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Now THIS is going to be a party :-)

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 03:47:09 +0000

Sure, VMworld is about learning. It’s also about networking with people – friends, colleagues, customers, and even respected competitors. Heck – I’m in full on cram mode now. We are prepping content, kit to support the hands-on-labs, finalizing face-melting demos, giveaways (1 iPad per hour), and much, much more. Hey, I’m getting daily “where is your content” nag emails (well deserved!) from the VMworld crew. but – it’s also about having a little fun while saying THANK YOU to the customers Since I started being “Mr. VMware at EMC” – one thing I said to Joe was “I want EMC to not only win in the VMware context on our own merits, but have fun while doing it!” So… here are details on the VMworld 2010 EMC/VMware customer appreciation party… Read on (including how to get an invite)… Where : (Temple) 540 HOWARD ST (2 blocks from Moscone Center) When: Tuesday August 31, 2010 6:30-10:30pm What: EMC’s Customer appreciation party – our chance to have fun, and thank EMC customers and partners. There will be great food, two open bars, and in general – a good fun time Who: It’s by invite – only up to 500 people – have your EMC team reach out to their vSpecialists and Brittany Coulson.

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Now THIS is going to be a party

Oh if ONLY there was a way to

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 13:15:12 +0000

The lament of many cloud compute providers as we engage with them… “I wish someone would offer a storage subsystem:” Was transactional (which VMware needs today to host VMDK storage) – but scaled, so I could manage at scale with less: scaled out linearly to large clusters (lets say 16 nodes – for a total of 128 intel cores for dealing with the IO load), using commodity x86 servers, but commodity components built for a service provider. where any resource in that cluster – brains, ports, caches could all service any IO – meaning it’s one big pool. A datastore literally is everywhere, but also dependent on no one element. that could scale up to huge capacity (let’s say petabytes) without increasing my FTE cost because it’s designed for management at scale (hey, just like Cisco UCS!) where everything could be wide-striped across the entire backend of the array – so it acts as one big aggregate pool of ports, IO, brains, IOps and GBs

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Oh if ONLY there was a way to

vSphere 4.1 Cross-EMC support whats the good/bad/ugly?

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:52:51 +0000

Whenever there is a major VMware release, a common question from EMCers, EMC customers, and EMC partners is: “what is supported day one, and what will break if I upgrade?” Any vendor who tells you “nothing will break” is either: lying (lying maliciously) delusional (lying, but unintentionally) – if you’re a competitor that piles on to this post, remember I have most competitor’s products myself, and I’ll call you on it a one-product company As soon as you have a broad portfolio – getting everything to line up is impossible. As we near major VMware releases, as the “face for VMware inside EMC”, I rally across the product teams to make sure we’re aligning. We all work hard, and push as much as possible – but inevitably there are little time gaps. They are all on eLab and the VMware HCL – but I’ve found it’s useful to have it integrated in one place. So – I’m taking the high road here and being as explicit as possible – even with gaps . Read on for details, but in a nutshell – core storage support is a rock on day one, and almost everything else lands within Q3, with some Q4 stragglers. BTW – also getting the inevitable “can I get a Vblock with vSphere 4.1?”. That one is a firm NO right now. Remember – the core idea of a Vblock is that it’s all integrated and tested so you don’t need to. That means that by definition it will always lag any given component a little bit – and that’s a GOOD thing. Of course, expect an update soon Remember everyone – always test before putting anything into production!!!! Read on for details… Storage: Platforms = YES. Day 1 support is perfect – and you can see it here . Every EMC storage platform target (Iomega, CLARiiON, EMC Unified/Celerra, Symmetrix and VPLEX) is on the VMware HCL day one across all protocols. This was a chunk of work – so thank you from me to the VMware and EMC teams that made that happen

A bit of insider perspective part I: my take on the Greenplum deal

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:08:51 +0000

Normally, I try to keep the discussions on the blog technology focused, but getting questions on this one, so wanted to put my 2 cents out there, just like I shared with the vSpecialist team internally. What is going on here? Well, here are my cliff-notes on it.

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A bit of insider perspective part I: my take on the Greenplum deal

Understanding what were doing with Atmos

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:10:37 +0000

I suppose it’s inevitable that the EMC competitors would attack as EMC has decided to make things clearer by not being in the business of OFFERING Atmos as a service for any additional customers (it is staying up for existing users). So – why did we do it? Well – in basic terms, we made a mistake, and are correcting it. (BTW – that’s **MY** view – another valid view is that it was a necessary step to get the ball rolling). In more detail… People had a hard mental time understanding whether EMC was positioning Atmos as a: An EMC PRODUCT – as a Virtual Appliance on top of traditional storage models, or as physical appliance designed for maximum scale and lowest cost. OR….

Wow what a compliment.

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:42:20 +0000

I’ve been crazy busy for a while – and it’s a beautiful thing to see the vSpecialist team (aka “Chad’s Army”) grow and blossom. The newbs are becoming vets, and helping the other newbs. It’s becoming self-sustaining, and it means that I can be focused on a lot of other things – which is great. I’m very proud of the team collectively and the individuals that comprise it. It means I have no lack of confidence (though I wish I was there – work/life balance) that they go to Cisco Live 2010 and cover it without me. It means that craziness like the picture below happens – yes… that is John Chambers in the VCE booth getting his vSpecialist shirt We try to have a lot of fun – and I love the team. It’s a bit crazy because today these two links crossed my path – posts by Elias Khnaser and Nigel Poulton It’s crazy to have outside folks making those comments. Flattering, but they give me WAY too much credit.

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Wow what a compliment.

Update on EMC vSphere plugins

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:57:48 +0000

Folks – these plugins rock, and are free. They are all FULLY SUPPORTED – just like any EMC product. As an EMC customer or partner, you can call 1-800-SVC-4-EMC on them. They are simple, and take almost no time to install. If you’re an EMC customers – there’s NO reason not to be running these. There are some great recent updates to EMC’s plugins I want people to know about: EMC’s Virtual Storage Integrator 3.0 This is the “big daddy” of EMC’s plugins – provides visibility/mapping of all sorts of things and some provisioning capabilities.

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Update on EMC vSphere plugins

So why all the fuss about Alignment?

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:50:18 +0000

Aaron Delp (all round good dude) did a great post on VDMK alignment here . alignment (both of volumes – both in the virtual and physical domain) and VMDKs falls into the category of “operational excellence” IMO. It’s these little things that done right let you do more with less (often more than any neato thing a vendor has to offer you). I posted a comment to explain a little bit, and it’s long enough that it’s out of “comment” category, and more like “blog post” category

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So why all the fuss about Alignment?

Ok topic of Chads Choice June 24th Webcast will be

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:49:58 +0000

Drum roll… Survey says… Thank you all who voted! The table isn’t intuitive, but the “count” is the number of votes in the stack rank (4 being “must have it”, 1 being “not that interested”). Looks like we have a winner in vStorage APIs for Array Integration – what is it and what to expect! I’ll make sure we leave a solid 30 minutes for open QnA, and will run long if need be. Looking forward to seeing you there! You can register here .

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Ok topic of Chads Choice June 24th Webcast will be

Upcoming Chads Choice Webcast

admin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:25:37 +0000

There is an EMC/VMware webcast every week at a standing time – Thursday @ 8 am PT / 11 am ET / 15:00 GMT BTW – you can see ALL EMC webcasts right here. So – you can register below, the one this week is pretty cool and focuses on how to use EMC Storage Configuration Advisor to ensure your storage network is properly configured. The following week (June 24th), I’m doing a “Chad’s Choice” session. The idea is that we do a 1hr webcast on a regular basis based on what’s cool and current in my world, but I’m always going to do a survey (also below) on topics that are on my mind (and also query folks for what they are looking for).

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Upcoming Chads Choice Webcast