, and CPU available,
meaning we can virtualize nearly every workload we have.”

You can see from the quotes we’ve come a long way from server consolidation – for VMware customers, it’s about increasing your business agility. Or to dip into the language of the release: vSphere “offers unmatched cost savings; delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications; provides uncompromised control over application service levels, and preserves customer choice  of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.” That’s some marketing speak I can believe in.

More VMworld news to come!
John Troyer