This statement sounded somewhat familiar to me, somewhere I had heard this before.  I did some digging and I found why this rang such a bell.  Flash back four and a half years ago.  I remembered this article from the NY Times in February of 2007.  In it was an introduction to a little company called VMware.  It describes this little company and how it was taking on the Goliath Microsoft.  My favorite part was a quote in the article from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who said: “Our view is that virtualization is something that should be built into the operating system.”  Essentially, virtualization is a feature and not a product.  Funny how times change.  VMware, who was selling a “feature,” just yesterday reported revenue of $941.9 million for the just-ended third quarter.  Vmware is projecting Q4 revenue to be between 1.03 and 1.06 billion.  Not bad for a “feature.”

In this day and age Apple is the Goliath and the biggest kid on the block.

Dropbox, only yesterday, scored $250 million in funding and appears to be growing well.

It amazes me sometimes how what comes around, goes around.  Never underestimate the power of a competitor and the “feature” they might be selling.  Who knows where Dropbox might be 4 years from now.  Maybe they are the next VMware.

The class was comprised of eight modules.  Day one ran through modules one thru four, day two had modules 5 and 6 and day three was comprised of modules seven and eight.  You can read this to see the syllabus for the class as well as the description for each of the modules.

There were a two things about this class that I found to be very different than any other VMware class I had attended.  First, there was no real administrative work.  We never used the vSphere client or looked at a host.  We barely used the classroom terminals at all.  Almost all of the work was whiteboarding and drawing architectures of networks and storage and physical infrastructure.  For the labs, the class was divided into two groups, one group was given an enterprise customer case study and the other received a SMB case study.  Both study’s had physical environments that wanted to virtualize.  The enterprise study was obviously significantly larger however the SMB had a very limited budget.  Both had items to challenge the designers.  As we reached the end of each module, we would incorporate what we learned into that phase of the design.  The labs were actually designed very well.  At the end of each lab session, each group had to pick someone to defend their design to the rest of the class (surely to prep us for what we might find at the VCDX defense session).

The second thing I noticed about the class that was very different from other classes was the references to blogger’s information.  The instructor referenced Duncan, Frank and Mike on more than one occasion (The VMguy was left out unfortunately – guess I’ll have to try harder).  Never had I seen such a display of non-vmware owned information in such a class.  Personally, I read all of their information pretty religiously yet I still found things I did not know or had not read.  This class was a very good summary of the pitfalls to avoid in design.  It was a collaboration of all of the gotchas that these designers (some who are now VCDXs) have seen.  Everything from the configuration maximums to what features are not supported with Fault Tolerance.  It was an outstanding display of all the things you have to remember when designing an entire virtualized datacenter.

My only complaint would be that the case study notes for the labs were incomplete.  We constantly found ourselves wanting to ask our imaginary customer for more information.  This can be expected somewhat as the class is a new offering from the education department.  I must say that our instructor was constantly requesting feedback for the course and promised to relay that information back to the class designers.

All in all, I would highly recommend this class to anyone who might need to design a virtualized datacenter.  It was an outstanding collaboration of experiences and best practices that would be required before creating a accurate, reliable, properly sized, well thought-out design.  Well done VMware Education Department, well done.

But what if we want to change our vendor?  Many of us have done this in the past.  Ever changed your storage vendor?  Ever change your server hardware vendor?  Many of us know the pains involved to do so.  We have to learn new tools, new ways of configuring, monitoring and managing our infrastructure.  We may have to migrate applications or data to the new pieces of the datacenter.  This can be quite an undertaking requiring some dedicated project management, months of implementation work and hours of staff training.  All of that if you chose a new vendor for your infrastructure.  Now, what if you had to replace your storage, networking, server and virtualization vendor all at the same time?  What would that project look like?  Would you do it?

If Microsoft and HP decide to release Hyper-Cells (or whatever they may call them).  What if I decide I don’t like HP storage?  What options do I have then?  If I change the storage, is the rest of the solution supported?  What if I decide I don’t like any of it?  Will I still be free to choose the pieces of my infrastructure that I want?

I think the unified solutions have some great benefits to them.  I’m just not sure I’m ready for that kind of commitment…

For those thinking of starting a blog, here’s what vmguy.com has grown to in one year’s time:

6,500 unique visitors per month

250,000 hits per month

1,152 newsfeed subscribers

153 posts

179 comments

That’s only a post every other day, I’ll need to work on that.

Thanks again for all your support,

-Dave “the vmguy” Lawrence

ok, now I’ll have to write more to keep my status!  New post coming tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks Eric.

• Over 12,500 attendees (still awaiting the final tally)
• Over 300 attendees at VMware’s first Technology Exchange – Developer Day
• Over 200 sponsors and exhibitor companies
• 300 break out sessions across 6 tracks
• 12 Instructor led labs and 9 Self Paced lab courses
• 920 new VMUG members recruited on site
• VMworld 2009 generated a strong volume of coverage with a total of 315 articles. 90 original US articles, 11 ANZ articles, 51 APAC articles, and 163 EMEA articles.
• Strong social media activity with:
  • 4,305 tweets on the event, 1205 contributors and 2,350 followers
  • New VMworld YouTube views: 5,714
• VMware produced 14 VMworld videos on site and released these on VMware TV with 13,509 total views
• 4,459 Self Paced labs taken with 41,043 VMs deployed. This has broken all previous self paced lab records.
• 6,149 Instructor led labs taken across 12 labs on offer during VMworld 2009.

And just for fun (yes these are real and not made up):

• Quantity of sodas purchased     54,742
• Quantity of bananas      14,813
• Quantity of apples         14,813
• Gallons of coffee          1,895
• Quantity of cookies       5,647
• Quantity of brownies     9,188
• # of beers consumed at the welcome reception monday night: 10,200

We’ll have to work on that beer number next year!!!

The lines were not too long yet and moving quickly at the registration counter….

The longest lines I would find were in the VMware Store in Moscone South.  Make sure to head over there soon if you want the “big guy” shirts like me…..

If you haven’t done so already, head on over to the scheduler builder and get the sessions you want.  We’d love to have you in BC2704 and I hope to see you there.

-Dave

Microsoft provided a chart to Walt Mossburg, a writer for the Wall Street Journal.  It was a chart showing the upgrade options for users of XP and Vista and what options then had when upgrading.  Walt felt the need to blog on the topic due to the complexity of the chart and limited options for some users.
You can read his entire article here or just take a quick look at the chart he posted here.

What amazes me (and Walt) is that there are 66 cells on this chart and only 14 of them are “in-place” upgrades.  52 of the cells are “custom install”  Now I will be the first to concede that the majority of the users will fall into the 14 cells.  However, if you were considering changing edition or moving to 64-bit when you went to Windows 7 the upgrade may not be very friendly.  That means the users (or admins) must move their data off, install from scratch, and reinstall all their apps and copy their data back.  Yikes.

Seeing an opportunity to poke a little fun, the guys over at cultofmac.com posted some similar charts for OSX.  Pretty funny for a Monday morning.

My decision to go to a Macbook was not based on “the cool factor”.  It was 3 things for me: battery life, reliability, and sturdyness (I’m a bit rough on laptops). Boasting a battery life of 7 hours seemed to good to be true but I was able to run 6 with no problem on my initial test.  Reliability was becoming a problem with my old laptop.  It was a Lenovo X61.  Nice and small but it could no longer cool itself effectively.  Running a demo or a intensive webex would get the CPU too hot and it would go into standby mode randomly to protect itself and not let itself out until it cooled down.  Not very fun as it happened the last two times while I was on a Webex showing our software to a customer.  Sturdyness, I cracked the screen of my first x61.  The second and final one had a broken off PCMCIA slot door, and a chip off the base corner.  I really liked the aluminum shell.  I liked the fact that I can hold the laptop by the corner while open and the case does not flex from the stress.

Yes I paid a premium for it, but I was getting tired of all of the windows B.S.  Don’t get me wrong, windows is a great OS.  I hear great things are coming in Windows 7 and I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some of them.  I can’t wait to get my hands on it to load it into Fusion and play with the new features.  However, as for my base OS, I’m going to give OSX a try for a while.  I’ve been lucky enough to learn in my off time on my wife’s Mac I bought for her about 8 months ago.  Her laptop was dying and I was tired of being the “helpdesk” for every issue.  Getting a Mac was a great idea, supposedly easy to use and reliable.  Besides, whenever she would ask me for help I could use the “I don’t know Macs” excuse (for future reference, this only works for about the first month, she stopped buying it after that.)  So I would use her laptop on the evenings and weekends to understand it better.  I found myself asking her if I could use it instead of my own.  That’s when I knew I was getting hooked.

I was given the green light about 2 weeks ago.  I went down to the local Apple store in Columbus.  I really did not need the pitch or to ask any questions.  Any self-respecting geek researches every possible technical question before going to a store to buy a computer.  What I wanted to know is can I get one with a bigger-than standard hard drive in the store.  Unfortunately, the answer is no, not in the store.  They can add RAM for you but that’s it.  If you want to upgrade the CPU or the hard drive or digress from the standard models in any other way but RAM, you have to order online.  So I headed home.  Got online and picked the 13-in Macbook Pro  with the 2.53 GHz processor.  It came with 4 GB of RAM (a must if you want to demo anything in Fusion). I added the 500GB drive to it.  This was my whole reason for ordering it online.  It you want to run a bunch of VMs on a laptop, get an external drive or the biggest internal one you can, so I did.  The web site said it would ship with 2-3 days and I added expedited shipping for an additional $15.  It was built and shipped in 3 days, from Shanghai.  I ordered it on a Tuesday about 2pm and signed for it the following Tuesday at 10am.

I did the basic setup and then installed Fusion and ran a P2V of my old laptop.  From inside Fusion I can now power up my old pc and get any info I need.  I have an Airport Extreme at home now with a 1TB mybook drive attached to it.  I have time machine backing up to it.  One tip I can give you:  if you use Fusion, exclude the VM directories from Time Machine.  If you power up a VM in Fusion the vmdk (hard disk) files get updated.  Time Machine is not based on block level changes, that is, it does not back up just the parts of the files that have changed.  Instead, it is file based and backs up the entire file each time it gets changed.  This will send a lot of data to your time machine that is not necessary.  Copy them periodically to another file location but don’t let time machine get them.

So that’s where I am now.  If you use a Mac and know some tricks or a great software app to use on it, please post in the comments.  I’d love to hear from you.  Next up, I’m setting up an entire SRM demo in Fusion on my laptop and I’ll be posting exactly how to do that in the very near future.  I’ll do my best to have that done this week.

The best new section is the VMware launch portal vlp.vmware-land.com This is an outstanding resource for new and old administrators.  Definitely worth bookmarking if you have not already.

Looks like someone made #16!  Now on to challenge Duncan at Yellow-bricks.com .  I’m gunnin for ya Duncan!

Great information and thank you all that responded to the poll.

Just as a FYI, I run mine in a VM.

The final results:

For those in the local area, I’ll track PA, OH, MI, KY and IN.

If you want to find out more info about any of them before you vote, you can find the details at the links below.  Some features do not have their own page but additional info can be found on the linked page.

• Fault Tolerance
• vCenter Data Recovery
• vCenter AppSpeed
• vCenter Distrubuted Switch
• 3rd Party Virtual Switch
• vStorage Thin Provisioning @ Linked Clones
• VMDirectPath
• VMSafe
• vCenter Capacity IQ
• vCenter Chargeback
• vCenter Config Control

"Relax the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certification requirements. I shouldn’t have to take a class to become a VCP, if I have the knowledge and experience to pass the VCP exam that should be enough. Many qualified people can’t afford to take a class just so they can take the test."

One of my readers wrote in (Thanks Jay!) and disagreed with this one and I do as well.  My reader, Jay, reminded me of the integrity of the exam and how that must be maintained.  He told me how VMware should keep it the way it is to avoid "good test takers".  He also reminded me of the girl who got her MCP at age 9 . Sheesh, really!?!  (and I failed my first one, that makes me feel good.)

Costs is another way to deter 9-year olds from getting a certification.  What costs did the 9-year-old incur? $50 for a book and $125 for the exam (that’s less than most iPods).  Adding the costs for the exam also deters expert test takers who want the cert for free.  It’s a fact in this world that things that are free or near free are perceived to be less quality, even if they are not.  If I put two identical apples in front of you and told you that one costs 50¢ and one costs $5 but today, for you, both apples are free.  You can only choose one, which would you choose?  I’ll bet the $5 one.

Your certification should be a challenge in the form of effort, know how and experience .  I think that VMware wants to be certain that the test takers have actually seen and used the product at least once.  Perhaps the MCP should do the same so 4th graders are not getting their certifications.

When I was 5 years old my mother took me to a Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) doctor because I was having trouble hearing.  The doctor sat me down and looked at my ears and saw fluid behind my eardrums.  He put a set of tubes in my ears (still a very common practice today) to drain the fluid and sent me on my way.  I remember how much better I could hear almost immediately.  "I was cured", I thought.  What a great doctor I have! "These tubes will fall out on their own in about a year," my doctor told me.  "You won’t even know when."

I can assure you that they did fall out about a year after they were put in.  I know this because my hearing problem came back again.  This is also somewhat common as some children need a second treatment before they grow out of this typically childhood issue.  Again my mother took me into my ENT for his diagnosis.  He responded with the same diagnosis and treatment.  Another set of tubes was inserted in my ears and I was on my way.  This process continued for the next 20 years with the same doctor inserting over 7 sets of tubes in my ears.

When we work in our cubicles in the IT Department and a someone comes to us with a computer problem, what a great feeling it is to solve that problem for them.  They were not able to use the technology on their own very efficiently.  We, being well versed on the topic, have a much deeper understanding of what is going on.  Often times we can determine the correct course of action quickly and there is no better satisfaction for us than watching a fellow employee walk away with a smile on their face knowing we put them back on track.  When another employee comes to us with the same issue, it’s a great feeling to repeat the diagnosis and resolve their issue quickly to allow us time for the more difficult issues.

There comes a point in our IT career where we have to stop the next person coming in with the same issue.  We have to step back for a moment and wonder what the larger problem may be.  For many of us, this is a challenge.  For many of us, it’s a challenge to think outside the box.  This issue could be caused by a much larger problem.  It could be caused by a symptom of a much larger problem.  Some of us spend all of our time being reactive to the needs of the users and not being proactive on better solutions for the company and ourselves.

By taking just a few hours a week to examine new technologies, think of how much better off we could be.  I meet too many administrators today who spend all of their time in react-mode.  They perform their tasks admirably, yet something is missing.  They never get better at what they do.  Sure they learn how to fix the repetitive problems faster and what works for this situation and what works for another.  What they forget is stepping back to view the bigger picture.  They might have missed one simple piece of technology or new procedure or method in their infrastructure that would have eliminated 26 support tickets.  How many late dinners would they have made on time or nights of sound sleep without the pager or text message if they would have kept up to date in their knowledge?

If I can stress one thing to you from my 18 years of IT experience, plan time in your work week to research new technologies .  Put a recurring two hour meeting on your calendar twice a week just to do research.  If you can’t find 4 hours a week, try to do two.  Take a look at the new technologies that are out there.  Pick some vendors and go to their website (or mine :) ) and look to see what is new.   They just may help you to help your company.  Who knows, you could be the next rising star in your company, having saved your company a large amount of money.  Try to find a solution to fix an issue you’ve seen over and over again.  Or maybe you find something that gives you just the right perspective to see the big picture and what’s really going on.  Anyone can be trained to be a repairman, but it takes discipline to be an Engineer.

I moved out of my hometown in 1998 to Columbus, Ohio.  That was about 2 years after my last set of tubes and my hearing was getting worse again.  I found a new doctor and made an appointment.  He was stunned by my medical history and that my previous doctor was not up to date on current procedures.  He immediately prescribed an allergy test.  The results indicated that I was severely allergic to nicotine and dust mites.  It was explained to me that when I am exposed to either, my nose gets congested and my glands swell in my throat.  This causes the eustachian tubes in my throat to close which prevents the ears from draining and causes fluid to build up.  What I haven’t mentioned so far was that my parents smoked two packs a day in my childhood home or that my bed had numerous stuffed animals (a haven for dust mites) on it when I was a kid.

It took for me to find someone who was up to date on new technologies and procedures to see the bigger picture.  Someone who never thought to put another tube in my ear.  Who knew that there was a much bigger issue at work and identified what it was and how to correct it.  He is a good doctor.

Be a good doctor, take the time to research a better treatment, it will help all of us in the long run.

Dave

I read a good article from one of our friends up North, Rafael Ruffolo from ComputerWorld Canada.  Rafael describes why Virtualization should not be one of those cuts.  Virtualization is a technology that saves companies so much that it should not be avoided in these tough times.  My favorite part of the article is a quote by Grant Aiken, VMware Canadian Country Manager who said, "It’s like putting a new, more efficient furnace in your home, you have to make the investment up front before you can start reaping the rewards."

I could not have said it better myself.  Find the article in it’s entirety here .

For those doing the math, 1225 days, that’s over 3 years and 4 months!  How many non-ESX x86 hosts do you have running that long?