Storage Nation

Was a fun week last week – we’re onboarding so many fantastic people so fast, we’ve needed to develop a custom onboarding process.  Not enough time to do blog posts   Keith Coughlin, the vSpecialist leader for the Americas call is it the “Emersion” program.  The use of “Emersion” as opposed to “Immersion” is intentional As people are coming from all sorts of backgrounds, we are trying to cram them full of stuff and build a sense of camraderie.

Folks – we spend so much time fighting, so much seriousness in things that in the end, while important aren’t as important of the lives of people, in particular the lives of children. A friend and colleague at NetApp let me know they were doing a drive for St. Baldricks – a campaign where people shave their heads to help raise funds for fighting cancer in children.   So, in the spirit of competition driving positive things and staying above the fray, we made a little wager

Mucho going on in View (and more generally VDI) land.   My first part I was posted here . If you’re interested in a quick catch-up, read on… View 4.5 beta The existence of this has been discussed by others ( here , and here ) – I will neither confirm nor deny.   What I can say is that the ongoing march of improved simplicity, scale, function in the hosted virtual desktop use case is well underway, and that every day, more and more customers are starting to embrace it.

Happy day for EMC unified customers.   A whole bunch of new integration, additional cost savings – all for existing and new EMC customers.   Oh, and it’s all free Here’s the PR , but in usual fashion, I tend to like the nerd version. Read on for more! So – without further ado, what’s new and GA?

Lots of back and forth with various folks internally on this in the last couple of days, and thought I would just put it out there: Despite the obvious simplicity that would come from directly connecting a UCS to an iSCSI, NFS, FC or FCoE target, this is currently (as of this posting on March 3rd, 2010) not possible with just a UCS chassis and UCS 6100 series fabric interconnect. I’ve had a couple people ask me “why” – after all, they’re just standard SFP+ connectors – you should be able to “plug Tab A into Slot B”. This is not new info (Scott and Rick have hit on this), but since I got asked so much (twice last week at different customers in a New York City tour), I thought I would summarize it here, as our readerships are not the same

These webcasts which EMC and VMware are doing jointly on tier-1 apps in the VMware context are generally very popular.

The sub-title of my blog is “an insider’s perspective, technical tips n’ tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution”.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – I think I’ve got the coolest job on the planet    I’ll give you a couple “insider” hints.   2010 will be a very big year on the VMware front – loads of big releases, new functionality and expanding use cases.   Likewise, it’s shaping up to be a block-buster year on the product front at EMC.   The number of “headline” level things down the storage and security fronts between now and EMC World (May) are huge.   Between now and the end of the year – massive. So today, a big move occurred on the management side of the house that’s been underway for a while.   You can read more here . For more detail, and that “insider perspective”, read on… My blog posts are long, and I’m long-winded by nature – so here’s the conclusion before the detail: This is a move where VMware in an instant, makes a quantum increases the depth of resources, tools and capabilities in things that are focused on server-layer and up.   This expands the vCenter family of management capabilities, and the teams that develop them, and the teams take them to market. This is a move where EMC, in an instant, can focus ongoing management M&A and R&D and go to market on the things that focus on UCS, networks, and storage – the server layer and down.  This accelerates EMC’s management efforts

Recently was working a customer case with my VMware colleagues where a customer was seeing that cloning operations were taking a lot longer on their V-Max than it was on their mid-range CXes.   Turned out to be a tricky case, and taught me something new. This experience would apply across more than just EMC arrays, so I thought I would share what we found, how we found it, and what we did about it – in the hopes of helping folks our there. If you’re interested – read on…. I’ve got a mixed readership – some very VMware-centric, some storage-centric, and some brave open minded souls who span both.   Storage-centric folks – bear with this for a bit, as you likely know this, but important to have the VMware-centric folks understand

These EMC IT webcasts are fantastic, and customer feedback has been very positive.   They break down the good/bad/ugly of our journey to the private cloud. This week’s session (Thursday, 8am PT/11am ET)  is on EMC’s own deployment of View 4.   I’m using it right now, and love it!  Of course, there’s still a long way to go (check-in/check-out is big for me).   I use it all the time to access my lab on the corp network – fire up the View client and I am in the core network (extra secured via RSA, which integrates with View Manager). We’re still in the pilot stages with our View 4/Windows 7 activities (hundreds of clients), but so are a lot of customers.   Join in for a perspective (and the upside of the EMC IT folks presenting themselves is it’s not a salesperson   on a 40K employee company’s deployment of client virtualization. http://info.emc.com/mk/get/DBM6065-3450_raf_lp BTW – this is part of a large series.   EMC IT is a massive consumer of the technologies we develop, and is rapidly approaching the 100% virtualized mark for our x86 workloads.

As discussed here , in VI3.x, any VMs deployed on VMFS via “clone” or “deploy from template” by default use the “eagerzeroedthick” format.  This was the case all the way up to update 5, which fixed this behavior.   vSphere 4 “clone” and “deploy from template” operations have always used the zeroedthick format (exception is a VM configured for Fault Tolerance, or where the administrator forces the eagerzeroedthick option – for a MSCS/WSFC device for example). This is important for the reasons covered in that post ( check it out ) – but the key is that it means you use more storage (a lot more) than needed. I’ll add another reason – it literally doesn’t just consume more storage, but it makes takes that do this “zeroing” (clone, template) take a lot longer than they need to.