WoodITWork.com

I have had the pleasure today of presenting at the 4th annual UK VMware User Group conference at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull near Birmingham.

I did a whirlwind tour of everything that was announced at VMworld and believe me, there was a huge amount. OK, so no major release which is the norm (but plenty of teasers) but enough other things going on in the VMware space to fill more than a UKVMUG! I know, I’ve done the research! Even though I was at VMworld US, so much was going on that I didn’t appreciate all the new shiny things being announced and once you start getting down to the nitty gritty of everything, you will be amazed at how much is going on.

I really didn’t have time to go through everything in detail so the presentation acts as an independently curated jumping off point for you to find out more information about the announcements that matter to you. You may not care particularly about hyper-converged or OpenStack so you can flick through the slides and then head off to continue your explorations.

Thanks for having me UKVMUG!

Here’s the presentation:

Another Run VMworld with an ever bigger group and plenty to talk about.

American style breakfast, hey there was fruit though!

General Session

The second general session which is usually the more technical show-and-tell of the mass presentations was led by VMware’s CTO Ben Fathi making his first VMworld keynote appearance. Wearing jeans and talking to the engineers in the audience, his job is to show some of the technology announced. He went through the story of businesses stuck in silos battling the change from traditional apps to cloud-native apps. VMware wants to make things much easier to deploy all kinds of workloads from your private data center using vCloud Suite to Public cloud with vCloud Air but with a common management framework and toolset covering both. Quite a bit of time spent talking about the power of “and”, saying you can use multiple things (hybrid cloud) over having to make a decision and being stuck with “or”.

Read more…

Many companies trying to take advantage of cloud computing are embracing the moniker of the “Software Defined Data Center” as one way to understand and communicate the benefits of moving towards an infrastructure resource utility model. VMware has taken on the term SDDC to mean doing everything in your data center with software and not requiring any custom hardware. Other companies sell “software-defined” products which do require particular hardware for various reasons but the functionality can be programmatically controlled and requested all in software. Whether your definition of “software-defined” mandates hardware or not the general premise (nothing to do with premises!) is being able to deliver and scale IT resources programmatically.

This is great but I think SDDC is just a stepping stone to what we are really trying to achieve which is the “Policy Defined Data Center”.

Once you can deliver IT resources in software, the next step is ensuring those IT resources are following your business rules and processes, what you would probably call business intelligence policy enforcement. These are the things that your business asks of IT partly for regulatory reasons like data retention and storing credit cards securely but also encompasses a huge amount of what you do in IT.

Here are a few examples of what kinds of policies may you have:

• Users need to change their passwords every 30 days.
• Local admin access to servers is strictly controlled by AD groups.
• Developers cannot have access to production systems.
• You can only RDP to servers over a management connection.
• Critical services need to be replicated to a DR site, some synchronously, others not.
• Production servers need to get priority over test and development servers.
• Web server connections need to be secured with SSL.
• SQL Server storage needs to have higher priority over say print servers.
• Oracle VMs need to run on particular hosts for licensing considerations.
• Load balanced web servers need to sit in different blade chassis in different racks.
• Your trading application needs to have maximum x latency and minimum y IOPS
• Your widget application needs to be recoverable within an hour and no be more than 2 hours out of date.
• Your credit card database storage needs to be encrypted
• All production servers need to be backed up, some need to be kept for 7 years.

Read more…

I’m very excited that HP has invited me to attend HP Discover in Las Vegas next week as a blogger. It’s going to be an intense few days, 15 hours of travel each way for 2.5 days of HP Discover!

I’m particularly looking forward to speaking to HP product managers and executives and chatting to other bloggers and attendees to get a sense of what’s new with the “new” HP.

Management

Product wise, I’m first of all keen to delve deeper into HP OneView, HP’s converged infrastructure manager which aims to finally bring together HP’s disparate management tools, ultimately replacing HP SIM which I really don’t like and incorporating Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager. HP OneView runs as a virtual appliance and you pull in your servers, iLOs, chassis, Virtual Connects etc. where they can be managed and reported on from one place. It has an API so you can finally script against it with PowerCLI and other tools which cannot come soon enough.

Read more…

Recently I’ve been looking further into what the “cloud” means and how cloud computing should be understood and if/how it should be aligned with IT strategy. No cloud discussion is brief so bear with me!

“Cloud” is obviously the IT buzz word of the moment and as a buzz word carries with it positives and negatives.

Having a simple word like cloud is good for IT in a way that it brings with it a fresh new way of thinking about how IT is delivered forcing companies to re-evaluate the way they do IT which drives innovation.

Unfortunately with such a broad, difficult to define concept it becomes very difficult for companies to effectively understand and plan a cloud strategy when there are as many definitions of what the cloud is as there are products.

Companies and cloud thinking

Read more…