Category Archives: Management

VMworld Copenhagen – Day one summary

Management, Netapp, Virtualisation, VMware, VMworld, ,
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Today was officially the start of VMworld Copenhagen even though many people were here yesterday for partner day. The hands on labs are always popular at VMworld shows, and for all the reasons previously covered by others. I’ve done two labs so far (HOL01, Creating the Hybrid Cloud and HOL27, Netapp and VMware) which were both useful in different ways. There’s a good atmosphere and the technology behind the labs continues to evolve – this year vCenter Operations (and I think Netapp Insight Balance) are on display showing how the lab infrastructure is performing. There are more seats and the labs are open longer than last year (32 hours) which is good to see.

I spent fair bit of time in the bloggers lounge, a small dedicated area with power, a separate wifi connection, and facilities for VMworld TV to broadcast live from. This is where you can often find John Troyer, the godfather of VMware’s social media scene along with many of the twittter names you’ve seen but never met in person. VMworld is a vertitable ‘who’s who’ of the virtualisation world – I found myself sitting next to Scott Lowe for ten minutes before realising who he was and saying hi! Many of the people hanging around the bloggers lounds have been at VMworld many times so it’s a good place to get a feel for what’s hot and what’s not at this year’s conference. I got my first taste of VMworld TV via an invite to vSoupTV. Quite a few people mentioned that it felt quieter this year but as the attendance has been confirmed at over 7,000 it must be because there’s more space rather than less people.

The centre of the complex is used as a relaxation zone complete with plenty of seating, food, recliners (for those quick power naps), table tennis, table ice hockey, chess sets etc. It’s a good place to meet people as you pass through on your way from a general session to the labs. Free wifi is available throughout the Bella Centre but unfortunately it’s pretty temperamental – somewhat expected for a large conference with over 7000 people. That wouldn’t be so bad but the VMworld iPhone app relies on internet access so when that’s not working you can’t reference your schedule or register for sessions. When it does work the VMworld iPhone app is pretty good – you can check for upcoming sessions, get a filtered twitter stream for a given session, and even check site maps. Continue reading VMworld Copenhagen – Day one summary →

vCenter Operations 1.0 – Pros and Cons

Management, VMware, , ,
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

As the complexity of virtual infrastructures increases it’s becoming harder to manage using conventional monitoring tools which were built with a more static environment in mind. In March 2011 VMware released the vCenter Operations product (vCOPS) to address this pain point. I’ve been running the 60 day trial at my company and now that the trial’s ending it’s time to share my thoughts.

What is vCOPS?

To quote the product page at VMware;

VMware vCenter Operations uses patented analytics and powerful visualizations to automate performance, capacity and configuration management. It collects and analyzes performance data, correlates abnormalities and identifies the root cause of building performance problems. VMware vCenter Operations provides capacity management to optimize resource usage and policy-based configuration management to assure compliance and eliminate sprawl and configuration drift. (emphasis my own)

The key differentiator is this promise to learn and understand the context of multiple metrics (CPU, memory, storage and network) and provide root cause analysis without you needing to manually define thresholds, benchmarks etc. Bear in mind that vCOPS is an infrastructure monitoring solution rather than application layer (which is more the domain on VMware’s AppSpeed, Quest’s solutions or ManageEngine’s Application Manager). I’m not the first blogger to cover this product so here’s some reading to get you up to speed;

While technically a ‘v1’ release the product comes from VMware’s purchase of Integrien (in August 2010) where it was originally marketed as VMAlive. Integrien have been working on the patented algorithms for several years so while the integration and VMware branding are new the guts of the product are not. VMware have published some YouTube videos or you can listen to VM Communities podcast #119 to get an overview of what vCOPS can offer. Continue reading vCenter Operations 1.0 – Pros and Cons →

Mindjet’s new iPhone app reviewed

Management,
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Since joining my present company nearly four years ago I’ve been using Mindjet’s MindManager to help me manage my job. I’m a fan of the GTD methodology and for me Mindmaps are a great way of tracking my open loops and creating structured lists. Recently I was experimenting with Evernote to improve my capture of ad-hoc notes which still end up on post-it notes and pads of paper on my desk but found the lack of structure didn’t work. Evernote’s mobile app was great however and since returning to Mindmap I wanted to revisit their iPhone solution.

This is where I hit the first hurdle. In June this year they released a completely new, rewritten app which unfortunately was not an upgrade for existing users, along with the following rationale;

Automatically pushing out an “upgrade” from the old one to the new one would actually remove some features you are already using while enabling different ones. It was our judgment that, for most users of the original app, this would not be a good experience so we did not label the new Mindjet iPhone as an “upgrade” on the iTunes store. It is truly a brand new, v1.0 app.

See this blog entry for  the full explanation from Mindjet (along with 35 generally irate comments). £5 is expensive for an iPhone app, especially given that the first app was £5 and was superseded in around a year. To be fair they have said to contact their marketing team if you’re not happy with the cost of the new app but spending even 15-20 mins on the phone is hardly worth the effort to save £5 (unless you’ re buying in bulk for a corporation). Either way I think this leaves a negative impression.

Anyway, what’s the new app like? There is one key (much requested) feature which makes it worth the asking price (for me, maybe not for you!) and that’s integration with Dropbox (although there’s no support for SugarSync, Crashplan or any of the other popular cloud storage vendors). Although it does what it says on the tin it’s by no means perfect;

  • The files are all stored in a Mindjet folder in the root of your Dropbox (over which you have no choice)
  • Synchronisation is a manual process and therefore easily forgotten. It does handle a conflict between the local (iPhone http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/priligy/ version) of a map and the Dropbox online pharmacy business for sale version but there’s no option to ‘keep both’ (typically via a rename) just in case both have useful content.
  • Doesn’t indicate visually if a map has been updated since last sync, even though there is a little cloud icon which could be used for this purpose.
  • Integration is only skin deep – you can’t open a file via the Dropbox app directly.
  • This does enable cross platform, roundtrip editing. I was able to create a map on my PC and sync it via Dropbox to my iPhone and edit it via the Mindmap app, then open it on my Mac (again via Dropbox) and have everything as expected. Hurrah!

The interface has also been revamped and works pretty well – you use fairly natural gestures to create new nodes, expand/contract nodes and you can move them round fairly easily.Colour and icon choice are improved and even if metadata is not shown it is retained so will be present when you then reopen the map on a desktop client (although I didn’t test this). Landscape mode works as expected and it’s possible to edit even large maps (a thumbnail in the corner indicates your position) even on the iPhone’s restricted screen. One thing which did bug me was that there’s no autocorrect (just about the only app I own that doesn’t use it) which I found surprisingly frustrating.

Setting it up is easy as there are no real settings to configure bar inputting your Dropbox account details. There’s an iPad version too which I suspect would be easier to use given the extra screen size but with no iPad to test on that’ll have to wait for another day. Since it’s first release at the start of July there’s already been a 1.1 release which added a few new features. Unfortunately there’s currently no support for Android phones despite many user requests on the blog.

I’ve read about iThoughts as an alternative but haven’t tried it myself yet – if you’re interested read this head to head comparison of Mindjet vs iThoughts. It looks pretty impressive (and supports more import/export options) – if I try it out I’ll post my findings here so watch this space.

PS. SF Bay area users – get paid to provide feedback on the iPhone Mindmap app (valid until 8th August 2011)

Gunfight at the ‘OK’ Corral: could you change hypervisors?

Hyper-V, Management, VMware, , ,
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

In my article The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly I discussed the controversial licencing change which is coming with vSphere5. Many people are saying they’ll move to a competing hypervisor to escape these potentially higher license fees and even though my company aren’t facing this issue (our vRAM entitlement is sufficient in the short term at least) at some point my management team are going to (or should!) ask me to justify the expense and whether there are suitable alternatives. Most people I speak to acknowledge that the competition can’t compare with vSphere for features or maturity but they do discuss when they’ll be ‘good enough’ to satisfy the more basic requirements (and at a cheaper price?). So is now the time for the competition to shootdown vSphere?

‘Gunfight at the ‘OK?’ corral!

I needed facts so I set out to see how feasible a change would be and if the benefits were justified. For the purposes of this article I’m going to concentrate on the three main virtualisation vendors recognised as leaders by Gartner – VMware (vSphere), Citrix(XenServer) and Microsoft (Hyper-V). I’m also going to focus purely on my own environment – I don’t know XenServer or Hyper-V well enough to do a general purpose comparison and there are too many factors to consider in a single blogpost.
PS. If you’re after a general comparison  I’d suggest starting with Andreas Groth’s virtualisation matrix. This excellent site lets you see at a glance the feature sets of the three main hypervisors and even generate custom reports. Note that the site starts with the free version of ESXi and XenServer selected for comparison. You can use the menus on the left to change the version for each solution etc as required – nice!

Before even worrying about general performance, stability, quality of support, roadmaps etc I thought I’d do a feature check specific to my environment. We’re primarily using our VMware platform for server consolidation – we’ve done the P2V game for all but a few tier1 apps and now use it heavily for dev and test environments which are 100% virtual. As an Enterprise (not Enterprise+) licencee we don’t have access to some of the higher end features (distributed switches, host profiles, SIOC) nor are we using the extended VMware ecosystem such as SRM, Cloud Director, Orchestrator etc. Given our relatively simple use of virtualisation I suspected we’d be a good candidate for the ‘good enough’ competitors.  Comparing vSphere Enterprise vs Hyper-V Enterprise vs XenSever Enterprise Edition I found that;

  • We use storage vMotion all the time to rearrange our underlying storage for capacity or performance reasons, or to migrate to new Netapp arrays etc. Moving to a rival hypervisor would mean losing this functionality as neither XenServer of Hyper-V offer a completely nondisruptive migration. Given the downtime this would cause the business it would either result in lots of out of hours work (with associated overtime costs) or disruption to the business – both of which I know they’d rather pay more to avoid.
  • Alongside various flavours of Windows we run a significant number of Oracle Enterprise Linux  and Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. When I last looked back in early 2010 Hyper-V only supported a single vCPU for Linux VMs and while it now supports vSMP (up to 4, same as our Enterprise licence of vSphere) only RHEL and SUSE are officially supported. A quick Google shows that OEL does work but that’s another argument altogether. Xenserver supports http://premier-pharmacy.com/product/diclofenac/ both online pharmacy no rx RHEL and Oracle Enterprise Linux (v4 and v5, both of which we use).
  • We use plenty of VLANs on our ESX blades (HP C class) which Hyper-V would work with but XenServer would not. It requires management ports to be ‘access ports’ and in blades with limited pNICs we’d have a problem. We could work around it using HPs Virtual Connect, Xsigo etc but that’s more cost and complexity.
  • We currently use NFS for the majority of our VMware estate and while our underlying storage arrays offer both FC and iSCSI (and we have a SAN fabric in place) it’s not a change we’d make lightly. XenServer supports NFS but Hyper-V does not. We have inhouse expertise on other protocols but it means changing our processes, provisioning scripts, documentation, training etc. It’s also a significant technical change so would consume quite a lot of time in change requests and implementation. Management would want to clearly justify the time and risks involved.
  • We currently get nearly 50% memory overcommit on our ESX hosts, a feature which saves us money on hardware purchases and isn’t available in either competing hypervisor. Hyper-V does offer Dynamic Memory but it doesn’t work with Linux VMs, which rules it out for us. With vSphere5 and the new vRAM licensing this benefit is largely lost however.
  • We’ve used Update Manager to a significant degree and while Hyper-V offers similar functionality via WSUS (which we already have deployed), XenServer is more limited.

Conclusions

For my specific circumstances the competition is not ‘OK’ because we’d lose functionality we rely on.

This will vary for everyone and will be completely different if you’re just starting down the virtualisation road and don’t have a feature-set to match up to (in which case this VMware vs XenServer cost calculator or VMware vs Hyper-V cost comparison might help). Could we work around all the issues above? Sure we could, but would it be cost effective? Having already paid for our VMware licensing we aren’t going to simply drop the technology however, at best we’d add new capacity using an alternative hypervisor and slowly migrate all hosts to the new platform. If we did go down that road then we’d have the challenge of running a multi-hypervisor infrastructure at least in the short term – increased training, increased complexity, limited toolsets (most support a single hypervisor only), interoperability issues etc.

The whole reason behind this research was to see if we could save money, and if that in turn justified a switch. This is always tricky as it’s rarely an ‘apples to apples’ comparison but my brief findings were that any cost saving would be eaten up by new toolsets, training, migration costs etc. I’d also note that as we’re entitled to vSphere5’s new features for no extra cost the competition is going to have to improve futher still to make this change feasible in the future.

If the recent licensing change means your costs will increase or you just want to reduce vendor lock in I’d recommend doing the same comparison for your infrastructure to see how feasible a change really is. I suspect VMware are able to raise prices (even if only for the alleged minority) because they know that for most people it’s not a viable or particularly attractive option.

Further reading

Is Hyper-V good enough?

This free online training from Microsoft Virtual Academy is a good place to learn more about Hyper-V.

Xenserver and Hyper-V make the ‘leaders’ quadrant

Why VMware continues to dominate despite Hyper-V advances