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Registrations for HP Discover continue – and it’s not too late

martin237 — Sun, 19 May 2013 22:41:11 +0000

HP Discover is in Las Vegas between 11th June to the 13th and it’s set to be a great event with some great content as well as opportunities to leverage from the hands on labs, the sessions and on site communities.

The core reasons for attending HP Discover are:

Keeping up to date with HP product and service innovations, this includes innovation with their technology partners and event sponsors to aid integration and support – their hpcloud.com solutions being a prime example.
The sessions cover not only technical topics but business and operational ones, development and operations, strategy and architecture, they can be an invaluable offering throughout the event.
Networking with fellow attendees and the HP technical and leadership teams – being able to ask questions and speak below the radar to get those issues resolved and opportunities realised.

I put together some bullet points and notes for justification here.

VMware to Announce vCloud Hybrid Service

martin237 — Tue, 07 May 2013 22:00:33 +0000

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-vcloud-hybrid-webcast-043013.html

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 30, 2013 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced that Pat Gelsinger, CEO, and Bill Fathers, senior vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Services Business Unit, will present at a VMware-sponsored live webcast to unveil a new cloud service on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at 10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT.

To register, please go to:
http://www.vmware.com/go/vmwarehybrid

This is an exciting announcement and it will be great to see how VMware’s hybrid cloud is packaged, what the various levels of service and features are available, be sure to register and see how VMware are innovating their services for their customers.

Talking about SMB’s, cheapseats, club class and enterprise grade

martin237 — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 23:25:08 +0000

http://www.zdnet.com/why-vmware-needs-to-focus-on-smbs-7000012969/

Thinking of VMware’s dominance in server virtualization made me wonder how the company approaches small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and it occurred to me that the focus is really on enterprises. Are SMBs an afterthought for VMware? No, says VMware but yes, say analysts and SMBs. Given that VMware has only begun to focus in this broad area, with any serious effort, in the past year or so, it makes one wonder. My best guess is that VMware has begun to feel pressure from Microsoft and Citrix to make a server virtualization product lineup available that fits better into the SMB market than its standard vSphere products do. It’s about time.

An interesting article talking about VMware needing to focus on the SMB space. What we’re finding with cloud, with the internet is the disintermediary effect of transparency. I’m now working in a world where a google search for web design puts me instantly in touch with everyone from the world class design ageny through to Terrance who’s good, not brilliant but crucially good enough with wordpress to get me online, looking industrial grade and functional using appropriate technologies to drive my business.

There are enough service providers, open networks and communities offering a vast range of services and solutions to your business, increasingly therefore there are three demographics

Cheapseats – where we compete on price, or go open source and pay for the support or service we need
Club class – where my cost of doing business mandates an industry standard solution to deliver my business goals
Enterprise grade – where what matters is always on, never-fail, seemless, zero data loss, all the buzz words to indicate that my ATM never stops serving cash (the G4 van delivers the cash, the ATM line is on, the application is up), through to the Point-Of-Sale thing scanning and submitting my payment request through my intermediaries to transfer cash or seek payment approval.

What’s changing is two-fold, increasingly the cheapseats and club class are integrating, what the cheapseats can offer is actually good enough, with gmail, free email I get 10GB of email space. Enterprise grade might be 150MB, or 500MB, is it therefore Enterprise grade email I need or something that is good enough. Interestingly in the Enterprise level the business and the engaged IT teams are looking at how we do IT and asking the question is that what we need, is this good enough? If we take the simple level do I need teamed network card – in my life how many network cards have failed, I can remember about 7 events, in 13 years – so what therefore is the marginal cost of a network card failure to my business? Are we investing on two of every switch, two network cables end to end, and two network cards for a 7 in 13 year event issue being an issue? Crucially as start-ups come along that can do everything we need at a price point we need without the baggage, enterprises need to have one foot in keeping the lights on, living by the olden days infrastructure and applications whilst launching new applications for new and existing markets to keep connected to their consumers, most importantly, relevant and integral to their lifestyles.

When it comes to VMware and the SMB, just like it does to Dell to HP or any other service or hardware provider. Your first product, the first server, the first download is that customers’ gateway to your business. That MicroServer is your gateway to the cloud, the device which can cache your data locally and then link you to the cloud for new and exciting enterprise grade services, an online store, a SharePoint or wiki, the accounts or human resources products you need. Increasingly it’s not about virtualization, what hardware you use as so much as it is about how your business can be the broker to me achieving my business outcomes, more revenue, more sales, more stuff to allow me to target consumers and opportunities across regions, sectors and markets. I want the VMware, HP and Dell’s of this world to be not only my technology provider, but my business partner, my IT, the broker and innovator that comes along and says hey you know your client database shall we shove that through our analytics tool and see how we can derive or identify more opportunities for your business. Not selling tin. Not selling services, but helping me reach my business goals and helping me run my IT as I would run my business, this combined from a range of cheapseats, club class and enterprise grade tools and services.

Recognizing commodity is a reality and ‘go live checks’

martin237 — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:49:07 +0000

Chris called me up, he remains a happy man walking around sunny (but cold) Canary Wharf and is now leading the Windows operations team for a multinational, we continue to keep in touch discussing what’s going on and he emailed me a single line question.

We’re building medium’s do you bother with production checks anymore?

A bit of background. Chris’ company has implemented a self servicing imaging process, so to request a machine, you use an automated deployment tool which builds a new machine using their gold image. They can now therefore deploy a virtual machine in about 35 minutes, Chris would select the image (there are only a few Windows 2003/2008) and then the number of cpu/memory and a virtual machine is then built from template, it gets a dhcp address and then when the ‘build’ is complete he allocates a new IP address and updates DNS.

This has resulted in his phrasing around “medium’s”, in that he is increasingly building virtual machines with a similar configuration which the design term refer to as medium that is the midrange spec virtual machine, he is therefore as he jokes deploying “medium’s”. With that in mind, on the basis that it’s all templated and automatic (except for the change of IP address which is apparently being scripted into PowerShell) are the olden days production checks necessary.

What checks do you do I ask?

Check page file size
Compare original request helpdesk call with what’s been built (the specs are the same as what’s been requested)
Verify the security patches are up to date
That the inventory has been updated and it’s registered for backups and the performance monitoring tools
Well shouldn’t most of that be scripted?

Yes he says, we’re working on it, what’s your take?

This is a topic which caused me quite a bit of thought. To me it all depends on how you see your server, if it’s your central point of failure, your system which you are not going to swap out, rebuild or replace unless it is completely unrecoverable then yes you need production and verification checks.

For Chris though, who is deploying “medium’s” in a disposable server world (where if it breaks, the app team typically have a resilient solution, and more importantly they can deploy a machine in 35 minutes), I wonder if they are relevant. We script as much as possible and isolate all the tasks that can be integrated into the image and post build activities and with the operational risk standpoint make a judgement call balancing delivery (which is key), with operational risk and acceptance. In a disposable world, if we get the image, the rapid provisioning and automation steps right we shouldn’t need any manual steps, we just need the existing monitoring and security management or policy management tools to verify deviation from operating standards so that they can be addressed.

Put another way we shouldn’t be innovating a server deployment process without considering the go live one, it’s deferred success to say the least to be delivering a server in 35 minutes to the end user and then asking them to wait days or weeks whilst manual go live acceptance checks are performed before it’s ‘supported’.

To P2V or not to P2V – the questions and benefits

martin237 — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 23:16:00 +0000

I was having a chat with a colleague a debate really. He’s a project manager working in IT for one of many multinational organizations in the City of London delivering a P2V project, this is the process of virtualizing your servers, migrating the operating system, application and data from a physical server to a virtual server running on an ESX host.

It was time to catch up with him and discuss how his project was going, it’s phase three, this means it’s the final phase over the last six years to virtualize the server estate, the project in summary is below (for background):

Phase one – virtualize all non production application servers, standardizing configurations during the process to reduce support calls and management overheads, this meant for example standardizing the disk space and memory to improve performance or reduce unncessary calls/alerts being generated.
Phase two – virtualize all infrastructure and application servers older than three years to allow IT to decommission any physical servers no longer supported under their support contract and reduce data center footprint.
Phase three – virtualize systems of all types based on usage metrics and industry standard performance analysis tools to reduce physical server footprint and data center capacity required. This might for example include physical servers deployed in the last 6 months if they could be easily virtualized due to actual load differing from anticipated load.

I was interested to further understand the scope and got us in a debate you see I have mixed views about P2V projects, I am more a fan of combining P2V with a build out program. By that I mean that we do a new for old swap and ask the application teams to test and migrate their applications to a new virtual machine running a newer operating system. Why? We’re only removing the hardware limitation, not the other factors that can generate just as many alerts or risks to stability that is: inadequate configurations (memory/disk space), maintained range of operating systems and configurations that might not meet current standards in terms of design, security baselines and best practice.
So what are the benefits of P2V only project: (Migrating physical server to a virtual machine)

Reduce number of physical servers
Allow physical servers to be re-organized and re-deployed if they have useable life left in them
Less disruption to the end users and application team or underlying infrastructure and application code
Path of least resistance – less testing, operational risk and quicker time to market

Advantages of P2V combined with new for old: (replacing physical server with a new virtual machine):

We still deliver a virtualized infrastructure – building a new virtual machine is non disruptive
Allows parallel run testing before switch over to the new machine and therefore easy roll back
Enables IT to bring all systems up to a supported platform (Windows 2008 for example) including layered components, middleware and database
Empowers IT to tackle multiple challenges and project goals through one offering, migrating off a physical server on an old operating system, using old SAN switches on old storage to be migrated to a virtual machine on fully supported recently deployed infrastructure – converging business benefit
Creates opportunity to standardize applications migrated to existing or next generation standards in configuration and security baselines, standardizing technical issues (development environment, failover and automation where posssible) with non technical, does the existing solution meet the application tiering emposed by the business, it’s tier1 does the current environment meet that requirement?
Can be used as an opportunity for both application empowerment (enhance functionality, possibilities from new operating system, middleware and new technologies), as well as training to understand how the application works, data flows for full end to end testing and support.
Facilitates the re-enforcing of corporate standards and architecture rules, all front office systems be hosted in data center two rather than three, as we now have the scope and opportunity to build out new systems and migrate rather than work around issues real or perceived.
We have one disruptive work stream, the migration to the new virtual machine rather than migrate to a virtual machine only to be contacted months later requesting layered components be upgrade, the server be scheduled for a rebuild to a newer operating system or downtime to extend the disk, allocate more memory or apply service packs.
We force the discussion – we’re going to build out a new server, do you actually need this server, or can you relocate that workload to another server where it might co-exist – we in essence initiate the discussion to see if it’s actually needed and in use.

Which should we be opting for then?

It’s going to depend on your circumstances, your operational, political and financial operating model, but I remain a fan of building out a new machine where possible and then migrating the workloads to the new machine, that way we have in essence (where posssible) we target several IT objectives, we have one ‘downtime’ or disruptive activity and move on using our new fully supported and optimized platform on a new OS. More specifically we don’t migrate our existing challenges from a physical environment to a virtual one, just because it’s virtual does not mean the operating system, application code and layered components don’t still need upgraded to keep everything moving along and in line with both business requirements and vendor support.

EMC and VMware talk about their Pivotal Initiative

martin237 — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 23:07:54 +0000

EMC and VMware made some announcements around their Pivotal Initiative which involves a re-alignment of teams to better address and deliver to its customers in the cloud space. The announcement is below on the VMware blog.

http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2012/12/the-pivotal-initiative.html

On December 4, 2012, EMC and VMware shared information on the newly formed Pivotal Initiative.

Q: What is the Pivotal Initiative?

VMware and EMC are committing key existing technology, people and programs from both companies focused on Big Data and Cloud Application Platforms under one virtual organization—the Pivotal Initiative—led by Paul Maritz, Chief Strategy Officer of EMC. The companies expect to formally unite these resources by Q2 2013, with a specific operational structure to be determined.*

It will be interesting to see what changes this delivers and anything the two can do to provide a unified business or gateway to delivering cloud services, solutions and opportunities for its customers has to be a good thing. I wish both teams every success.

VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 announced

martin237 — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:34:43 +0000

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/vmware-launches-software-defined-data-ce/240143004

By Charles Babcock, InformationWeek
December 03, 2012 09:30 AM

VMware announced Monday that it has integrated its virtualized environment software with its cloud management products, putting into one box the software that generates virtual machines, applies cloud management, and introduces performance and capacity management to the resulting environment.

Dubbed VMware vCloud Suite 5.1, it combines the latest version of three previously separate products: vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.6 for virtual systems management; vFabric Application Director 5.0 for deploying applications in a virtual environment; and vCloud Suite 5.1 for managing pooled resources as a cloud operation.

Continued innovation from VMware has to be a good thing for virtualization as a platform and for the industry in terms of end user functionality, I’m off to read up more about the announcement and to see what the upgrade path is.

VirtualSharp for next generation automation in Disaster Recovery space

martin237 — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:08:12 +0000

http://www.virtualsharp.com/

REDWOOD CITY, CA – November 28, 2012 – Today at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012, VirtualSharp Software, the leading provider of next generation automated Disaster Recovery solutions for private and public clouds, announced record momentum for ReliableDR a year after launching version 3.0 at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2011.

Disaster Recovery is a mandatory part of Business Continuity Planning that needs to be tested frequently for reliability and accuracy. Disaster Recovery testing used to be expensive and cumbersome but virtualization and cloud have made it easy and effective. Automated recovery processes in the cloud ensure that Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) become ‘Actuals’ (RPA/RTA) and organizations can guarantee compliance with corporate Business Continuity policies.

“We make Disaster Recovery testing a mundane and predictable task handled by software without human intervention,” said Carlos Escapa, CEO and Co-Founder of VirtualSharp Software. “Service level agreements are tracked and enforced automatically, auditable anytime without disruption. We’re seeing accelerating demand for our Disaster Recovery solutions as awareness grows regarding the ease and convenience of multi-cloud orchestration.”

In the last 12 months, VirtualSharp Software has:

Doubled the number of paying customers and quadrupled the number of VMware virtual machines licensed

Released ReliableDR Free Edition at VMware’s VMworld that customers can use to replicate as often as needed and automate migration and recovery testing

Launched its Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering for Cloud Services Providers

Expanded support of storage technologies to DataCore, Oracle Axiom and Nimble

Launched its V#P Partner program and now has 54 partners spanning 23 countries

Been named a Cool Vendor in Business Continuity Management and IT Disaster Recovery Management by Gartner

Added VMware Co-Founder Ed Bugnion to its Board of Advisors

I have heard a few comments about VirtualSharp and came across this article talking about their achievements in the past 12 months, they are continuing to make success in the Disaster Reocvery testing space which is great news. Their solution covers cloud and virtual environments (including VMware) is something I need to read up more about, do check it out.

Moving a rack server quick reference guide

martin237 — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 22:39:08 +0000

I put together this quick reference guide about moving a rack server for my brother who’s working on a data center exit project (migrating servers from one data center to another) as a point of reference, do change it to suit your needs, I have made some assumptions which might not apply to all servers. Where I’ve said ILO, it’s the same concept for Dell’s iDRAC or IBM’s IMM.

At this point I can sense many colleagues, industry experts and vendors saying but the ROI, the cost benefit analysis of physically moving servers just isn’t there, you could p2v them, or do a new for old swap and do it that way. Absolutely but let us appreciate that not everyone is in the same space in their IT lifecycle, that not everyone would necessarily have forward planned such activities nor have relevant buy in, that in some cases, moving it and then addressing at a later stage might work. That olden days issue that I have budget set aside to move, but none to buy new hardware to build out a new virtual farm or replace like for like hardware.

Information required:

Server name

Serial number

Network teaming – yes/no

Network connection(s) and IP – MAC(s), IP/Subnet/Gateway per connection

ILO(iDRAC/IMM) – yes/no

ILO/iDRAC/IMM – ip configuration

SAN storage – yes/no

WorldWideNames – referred to as WWN (the equivalent of the MAC for the SAN fibre cards)

Cabinet location

Size in U

Checks required on power down (Windows but concepts for other operating systems apply)

Ping ILO and check that you can log in.

Save and clear IML

Log on to event logs and check for any hardware or software errors

Run command prompt (in Administrator mode if UAC turned on) ipconfig /full >ipbfmove.txt

Check disk space to avoid any issues

Shut server down

On power up:

Switch server on

Log into ILO config screen and configure new IP details (if applicable), check the port speed and duplex match expected, apply changes and save

Boot into the operating system and apply new IP details (if applicable)

Ping default gateway (for some isolated/customer facing networks this might not work)

Ping a server on the same network to check connectivity

Check that you can see all the drives, that the event logs are clear of errors and all services set to automatic are started (as normal)

Hand server over to project manager for application sign off

Components that I would have to hand during a physical lift and shift data center move project:

Hard disk drives

Power supplies

Memory

Either a system board or servers of the same vintage/range that we can use either as spare swap servers or to obtain parts

Hudson streamlines operations with HP storage and servers

martin237 — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 23:39:04 +0000

HP.com

LONDON, UK, 15 October 2012 — HP announced today that global talent solutions company Hudson has streamlined operations and improved business continuity with HP storage and servers.

With a global presence of more than 2,000 employees operating in approximately 20 countries, Hudson (NASDAQ:HSON) offers highly specialized professional recruitment, talent management, recruitment outsourcing and related staffing services and solutions. Clients partnering with Hudson achieve greater organizational performance by attracting, selecting, engaging and developing the best talent for their business.

“We have improved Hudson’s business continuity by modifying our disaster recovery strategy,” says Bas Alblas, IT Director Europe, Hudson. “The back-office IT infrastructure of all our offices across Europe has been consolidated into a London data center, and we plan to build a mirrored data center for complete redundancy. HP servers and storage now ensure full recovery of all our applications. HP storage ensures uninterrupted availability for all our users, and virtualizing all our physical servers onto HP ProLiant blade servers has cut Hudson’s data center power usage in half.”

A single unified storage pool now supports Hudson’s virtualized environment, business applications and services. A storage area network (SAN) based on an HP LeftHand Storage system provides 61TB of secure, easily managed storage for Hudson’s business-critical data. Thin provisioning has already saved 43TB of physical disk space, and performance can be scaled linearly to grow with Hudson’s business.

HP Virtual Connect simplifies the connection of the SAN to a virtualized server platform of HP ProLiant BladeSystem c7000 enclosures with 26 HP ProLiant BL490c server blades running VMware 4.1. HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) makes it possible to manage the HP servers remotely.

It’s always great to read what technologies people are using in order to deliver their infrastructure or resolve their objectives, whether it’s streamlining operations or transitioning to a more agile platform for revenue generation.