Excited about VMware Cloud Director releases? Me too. 10.3.2 GA was recently announced, and you can read more about that here.
Speaking of Cloud Director, Al Rasheed put together this great post on deploying VCD 10.3.x – you can check it out here.
Getting started with VMware Cloud on AWS but feeling a bit confused by some of the AWS terminology? Me too. Check out this extremely useful post on Amazon VPCs from a VMware perspective.
Still on VMware Cloud on AWS. So you need some help with HCX? My colleague Greg put together this excellent guide a little while ago – highly recommended. This margarita recipe is also highly recommended, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Speaking of hyperscalers, Mellor put together a nice overview of Hyve Solutionshere.
Detecting audio problems in your home theatre? Are you though? Tom Andry breaks down what you should be looking for here.
Working with NSX-T and needing to delete route advertisement filters via API? Say no more.
Lost the password you set on that Raspbian install? Frederic has you covered.
Speaking of cloud, I enjoyed this article from Chris M. Evans on the AWS “wobble” (as he puts it) in us-east-1 recently. Speaking of articles Chris has written recently, check out his coverage of the Pure Storage FlashArray//XL announcement.
Speaking of Pure Storage, my friend Jon wrote about his experience with ActiveCluster in the field recently. You can find that here. I always find these articles to be invaluable, if only because they demonstrate what’s happening out there in the real world.
Want some press releases? Here’s one from Datadobi announcing it has released new Starter Packs for DobiMigrate ranging from 1PB up to 7PB.
Data protection isn’t just something you do at the office – it’s a problem for home too. I’m always interested to hear how other people tackle the problem. This article from Jeff Geerling (and the associated documentation on Github) was great.
John Nicholson is a smart guy, so I think you should check out his articles on benchmarking (and what folks are getting wrong). At the moment this is a 2-part series, but I suspect that could be expanded. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. He makes a great point that benchmarking can be valuable, but benchmarking like it’s 1999 may not be the best thing to do (I’m paraphrasing).
Speaking of smart people, Tom Andry put together a great article recently on dispelling myths around subwoofers. If you or a loved one are getting worked up about subwoofers, check out this article.
I had people ask me if I was doing a predictions post this year. I’m not crazy enough to do that, but Mellor is. You can read his article here.
In some personal news (and it’s not LinkedIn official yet) I recently quit my job and will be taking up a new role in the new year. I’m not shutting the blog down, but you might see a bit of a change in the content. I can’t see myself stopping these articles, but it’s likely there’ll be less of the data protection howto articles being published. But we’ll see. In any case, wherever you are, stay safe, happy holidays, and see you on the line next year.
VMware Cloud Director 10.3 went GA recently, and this post will point you in the right direction when it comes to planning the upgrade process.
Speaking of VMware products hitting GA, VMware Cloud Foundation 4.3 became available about a week ago. You can read more about that here.
My friend Tony knows a bit about NSX-T, and certificates, so when he bumped into an issue with NSX-T and certificates in his lab, it was no big deal to come up with the fix.
I haven’t talked to the good folks at StarWind in a while (I miss you Max!), but this article on the new All-NVMe StarWind Backup Appliance by Paolo made for some interesting reading.
I loved this article from Chin-Fah on storage fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). I’ve seen a fair bit of it slung about having been a customer and partner of some big storage vendors over the years.
This whitepaper from Preston on some of the challenges with data protection and long-term retention is brilliant and well worth the read.
Finally, I don’t know how I came across this article on hacking Playstation 2 machines, but here you go. Worth a read if only for the labels on some of the discs.
Welcome to Random Short Take #56. Only three players have worn 56 in the NBA. I may need to come up with a new bit of trivia. Let’s get random.
Are we nearing the end of blade servers? I’d hoped the answer was yes, but it’s not that simple, sadly. It’s not that I hate them, exactly. I bought blade servers from Dell when they first sold them. But they can present challenges.
22dot6 emerged from stealth mode recently. I had the opportunity to talk to them and I’ll post something soon about that. In the meantime, this post from Mellor covers it pretty well.
It may be a Northern Hemisphere reference that I don’t quite understand, but Retrospect is running a “Dads and Grads” promotion offering 90 days of free backup subscriptions. Worth checking out if you don’t have something in place to protect your desktop.
Running VMware Cloud Foundation and want to stretch your vSAN cluster across two sites? Tony has you covered.
Pure//Accelerate happened recently / is still happening, and there was a bit of news from the event, including the new and improved Pure1 Digital Experience. As a former Pure1 user I can say this was a big part of the reason why I liked using Pure Storage.
Speaking of press releases, this one from PDI and its investment intentions caught my eye. It’s always good to see companies willing to spend a bit of cash to make progress.
I stumbled across Oxide on Twitter and fell for the aesthetic and design principles. Then I read some of the articles on the blog and got even more interested. Worth checking out. And I’ll be keen to see just how it goes for the company.
*Bonus Round*
I was recently on the Restore it All podcast with W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi. It was a lot of fun as always, despite the fact that we talked about something that’s a pretty scary subject (data (centre) loss). No, I’m not a DC manager in real life, but I do have responsibility for what goes into our DC so I sort of am. Don’t forget there’s a discount code for the book in the podcast too.
More data protection press releases? I’ve got you covered. Zerto released one recently about cloud data protection. Turns out folks like cloud when it comes to data protection. But I don’t know that everyone has realised that there’s some work still to do in that space.
This article on some of the peculiarities associated with mainframe deployments in the old days by Anthony Vanderwerdt was the most entertaining thing I’ve read in a while.
Alastair has been pumping out a series of articles around AWS principles, and this one on understanding your single points of failure is spot on.
Get excited! VMware Cloud Director 10.2.2 is out now. Read more about that here.
A lot of people seem to think it’s no big thing to stretch Layer 2 networks. I don’t like it, and this article from Ethan Banks covers a good number of reasons why you should think again if you’re that way inclined.
Welcome to Random Short Take #46. Not a great many players have worn 46 in the NBA, but one player who has is one of my favourite Aussie players: Aron “Bangers” Baynes. So let’s get random.
Enrico recently attended Cloud Field Day 9, and had some thoughts on NetApp’s identity in the new cloud world. You can read his insights here.
This article from Chris Wahl on multi-cloud design patterns was fantastic, and well worth reading.
I really enjoyed this piece from Russ on technical debt, and some considerations when thinking about how we can “future-proof” our solutions.
The Raspberry Pi 400 was announced recently. My first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464, so I have a real soft spot for jamming computers inside keyboards.
Disclaimer: I recently attended VMworld 2019 – US. My flights and accommodation were paid for by Digital Sense, and VMware provided me with a free pass to the conference and various bits of swag. There is no requirement for me to blog about any of the content presented and I am not compensated by VMware for my time at the event. Some materials presented were discussed under NDA and don’t form part of my blog posts, but could influence future discussions.
Here are my rough notes from “HBI2537PU – Cloud Provider CXO Panel with Cohesity, Cloudian and PhoenixNAP”, a panel-type presentation with the following people:
Ari Paul – Product Marketing, Cloud Providers, VMware
YR: William, given your breadth of experience, what are some of the emerging trends you’ve been seeing?
WB: Companies are struggling to keep up with the pace of information generation. Understanding the data, storing and retaining it, and protecting it. Multi-cloud adds a lot of complexity. We’ve heard studies that say 22% of data generated is actually usable. It’s just sitting there. Public cloud is still hot, but it’s settling down a little.
YR: William comes from a massive cloud provider. What are you guys using?
WB: We’ve standardised on vCloud Director (vCD) and vSphere. We came from build our own but it wasn’t providing the value that we hoped it would. Customers want a seamless way to manage multiple cloud resources.
YR: Are you guys familiar with VCPP?
AP: VCPP is the crown jewel of our partner program at VMware. 4000+ providers, 120+ countries, 10+ million VMs, 10000+ DCs. We help you save money, make money (things are services ready). We’re continuing to invest in vCD. Kubernetes, GPUs, etc. Lots of R&D.
YR: William, you mentioned you standardised on the VMware platform. Talk to us about your experience. Why vCD?
WB: It’s been a checkered past for vCD. We were one of the first five on the vCloud Express program in 2010 / 11. We didn’t like vCD in its 1.0 version. We thought we can do this better. And we did. We launched the first on-demand, pay by the hour public cloud for enterprise in 2011. But it didn’t really work out. 2012 / 13 we started to see investments being made in vCD. 5.0 / 5.5 improved. Many people thought vCD was gong to die. We now see a modern, flexible portal that can be customised. And we can take our devs and have them customise vCD, rather than build a customised portal. That’s where we can put our time and effort. We’ve always done things differently. Always been doing other things. How do we bring our work in visual cloud into that cloud provider portal with vCD?
YR: You have an extensive career at VMware.
RR: I was one of the first people to take vCD out to the world. But Enterprise wasn’t mature enough. When we focused on SPs, it was the right thing to do. DIY portals needs a lot of investment. VMware allows a lot of extensibility now. For us, as Cohesity, we want to be able to plug in to that as well.
WB: At one point we had 45 devs working on a proprietary portal.
YR: We’ve been doing a lot on the extensibility side. What role are services playing in cloud providers?
AP: It takes away the complexities of deploying the stack.
JT: We’re specifically in object. A third of our customers are service providers. You guys know that object is built for scale, easy to manage, cost-effective. 20% of the data gets used. We hear that customers want to improve on that. People are moving away from tape. There’s a tremendous opportunity for services built on storage. Amazon has shown that. Data protection like Cohesity. Big data with Splunk. You can offer an industry standard, but differentiate based on other services.
YR: As we move towards a services-oriented world, William how do you see cloud management services evolving?
WB: It’s not good enough to provide some compute infrastructure any more. You have to do something more. We’re stubbornly focussed on different types of IaaS. We’re not doing generic x86 on top of vSphere. Backup, DR – those are in our wheelhouse. From a platform perspective, more and more customers want some kind of single pane of glass across their data. For some that’s on-premises, for some its public, for some it’s SaaS. You have to be able to provide value to the customer, or they will disappear. Object storage, backup with Cohesity. You need to keep pace with data movement. Any cloud, any data, any where.
AP: I’ve been at VMware long enough not to drink the Kool-Aid. Our whole cloud provider business is rooted in some humility. vCD can help other people doing better things to integrate. vCD has always been about reducing OPEX. Now we’re hitting the top line. Any cloud management platform today needs to open, extensible, not try to do anything.
YR: Is the crowd seeing pressure on pure IaaS?
Commentator: Coming from an SP to enterprise is different. Economics. Are you able to do a show back with vCD 9 and vROps?
WB: We’re putting that in the hands of customers. Looking at CloudHealth. There’s a benefit to being in the business management space. You have the opportunity to give customers a better service. That, and more flexible business models. Moving into flexible billing models – gives more freedom to the enterprise customer. Unless you’re the largest of the large – enterprises have difficulty acting as a service provider. Citibank are an exception to this. Honeywell do it too. If you’re Discount Tire – it’s hard. You’re the guy providing the service, and you’re costing them money. There’s animosity – and there’s no choice.
Commentator: Other people have pushed to public because chargeback is more effective than internal show back with private cloud.
WB: IT departments are poorly equipped to offer a breadth of services to their customers.
JT: People are moving workloads around. They want choice and flexibility. VMware with S3 compatible storage. A common underlying layer.
YR: Economics, chargeback. Is VMware (and VCPP) doing enough?
WB: The two guys to my right (RR and JT) have committed to building products that let me do that. I’ve been working on object storage use cases. I was talking to a customer. They’re using our IaaS and connected to Amazon S3. You’ve gone to Amazon. They didn’t know about it though. Experience and cost that can be the same or better. Egress in Amazon S3 is ridiculous. You don’t know what you don’t know. You can take that service and deliver it cost-effectively.
YR: RR talk to us about the evolution of data protection.
RR: Information has grown. Data is fragmented. Information placement is almost unmanageable. Services have now become available in a way that can be audited, secured, managed. At Cohesity, first thing we did was data protection, and I knew the rest was coming. Complexity’s a problem.
YR: JT. We know Cloudian’s a leader in object storage. Where do you see object going?
JT: It’s the underlying storage layer of the cloud. Brings down cost of your storage layer. It’s all about TCO. What’s going to help you build more revenue streams? Cloudian has been around since 2011. New solutions in backup, DR, etc, to help you build new revenue streams. S3 users on Amazon are looking for alternatives. Many of Cloudian’s customers are ex-Amazon customers. What are we doing? vCD integration. Search Cloudian and vCD on YouTube. Continuously working to drive down the cost of managing storage. 1.5PB in a 4RU box in collaboration with Seagate.
WB: Expanding service delivery, specifically around object storage, is important. You can do some really cool stuff – not just backup, it’s M&E, it’s analytics. Very few of our customers are using object just to store files and folders.
YR: We have a lot of providers in the room. JT can you talk more about these key use cases?
JT: It runs the gamut. You can break it down by verticals. M&E companies are offering editing suites via service providers. People are doing that for the legal profession. Accounting – storing financial records. Dental records and health care. The back end is the same thing – compute with S3 storage behind it. Cloudian provides multi-tenanted, scalable performance. Cost is driven down as you get larger.
YR: RR your key use cases?
RR: DRaaS is hot right now. When I was at VMware we did stuff with SRM. DR is hard. It’s so simple now. Now every SP can do it themselves. Use S3 to move data around from the same interface. And it’s very needed too. Everyone should have ubiquitous access to their data. We have that capability. We can now do vulnerability scans on the data we store on the platform. We can tell you if a VM is compromised. You can orchestrate the restoration of an environment – as a service.
YR: WB what are the other services you want us to deliver?
WB: We’re an odd duck. One of our major practices is information security. The idea that we have intelligent access to data residing in our infrastructure. Being able to detect vulnerabilities, taking action, sending an email to the customer, that’s the type of thing that cloud providers have. You might not be doing it yet – but you could.
YR: Security, threat protection. RR – do you see Cohesity as the driver to solve that problem?
RR: Cohesity will provide the platform. Data is insecure because it’s fragmented. Cohesity lets you run applications on the platform. Virus scanners, run books, all kinds of stuff you can offer as a service provider.
YR: William, where does the onus lie, how do you see it fitting together?
WB: The key for us is being open. Eg Cohesity integration into vCD. If I don’t want to – I don’t have to. Freedom of choice to pick and choose where we went to deliver our own IP to the customer. I don’t have to use Cohesity for everything.
JT: That’s exactly what we’re into. Choice of hardware, management. That’s the point. Standards-based top end.
YR: Security
*They had 2 minutes to go but I ran out of time and had to get to another meeting. Informative session. 4 stars.
WekaIO recently raised some C round funding. You can read more on that here.
Confused by some of the VMware Cloud nomenclature? Curtis attempts to clarify things in this post.
Rhys Hammond has put together the VMCE 9.5 Unofficial Study Guide and it is worth checking out, particularly if you work with Veeam products and you’re looking to get certified.
If you work with VMware Cloud Director and haven’t visited Stellios’s blog before you’re missing out. Stellios has a wealth of experience from his days as a customer and now works as a VMware TAM in BrisVegas. This article on LDAPS in vCD 9.5 was particularly useful.
And this one by George Crump on hyperscale storage is also worth a look.
The May edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting is being held on the 28th. If you’ll be in the area you can register here. It’s sponsored by Cohesity and should be a lot fo fun. Speaking of Cohesity, I offered up some thoughts on my experiences using Cohesity during their recent Build Day Live event.
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