Today I was having trouble getting my UCS manager to launch.

JARSigningException: Found unsigned entry in resource: http://{HOST}.{DOMAIN}/ucsm/unpacked/OfficeLnFs_2.7.jar

I tried firefox, chrome, and Internet Explorer with similar results. I found my issue by retracing my steps from yesterday. I had disabled java from keeping temporary files on my computer. It’s a JRE setting you can find on Java in Control Panel. Enabled this again and everything works just fine in UCS.

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Getting ready for EMC World 2012. I’ll be attending in force this year. Armed with a hunger for a number of technologies I am working with this year. I’m saddened we cannot schedule our sessions. I’ve signed up for the bloggers lounge. I hope to see some fellow bloggers there.

This year I’ll be paying some close attention to Isilon, VMAXe, Avamar, DataDomain, and of course VMware. I’ve been working closely with VMware and VMAXe for about a year and have many questions to ask my peers. Quite a bit of lessons learned this year as well, looking to share those.

See you guys in the lounge between sessions for a Doppio Con Panna and some good conversations!

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Although orphaned VM’s are no fun usually, I am having some fun with them right now. I had an HA issue that caused 300+ VM’s to be moved to one host. Then somehow they all became orphaned. The host doesn’t think it has any of them. vCenter thinks they are there though. After a quick cry and a cup of coffee, I have tried restarting the management agents and vCenter. Migrating the orphaned vm’s to another host is working for many of them. So I had the bright idea of putting the questionable host in maintenance mode and leaving the box checked to evacuate all powered off vm’s and templates. This is working great. However at about 114 left the host popped into maintenance mode completely and left vm’s on there. So I exited maintenance mode and entered again. Now it is at 108 and 107 and bouncing back and forth. How odd….

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I have recently been paying some close attention to what will be needed for the buzzword cloud to come to true fruition. It is that applications will have to be rewritten from the ground up to fit into tomorrow’s IT as a Service and cloud. Cloud has been a word that means nothing without an adjective for me for some time. Private, Hybrid, and Public have been some recent ones that help a bit. A few details keep getting missed Workload Mobility, Self Service, and Elasticity. Applications need to be designed to function in all of these areas in order to have a real future in the cloud.

Many solutions exist for creating your own private cloud infrastructure. On the bottom of the stack you have hardware and virtualization. The operation, capacity, and performance management of this is something that will need to be compatible in both the public and private cloud.
Workload mobility needs to be seamless and non-disruptive. A VM should not require being shutdown, moved, and powered back on as it moves between the clouds. An application that is role based and aware of peer roles becoming unavailable could remove some of the need for this. Applications will need to be able to scale out their roles in the cloud so that manual installation and configuration is not needed.

Self Service is really more about bringing agility and speed to requests for service. Low hanging fruit of course is services like a test server for some developers or researchers. However this can be advanced into things like a manager requesting a new virtual desktop for their employee. Self Service enables some things like virtual machine lifecycle and really can provide for better tracking of the reasons we deployed a service.

Elasticity will come when applications are role based and can scale out with no manual input. This should allow for applications to exist on servers in either a private or public cloud. Infrastructure capacity planning could then function such that you only buy capacity as CapEx if it meets a watermark of your usage. If you need to burst your capacity that could be done in the public cloud. When the burst is no longer needed your shrink your capacity by only running in the private cloud you paid for.

The key to all of this is applications have to change. The cloud providers really need to take on the campaign to have this accomplished. I think the cloud providers need to get a standard around cloud and virtualization first. Of course time will tell how well this is accomplished. It is looking like the next five to ten years will be interesting to watch as this application transformation unfolds.

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I got to play around with Microsoft Windows 8 client with Metro on a few devices. This new OS from Microsoft seems to have a very few improvements over Windows 7. There is new dashboard type interface that appears to be focused on touch devices. In all honesty this seems to be the only improvement of note.

The touch interface is good. The soft keyboard performed well. The interface was easy to navigate and intuitive. I found the use for it to be mostly eye candy though. Anytime you opened a useful application you were taken back over to a Windows 7 feeling desktop. I looked inside regedit and control panel, I found nothing really new here. In fact many things looked exactly like Windows 7.

The lack of finding anything really different in the desktop side of Windows 8 has lead me to believe that maybe Metro was just a skin on Windows. As I later discovered, Metro is in fact not just a skin on Windows 8. The Internet Explorer appears to run in a separate space on Metro vs. the desktop.

I asked myself, what is the benefit of Windows 8 to the average corporate worker in an office? The answer is nothing. The real benefits are for mobile workers and those who wish to consume Windows 8 with a touch device. I could easily see using an iPad or other touch device to consume a Windows 8 virtual desktop with ease. This of course would depend on the swipe and other touch capabilities working via remote desktop.

There are a few other remote worker beneficial technologies in Windows 8. As I discover their real benefits in the future I am sure we will discuss them. For now I am anxiously awaiting the release of Windows 8 client for use in the home.

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VMware vCenter chargeback is a product I use today. I use it for show back for internal IT costs. I am working to get it tuned to the point I can show where the money I spend in CapEx and OpEx is actually going. I think the holy grail of configuration for it would be balancing the spends vs usage seen, showing that each dollar we spend is either available or consumed resources. I also wish to use vCenter Chargeback to show that I provide a value back to the business. Cost transparency in how I am running the infrastructure is something i have tried to show, and that needs to exist going forward. Chargeback helps greatly with that.

From the session we can gather a few points.
1. A data collector is good for up to 15,000 VM’s or 5 vSphere instances.
2. Charge back managers scale out for performance and high availability.
3. Max config is around 35,000 VM’s and 10 vCenter servers.
4. I have heard via various conversations that people want API’s into chargeback. It looks like that is occurring. Also a SDK is to be released in Q4 2011

I encourage you to visit the chargeback community on VMware.com. I frequently browse them and there is some good info available there.

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For the past 2 years I have been trying to get more value out of vCO. It has seemed like vCO was a dead product. Today the room if nearly full with hundreds of people in this session. I am very happy to see this. I hope there is more content like plugins and workflow libraries available in them communities for vCO.

One of the first slides eludes to vCO being used to connect VMware Service Manager to vCloud. I hope this happens quickly, I really want this type of capability and agility. VCO isn’t about replacing the existing management systems. VCO is to be used to automate the manual tasks you perform in those management systems. Having VSM kick off workflows and automatically input the variables needed for the workflow to being is one of my goals at my company, happy it was mentioned here. I am very interested in VMware’s management strategy, I think we can expect good things.

One of the slides in this presentation shows VMware’s current it infrastructure from a high level. The next slide shows their end to end business application provisioning. I need to make sure to check these 2 slides out further.

Looks like there is a beta plugin for vCO to control F5 BigIP application delivery controllers. Application blueprints is a term we will be hearing more it seems. Finally it seems we are becoming aware that there is more to delivering an application that just a web server and a database.

VMware has seen 90%+ reduction in time for provisioning VM’s, applications, and scaling applications up with moving to cloud and using vCenter Orchestrator. Days and weeks to hours.

Plugins for vCO are being developed and seem to have some focus. Available on the VMware solutions portal. Hopefully a community can be created around these plugins and hopefully workflows that can help customers get a good jumpstart on using these tools. A plugin sdk and certification program is being created. Single stop market place for plugins is currently in beta.

There is a new instructor course for developing workflows. There will be self paced online training coming late 2011. There is also a book “Automating vCenter 5.0 with vCO” to be released in 2011. There is a blog for vCO with examples and best practices. This is actually where i saw the UCS plugin in action.

Hopefully VMware develops a virtual appliance for all of their software. A vCO appliance is in the works.

Well, let’s get started reducing our OpEx by using vCenter Orchestrator.

TEX2923 and TEX1442 are two additional sessions to look at for vCO.

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Lab Manager does a great job of providing environments on the fly via self service. vCloud Director appears to be positioned to provide the same service in a better way.

One of the first slides in this session shows the terminology map between vCloud director and lab manager. I myself need to remember to go and look at this session online and get a copy of that slide.

Lab manager only supports 1 vCenter, but vCloud director supports 25 vCenters today. VCloud director 1.5 supports SQL now which is a nice change.

This session was mostly about SAP’s massive lab manager deployment and PoC of vCloud director to be the successor of this. They have their work cut out for them for migrating all of their VM’s in lab manager to vCloud.

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I recently acquired vCenter Operations enterprise. I have had a PoC done by VMware to ensure it met my requirements of a consolidated view of what is really going on in my converged infrastructure. Although I have some extensive knowledge into vCOps I am very interested in getting an under the covers look at how some of the data is calculated. I am also interested on how best to monitor my operation and what KPI’s I should really be looking at. Then I want to learn how best to interpret some of them. Let’s see what this session has to offer….

1. Lol first slide says it’s not just black magic! I like this session already.
2. With virtualization capacity is now fluid, I agree.
3. Invisible walls, with vm CPU and memory issues may not be resolved by adding more, contention can play a significant role. Proper troubleshooting is required.
4. With vmview you have to monitor end users not VM’s. I agree here as well as a user may move between virtual desktops. End user experience is important.
5. The key thing for VC OPs to do for me is to take the tons of metrics I have and to present the end calculation to me. Am I green or red?
6. Dynamic threshold analysis uses competing algorithms, meaning the system actually uses multiple methods to calculate the trend, then checks to see who is right more often and then uses that method. Genius. These are calculated every night.
7. A version change can cause the normal operation of a system to change. Thresholds may not catch this but trends have a better chance. I liked this idea.
8. Trending noise to determine abnormalities, this is really going to help my environment since we use a number of tools that are all sending emails for every little thing. We use our brains today to get a feel for the data center health. I declared this a broken model earlier in the year.
9. Alerts should be an indication of a real problem, yes yes yes! Do not alert on every threshold that is reached. Yes please. May I subscribe to your newsletter!
10. Root cause determination in this product is really root metric determination. It isn’t telling you what the problem was just what metric that was being monitored was the starting metric of the issue. I.e. We saw disk latency go to 100ms before the app crashed.
11. Workload is demand divided by entitlement.
12. Right-sizing is a concept I always support, but VM admins and I seem to be on the front line of this alone on this.

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I like vCenter Configuration Manager more and more as I use it. The reporting and control it gives me is much better than my previous product. I am pointing at my Altiris server with the dust on it. Who am i kidding, I virtualized that product when we installed it. The thought of a physical server not running esx on it is laughable to me. I am going to sit here and eat my pretzel while we wait for the session to start. I assure you that your wait will be shorter than mine.

See? Let’s begin.

1. This session was a little weird because the presenters would interrupt each other and start talking. Odd.
2. VCM integration with vCloud Director looks cool. Auto discovery and understanding of machines with the same name and ip but in different zones.
3. The change detection is tricky for me. I want to monitor everything that could possibly change because of paranoia.
4. Although I do not use it, VCM can provision OS, via pxe boot.
5. Someone agrees that the cloud should include moving the workload back and forth between the public and private cloud.
6. One thing I had not really considered before but I am now, is giving read only access and reports to the server app owners in my org. We keep this info to the server guys right now.

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