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Archive for October, 2015

VMworld EU 2015 Buzz: The Future of Software-Defined Storage – What does it look like in 3 years time? – CTO6453

October 28th, 2015 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

Richard McDougall, a Principal Engineer at VMware led this presentation peeking into the future.

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This session was about the futures & trends for storage hardware and next-gen distributed services. shared NVMe/PCIe rack scale, flash densities & if magnetic storage still has a place.

2015-10-13 17.02.18Richard gave an interesting talk explaining the needs of Big Data/No SQL etc. applications and their storage requirements building up a graph using two axis, horizontal for size from 10s of TBs to 10s of PBs and vertical for IOPS from 1000 to 1,000,000.

He built up the picture showing where various memory and storage applications sit and then added what hardware / software platforms are used to service these applications, it was a great visual aid.

He spend time going through how cloud native applications and containers still have a storage requirement with some options copying the whole root tree, using a Docker solution by cloning using another union file system (aufs), like redo logs for VMDKs.

Containers still need files, not blocks and need snapshots and clones. You need non-persistent boot environment as well as somewhere to put persistent data. Shared volumes may be needed as well as an object store for retention/archive.

Richard went on to talk about hardware and the massive increase in performance for NVDIMMs, getting closer to DRAM. Have a look at the comparison chart relative for travel time from California to Australia.

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He then went through some of the device interconnects and posited that NVMe will take over most current interconnect methods, he was very positive about NVMe!

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He mentioned how hard it is to actually build true scale out performant storage.

2015-10-13 17.48.31He mentioned a great use case for caching companies like PernixData and how they in the future could be used to front end things like S3 storage, so have massive buckets in the cloud yet give very fast locally cached access, interesting.

The dream is a single common storage platform that can be used with a single HCL and common software defined storage platform for Block, CEPH, MySQL, MongoDB, Hadoop etc. I think that’s what VMware is trying to make VSAN do.

This is very difficult to achieve but I certainly see future VSAN not too far away with native SMB and NFS access as well as persistent storage for containers running on the Photon Platform. This will give you the best of both worlds, stateless containers running natively as well as stateful containers with their data stored locally within the container being replicated to other nodes in the VSAN cluster as they are VMs. Other services can access SMB and NFS for file data natively on VSAN which will also be replicated across the cluster and across sites for DR.

VMworld EU 2015 Buzz: Meeting OpenNebula

October 28th, 2015 1 comment

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

OpenNebula

2015-10-13 13.43.58I spent quiet a bit of time in the Solutions Exchange and made a point of going through the New Innovators section. I found OpenNebula which seems a very simple private cloud enabler which piqued my interest after worrying about the complexity of vRealize Automation and vCloud Director for private cloud. It seems a very simple solution, download an .OVA, suck in your templates and then provide a portal to clients to be able to deploy cloud like those templates, very simple just what many companies need. I believe it is even open source with an Apache license.

Open Nebula says it is an enterprise-ready turnkey solution for deploying private clouds, You can use KVM, Xen or ESXi as your hypervisor and can also layer it over vCenter to provide a multi-tenant private cloud.

As a consumer you can use AWS EC2 and EBS APIs, it has a marketplace of appliances ready to be run in OpenNebula, has chargeback/accounting, auditing, RBAC, quotas, etc. a pretty comprehensive list of features.

Community support is available or you can pay for commercial support straight from the developers.

I will certainly be downloading their software and having a look.

 

VMworld EU 2015 Buzz: Meeting Cirba

October 27th, 2015 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

Cirba

2015-10-13 13.27.36I spoke to Bill Chatzidakis from Cirba as I’ll be visiting them soon on a Tech Field Day event. He went through what Cirba is (been around 10+years in different incarnations!).  It’s a software product which is all about capacity planning and right sizing your environment, targeted at enterprises and service providers to manage big numbers of VMs. It has nifty graphs for telling you which clusters are over or under subscribed and collects a month’s worth of data to work out best placement of VMs. This is DRS on steroids, an approach VMTurbo is also tackling. You can create models for what your VMs require in terms of resources, availability, security and then Cirba can tell you what clusters you have available (vSPhere, Hyper-V, KVM) and where best to host these. You can use Cirba integration with vRealize Automation so as part of the approval process it will reserve future capacity in Cirba for the VMs. Once approved, Cirba talks back to vRealize Automation for the deployment. It uses multiple metrics so can push together VMs or push them apart using many measurements as well as what it thinks the VM will be doing in the future based on previous history. Cirba says it is therefore far more proavtively responsive rather than reactive like DRS.

Cloud placement is going to be an interesting future conundrum: what cloud, what location, what network, what price, what risk, what availability?

This was a good primer before I get to hear more in a few weeks.

VMworld EU 2015 Buzz: Day 1 General Session Thoughts

October 27th, 2015 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

I suppose you could say VMworld for most attendees (partners were having their 1st day yesterday) kicked off with the General Sessions.

The keynote had  fair amount of content common to the VMworld US keynote with some local changed information.

There was no point live blogging as a lot of the content has been covered previously so well by Scott Lowe.

Jean-Pierre Brulard, SVP and GM for EMEA started the show off.

10k attendees, 96 countries, 2.3k VMUG members.

He mentioned Destination Give back which is a VMware Foundation charity programme focussed on children, education , health, environment.

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VMworld EU 2015 Buzz: Should I be Transitioning my Legacy Applications into CNA? – CNA6813-QT

October 27th, 2015 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

Session was led by Chris Crafford, a Practice Manager, VMware

This again was a high level overview of the technologies available and went through what microservice are, the 12 factor apps I mentioned in the lab I did and why they are better for cloud environments. Microservices only manage the data they care about, are accessed only via the service, there are no shared libraries.

Chris mentioned an interesting thing I hadn’t thought of for the definition. Microservices need to be automatically deployed to make them true microservices, its not good enough to just have services that are micro.

Chris went through one of the major tenets of microservices which is all about failure management, assume failure and have an architecture that mitigates the impact of the faults, errors and failures at runtime.

Then Chris went on to talk about migrating legacy applications which must be done as an evolutionary approach. Choose the most business urgent to break out first. Use containers for this new bit and leverage best practices for CI/CD, automating all the steps. Learn and improve and then repeat for the next service that has been prioritised.

Another thing Chris mentioned was some deployments use one microservice per container but this makes management more challenging so consider a business role mapped to a container model instead.

The short session ended with a vCloud Air commercial, VMware funnily enough says it is the ideal target for migration of legacy applications particularly with the recent announcements with layer 2 networking between your data center and vCloud Air and container security with NSX.

The future of vCloud Air and how it will integrate with EMCs recent aquisition of Virtustream now becomes very interesting as vCloud Air is being moved out of VMware direct management and folded directly into Virtustream. Who knows what the future holds.

VMworld EU 2015 Buzz: Cloud Native Apps Lab – HOL-SDC-1630

October 27th, 2015 No comments

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

“DevOps, Containers, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, Microservices, 12-factor applications, 3rd platform, oh my!” is how it is described.

The VMware Hands-on-Labs are available online from http://labs.hol.vmware.com/ and the VMworld specific ones are available from: http://labs.hol.vmware.com/vmworld. It doesn’t seem the VMworld labs are available yet post show and this lab isn’t available with the main ones so hopefully this will appear soon.

This was a big ‘ol lab with plenty of content. Labs are in 90 minute slots which you can extend by 20 minutes and topics may not be finished in time so you may need another session to complete.

All the seats were full when I arrived but I was able to use my own laptop and just connect over the internet to do the lab, I could have done it from anywhere in the world. Kudos to the lab team, they’ve done a great job, the layout was great, no delays or any connectivity issues.

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This lab went through a fair amount of background information on what microservices are (splitting apart monolithic applications into many more nimble parts) and listed the 12 factors that ideally make up a cloud native applications. You can read more about them at http://12factor.net/ and in plain English http://www.clearlytech.com/2014/01/04/12-factor-apps-plain-english/

The lab then went through an explanation of containers, Docker (company that does containers) and Kubernetes (container orchestrations)

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VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 3 Buzz

October 15th, 2015 No comments

VMWorld2015

Well, VMworld is drawing to a close, today is the last day of the whirlwind. For a conference that is only a few days it flies by yet seems like so much is packed in.

There was no General Session this morning which is a shame as at VMworld US on the last day they generally have 3 tech focused TED presenters showing some interesting things not at all related to clouds, DevOps and infrastructure which is refreshing and enlightening.

I’m sure people managed a bit of a lie-in after Faithless at the VMworld party last night and likely late night continued libations.

vExpert Daily

I was on the vExpert Daily panel again which was good to reflect on the last day.

VMware Video Game Container System

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VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 2 Buzz

October 14th, 2015 No comments

Day 2 kicked off after breakfast with again sort of a repeat of the VMworld US keynote kicked off by the engaging Sanjay Poonam, the EUC boss .

Sanjay has really lit a fire under VMware’s EUC, started talking about the amazing effect of smartphones, AirWatch is the tech VMware bought which now manages mobile devices but Windows 10 is on the cards as announced at VMworld US. This will bring together mobile and PC management which could be very attractive for enterprises.

Announced Boxer acquisition which is simple, secure access to email, content and apps.

The Boxer team, which will join the AirWatch team, has developed a mature personal information management (PIM) solution for enterprises that offers a container approach to mobile application management and security. Boxer has partnered with industry leaders and supports market leading productivity, enterprise and social networking solutions including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Gmail, iCloud, Salesforce, Twitter, Outlook and Yahoo, just to name a few.

Rory Clements, Solutions Engineering Director for EUC then went through the same demo that Microsoft came on stage for in the US version and demoed AirWatch managing Windows 10 as well as using App Volumes on physical as part of Project A2

Single sign-on across multiple devices and applications (over 40) with AirWatch.

Sanjay and Rory then showed a windows application remoted on a Tesla and then the mixing of AirWatch and NSX network security.

Sanjay then tried to get the crowd chanting “EUC will Rock You” with the backing of some drummers!

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VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 1 Buzz

October 13th, 2015 No comments

vBreakfast

A great early start to the day was joining the #vBreakfast, an import from the VMworld US conference organised locally by Fred Hofer . Conveniently near the conference venue it was great to meet up with 20 early breakfasters.

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I headed to the Hang Space which has been well thought out, great having the Hands on Labs in the same space as it brings people together. There’s the Community Theatre, VMUG Lounge, games, tables, power and charging points, what more could you want to a bit of down time.

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I had been interviewed by VMworld TV last night at the vExpert party talking about the community and being a vExpert.

General Session

I suppose you could say VMworld for most attendees (partners were having their 1st day yesterday) kicked off with the General Sessions.

The keynote had  fair amount of content common to the VMworld US keynote with some local changed information.

There was no point live blogging as a lot of the content has been covered previously so well by Scott Lowe.

Jean-Pierre Brulard, SVP and GM for EMEA started the show off.

10k attendees, 96 countries, 2.3k VMUG members.

Read more…

Categories: VMware, VMworld Tags: , ,

VMworld Europe 2015: The Day 0 Buzz

October 12th, 2015 No comments

VMworld Europe on Monday is Partner Day which is a separate track from the main VMworld dedicated to helping partners sell VMware products.

VMworld for most attendees kicks off in earnest tomorrow.

VMware Partner TV has a preview of what’s it about:

Run DMC!

BIG BIG News of the Day is that Dell is Buying EMC and the 80% is owns of VMware! It’s also worth reading a personal note from EMC CEO Joe Tucci, Dell and EMC: Why, and What It Means,  who will retire when the deal is done by year end and hand over the reigns to Michael Dell.

2015-10-12 11.12.31Really unexpected news, rumours started circulated last week and the many many people I spoke to today had no real advanced knowledge.

The industry is going through very turbulent times, HP is splitting at this very moment and Dell and EMC are coming together. Are these the last gasps of industry titans regrouping to battle for the scraps left behind after cloud ate their lunch? Worth a read: Dell. EMC. HP. Cisco. These Tech Giants Are the Walking Dead.

Rumours are circulating that Michael Dell will be coming to VMworld.

My laptop felt a little more at home today!

OK, back to VMworld!

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