www.vExperienced.co.uk

Firstly an apology for those who regularly read my blog – I’ve just returned from three months paternity leave where I was largely ‘off the grid’ and had very little to do with technology and lots to do with changing nappies and singing nursery rhymes in public!  I could write a blogpost about technology parallels but that’s already been covered by Bob Plankers so I thought I’d at least check on industry developments and write up the events that caught my attention in those months. In no particular order;

• VMware Hybrid Cloud was finally announced (register for the official launch on the 21st May)
• VMware finally released the Horizon Suite including the new Horizon Workspace
• VMware announced NSX (good intro blog from VMware, and useful info at the Register)
• VMware acquired Virsto
• In the community vExpert applications opened for 2013 and CloudCred was launched (VMware’s attempt to gamify their learning paths), vOpenData was launched to great success, plus Storage Field Day #3 and LonVMUG offered their usual excellent mix of technology and social.
• OpenStack ‘Grizzly’ was released (with VMware plugins supported via Canonical) and there was the OpenStack summit in Portland
• HP announced their ‘Moonshot’ architecture aimed at hyperscale architectures
• Amazon announced a certification program for AWS
• EMC ViPR (Chad Sakacc’s blogpost)
• Netapp EF540 all flash array (covered by Chris Wahl).

Obviously three months isn’t very long in strategic terms although there are a couple of interesting developments. With the acquisition of Virsto and the announcement of NSX VMware are progressing their ‘software defined’ datacentre vision while the hybrid cloud move was leaked last year and now seems obvious given their lack of progress against rival public cloud providers like Amazon. EMC aren’t ignoring the threat that the shift towards open source, commodity, and ‘software defined’ products poses to their existing product lines although it’ll be interesting to see how other storage vendors respond to the same challenges. From my limited viewpoint (my company aren’t really doing ‘cloud’ at all if you ignore shadow IT) OpenStack seems to be gaining ground – I see more coverage and more people I know getting involved.

Anything I’ve missed? What’s in store in the next twelve weeks? Interesting times!

For those of us in the UK it may feel as if winter has gone on forever but finally the sun has shown it’s face and everyone has a new spring in their step. What to do with all that pent up energy?

Attend the London VMUG on Thursday 25th April of course! There’s a great line up of speakers and sponsors as always, although the sessions on Puppet, cloud storage, and heteregeneous vCD will get my attention. Below is the full agenda but note that you need to register for free in advance.

Where to go for the usergroup

London Chamber of Commerce and Industry 33 Queen Street
London, EC4R 1AP (map)

Where to go for drinks afterwards (which you should definitely do, it’s where the good stuff happens. It’s a five minute walk from the usergroup)

The Pavilion End pub
23 Watling Street, Moorgate
London
EC4M 9BR (map)

Twitter:@lonvmug (or hashtag #lonvmug)

Hope to see you there!

I’ve recently installed the BetterWPSecurity WordPress plugin, and found that while it’s very useful and does increase the security of WordPress it can also break your site.

Ah, Monday morning and the start of my three months paternity leave looking after my six month old son Zach. During his morning nap I logged into my blog to work on an article and noticed that my blog wasn’t loading articles correctly even though the home page worked just fine. Investigating further and looking at my site stats (I use both the Jetpack plugin and Google Analytics) clearly showed that something broke at the start of the weekend – I had nearly no traffic all weekend. Having just referred a colleague to my site for some information and on my first day of paternity leave (ie less time on my hands, not more as some may think) this was definitely not ideal timing!

My first step was to check my logs for information, in this case the BetterWPSecurity log for changed files. This revealed that the .htaccess file in the root directory was changed late on Friday night at 11:35pm – and I knew that wasn’t me as I was tucked up in bed. My first thought was a hack as the .htaccess file permits access to the site but there was no redirect or site graffiti and the homepage still worked so that didn’t seem likely. I logged in via SSH to have a look at the .htaccess file but didn’t see anything obvious although I’m no WordPress expert.

My priority was to get the blog working again so I tried restoring a copy of the changed file from the previous week’s backup (made via the BackWPUp plugin) only to find the backup wasn’t useable. Bad plugin! Luckily I’m a believer in ‘belt and braces’ and I knew my hosting company, EvoHosting, also took backups. I logged a call with them and within the hour they’d replied with the contents of the file from a week earlier. Sure enough the file had been changed but looking at the syntax it appeared to be an error rather than malicious hack.

My .htaccess file when the site was working;

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

My .htaccess file after the suspicious change;

# BEGIN Better WP Security

Order allow,deny

Allow from all

Deny from 88.227.227.32

# END Better WP Security

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I backed up the suspicious copy of the file (for future reference, ie writing this blogpost), restored the original et voila – the blog was working again. Step one complete, now to find the root cause…

Part of any diagnostic process is the question ‘what’s changed?’ and I had a suspicion that BetterWPSecurity could be the culprit as I’d only installed it a few weeks earlier. There was also the obvious issue of the new code in the .htaccess file which looked to belong to BetterWPSecurity. I checked the site access logs which confirmed my hypothesis – someone had attempted to break into my site and while attempting to block the attacker BetterWPSecurity had mangled my .htaccess file. The logs below have been truncated to remove many of the brute force login attempts (there were plenty more) but note that on the final line (after BetterWPSecurity has blocked the attacker) the HTML return code was 418 (“I’m a teapot”) rather than 200 plus the suspect IP 88.227.227.32 is the same as the one denied in the mangled .htaccess file. Yes, you read that right, “I’m a teapot”! Here’s a full explanation for that April Fool’s error code.

88.227.227.32 - - [15/Feb/2013:23:35:19 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 3017 "http://www.vexperienced.co.uk//wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1"
88.227.227.32 - - [15/Feb/2013:23:35:19 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 3017 "http://www.vexperienced.co.uk//wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1"
88.227.227.32 - - [15/Feb/2013:23:35:19 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 3017 "http://www.vexperienced.co.uk//wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1"
88.227.227.32 - - [15/Feb/2013:23:35:19 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 200 3017 "http://www.vexperienced.co.uk//wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1"
88.227.227.32 - - [15/Feb/2013:23:35:19 +0000] "POST /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1" 418 5 "http://www.vexperienced.co.uk//wp-login.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1"

So BetterWPSecurity led me to the fault but also caused it. To be fair the plugin does warn you which settings are potentially going to cause issues but I’d assumed that it wouldn’t be me – dangerous things assumptions. I’ve rectified the issue by restricing BetterWPSecurity from altering core system files as shown in the screenshot below;

My blog is fixed and I’m feeling quite chuffed that it was all resolved during a long lunchbreak – not a bad day’s work if I do say so myself! Lesson for today? Take warnings seriously and have multiple backups!

Late last week I joined an illustrious line of community bloggers, vendors, and authors by having a ‘chinwag’ with Mike Laverick. Anyone who knows Mike knows that a quick chat can easily last an hour for all the right reasons – he’s passionate about VMware and technology in general and good at presenting complex ideas in an easily understood manner. I guess that’s why he recently became a senior cloud evangelist for VMware! We discussed a few topics which are close to my heart at the moment;

• Oracle
• vCloud Director
• Storage Field Day

You can listen to the audio (MP3 or the iPod/iPad friendly M4V) or watch the YouTube video. As time is limited on the actual chinwag I thought I’d offer a few additional thoughts on a couple of the topics we discussed.

Oracle and converged infrastructure

I didn’t want to get embroiled in a discussion about Oracle’s support stance on VMware as that’s been covered many times before but it’s definitely still a barrier. Some of our Oracle team have peddled the ‘it’s not supported’ argument to senior management and even though I’ve clarified the ‘supported vs certified’ distinction it’s a difficult perception to alter. Every vendor wants to push their own solutions so you can’t blame Oracle for wanting to push their own solution but it sure is frustrating!

Of more interest to me is where converged infrastructure is going. As we discussed on the chinwag Oracle are an interesting use case for converged infrastructure (or engineered systems, pick your terminology of choice) because it includes the application tier. Most other converged offerings (VCE, FlexPod, vStart and even hyperconverged solutions like Nutanix) tend to stop at the hypervisor, thus providing a abstraction layer that you can run whatever workload you like on. Oracle (with the possible exception of IBM?) may be unique in owning the entire stack from hardware all the way up through storage, networking, compute, through to the hypervisor and up to their crown jewels, the Oracle database and applications. This gives them a position of strength to negotiate with even when certain layers are weak in comparison to ‘best of breed’, as is the case with OracleVM. Archie Hendryx explores this in his blogpost although I think he undersells the advantage Oracle have of owning a tier 1 application – Dell’s vStart or VCE’s vBlock may offer competition from an infrastructure perspective but my company don’t run any Dell or VCE applications. If you’re not Oracle how do you compete with this? You team up to provide a ‘virtual stack’ optimised for various workloads – today VDI is the most common (see reference architectures from Nexenta, Nimble Storage et al). As the market for converged infrastructure grows I think we’ll see more of these ‘vertical’ stack style offerings.

Here’s a few blogpost’s I found interesting related to Oracle’s solutions: a look at the Exadata infrastructure, who manages the Exadata, Exalogic 2.0 Focuses on Elastic Cloud

vCloud Director

After I described my problem getting vCD tabled as a viable technology for lab management Mike rightly pointed out that many people are using vCD in test and dev – maybe more than in production. I agree with Mike but suspect that most are using dev/test as a POC for a production private cloud, not as purpose built lab management environment. I didn’t get time to discuss a couple of other points which both complicate the introduction of vCD even if you have an existing VMware environment;

• Introducing vCD (or any cloud solution for that matter) is potentially a much bigger change compared to the initial introduction of server virtualisation. In the latter the changes mainly impacted the infrastructure teams although provisioning, purchasing, networks and storage were all impacted. If you’re intending to deliver test/dev environments you’re suddenly incorporating your applications too, potentially including the whole development/delivery lifecycle. If you go the whole hog to self-service then you potentially include an even larger part of the business right up to the end users. That’s a very disruptive change for some ‘infrastructure guy’ to be proposing!
• vCD recommends Enterprise+ licencing which means I have to argue for the highest licencing level for test/dev, even if I don’t have it in production

If you’re interested in vCloud Director as a lab management solution here are links to some of the companies and technologies I mentioned;  SkyTap Cloud, VMworld session OPS-CSM2150 – “Lab management with VMware vCloud Director: Software development customer panel”, Frank Brix’s network fencing blogpost, and a good generic post about using the cloud for development.

It’s that time of year when I book the next London VMUG session into my calendar and rather than my usual ‘here’s the agenda, you should go‘ blogpost I thought I’d recap what the last year has delivered. If this doesn’t convince you that there’s value in attending a free event where you could have learnt all the topics listed below as well as networking with your peers then nothing will.

If there’s a topic you’d like covered or if you’d like to present something yourself get in touch with the organising commmittee. I’m planning to present at one of next year’s VMUG sessions (it’s about time!) because it’s a user group and real world experience can be gold dust for others to learn from. I’m told we’re a friendly audience!

Before you continue, register for the next session on 24th Jan 2013!

I’ve grouped them according to some industry trends so your own ‘pointy haired boss’ will also see the value;

• Virtualisation. As you’d expect from a VMware usergroup there’s been a strong focus on virtualisation;
  • Covered the features in vSphere 5.1 and when you’d use them or not (Gregg Robertson and Darren Woollard, vExperts)
  • Took an indepth look at the storage functionality of vSphere5.1 plus a peak at future storage features (Cormac Hogan, VMware
  • Learned how to use stretch clusters, SRM, and vSphere replication to provide high availability, even across geographically dispersed sites (Lee Dilworth)
  • Using vSphere’s new AutoDeploy functionality (with a sneak peak at a prerelease tool)
  • What’s the vCenter Appliance and how does it compare to the Windows version we all know and love? (Hugo Phan, VCDX)
  • Preparing for your VCP5 exam (Gregg Robertson, vExpert)
  • Xangati explained why you need 360 degree monitoring of your infrastructure
  • Darren Woollard ran a couple of interactive VMware design workshops
  • This year saw the first EMEA NDA session which covered the future roadmap from VMware. Exciting stuff but not available online for obvious reasons – you had to be there!
• Storage
  • Chris Evans (from TheStorageArchitect.com) gave a great presentation about next generation storage – flash, tiering, current vendor landscape etc
  • Nimble Storage, Tintri, and Whiptail all presented their storage arrays and gave us their take on the future of storage
  • Fusion-IO gave us their solution to the compute/storage gap
• End User Computing
  • VMUG stalwarts Tom Howarth and Julian Wood both covered the challenges of VDI deployments from different angles. Tom covered hypervisor agnostic VDI considerations while Julian Wood provided an overview of why you should or shouldn’t do VDI and common stumbling blocks.
  • Clive Wenman (from VMware) gave us a longer term perspective on VMware’s vision for EUC including project Horizon, Appblast, and Horizon Data
  • Centrix showed us how to manage the ‘workspace of the future’ while Liquidware labs gave us their vision of desktop transformation
    
• Converged infrastructure
  • We had a couple of sessions around Cisco UCS networking and converged I/O (from Colin Lynch and Julian Wood respectively)
  • vSphere on Flexpod (Chris Kranz)
• Cloud and automation. I’ve put these subjects together as a cloud solution really needs automation – you can argue about this in your own time!
  • There were a couple of vCloud sessions throughout the year, including an architecture deep dive and one on DR (Aidan Dalgleish and Dave Hill)
  • An introduction to vCloud Automation Center (from the acquisition of Dynamic Ops who themselves presented back in 2009!)
  • Practical automation (Al Renouf and William Lam) which focused on VMware tools for automation including PowerCLI, esxcli, and vCenter Orchestrator.
    
  • We had a couple of sessions around automation and orchestration. Michael Poore covered the what, when, and why of orchestration and Steve Bryen covered available automation and orchestration solutions (including Chef, Puppet etc) and where they fit in the stack from infrastructure through to applications.
  • Security in the cloud wasn’t forgotten either – Trend Micro presented their Deep Security product.
  • You want real world cloud case studies? Pete Rossi showed that ‘Government Can Run vCloud, How Skyscape Did It’ (no slides available)
• Applications. As infrastructure professionals we may not spend much of our time thinking about the applications but eventually we all have to admit they rule the roost;
  • We had an introduction to the vFabric product suite along with coverage of VMware’s Application Management roadmap
  • Symantec presented their virtualisation-aware ApplicationHA software to bring high availability to tier1 apps
  • Want to know how to start using VMware APIs to create small but invaluable utilities? (Ricky El-Qasem)
• Nontechnical sessions. While I have my head in the technical clouds it’s good to look over the parapet once in a while and these sessions helped me do just that;
  • Industry thought leader Joe Baguley’s perspective on the transformation of IT and VMware’s role
  • A couple of well respected IT professionals, Chris Kranz and Scott Lowe, gave us their views on how virtualisation and cloud is changing job roles and how to stay relevant in IT. We also heard from a leading virtualisation recruitment agent, Neil Mills, who gave us insight from the ‘other side of the fence’. These guys are at the top of their game and well worth listening to.
  • A thought provoking session on DevOps and service management from Alex Smith. This topic was probably out of many people’s comfort zones but it’s good to learn something new and challenge your thinking.

I could mention the giveaways (iPad, Fusion-IO card, t-shirts, AppleTV etc) and the free beers afterwards, the fact we had at least five VCDX’s presenting and the live labs from EMC, VMTurbo, and Embotics etc but you’re already sold right?

Register for the next session on 24th Jan 2013 (did I mention it’s free?)

While upgrading my home lab recently I found myself reconsidering the scale up vs scale out argument. There are countless articles about building your own home lab and whitebox hardware but is there a good alternative to the accepted ‘two whiteboxes and a NAS’ scenario that’s so common for entry level labs? I’m studying for the VCAP5-DCD so while the ‘up vs out’ discussion is a well trodden path there’s value (for me at least) in covering it again.

There are two main issues with many lab (and production) environments, mine included;

1. Memory is a bottleneck and doubly so in labs using low end hardware – the vCentre appliance defaults to 8GB, as does vShield Manager so anyone wanting to play with vCloud (for example) needs a lot of RAM.
2. Affordable yet performant shared storage is also a challenge – I’ve used both consumer NAS (from 2 to 5 bays) and ZFS based appliances but I’m still searching for more performance.

In an enterprise environment there are a variety of solutions to these challenges – memory density is increasing (up to 512GB per blade in the latest UCS servers for example) and on the storage front SSDs and flash memory have spurred innovations in the storage battle. In particular Fusion-IO have had great success with their flash memory devices which reduce the burden on shared storage while dramatically increasing performance. I was after something similar but without the budget.

When I built my newest home lab server, the vHydra I used a dual socket motherboard to maximise the possible RAM (up to 256GB RAM) and used local SSDs to supplement my shared storage. This has allowed me to solve the two issues above – I have a single server which can host a larger number of VMs with minimal reliance on my shared storage. The concepts are the same as solutions like Fusion-IO aim to do in production environments but mine isn’t particularly scalable. In fact it doesn’t really scale at all – I’ll have to revert to centralised storage if I buy more servers. Nor does it have any resilience – the ESXi server itself isn’t clustered and the storage is a single point of failure as there’s no RAID. It is cheap however, and for lab testing I can live with those compromises. None of this is vaguely new of course – Simon Gallagher’s vTardis has been using these same concepts to provide excellent lab solutions for years. Is this really a poor man’s Fusion-IO? There’s nothing like the peformance and nothing like the budget but the objectives are the same but to be honest it’s probably a slightly trolling blog title. I won’t do it again. Promise!

If you’re thinking of building a home lab from scratch consider buying a single large server with local SSD storage instead of multiple smaller servers with shared storage. You can always scale out later or wait for Ceph or HDFS to elimate the need for centralised storage at all…

Tip: It’s worth bearing in mind the 32GB limit on the free version of ESXi – unless you’re a vExpert or they reinstate the VMTN subscription you’ll be stuck with 60 day eval editions if you go above 32GB (or buying a licence!).

Further Reading

Is performant a word?

I recently had to complete an external audit of our VMware estate and thought it might be useful to others to know what the process entails, what you’ll need to provide to the auditors, and a few issues that I wasn’t aware of beforehand around licencing compliance. The initial approach by the auditor will describe the overall process and expected timelines (which will vary based on the size of your company).

There are two main steps in the process – self disclosure and discovery;

1. Self disclosure is where you detail your use of VMware software including vCenters, ESX/ESXi hosts, VMs, and licences. In our case this was collated into an Excel spreadsheet provided by the auditor (the deployment detail workbook). You’ll also have to answer some high level questions about your company (such as how many locations you have), how you audit internally (how you track licences – third party tools, vCenter etc), when you initially deployed VMware in your company, and some info about your contacts for the audit. How you collect this information is up to you but there are a couple of good choices;
   • Export data from vCenter using the GUI
   • Export date from vCenter using PowerCLI scripts
   • Use third party tools.

   I used a mixture of RVTools (which is a handy and free download) and PowerCLI scripts. The native ‘Export’ feature in vCenter isn’t very flexible (there’s no way to export all the MAC addresses of VMs for example) but while RVTools came close it didn’t provide everything I needed either. I needed host uptime and while RVTools does show the last reboot time I still needed to translate that into days plus it didn’t cover licencing for each host (which I could have got from vCenter). I’ve included the script I ran at the end of this post in case it’s of use to someone else.

2. Validation. Once the disclose is completed the auditor will want to ‘validate’ the information – auditor talk for “are you telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”! This can be done in a variety of ways depending on the size of your estate, location, the auditor etc. It could include using your inhouse auditing tools (Centennial for example), data from directories like Active Directory or a scan of your network switches for a list of VMware MAC addresses (prefixes 00.05.69, 00.0C.29, 00.1C.14, as well as the more commonly known 00.50.56) . The latter was the approach we took due to a mixed Linux/Windows estate and the auditors preference. NOTE: you’ll do the actuall collection of all data not the auditors, even if they’re onsite.
   In an ideal world the information collected in this step matches up nicely with the information you’ve disclosed – any discrepancies will need investigating and explaining. A few things that caught me out here;
   • Ensure you keep track of any changes to the VMware environment after the audit process kicks off (this is an audit requirement). Some of my discrepancies were because another admin had decommissioned some VMs after my initial disclosure so they flagged up as ‘missing’. Simple to explain, but time consuming to track down! This could be a real challenge in a larger environment.
   • Remember that VMkernel ports also have VMware MAC addresses, not just the VMs. I spent a while trying to find ‘phantom’ VMs before tracking down the issue. RVTools shows these in a seperate tab so you’ll need to export both.
   • Even if you’re over entitled (you have more licences than you’re using) you’ll probably have to justify it, just to be sure you’re not hiding some part of your installation.

Read more…

During my recent build of the vHydra server I found myself rather frustrated with Supermicro for a couple of reasons.

Firstly their UK distribution doesn’t seem to be working particularly well as there’s a two week wait for most parts which are apparently shipped from the US on demand. There are UK based resellers (I tried www.boston.co.uk) but even then some parts still have a long lead time (around a week) and I found them to be expensive compared to alternative web based vendors.

Secondly their technical support was somewhat lacking. Once I’d built the server I found I was getting an overvoltage warning on the second, empty, CPU socket. As I was planning on populating this socket (once the second CPU and heatsink arrived, another three weeks wait ) I was keen to know if this was a false positive or whether the board should be returned as faulty.

I emailed Supermicro technical support who went through the usual information gathering – firmware, BIOS, motherboard details etc. They identified that the IPMI firmware was out of date Read more…

Having recently upgraded my home lab’s storage I decided it was also time to upgrade my aging hosts which date back to 2007. They’ve done well to survive and still be useful(ish) five years later but they’re maxed out at 8GB RAM and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do anything with that. I briefly considered adding SSDs as host cache but that doesn’t address some of their other shortcomings such as no support for Fault Tolerance, VMDirectPath or any type of KVM functionality.

A quick look around the blogosphere revealed a few common options;

• The Baby Dragon II, (with a minor change via Chris Wahl)
• The HP Microserver range
• The HP ML110 G7 range

More power!

The problem for me was that these solutions all maxed out at 16 or 32GB RAM per host, a limitation of the single socket Xeon’s architecture. That’s a lot of memory for a home lab server today but to ensure that this server can last five years I really wanted more scalability. I wasn’t too fussed about noise as I use my cellar for my lab, and power consumption was a secondary concern. The server features of the Supermicro boards appeal to me (and many Supermicro motherboards are compatible with vSphere) so I browsed their range looking for the one that best met my requirements. My final parts list ended up as;

• CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2603, 1.8GHz, 4 cores, 80W (£157 each at Lambdatek)
• Heatsink: Supermicro SNK-P0048AP4 (£28 at Lambdatek)
• Motherboard: Supermico X9DRL-3F, dual CPU socket, up to 256GB RAM, onboard SAS & SATA, IPMI/KVM, dual Gb NICs (£330 at Lambdatek)
• RAM: 64GB (8*8GB) Samsung 240 pin DDR3 non-ECC UDIMM, 10600 PC3 (£300 at scan.co.uk)
• Case: Lian-Li PC-A05NB (£65 at Scan.co.uk)
• Power supply: Silverstone Strider Plus 600W (£85 at Scan.co.uk)

Must….have…more…POWER..the vHydra!

The total cost comes to around £1150. I’m branding mine the vHydra after the mythical multi-headed dragon!
Note: In the US this is significantly cheaper, coming in at $1450, or about £900.

For the money I get a powerful server that can replace all three of my current 8GB hosts and more than match their performance while consuming less power and space, plus Read more…

This year my VMworld experience started in a more relaxed fashion than previously as I flew in ahead of time on the Sunday night. After checking in to my hotel and getting my orientation in the city I headed (along with LonVMUG’s Luke Munro) to the vRockstar party at the Hard Rock Cafe organised by Marco Broeken and Patrick Redknapp. This coincided nicely with ‘El Classico’ when the two giants of Spanish football, Real Madrid and Barcelona, play each other in the Spanish league. This ensured the Hard Rock Cafe was rammed full so it was a good thing they’d reserved an area for us. Food, (free) drink, and good conversation – thanks for organizing a great start to VMworld guys!

Next day registration at the conference venue was very quick partly because it was partner day and the masses had yet to arrive. There was some misleading information about the HOL being closed although after a quick Twitter shoutout to John Troyer that was quickly remedied. As I’m a customer not a partner I didn’t have access to the partner breakout sessions so I figured my day was going to be a mixture of labs and people networking. Compared to Copenhagen the weather was a distinct improvement, hovering around 25 degrees and quite humid, although inside the air conditioning kept everyone cool.

The Keynotes and announcements

Tuesday signaled the first day of the main conference when all 7000 attendees turned up. The day started with the keynote from Pat Gelsinger and Steve Herrod and was largely a repeat of the US keynote with a few notable exceptions which I’ll cover later. For those that haven’t seen the US keynotes here’s the highlights;

• there is a new vCloud Suite which bundles many of the VMware products together in a more compelling and cost effective package
• vRAM is no more (cost is now per socket)
• the launch of vSphere 5.1
• new certification tracks including a vCloud track

VMware always like to hold back some product launches so that VMworld Europe has something to get excited about. Here’s a summary of the announcements at Barcelona;

• Dynamic Ops has been integrated into the vCloud Suite and rebranded to vCloud Automation Center 5.1.
• Updates to vCloud Connector and vCenter Operations
• Updates to the vFabric line including Application Director and Application Performance Manager.

With the swift integration of the Dynamic Ops technology VMware obviously want to manage heterogeneous clouds having spent the last five years saying there was no demand. Should we take this as indirect endorsement of Hyper-V?

Read more…