Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Ok so you have been to VMworld 2010, got out of bed at 730AM for the keynote on vCD with before hand having a ridiculous burrito and stale awful coffee or such like for breakfast at the VMworld catering, before rushing to get into the first sessions feeling like you are merely a single sardine in a sea of many through the crowds and then after all that got home after those general product sessions to install and see vCD for yourself to find;

• It requires Redhat 64 Bit,
• Needs an Oracle DB
• Has no OVF based appliance

Disappointed comes to mind with a prereq list like that, especially after i’ve had a twitter stream, RSS feed and work email box inundated with hype over this product. I would expect with the push of virtual appliances and the alliances with Novell this could be packaged into a VA so at least simpletons like me could at least get half way to deploying.

It’s a shame, it appears vCD that I know full well has been in development for sometime under the Redwood guise has merely been released to woo customer and raise share prize at VMworld.

Well I will tell you this…if a product that is going to “take me into the next decade of IT” as the marketing waffle suggest it has got a lot of work to do in a short space of time to convince me of this…..personally releasing a product that is as fundamental to VMware’s future as where the initial ESX releases back in the original rise of VMware I think they are treading on thin ice.

End of rant

Well it did strike me as a rather unusual piece of news when i’d read that Intel had bought Mcafee, although in the year of 2010 which seems to be the year of vendor consolidation I guess it should be no surprise. Mcafee that is predominantly based within the Anti Virus market space and most recently the security and compliance space is going to be rather a new territory for Intel.

Something leads me to believe that its not a spur of the moment purchase and there is a lot more devil in the detail, these are some of my reasons in short;

Patents

It strikes me that Mcafee has a lot of these, and in particular to my blog title I have discovered they have this patent.

This patent as it states could have implications for the big SaaS players such as Google, Microsoft and VMware, its basically a sure thing to be central to the future of Cloud computing revenue models. Does this mean Intel own intellectual rights to anyone selling SaaS or any related based service? I’m not a patent specialist so can’t completely concur however it does sound like it has potential.

Future tech

Linked in some respects to owned patents, I have a suspicion that Mcafee has been working with Intel for some time on technology that moves the security engine into a hardware layer of either on the CPU, Mainboards or Network cards. Couple this with Intel’s vision of vPro and centralised onboard management of compute nodes and this has potential to reach the consumer space in the home and then devices in the commercial space.

Confusing messages

The above are my main reasons that I think mcafee were purchased, their are a lot of confusing messages that I expect are being read, one of mine is VMware VMsafe. This technology has been in the works for well over Three years now, the future is clearly based on this for a virtualised environment and the basis around the efficiencies and performance gains are achieved mean VMsafe will mean less revenue to be made on AV (and in future other) server agents. Does this however mean that less revenue will be made on this area of business? do Intel care due to knowing something we don’t? I think its going to be an interesting future with this acquisition so I will be watching it unfold rather closely.

A colleagues mother at work was being overcharged for Electricity bills for the period of the last year, with the reason for this being that the electricity company was reading the wrong meter! This got me thinking, how many people have this certain electricity company overcharged over the same period or even since they started as a business? I expect a large volume of people have been ripped off with the net result of revenue being accrued into the service providers coffers.

With those negative views withstanding now align this overcharge scenario within todays era of Utility computing and billing within the IT Sector. Unless you are exceptionally efficient as an IT unit and have invested in toolset and technology to have a personal “IT Meter” you most certainly are going to be being overcharged I expect.

My point with this is that is the Utility computing world that is used for IT Managed Service agreements going to be as granular and utility driven as the bill you are receiving actually states? Are you sure you are really obtaining the true beneficial value that is offered by a utility billing agreement? Or in the grand scheme of things is your organisation more appropriately suited to an alternative way to pay for IT Services? Strong control and operational management reporting are most certainly needed to provide data that can facilitate your commercial teams to ensure you are not being overcharged and losing the potential benefits of a utility offering.

Additionally look at this overcharging scenario for a cloud based world and this potential overcharge in future will be magnified even further. Despite the same obvious traits in the Cloud world of ensuring that you are still paying for what you actually use I believe that this new wave of computing era will bring yet even more true characteristic that we see within home based billing.

Now, I do not want a plethora of Spam and followers on Twitter trying to sell me chargeback/measurement tools, I am merely stating that what you believe you are paying for within day to day usage utility service may or may not always be what you actually think when it comes to utility and this is evident by what I discovered happened with utility services for the home that have most likely been over charging consumers after 40-50 years since meters (or the wrong meters) were installed into millions of homes.

So you would have thought that my first real post following being awarded a vExpert award would be all songs and praises for something to do with the big V? Well maybe it isn’t…I have noticed a lot of dialogue over the last week on twitter between a few VMware employees and VMware end users on whether DPM can add value and whether the Distributed Power Management feature in vSphere brings reduced TCO to an IT infrastructure. It appears mixed views are present, obviously the evangelists of the technology say it can be used to provide great cost savings and reductions in Opex cost of power and cooling requirements in the datacentre, others (mainly on the customer side) seem to be more negative towards DPM and advocate that strategy such as high density compute is better to sweat the underlying assets or DPM isn’t able to fit into there current IT model.

DPM technology is excellent and to be honest plain common sense, it has moved from being experimental into full blown production supportable within the later versions of ESX and now as a de facto proven product within vSphere. Core Main benefit of DPM is simple, it will dynamically turn off virtual hosts that are not needed at non peak times which is great, it avoids the cost that would have been occurred by running even vSphere hosts in an under utilised state. So I’ll get to the point do I think DPM is capability that can be used it to obtain the saving to anyone? well not really to be honest, I am in the non enthusiastic camp when it comes to DPM and the reasons I think this are as follows;

IT Service Providers

This is something that immediately springs to mind when aligned to my existing environment. Large amounts of organisations Outsource management of Virtualised environments, it is common for the agreed managed service contract to be setup over a Five year period with a pricing schedule built around things like Price of management of the VM’s in the environment, ESX host management etc etc. Organisations that outsource to managed service and hosting organisations very rarely share infrastructure with other customers. Based on this factor why should an organisation using a hosted DC care about the power costs being incurred? The cost of Power and Cooling is already present within the pricing schedule that they agreed with the outsourcer so it is extremely rare that DPM is going to be deployed in this type of environment.

Longer term and as with most IT infrastructure developments I expect service providers will start to push customers to adopt DPM to reduce there power costs (and the customers), however at the moment this is currently the case and most are subjected to older pricing models.

Capital Expenditure

Organisations likely buy or leases underlying Infrastructure themselves or they potentially lease the hardware from the service provider. This of course means the organisation or the outsourcer has to purchase server hardware with CAPEX.

DPM falls short here, organisations simply don’t like to waste capital investment especially when they are paying a service provider to manage that environment 24/7 and not just at peak times. This dosn’t mean I agree with where DPM falls short here, it is merely a fact that is present in most outsourcer agreements.

Change control

This might seem harsh and vintage but some organisations are still very low on the maturity level when it comes to aligning change to the great dynamic capability available within VMware environments. Functionality such as Vmotion and SVMotion are just starting to be accepted as something that dosn’t require change. I am skeptical as to whether change boards would be happy with underlying server hosts turning on and off at certain periods of the day/night.

Additionally in hosted datacentre’s you can struggle to even be able to turn on physical infrastructure at certain periods of the day, this is mainly for M&E reasons such as potential power spikes or sudden dramatic increases of power draw from the UPS.

DPM is yet another dynamic feature within the VMware suite that will again need excessive volumes of education and evangelising from people like you and me for change boards to understand and accept.

TCO Evidence

The jury is out as to whether TCO cost savings in OPEX for power and cooling is percentage wise worthwhile the time and effort. Think of it this way, how much cost is incurred in designing, planning and operating an environment that is DPM enabled? As much as I trust VMware it is still software and still potentially prone to failure at some stage, so does a DPM environment need someone to be monitoring it more to ensure that it actually is working effectively?

Being an Architect I question whether it is more cost effective to plan for more higher density DRS pools in the first initial design phase as apposed to just installing hosts and using DPM to turn them off when not needed?

Also remember when your hosts are not being used and are turned off by DPM algorithms you still are paying for the Licensing and Hardware cost to sit basically turned off!

If DPM has true capability to reduce TCO then Maybe VMware should introduce a TCO calculator or build in something to highlight to give organisations the piece of mind?

So where is DPM suited?

At the moment I think DPM is suited to and should only be employed within some of the following areas;

• Organisations that internally manage there own Virtual environment from the Infrastructure level up,
• Are not subjected to OPEX cost for management of hosts and have to pay with facility budget for power and cooling.
• Has management and bean counters that embrace such technology
• Can demonstrate and measure the cost saving on Power and Cooling. Main crux of this is you should not install or enable technology if you cannot measure and justify the reason you are doing it.
• Has acceptance and clarity with CAB’s and other service management teams

Future hope is present for DPM to grow in popularity with the predominant growth of Cloud and multi tenant hosted environments. Cloud or shared utility models mean that turning off non used hosts within a cluster will become more realistic and crucial to the finance model of the cloud service provider, in a cloud IaaS environment the customer will only pay for VM’s and will not be concerned about wasting CAPEX, that will be the Cloud service providers problem!

Summary

Please do not think I think that DPM is rubbish, it is excellent innovation and great plain common sense thinking from VMware, I do feel though that awareness is needed to understand that it is not functionality that can simply be just ticked and used to reap reward, there are various factors that limit its potential within most larger enterprises and certain IT models.

Well this announcement came into my email yesterday and its a mega shock with it all still sinking in!

Now here is the Oscar speech;

My thank you’s

• I thank the person that nominated me, this means I am obviously doing something right!,
• I have a special thanks to the guys that I’ve been fortunate to network with i.e. @storagebod, @ianhf and @chrismevans and the #storagebeers crew, these guys are Storage guys, however it has exposed me when it comes down to Virtualisation which has meant an increase in confidence,
• Thanks go to @stevie_chambers for his constructive critism about blog content and also for reminding me my English grammar is diabolical (which unfortunately I am aware of ,
• All the top notch people I see on a 2-3 monthly basis at London VMUGs, it is a great honor to now be a fellow vExpert with the top dogs such as @vinternals, @tom_howarth, @kiwi_si, @simon_long, @vinf_net (and the list could go on),
• @john_troyer for making vExpert what it is today, I am honored to be within the first 3-500 EVER vExperts and hope my number continues to remain the same!

So, speech is over, now I am a vExpert it means I have a duty, this duty is to provide you with some of the following (given time and brain power)

• More blog content which is focussed on my view of the futures of the technology we love and crave of Virtualisation, Unfortunately though I am a namby pamby Technical Architect which means in my day time I am not hands on, that withstanding I will endeavour to ensure that I meet most user requirements,
• Views and feedback (mainly to fellow vendors), yes I am now a vExpert but it doesn’t mean I am a salesman for VMware. To be blunt if I don’t like something I will be constructive and ensure that my opinions are known,
• I endeavour to build some reference templates within a section on my blog, these will not be technical in the operational sense but will be approaches that can be made to things such as IT Roadmap, Blueprint strategy and many other areas that I currently get involved in on a day to day basis,
• Honest advice, if you see me at a VMUG or an event then talk to me, I will be more than happy to help you or provide advice, as i’ve said this may not be to a technical level that some of the other vExperts are at but if I can’t answer your problem/barrier “I know a man who can”.

So, speech is over I am sure I have missed something/one so if I have many apologies….after receiving this vExpert award I guess the hardwork has to begin of doing all of the above and retaining it for 2011!

Dan