Well the year is starting to wrap up – Twitter avatars look a little snowier and analysts are digging deep into their prediction boxes in the attic to see what 2012 is going to “be the year of <insert technology>”.

If you make no other resolutions in the coming 2 weeks or so , make this one , “I will attend a user group meeting” – for example the next London VMware User Group meeting is on the 26th of January, so its a nice early one to tick off the list. If you’d like to sign up for the meeting , head on over to here and sign up. If you feel you need a little more convincing on why a user group is for you, then read on.

7 Reasons why you should go to a usergroup

1. Its an educational event – Not only is there a chance to pick up some handy info from the sponsors and members presentations , for instance “how to build 1000 hosts in 10 minutes with VMware auto deploy” by Alan Renouf from VMware , or dabble in “A little orchestration after lunch" with Michael Poore – you could even brush up on those skills to complete a certification such as with Gregg Robertson’s VCP5 Tips & Tricks session.

2. Its a social event – a chance to meet with people who share similar sets of day to day issues as yourself , so its the perfect place to bounce an idea around with a peer group of very bright people

3. Its a fun event – from Alaric’s jokes at the welcome to the laughs and war stories at the pub afterwards its good humour all the way – just because we work in IT doesn’t mean that we’re socially crippled!

4. Its a free event! even lunch and a swift half at the pub later is covered

5. Its an interactive event – Its not just a day of PowerPoint overload , you can get involved with the hands on lab sessions , on this occasion sponsored by the guys over at Embotics, I’m sure you’ll have built a self service cloud portal before you can say “boo!”

6. Its a networking event – People pay quite a lot of money to marketing companies to be able to have “breakfast” with like minded peers for the purpose of networking – being in IT we’re much more practical , we’ll do it for free at the usergroup! Find out the gossip , who’s hiring & who wants to be hired. You might just find that next rockstar position you’ve been promising yourself!

7. Its a community driven event – think you can do better than the guy on stage ? got something worth saying ? well you have the opportunity to prove it at a user group – We love the sponsors, but what makes it a *user* group is the member driven content – it could be a panel / open roundtable or just an aspect of your day to day techie life that you think you’ve done well and would like to tell people about

Hopefully there is something that will strike a chord above – and I’ll see you on the 26th!

No I don’t have the date wrong – There’s a much better thing to do at the beginning of November than trying to blow up a bit of your garden with pyrotechnics. The London VMware User group as stepped up to produce what the committee hopes to be the first of many UK VMware User group days.

To be held at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull , West Midlands this full day event will have not only a Keynote from VMware’s Joe Baguley , but 4 Tracks of Partner & Community sessions with more Rockstars the Glastonbury !

The VMUG “scene” in the UK is going from strength to strength and I’m sure this event will be no exception. Best of all, its free to attend , including an evening reception the night before hosted by Veeam

To Sign up for the event , head over to The MyVMUG site for registration. Look forward to seeing you there !

I got wind of a new project launched by Veeam from one of the many, many, many tweets that flooded by tweetdeck during VMworld US week – when my fellow vExpert, Blogger & Colleague Rick Vanover hinted that Veeam was due to launch another free community resource, I was keen to discover !

Having made the transition to vendor world, finding content as a blogger can be a little bit more of a search. For some reason, many of Veeam’s competitors don’t seem to want to give me a sneak peak of their products ,however in this case the product in question isn’t one that Veeam will be selling !

When we shifted into virtualisation, many of us from the physical server world had to make a little bit of a leap of faith into the new mind-set around virtualisation, now that we’ve made it, its is almost second nature to us. If you cast your mind back to those days of 7u file servers, imagine how alien the concept would be that they could be represented as a handful of files running of a single half height blade. Fast wording that concept to today and many people have yet to make that similar leap of faith when it comes to image based backup of VM’s

The Backup Academy as developed by Veeam to provide administrators with the foundations and fundamentals of Virtual Machine level backups, no matter who you choose for the solution. Veeam are by no means the first vendor to produce “neutral” training, EMC for example have paved the way with  Their Cloud Certifications last year.

The solution consists of a series of Videos produced by well known community contributors and trainers, such as David Davis, Eric Siebert & Greg Shields . The Academy Professors will be an ever growing list of subject matter experts around the backup and management of virtual machines.

Users of the site will be able to take an exam based on the content and even get a certificate for passing. I personally see the academy as a great way for current backup admins & virtualisation specialists to move to the next level – now that you have made game changing strategies to your production infrastructure, why not do the same for your backups ?

to find out more, head to http://backupacademy.com

Ok so I’ll take my tongue out of my cheek  – I have never heard Xangati’s summer refresh of their performance monitoring dashboard called by its Three Letter Acronym  (TLA) before, but I was lucky enough to be given a preview of the Xangati Management Dashboard (XMD) and to be shown some of the new ways in which it can gather information and metrics relevant to a Virtualised Desktop deployment.

When I first came across the product about 12 months ago, it’s main strength was in the networking information it could surface to a VI admin – by use of small appliance VM’s sitting on a promiscuous port group on a Virtual switch it was able to analyse net flow data going in and out of a host – when this was aligned with metrics coming form Virtual centre. The products “TiVo” like recording interface was able to capture what was happening to an infrastructure either side of an incident , be it a predefined threshold , or an automatically derived one – where a workload was suitably predictable for a given length of time , the application was able to create profiles for a number of metrics and record behavior outside that particular profile. As with other products that attempt to do dynamic thresholding , the problem comes in the form of an environment which is not subject to a predictable workload where is possible to miss an alert while the software is still “learning” – it also assumes that you have a good baseline to start with. If you have a legacy issue that becomes incorporated into that profile , then it can be difficult to troubleshoot. To this extent I’m glad that more traditional static thresholds are still able to be put in place. When monitoring environments with vSphere version 5 , there is no more requirement for the network flow appliances – the netflow data is provided directly to the main XDM appliance via a vCenter API. With a Single API connection , the application is focussed on much more than just the network data – allowing a VMware admin to see a wide view of the infrastructure from the Windows process to the VMware Datastore.

What interested me about the briefing was the level of attention being paid to VDI – I think Xangati is quite unique in terms of their VDI Monitoring dashboard and the latest release reinforces that. In addition to metrics that you would expect around a given virtual machine in terms of its resource consumption , Xangati have partnered with the developers of the PCoIP protocol , Terradici in order to be able to provide enhanced metrics at the protocol layer of a VDI connection. This offers a welcome alternative to the current method of having to utilise log analysers like Splunk.

VDI users are in my opinion much more sensitive to temporary performance glitches than consumers of a hosted web service. If a website is a little slow for a few seconds , people might look at their network connection or any number of alternative issues , but for a VDI consumer , that desktop is their “world” and would affect every application they use. Thus when it runs poorly they are much more liable to escalate than the aforementioned web service consumers. Use of the XMD within a VDI environment allows an administrator to trouble shoot those kinds of issues ( such as storage latency or badly configured AV policy causing excessive IO ) by examining the interaction between all of the components of the VDI infrastructure , even if the problem occurred beyond the rollup frequency of a more conventional monitoring product. This what Xangati views as one of its strengths , while I don’t think it is a product I would use for day to day monitoring of an environment – there is a lot of data onscreen and without profiles or adequate threshold tuning it would require more interaction than most “wallboard” monitoring solutions, I can see if being deployed as a tool for deeper troubleshooting. There is a facility which would allow an end user to trigger a “recording” of the relevant metrics to their desktop while they are experiencing a problem ( although if the problem is intermittent network connectivity , this could prove interesting ! )

As a tool for monitoring VDI environments it certainly has some traction , notably being used to monitor the lab environments for last years and this years VMworld cloud based lab setups , as well as some good sized enterprise customers. With this success I’m a little surprised at the last part of the launch, “No Brainer” pricing… In a market where prices seem to be on a more upward trend , Xangati have applied a substantial discount to theirs – with pricing for the VDI dashboard starting at $10 per desktop for up to 1000 desktops. I’m told there is an additional fee for environments larger than that. I’m no analyst but I’d love to explore the rationale behind this.. Was the product seen as too expensive ( although as with many things , the list price and the price a keen customer pays can often be pretty different – is this an attempt to make software pricing a little more “no nonsense ? “ I guess time will tell !

For more information on the XMD and to download a free version of the new product , good for a single host , check out http://Xangati.com

If you have been hiding under a rock for the last couple of weeks , you may not be aware that VMware held an online launch of its next generation Cloud platform , vSphere 5.0. It seems some of the announcements went down really well , and other parts , lets just say , not so well judging by the twitter reaction…

Have a listen to the show… here

I was very pleased to see a mail this morning from John Troyer – vExpert Program manager to say that I have been chosen this year as a vExpert. To quote the man himself !

We’re pleased to designate you as a vExpert 2011 as recognition of your contributions to the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities. You’ve done work above and beyond, and we’re delighted to communicate more closely, to share resources, and to offer other opportunities for greater interaction throughout the year as we continue to grow knowledge and success in the community of IT professionals. Welcome to the vExpert 2011 Program!

The award was chosen by a wide group of VMware Staff – who had a lot of great applications to go over and I’m as pleased as punch to have been chosen !

This is a blog post that I’ve had at the back of my mind for a good 6 months or so. The pieces of the puzzle have come together after the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day event in Boston. After spending the best part of a week with some very very clever virtualisation pro’s I think I’ve managed to marshal the ideas that have been trying to make the cerebral cortex to wordpress migration for some time !

Managing an environment , be it physical or virtual for capacity & performance requires tools that can provide you with a view along the timeline. Often the key difference between dedicated “capacity management” offerings and performance management tools is the very scale of that timeline.

Short Term : Performance & Availability

There we are looking at timings within a few seconds / minutes ( or less ) this is where a toolset is going to be focused for current performance on any particular metric , be it the response time to load a web application , Utilisation of a processor core or command operations rate on a disk array. The tools that are best placed to give us that information need to be capable of processing a large volume of data very quickly due to the requirement to pull in a given metric on a very frequent interval. The more frequently you can sample the data , the better quality output the tool can give. This can present a problem in large scale deployments due to a requirement that many tools have to write this data out to a table in a database – this potentially tethers the performance of a monitoring tool to the underlying storage available for that tools , which of course can be increased but sometimes at quite a significant cost. As a result you many want to scope the use of such tools only to the workloads that require that short term , high resolution monitoring. In a production environment with a known baseline workload , tools that use a dynamic threshold / profile for alerting on a metric can be very useful here ( for example Xangati or vCenter Operations ) If you don’t have a workload that can be suitably base lined ( and note that the baseline can vary on your business cycle , so may well take 12 months to establish ! ) then the dynamic thresholds are not of as much use.

Availability tools have less of a reliance on a high performance data layer as they are essentially storing a single bit of data on a given metric. This means the toolset can scale pretty well. The key part of availability monitoring is the visualisation and reporting layer. There is no point only displaying that data to a beautiful and elegant dashboard if no-one is there to see that dashboard ( and according to the Zen theory of network operations , would it change if there was no one there to watch it ! ) The data needs to be fed into a system that best allow an action to be made – even if it’s an SMS / Page to someone who is asleep. In this kind of case , having suitable thresholds are important – you don’t want to be setting fire alarms off for a blip in a system that does not affect the end service. Know the dependencies on the service and try to ensure that the root cause alert is the first one sent out. You do need to know that the router that affects 10,000 websites is out long before you have alerts for those individual websites.

Medium Term : Trending & Optimisation

Where the timeline goes beyond “what’s wrong now” , you can start to look at what’s going to go wrong soon. This is edge of the crystal ball stuff , where predictions are looking to be made in the order of days / weeks. Based on collected utilisation data in a given period , we can assess if we have sufficient capacity to be able to provide an acceptable service level in the near future. At this stage , adjustments can be made to the infrastructure in the form of resource balancing ( by storage or traditional load ) – tweaks can also be made to virtual machine configuration to “rightsize” an environment. By using these techniques it is possible to reclaim over allocated space and delay potential hardware expansions. This is especially valid where there may be a long lead time on a hardware order. The types of recommendations generated by the capacity optimisation components of VKernel , NetApp ( Akorri ) and Solarwinds products are great examples of rightsizing calculations.  As the environment scales up , not only are we looking for optimisations , but potential automated remediation ( within the bounds of a change controlled environment ) would save time and therefore money.

Long Term capacity analysis : When do we need to migrate Data centers ?

Trying to predict what is going to happen to an IT infrastructure in the long term is a little like trying to predict the weather in 5 years time , you know roughly what might happen but you don’t really know when. Taking a tangent away from the technology side of things , this is where the IT strategy comes in – knowing what applications are likely to come into the pipeline. Without this knowledge you can only guess how much capacity you will need in the long term. The process can be bidirectional though , with the information from a capacity management function being fed back into the wider picture for architectural strategy for example should a lack of physical space be discovered , this may combine with a strategy to refresh existing servers with blades. Larger Enterprises will often deploy dedicated capacity management software to do this ( for example Metron’s Athene product which will model capacity for not only the virtual but the physical environment )  Long term trending is a key part of a capacity management strategy but this will need to be blended with a solution to allow environmental modeling and what if scenarios. Within the virtual environment the scheduled modeling feature of VKernel’s vOperations Suite is possibly the best example of this that I’ve come across so far – all that is missing is an API to link to any particular enterprise architecture applications. When planning for growth not only must the growth of the application set be considered but the expansion in the management framework around it , including but not limited to backup and the short-medium term monitoring solutions.  Unless you are consuming your it infrastructure as a service , you will not be able to get away with a suite that only looks at the Virtual Piece of the puzzle – Power / Cooling & Available space need to be considered – look far enough into the future and you may want to look at some new premises !

We’re going to need a bigger house to fit the one pane of glass into…

“one pane of glass” – is a phrase I hear very often but not something I’ve really seen so far. Given the many facets of a management solution I have touched on above , that single pane of glass is going to need to display a lot ! So many metrics and visualisations to put together , you’d have a very cluttered single pane. Consolidating data from many systems into a mash-up portal is about the best that can occur , but yet there isn’t a single framework to date that can really tick all the boxes. Given the lack of a “savior” product you may feel disheartened , but have faith!. As the ecosystem begins to realise that no single vendor can give you everything and that an integrated management platform that can not only display consolidated data , but act as a databus to facilitate sharing between those discrete facets is very high on the enterprise wishlist , we may see something yet.

I’d like to leave you with some of the inspiration for this post – as seen on a recent “Demotivational Poster” –a quick reminder of perfection being in the eye of the beholder.

“No matter how good she looks, some other guy is sick and tired of putting up with her s***”

The London VMUG just keeps on getting better doesn’t it ? What do you mean you don’t know ?  Well for a start its now a pretty much full day event – Complete with its own Genius bar staffed by VMware GSS guys & girls who will be happy to help out on any issues you have ( Though I thought that was usually some of the vExperts enjoying a swift half or two at the pub afterwards ) If you can’t make the genius bar , then you’d be amazed at how the VMUG Hive mind can put itself towards a bit of problem solving , especially if you are buying the round !

The afternoon features two tracks with a few great guys , Several of which have been guests on vSoup , clearly a sign of greatness The morning features the Keynote & sponsor presentations, this time from Arista Networks , Vision Solutions & Embotics . If you can spare the time then the trip to London is well worth it , not only for the content but the chance to talk geeky with other like minded professionals !

I’ll leave you with the full timetable and the link for the signup , which can be found here 

Agenda
Plenary sessions in Capital
10:00 a.m.  – 10:15 a.m. – Welcome, Alaric Davies, Chairman
10:15 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. – Cloudvision for the Virtualised Environment, John Peach, Arista Networks, Sention System Architect
11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. – Private Cloud Management Made Simple, Martin Sajkowski, Embotics, EMEA Operations & Colin Jacks Senior Solutions Specialist
11:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.  – Break in Sponsor Expo
12:15 p.m. – 13:00 p.m.– Double-Take by Vision Solutions – Christian Willis, Technical Director: Meeting the Availability Challenges of physical, Virtual and Geographically Dispersed Systems
13:00 p.m. – 14:00 p.m.– Lunch in Sponsor Expo

Track 1 

14:00 p.m. – 14:50 p.m. - vCOPS Advanced, Mark Stockham, VMware  
15:00 p.m. – 15:50 p.m. – SRM Futures, Mike Laverick                                               
16:00 p.m. – 16:50 p.m.- Cloud: Can You Compete? Mark Craddock

Track 2

14:00 p.m. – 14:50 p.m. - Thinking, Building & Scripting Globally, Julian Wood
15:00 p.m. – 15:50 p.m. – Managing IT as We Evolve to Cloud Computing, Colin Fernandez, VMware
16:00 p.m. – 16:50 p.m. -  How to Save your Time With PowerCLI, Jonathan Medd

17:00 p.m. – Close
17:00 p.m. – Onward Drinks at Pavilion End

Note: Agenda Subject to change – you will need to register with myvmug.org to register for the event.

Never being a company to stagnate when it comes to releases , VKernel are continuing to develop their product set around capacity management and infrastructure optimisation for virtualised environments. After a strong quarter that has seen record numbers , expanded support for alternate Hypervisors such as Hyper-V & a new product aimed at the real time monitoring end of the capacity management spectrum ( vOPS Performance Analyzer )

The 3.5 release of the main VKernel vOperations Suite , to give it its full name is now “with added cloud”. I’m so glad the product marketing guys did NOT say that – in fact quite the opposite. The product had taken on features as suggested by its service provider & customers who are already down the path towards a private cloud.

vOPS 3.5 adds features which may make the life of an admin in such an environment easier – more often then not they are becoming the caretaker of an environment as workloads are generated via self service portals and on demand by applications. Being able to model different scenarios based on a real life workload is key to ensure your platform can meet its availability & performance SLA’s. Metrics in an environment mean nothing if you are unable to report on then, and this has been address with the implementation of a much improved reporting module within the product , which allows a much more granular permissions structure & the ability to export reports into other portals.

The capacity modeller component now allows “VM’s as a reservation” – knowing that not all workloads are equal means that you need to model the addition of workloads of differing size into an environment. These model VM’s can be based on a real CPU/MEM/IO workload.

The last key improvement is yet more metrics – this time around Datastore & VM performance including IOPS. Having been through an exercise where I had to manually collect IOPS data for an environment , I can personally attest to the value of automating this! When I was an end user of the vOPS product it was a metric I was constantly bugging the product development guys for – looks like they listened !

For more information, head over to the VKernel website.

I’ve just spent a couple of hours this morning having a kick about with some of the more advanced features of Veeam backup & replication v5.  I’ve been able to run instant restores of my machines without any issues , but what I really wanted was some backup verifications. I had a Virtual Lab & Application group built , but could not get the VM’s to ping. I’ve been digging into the setup of the router and on the verge of hair pulling – how hard can it be ? all of the VM’s are on the same VLAN/Subnet.

I tried a slight change of tack and selected a different test machine , simple because the sizable server 2008 r2 VM I used was taking a little longer than I was hoping for each test. When I used a smaller Server 2003 VM for the test the ping test worked just fine.

This led me to go back to the base virtual machine & its own settings. I’m trying to keep my lab network as secure as possible , and make use of the security settings Microsoft has been kind enough to provide. As a result , the windows firewall is enabled and set up correctly for the production environment. However as I am restoring the VM in isolation (without a domain controller ) it would appear that the following happens.

Windows Firewall on the Source VM.

Windows Firewall on the Recovered VM

File and printer settings in Firewall exceptions.

There’s ya problem ! I don’t have a Virtualised DC to test to see if a DC is in the same Surebackup application group that the windows firewall will not switch to Public settings , but in the interim I’ve had to open up the file and print sharing on the public domain. However it is possible to be a little bit more granular than just allowing all file and printer sharing. If you go to advanced settings, you can Enable the inbound rule “File and Printer Sharing ( Echo Request – ICMPv4-In)” for the Public domain.