With VMworld 2010 right around the corner we’d love to hear what’s on your mind in regards to virtualization and your environment. We in the vSpecialist organization at EMC would love to hear from you, this survey will be completely anonymous and will possibly help shape the future of virtualization.

• What’s your IT infrastructure look like?
• What do you like about it?
• What frustrates you about it?
• What do you think we should be doing that we’re not (EMC, VMware, or heck, the whole IT industry)?
• What are YOU doing that’s cool?

To complete this survey please click here.

Posted under VMworld

For those of you who haven’t purchased your pass to VMworld yet do I have a surprise for you!  Being an employee of EMC combined with EMC being a great partner of VMware allows me to extend some good perks to my readers.  If you use the following link (http://www.vmworld.com/registration.jspa?sponsorCode=EMC) to register for VMworld and enter in the promotion code EMC_EB_US2010 you will save $300 from the regular admission price (reg $1,795).

VMworld 2010 is going to have some great sessions, including some awesome Ask the Experts sessions as well as the opportunity to meet a good majority of the vSpecialist team. You can even pick yourself up a copy of Mastering VMware vSphere and have it signed by Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac and myself! Or even a copy of the VCP-410 study guide from McGraw-Hill.

I hope to see all of you there, be sure to visit the EMC booth to meet up and chat about all things virtualization.

Posted under Conferences, EMC, VMworld

EMC is running a webcast hosted by Chad Sakac next Thursday and the topic should be of an interest to any VMware or Storage administrator.  If you haven’t heard about VAAI and it’s great offloading capabilities I strongly urge you to register for this webcast.

Thursday, June 24, 2010, 11:00 am ET

Host: Chad Sakac, VP VMware Technology Alliance, EMC

Register Now by Clicking Here

During this discussion, you can learn about vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI). There are some functions that your storage system can handle more efficiently than your virtual servers and their hosts can. VAAI are a set of APIs that allows VMware vSphere to offload specific operations to the storage system improving VMware performance and freeing up resources on your virtual servers by leveraging more efficient array-based operations as an alternative to VMware host-based operations.

Join EMC Virtual Geek, Chad Sakac on June 24 to get key updates and honest answers to your most demanding questions.

Register Now by Clicking Here

Posted under EMC, Storage, vSphere

Last month at EMC World we released a storage virtualization product unlike any other. EMC VPLEX not only virtualizes back-end storage from other vendors it also allows shared storage to be presented active/active over long distances. This capability makes it possible for long distance vMotion and brings a new technical term to disaster planning, Disaster Avoidance.

Imagine you’re planning a datacenter shutdown due to a power outage or building maintenance, or perhaps that wildfire is making its way to your office location. Now you have the flexibility to be able to avoid major downtime by simply swinging your workloads to an off-site datacenter.

VMware has taken notice and has officially released a KB article detailing out full support for long distance vMotion with the EMC VPLEX product. More information on this KB article can be found at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021215. Perhaps you want to know more about VPLEX or even see a demo of it in action? Chad Sakac posted a great breakdown of how it works along with some videos on his website, check it out now.

Posted under Backup & Recovery, Storage, vCenter, vSphere

VMware, EMC, Cisco, VCE, Intel, Acadia….whew! what does it all mean?! 

VMware, Cisco and EMC created a new marketing ploy called VCE (Virtual Compute Environment), this will provide technical innovations as well as integrated pre-sales services and support.

What is the product? vBlock.  Think of vBlock as the plug and play data-center solution, it will consist of Cisco UCS/Nexus/MDS, EMC Storage and VMware Virtualization all within a pre-designed and built rack solution - simply drop it in your data-center, plug it in and deploy virtual machines.  This is not really any different than purchasing HP Servers, NetApp Storage and VMware licenses separately. Ultimately it is the same solution, but now with a single SKU that partners will be able to sell.

I can’t say that VCE is really innovative, but it is brilliant from a business standpoint.  It will allow partners to sell a single source solution quickly and easily - no longer will VARs need to bring in multiple vendors to sell the entire design.

Click Here to Learn more about VCE from the CEO’s of Cisco, EMC and VMware.

OK, so where does Intel come into this? Well with some venture capital from Cisco, EMC and Intel a new organization called Acadia is being formed.  Acadia will bring the vCloud into the private data-center.  In a phone conversation today, Chad Sakac informed me that Acadia will provide a pay by usage solution for Enterprise users that aren’t ready for the public cloud. The solution will be completely supported and provided by Acadia and the customer will only be billed for what they use.  Pretty much a vBlock will be dropped into the customers data-center, the end-user will have a self-provisioning utility to create virtual machines and then they’ll receive a bill for actual utilization.  So no capital expense at all, your data-center now turns into a full 100% operating expense.

I didn’t plan on writing a full explanation on who/how/why. Chad Sakac covers all of these topics extremely well on his blog and I invite you to check out the following links;

VCE-An Insiders Take

VCE-Technology Innovations

VCE-Integrated Sales/Service/Support

VCE-Acadia

VCE-Partner Ecosystem

Posted under Good Reading

In a clever marketing video NetApp produced (in house), NTAP takes on DD and e2 in an 8 Mile style rap battle. This was quite entertaining, thanks for the 4 minute break from a stressful day NetApp!

Read More…

Posted under NetApp

How could this be?!  EMC, owner of VMware does not support its own product to run virtualized?  You got it daddy-o!

We are currently working on an upgrade of Documentum and we need a new home for the full-text index search module of Documentum, we asked EMC support if we can virtualize this piece, they told us no.  Reference support note 43361 and line #5 clearly states If Index Server is running on VMware, this is not supported.

I really hope someone at VMware or EMC  can collaborate on this and get it resolved.  I know that EMC recently purchased Documentum, but a top priority would be to make sure all of their products work together in harmony.

Another sad day in the vSphere for me. (no pun intended)

Posted under Good Reading, VMware