It was very tough to pick a top 5 this time as most posts this week were about vSphere Update 1 and View 4. But I did manage to find 5 excellent articles again. Make sure you read them:

• Scott Sauer – More Bang for Your Buck with PVSCSI (Part 1)
  So let’s first find out if it’s all that.  We need to do some testing
  to validate the hype.  I created two virtual machines, one with the
  traditional LSI Logic SCSI driver, and one with the new PVSCSI driver. 
  The host is the same for each VM, 4 socket Intel Xeon system with 64 GB
  of RAM, connected to EMC Clariion CX3-80 storage.  The Raid
  configuration is a 4+1 RAID 5 set (10K spindles), with the default
  Clariion Active/Passive MRU setup (No PPVE).  Each VM has 2 vCPU’s and
  4 GB of RAM and both are running 32 bit Microsoft Windows 2003 R2. 
  Both Virtual Machines data disks were formatted using diskpart and the
  tracks were correctly aligned.  Anti-virus real time scanning was
  disabled on both systems.  This test is meant to get as close as
  possible to a standard configuration that we can benchmark from.
• Arnim van Lieshout – Geographically dispersed cluster design
  Let’s take it back one step and have a look at an active-passive setup.
  These setups have some sort of storage replication in place. The most
  common design I encounter is showed in figure 1. In the main datacenter
  there’s an ESX cluster with some sort of SAN based
  replication/mirroring to a second datacenter. In the second datacenter
  there is a passive ESX cluster available to start-up the virtual
  servers in case of disaster. Let’s use this setup as a starting point
  and turn this active-passive into an active-active setup.
• Andre Leibovici – Your Organization’s Desktop Virtualization Project – Part 3
  At the time this solution was designed, the numbers of users per CPU
  core could range from 3.8 to 4.2, however for most VDI deployments
  using new processors (Intel Nehalem 5500 and AMD Phenom II) this number
  can be around 6.0 per CPU core, allowing up to 100 virtual desktop
  machines in a single dual-quad server.
• Scott Drummonds – Another Day, Another Misconfigured Storage
  You will have to size your storage to peak, to average, or somewhere in between. If you size to the average, you are counting on the peaks occurring at different times. If you are wrong, when two workloads peak simultaneously, a bottleneck will form at the array. Also note that sizing to the average in this case (350 IOPS) is insufficient for VM C’s peak of 400 IOPS. You could size to the aggregate peak of 1200 IOPS but unless all of the virtual machines peaked at once the workloads would never consume the available bandwidth.

  All you can do in this case is make a best guess and modify later, as needed. I often suggest that a good start is one third of the way from average to peak which equals 633 IOPS in this case. If we assume 150 IOPS per spindle, that means five spindles for this VMFS volume.

• Luc Dekens – Scripts for Yellow Bricks’ advise: Thin Provisioning alarm & eagerZeroedThick
  This script will convert an existing thick VMDK to eagerZeroedThick. As you can read in Duncan’s blog entry there is a serious performance improvement to be obtained by doing this.

  Note that the guest needs to be powered off to be able to do the conversion ! This is in fact the case for most of the VirtualDiskManager methods. See also my Thick to Thin with PowerCLI and the SDK entry.

IBM Lotus Symphony Productivity Software Available On Credit Card-Sized, Keepod Devices . ARMONK, N.Y., PALTO ALTO, Calif., and MILAN – November 17, 2009 – IBM (NYSE: IBM), VMware (NYSE: VMW) and Keepod products family manufacturer NSEC, today announced that they have partnered to offer IBM’s Lotus Symphony productivity software suite on Keepod devices for the first time.
IBM’s Lotus Symphony software suite helps users create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Based on an open, secure platform, the intuitive business productivity offering is easy-to-use and free of charge. With today’s news, for the first time, users can access the information they need anytime,…

Palo Alto, Calif., November 17, 2009— VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter to the cloud, today announced that Tod Nielsen, chief operating officer of VMware, will present at the Credit Suisse First Boston Technology Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona on December 3, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. MT/ 9:00 a.m. PT.
A live webcast will be available on the Investor Relations page at http://ir.vmware.com. The replay of the webcast will be available for one month.
About VMware VMware delivers solutions for business infrastructure virtualization that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. With…

AMD“Desktop virtualization is a critical gateway between the server and client, enabling dynamic user experiences by taking advantage of advanced multi-core processors,” said Margaret Lewis, director, commercial software, AMD “VMware has delivered a great managed desktop virtualization package with VMware View™ 4, and collaborated with AMD during its development to help ensure that the end user can enjoy a superior experience on systems powered by AMD technology.”
Cisco“Many of our customers are looking to extend the power of virtualization beyond the datacenter to the desktop. Cisco is working closely with key desktop virtualization solutions vendors, like VMware, to help deliver…

Posted by Rick Jackson
Chief Marketing Officer

When a company grows as rapidly as VMware has, you know there is real value being delivered to customers.  One of the challenges we faced at VMware was how best to articulate our core value proposition, when there were just so many great things to talk about.  This was a classic exercise in defining the Point That Matters, the core reason why your customers buy from you.  (The Point That Matters is a phrase I borrow from Zoom Marketing, our trusted partner during this process.)

This exercise was a combination of examining our own internal view of our value proposition, compared to an external view shared by our customers, partners, and industry analysts, all of which were quite familiar with VMware and its solutions.  Through this exercise, we heard some not so surprising things, but with a few twists that really made us think about our positioning. 

For example, most people immediately think of cost savings as the primary benefit of virtualization.  While cost savings is definitely a factor in driving organizations to initiate a virtualization journey, it was not the pinnacle of value that was obtained.  In fact, those customers that had pursued more aggressive virtualization adoption were most excited by the achievement of flexibility within their IT environments, leading to significantly reduced management time, and dramatic improvements in their responsiveness to business.  In short, they were achieving IT agility, and in turn helping fuel business agility. 

When asked to rank statements related to our value proposition, both customers and prospects believed that the core value proposition was around the duality of achieving a dynamic, and flexible IT environment, while at the same time reducing costs.  This was something they believed to be unique to VMware.  Most importantly, they believed that this was the correct order as well – flexibility over cost savings.  Frankly, we knew this was a benefit, but have traditionally always led with our cost savings message. 

The other important thing we heard is how achieving flexibility and agility within IT really does put IT in a position to better serve the business – to respond to change and opportunity that can fuel growth.  In essence, they were better positioned to be a strategic partner to the business. 

The problem now was how to articulate a core set of messages around this point that matters, that doesn’t sound like every other IT vendor.  Take a quick browse around some websites, and you’ll find a common theme – everyone seems to promise dynamic, flexible, adaptive, on-demand, solutions for IT.  Hmmm. 

One of the things that stood out to Zoom Marketing during this process was how energetic VMware’s employees, customers and partners were.  During interviews that should typically last 30 minutes, our ecosystem wanted to keep on talking, typically an hour or more.  There was true excitement about the value they were seeing, and in the promise of VMware’s vision for bridging existing IT environments into the era of cloud computing.  This gave us an idea, a way to encapsulate the value proposition of our solutions, with the value that an agile IT environment provides to the business:

Energize the business through IT, while saving energy – financial, human and the earth’s.

The whole point of IT is to fuel the business.  So the whole point of achieving a more dynamic and flexible IT infrastructure is to be more adept at fueling that business, or as we like to say, energizing the business.  But the duality of our core value proposition cannot be ignored.  Our customers talk about real savings, in 3 categories:

• Optimizing Financial Energy – doing more with less.  Significant capex savings. Greater efficiencies in server, storage and networking. Saving financial resources to apply to the needs of the business.

• Shifting Human Energy – shift from serving hardware, to serving the business.  Dramatic reduction in manual tasks, and management time.  Simplified operations, supplemented with automation.

• Saving Earth’s Energy – using less, and using it more wisely.  Doing their part to reduce energy consumption and their respective carbon footprint.

The words are ours, the sentiment belongs to our customers.  What a great opportunity to learn from them, and be in a position to echo their sentiment.

It was an exciting week this week. For some the VCE announcement was not a real surprise for many it seemed to be. Like always some were skeptical and others were enthusiastic about this new initiative. The first post on this Top 5 covers every single aspect, keep in mind that Chad is an EMC employee. I can also recommend the articles by Chuck Hollis on this topic but as he is not part of PlanetV12n he did not make the top 5:

• Chad Sakac – VCE Coverage: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3, Post 4, Post 5, Post 6
  Let’s focus on the “Vblock” management layer. To restate the challenge – the goal is to have a thing that makes utility-like management of a Vblock (or more importantly a series of them), including server + LAN/SAN network (UCS manager does this well for one UCS system) + storage itself. As with all things in the VMware, Cisco, EMC consortium, we know customers need choice – and any one element is replaceable. The value proposition is that the things we build are so tightly focused, so tightly integrated, that if you are looking at something like this – the integration value is so high it’s nearly irresistible.
• Alan Renouf – Virtu-Al VESI & PowerGUI PowerPack & vCheck v3
  I have been teasing people on twitter for a week or so now and have
  just uploaded my PowerPack to the PowerGUI site, you can download it
  here. This is a first attempt at providing most of my scripts in one
  PowerPack and adding to the already great management that VESI and
  PowerGUI give you.
• Andre Leibovic – Your Organization’s Desktop Virtualization Project – Part 1 & Part 2
  I would anticipate that when your CAPEX is calculated for the next 5
  years after the adoption of desktop virtualization your CIO and CEO
  will not be very impressed only with the numbers, especially if you
  have incorporated acquisition of Thin Clients to your CAPEX. If you are looking for a justification to adopt desktop
  virtualization you should focus on your OPEX and cost savings coming
  from Lower Operating Cost/TCO, Power and Cooling Energy Savings and
  increased seat utilization, when applicable.
• Mike Laverick – Virtual Compute Environment – VMware, Cisco and EMC Coalition
  So here’s my attempt. It seems the case that whether you like or not -
  we are creeping steadily away from a best-of-breeds approach to
  building out datacenters. Everyone yaks endless about the
  commoditization of IT – and it’s happening right before our eyes. Each
  of the major OEMs – HP, IBM, Dell have been for sometime junking their
  valued partner relationships in effort to seal their customers into a
  one-stop solution. Of course, IBM are probably the company that’s most
  famous/notorious for this approach. In recent years, HP have been
  steadily improving their HP ProCurve stuff to the degree that they no
  longer feel the need to promote/resell Cisco switching gear. To me the
  VCE announcement amounts to 4th OEM provider coming along to this
  party. So in short while you will be able to CHOOSE which OEM to
  shackle yourself too. This choice will be limited to the “Gang of Four”.
• Duncan Epping – How to avoid HA slot sizing issues with reservations
  When you select a specific percentage that percentage of the total
  amount of resources will stay unused for HA purposes. First of all
  VMware HA will add up all available resources to see how much it has
  available. Then VMware HA will calculate how much resources are
  currently consumed by adding up all reservations of both memory and cpu
  for powered on virtual machines. For those machine that do not have a
  reservation a default of 256Mhz will be used for CPU and a default of
  0MB+memory overhead will be used for Memory.

Posted by Steve Herrod

Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D

This week HP introduced their
Converged Infrastructure Architecture, which is appropriately described as “a
blueprint for chief information officers to create elasticity in their
technology environments.” This blueprint unlocks currently siloed datacenter
resources (including compute, storage and network components) and, with the
help of virtualization, integrates them into a pool of very fluid resources
that can be smartly and safely allocated to the applications running on top.

Put another way, HP has unveiled a template that helps customers easily
build what many are now calling a “private cloud.” The general idea of a
private cloud is to bring many of the good traits associated with today’s
public cloud vendors (e.g. elasticity, efficiency, self-service, and
usage-based resource charges) to a company-owned and operated
datacenter—where IT is often more comfortable with their ability to meet
performance, availability, and compliance requirements.

VMware vSphere™ was explicitly designed for
building the private cloud, and HP BladeSystem Matrix’s out-of-box experience
and well-integrated management will help customers more quickly and more easily
realize the full capabilities of VMware vSphere. What’s more, even as customers
reap the benefits of their private cloud, they’re also laying the foundation to
leveraging public cloud resources. Virtual machines are well-encapsulated and
largely location independent. Working with HP, we can offer tools and a
complete portfolio of services that help customers continue to maintain the
control and security they have in their datacenters as they begin to leverage
resources in the public cloud. The resulting “hybrid” cloud is depicted below.

Infrastructure and application management in this new world is
incredibly important, too, and HP’s capabilities integrate quite well with
VMware vCenter™ to push the envelope on this front. I particularly like the
integration work HP has done to bring their Insight software capabilities into
VMware vCenter. You have to register to see it, but there’s a great
demonstration of this at minute 62 of the VMworld 2009 general
session.

I’ll stop here in the interest of keeping this blog short, but I did
just want to highlight again the excitement I have over holistic solutions
built for the fully virtualized datacenter that help enable the promise of the
private cloud.  If you would like
to see and hear a lot more about VMware and HP’s Converged Infrastructure,
be sure to also check out the video
from Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s VP of Server Product Marketing.

Unprecedented Collaboration Heralds Business-Ready IT Infrastructure Packages and Single Point of Contact for Design, Service and Support

Cisco-EMC Solutions Joint Venture Also Established to Help Enable Customer Adoption. SAN JOSE, California – Nov. 3, 2009 – Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, today introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, an unprecedented collaboration of three information technology (IT) industry leaders. The coalition has been created to accelerate customers’ ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to…

This was probably one of the toughest Top-5′s to write as I had the week off this week. I basically had to catch-up with a whole week of Planet V12n. One of the most annoying things about it is that half of the blogs on PlanetV12n enabled “content summary only”. Yes I know you will have a couple of extra visits, but isn’t blogging about getting people to read your content instead of being “numbers”(visits) focused? Now that I got that off my chest lets move on to what this article is about. It’s about the 5 top articles this week:

• Vaugn Stewart – VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics & VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond
  Like the thick format, thin VMDKs are not formatted at the time of
  deployment. This also means that data that needs to be written must
  pause while the blocks required to store the data are formatted. The
  formatting operation only occurs on demand at anytime an area of the
  virtual disk, which has never been written to, is required to store
  data.
• Chad Sakac – Solid State Disk will change the storage world…
  But surely, if you were looking for performance, you wouldn’t use the SATA disk, right? You would probably use a 15K RPM FC disk. Those cost about $1000. They do about 200 random write IOPs. So, you would need 20 of them to do what that $115 SSD could do. That’s 0.2 IOps per dollar – or 170x more expensive than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis. Oh, you think SAS 15K drives are a better deal? They are – than FC disks. A 15K SAS disk on Pricewatch costs about $210, and they also do about 200 IOps. that’s 0.95 IOps per dollar – or 37x more expense than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis.
• Luc Dekens – dvSwitch scripting – Part 4 – NIC teaming
  The double Service Consoles and vmKernel connection might look confusing at first. But when you select one these connections, the vSphere client will show you to which uplink a specific connection is going.

  To increase the availability of the dvSwitch, I will show how to add two pNics and how to activate and configure NIC Teaming.

  When I created the dvSwitch I configured it for two uplink ports (per host). Since I’m adding two pNics, I will first have to change the maximum number of dvUplink ports.

• Gabrie van Zanten – Design tips for VMware vSphere 4
  Recently at the Belgium VMUG I gave a presentation in which I covered some design tips for VMware vSphere 4. I talked about some business decisions that, how boring they may seem, are crucial for your design. I covered some security requirements you should check with the security department of the organisation and of course advised good capacity planning which also is very important for your design.

  What the average geek found most interesting where topics like: “What size of ESX host will you buy?”, “How to run vCenter in a VM”, “VMFS best practises”, “Understanding queue depth and lun size” and more….

• Simon Gallagher – iSCSI LUN is very slow/no longer visible from vSphere host
  Due to too many SCSI reservation conflicts, so hopefully it wasn’t looking like corruption but a locked-out disk – a quick Google turned up this KB article – which reminded me that SATA disks can only do so much

  Multiple reboots of hosts and the OpenFiler hadn’t cleared this situation – so I had to use vmkfstools to reset the locks and get my LUN back, these are the steps I took..

  You need to find the disk ID to pass to the vmkfstools –L targetreset command, to do this from the command line look under /vmfs/devices/disks