Archive for May, 2009

VirtualIron has finally been bought by Oracle with a finalised acquisition which has been an industry suspicion for a few months now, see http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/03/oracle_to_buy_v.html;jsessionid=2FZ22WY3F2H1WQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN

Some of you guys may have read and seen my views on Cisco UCS and read about how I feel Cisco may or may not gain massive popularity within the datacentre infrastructure space.

Cisco have provided direct from the horses mouth responsive feedback on comments such as mine that industry bloggers have raised and I am mightily impressed they have done this, it certainly takes a lot for an individual to represent the organisation to provide responses to feedback and possible criticism composed on various web blogs. The interview with Wendy Mars Cisco Director of the UCS Intiative is available in video format to view on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDUbttbatBo&feature=channel_page , responses were very good and cisco like, analytic and positive with no fear of that what has been said by the likes of myself is likely to give UCS a damaged impression at such an early stage and it is a very positive review. Cisco have as i’ve said before not got into the blade server market to dabble, they are here to become number one.

Collectively the blog commentary has probably come across in some respects as quite a hard critism on Cisco and pointed quite aggressively and looked at flaws that the new converged strategy they are using. Run up to the California UCS Launch was marketed from the outset by Cisco themselves in moderate build up and I think a lot of people not privy to internal discussions with Cisco directly were quite amazed at how architecturally basic the technology and strategy is yet on the flipside of this amazed at how it is likely to turn datacentre consolidation up a notch by the sheer simplistic nature of converged backplanes and converged IO between SAN and LAN with FcOE.

In response to my question which was “Do enterprises want to unify networks, storage and servers?”, It does seem that large amounts of views on UCS have come from a bottom up engineering nuts and bolts perspective not from the top down C level view or even a middle view which is an Architect who needs to invest in the right technology yet not sacrifice functionality, scalability etc for their organisation/customer.

I think a lot of engineering folk are most likely afraid or more probably concerned at how Converged networking affects the SAN or LAN admin as we know it and the role that they both play in IT today, I think it will be very hard to find any C level bods that have as a harsh view on how it will integrate, post descriptive recommendation from trusty aide they will most likely love the overall benefits with the reduced opex costs of running a datacentre with fewer cabling requirements and costs of fabric switching and Lan switching (longer term not immediately). Engineering folk will probably find it similar to Server Virtualisation and blade backplane technology such as Virtual connect and will need to find time to adapt with the new way of working within a structured IT department.

Lets hope we see more response to blogger opinions and questions on the internet, the organisations and companies that we comment on are nine times out of ten obtaining free marketing for large amounts of revenue gain in return so videos like this to appease us are the least they can/should do.

Make what you want of the title of this post but VSphere includes functionality within the SDK and within HA that performs a screen dump of your Virtual Machine when you get a bluescreen or VMtools not responding (also something you can do in Vmware workstation) Eric Sloof has coded a great app to see each of your VM’s current screen dump, this can be found at http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1097-Big-Brother-Really-Is-Watching.html…

Jeff Browning, an EMC employee has raised some exceptionally great points on the current state of affairs that surrounds Oracle support within Virtualised environments. Within his post is a simplified view on why he feels the current support model or more should I say the lack of support model at Oracle is technically floored and really not about the actual technology and more about the corporation building an agenda to basically monopolise and gain more revenue, read it as it sets some ideas running in your head. http://oraclestorageguy.typepad.com/

Being an early adopter of Vmware Virtualisation has meant that in the past I have faced this type of support hurdle many a time and felt of the same opinion, one example being SAP, from the way I see it, it took SAP large amounts of use case and almost eating the dog food themselves first internally to gain trust with ESX 2 being used to host its main B2C training and demo suites.

The scalable benefits of ESX VI3 arrived with larger than 3.6GB of addressable RAM per VM, multiple CPU’s and it was then the start of them being able to comfortably provide customers with full blown production support for running SAP within a Virtualised environment. Microsoft is another one, they have in the last year introduced the SVVP program http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx to ensure that Microsoft software customers play straight dice and align MS software versions to the latest releases and service pack revisions to gain break fix support from them. Although larger enterprises were able to gain acknowledgement for support entitlement under their Premier support agreement it was always a grey area of what would actually happen when the inevitable phone call had to be made and you had to migrate or replicate a problem with the software which was running say 10000 Exchange accounts! (it just wasnt practical lets face it).

In regards to why we still have a lack of clear positive Oracle alliances is that they more than likely still see Vmware (and other Hypervisors or soft parition mechanisms) as a threat to licensing and associated revenue, this is one of or if not the most important part of Oracles business model. Run considerably more Oracle workloads on less physical processors or run Oracle within a DRS cluster and that’s less revenue for them. On the licensing front they do seem to have tailored licensing for VMware (bit funny as its not supported) to mean that you have to license ALL possible hosts that a VM running Oracle could run upon, as you can gather this is just ridiculous and almost a non starter.

When it comes to aligning Oracle to any goal or hope of a complete virtualised datacentre you can see its just not going to fly and add up on your business case (or at least be easy at the moment), the licensing model is no doubt designed for large mainframe Iron which has no dynamic virtualisation capability such as Live migrate or resource scheduling. Interestingly however they now support LDOM’s which is a Hypervisor based Virtualisation tool (this was predate the SUN acquisition), http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/133/4/opt-sysadmin/21419 I can’t find if they have tailored licensing plan for this yet (they do for CMT Sparc processors) but this is a Hypervisor so no technical issues or arguements exists here then with the hypervisor indirection being used so this just increases the suspicion that Licensing rules the roost over virtualisation support.

Hopefully in future we will see some real movement in Oracle licensing schemes and acknowledged support, it is obvious that they are dependant on each other. Other issues arise within larger enterprises as it is hard to determine and show your data/dba teams that running Oracle on VMware is a reality, I could probably add loads of detail on how and what you can do to achieve this but will save for another rainy day.

The whole support, licensing and 100% virtualised datacentre vision will start to become more interesting when Vsphere arrives with all of its great scalable benefits along with the high availability benefits that are brought to organisations that can enable you to consolidate Tier 1 workloads, This was what happened in my example of SAP and others around release of ESX 3 so hopefully Oracle will acknowledge this and can forklift customers into building enough revolt to get Oracle on the straight and narrow and get focused on who is the most important person at the end of the day…..the paying customer.