Living in Clouds

THE KEYNOTE

So, naturally I did not make it to the keynote. I was up quite late looking into (and therefore recovering from) a small server problem we’ve been having, not to mention that I am not a morning person. So I tried firing up the keynote on an iPad, but pretty much as expected it was flash streaming, so I switched to a rapidly ageing Macbook with decaying battery life and watched it from the shower.

David Wakeman (@desktopguy) popped out at this point and started putting the grand design into context. The emphasis for vmWare this year seems to have switched from satisfying us nerds that we have the latest and greatest in the data centre to focusing on and delivering end-user solutions across multiple and mobile platforms. To this end, David rolled out a couple of remarkably technically adept actors to demonstrate the quandaries that we face in delivering services to users who, to paraphrase, now have more powerful devices of their own than we, as the I.T. department, can supply to them.

This seems to be the broad theme of vForum this year. Apple have successfully defined the “App Store” model, where they not only distribute applications to multiple devices, but tie your content together with iTunes, and now iCloud. Similarly, Google started by tying your content together with GMail and Docs, and have now successfully extended into the App space with Chrome and Android.

vmWare have come out with all guns blazing, determined to own the corporate “App space” by combining collaboration through platforms such as Zimbra and Octopus with packaged Apps through Thinapp and now Horizon, which has been extended quite substantially from the SSO java-based app platform that I used to think of it as. The way they’re doing this is by making Apps packageable and portable, and the sweetener for us is that they give the nerds the security and infrastructure we crave at the back end.

David demonstrated this with a stack of (empty) boxes. You should have been there.

LATE ARRIVAL

After having some analytical discussions at the office about our current problem, I arrived in the last session before lunch, scanned in and headed up to the NextDC presentation about DCaaS, which was a sequence of slides of very futuristic looking data centres, and promises about the impending ability to scale your rack on demand from an iPhone. Not having much experience in the data centre space it was quite interesting to hear what these guys are doing, but I still wonder whether they can compete price-wise with the likes of the Rackspaces and Softlayers of the world – although I’m sure their Canberra data centre is gearing up for a lot of new business right now, and then there’s always that 220ms overhead of hosting overseas.

Nevertheless, they seem to be committed to establishing a world-class network of interconnected data centres in Australia with all sorts of facilities such as workstations, Cisco telepresence and break-out rooms. I wouldn’t be surprised if they installed a cafeteria, creche and Ibis hotel into the deal. They’re peered with all the major telcos to boot.

LUNCH

The first thing to go is always the Coke. They always run out of Coke. I had to drink Diet Coke. You’d think they know us better than that. But they don’t exactly feed you pizza, the bean salad might have been a little too… beany… but as per usual the food was excessive and I hope OzHarvest or someone like that came to pick up the leftovers. The hall was packed.

VSPHERE5 FEATURE OVERVIEW

David Wakeman was running a View super-session downstairs, but I was a little afraid of being run through the basics again and opted to spend the first half of that in the vSphere 5 presentation / features sum-up. Wibowo doesn’t have the stage presence of David, but he does know his stuff. He’s the sort of guy whose phone number would be handy to have in your deskroll. However his presentation got slightly bogged down in a confusing analogy that got lost somewhere between Super Mario Brothers and Charles Darwin and only appeared at the beginning and end.

Nevertheless, if you pay attention to this guy (Wibowo, not Charles Darwin), you glean useful information. vSphere 5 introduces storage DRS, that’s a big one for me and something I have been looking forward to, but now I know it comes with all the standards you can expect from DRS such as Maintenance Mode for datastores, live migration, affinity rules… Reminds me of that time when our MSSQL server died horribly because a datastore ran out of space and it took seven hours to restore. Never again!

The vCenter server is now deployable as an ovf virtual appliance – thank god! No more underlying Windows operating system and I’ll never forget the painful switch to 64 bit 2003 server and the resource overhead that carried. The web interface is now the primary interface and has been substantially enhanced with better search and filtering and customisable layouts (although it is flash based).

However, somewhat suspiciously, Bo insinuated that our choices are the embedded database (which can’t be MSSQLe because that looks like another SUSE or Redhat appliance to me) or Oracle – surely these are not our only choices? Rebuilding a vCenter server would then become horribly painful for an organisation such as ours that is phasing out Oracle. Postgres sounds ideal to me, hint.

Bo went on to demonstrate vSphere’s ability to support ridiculously oversized VMs, auto-deploy ESXi and all sorts of other things I will never be able to convince anyone to pay for. Other enhancements include HA improvements, faster vMotion on multiple NICs, OS X support (with caveats that I think you can quite safely ignore), and my favourite – Resource Control. This is like applying reservations and limits for storage and network i/o. We saw a nice graph of how this can be applied to prevent excessive vMotion from throttling server performance, and that’s the sort of thing I’m interested in. I WANT to be able to put an ESXi host into maintenance at ten in the morning.

Note to self: visit the “vSphere Upgrade Center”. Upgrade paths have always proven to be very important, in my humble experience, and I will certainly be running the View 4.6 upgrade before even considering a vSphere 5 upgrade.

VIEW SUPER-SESSION PART 2

They wouldn’t let us into the second part of this session until they realised that there’s no shutting up David Wakeman – he just went straight through. Eventually we got let in to hear some guy from UCS rattling on about upscaling your VDI capacity (we’re not even close to needing that), followed by Mike Munro from CSC discussing how they provide on-demand VDI to SMBs using View.

By this time I had restarted IIS on our problem server (although I had to resort to using PocketCloud – the vmWare View iPad client has been playing up since I changed my password) and started paying attention again. I then realised that I may have underestimated the first half of the session, and it was actually more about distributed computing than the usual drudgery of Windows XP and PCoIP and the ViewManager.

In fact, I noticed a lot of Macs on stage – Macbooks and iPads. I could swear everything was running Windows 7 last year, and now they’re running presentations and demos on Macs? How about Visio running in Chrome on OS X? OK, now I’m interested.

The Horizon platform has exploded from its humble beginnings, when I used to think of it as SSO for SaaS and maybe something you could tie into an application platform for things you use that run on Java (such as our Atlassian stuff). Between the HTML5 and the Java layer, Horizon Mobile and Horizon Application Manager now basically allow you to deliver your Thinapped software to a web browser!

Yes!

So apparently this is called “Project Appblast”, then there is “Project Octopus”, which is still in Beta, but basically provides secure private cloud data sharing and collaboration (with version management and granular permissions) – it brought up fond memories of Wave, but as Horizon has done since the beginning, integrates with your AD environment. You can register for and download the beta from http://vmwareoctopus.com/ (another ovf).

We saw it in Chrome, on Windows and on an iPad (at which point the issue of connectivity in Australia became an issue again, but it ultimately worked). And then there is still Zimbra if you really want to get rid of that old, convoluted software.

It sounds like there will be some good sessions on this stuff tomorrow, I need to check my schedule at http://vforum2011.mobi (why won’t firefox on android save my session agenda? argh!)

VEEAM 6 DEMO

After trying unsuccessfully to procure a real coffee and to tweet-up with @bendiq (I suck at that sort of thing), I headed into the presentation by the team from Veeam. We’re basically a Quest shop, and boy did I have fun setting up vRanger. It all runs very smoothly now, thank you very much, but I have been asked about Veeam so decided to check out the competition.

The playing field seems pretty level to me as all of these products leverage the vCenter API, but Veaam does seem to be a pretty solid product. I like the distributed architecture with very light proxy servers for backup and replication controlled by a central backup server – reminds me a little of vCenter and ESXi!

The failover capabilities are quite impressive – this thing can practically bring your server up at your DRS site from a replicated restore point and reconfigure your DNS for you. This was demonstrated to us in the context of a 10Mbps link – if one good thing comes out of what’s been happening in our sector over the last few years hopefully it will be that dark fibre network to link our three sites. Then this type of failover and HA becomes reality.

The presenter seemed to be particularly fond of his Russian software engineer, who he claims is more trustworthy than his marketing department when he claims you will get a ten-fold performance boost from Veeam 6. This reminded me that I had some Russians of my own to deal with so I headed to Hall 5 (on my way back to work), where the exhibitors have been moved to this year to accommodate what seems to be quite a growth in attendance.

WAG SESSION

I wasn’t particularly interested in the last session so used it as an opportunity to get a real coffee and interrogate the exhibitors. I saw some nice analysis software from Hitachi today, I also sought out the Quest guys who showed me why I should install vFoglight (which we own) and clued me in on vFoglight Storage, then headed off to Samsung to take photos of their screens (with my Galaxy S).

In fact Samsung once again have a heavy presence at vForum, and with the likes of Teradici and so forth there is a lot of showing off going on, such as the NC240 streaming car racing games (illustrated above). PCoIP is obviously not the only solution (although View 5.0 announces a PCoIP compliant View client for Mac) and there is an HDX demo at the vmWare stand I intend to check out.

After this I went back to the office and skipped the after-party to go home and feed the cats and prime them for the next series of photos with vmWare-related lol-markup. So the only question remaining is will I make tomorrow’s keynote? Probably not, so I guess I’ll just have to watch it here:

http://info.vmware.com/content/APAC_ANZ_vForum_Webcast

… while i’m in the shower, no doubt.