Another VMworld event is over and it’s hard to believe it’s been a whole 12 months since the last one. Certainly during the keynotes there was a lot of coverage about what VMware has achieved over the last 12 months and it is impressive especially in the end user computing and hybrid cloud spaces. But overall I felt that VMworld USA 2014 lacked some of the sparkle of last year. But I guess it’s hard to top last year considering it was the 10th anniversary. This year seemed much more about building a solid foundation for a software defined datacenter, a software defined enterprise and a hybrid cloud model integrating applications with infrastructure, providing ability and flexibility, but without compromise. Although attendance was flat or a little down on last year the breakout sessions were packed, right up to the last session on Thursday. Instead of having our heads in the clouds this year it was all about the vCloud Air, and we vRealized the product naming is about to be changing. So lets dive into what I think are some of the highlights.

My VMworld started on Sunday with a Nutanix sponsored VCDX study group. Nutanix is a big supporter of the VCDX program for the entire community. The study group was put on for candidates that wanted to know more about the VCDX process and practice the design and troubleshooting scenarios. It was completely vendor agnostic, and it needs to stay that way. Nutanix understands that the only way sponsoring a VCDX study group can be of value is if the content is vendor agnostic and covers a wide range of topics. There were many VCDX helping in the room and giving advice from across many companies. This really is what the community is all about. Everyone helping each other.

Then I moved on to opening acts at VMunderground that was put on by vBrownBag. I was on the storage panel and it was a good discussion around Virtual Volumes, Hyper Convergence and Flash. I even agreed with a traditional SAN vendor that hyper converged appliances will not help SuperDomes and Mainframes, but then again I can always migrate the workloads and processes off those systems, and the Unix mid range systems as well, to a Hyper Converged world. SuperDomes, Mainframes and Unix systems is where the legacy SAN technology will stay for the foreseeable future and it will be a decline over a number of years, just like we’ve seen with the traditional big iron systems themselves. The move away from traditional SAN for x86 connected environments isn’t going to happen over night, but it’s a trend that is starting to take hold, but honestly it’s not even scratching the surface of the potential opportunity yet. The announcements from VMware and EMC around their hyper-converged offerings are just more validation of that. Flash is definitely the way of the future, and it opens up things that were previously not possible. I have a section on flash technology in the storage chapter of Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware.

There were a number of VMware announcements during the keynotes that are worth mentioning. But before I do I have to get something off my chest. vRealise is the worst name ever thought of for anything. My initial reaction to the new name for VMware’s hybrid cloud, vCloud Air was somewhat similar, but at least Air has a cool ring to it, like iPad Air for example. vRealize, just NO! I feel sorry for the sales team who have to try and sell that now. Ok, rant over. The overall themes about this being a brave new world and requiring bravery from all of the customers and the community participants was interesting. I’ve been doing virtualization for a very long time and even for business critical apps it’s a very safe bet. But SDDC and the Software Defined Enterprise going to further reduce silos and this will require some organisational changes and maturity. This is really where the bravery comes in, most of the challenges are not technical.

Two major overall themes were used during the keynotes. Firstly – “Compatibility, Compliance, Choice”, and secondly the “Power of &”. VMware has done a great job of building a partner ecosystem across a number of technologies, including the vCloud Air Network, which has 3900 partners, and the broader ecosystem around the hypervisor and NSX. This is where compatibility, compliance and choice really comes in. Seamless compatibility, compliance with regulatory and industry requirements, and choice of multiple partners and technologies. This is then extended to the OpenStack, NSX and Containers, which can run extremely well in a VMware environment, and this is the Power of &. Have your containers without compromise. Have your OpenStack on a platform easily fit on top of VMware vSphere.

By far the biggest highlight was meeting a lot of people who regularly read my blog and have benefited from the work that I and others in the community have done over the years. This is why we keep doing it. Because it makes a difference. It was also great to meet a lot of people who had bought Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware: Doing IT Right, and had got a lot out of it too. My co-authors, Michael Corey, Jeff Szastak and I were blown away by the stories that were relayed to us about how the book had helped people, especially when it was being used to explain to DBA’s how virtualization works and that SQL is a great candidate for virtualization. The book was so popular that it actually sold out at VMworld, and we had a lot of people come up to us during the meet the authors session and book signing.

Here is a photo of my co-authors and I with the happy customer who purchased the very last copy of our book at VMworld.

Shortly after the above photo was Michael Corey and I recorded an interview with VMworld TV’s Eric Sloof regarding virtualizing SQL Server Databases on VMware.

I was lucky again this year to present a session that was included in the top 10 sessions of VMworld for the second consecutive year – VMworld 2014 SDDC1600 Art of IT Infrastructure Design The Way of the VCDX Panel.

Final Word

It was another great VMworld and a very successful VMworld.  I’m very much looking forward to next year. Hopefully we’ll see the return of the Monster VM sessions and some other business critical apps sessions from me in next years VMworld.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

I’ve always enjoyed visiting Europe and every year when I visit Barcelona for VMworld it is special. It might be a smaller event than VMworld in San Francisco, but it lacks nothing in substance, networking opportunities, or announcements. The excitement level in Barcelona appears to be higher than what it was in San Francisco. This article is my thoughts on the keynotes with close to 9000 people in attendance. 

Day One Keynote

Rigid to Liquid, No Status Quo, Disruption, Break Down Silo’s. Over the last decade VMware has given us the tools and confidence to virtualize anything and take the world into an era of brave new IT that can help drive business growth. Pat’s message to the audience was clear, the status quo is being disrupted and the new style of IT will see more cross functional collaboration with fewer silos, in a new more dynamic and agile environment. This message was also quite well integrated into Sanjay Poonen’s message for workspace and end user computing with IT at the speed of life. There is a focus on applications coming through from VMware, and the infrastructure enabling all types of applications. Those applications will be deployed in a more hybrid environment with a mix of use cases on premises and in a cloud environment with vCloud Air or one of the 3900 vCloud Air Network partners. VMware really covers the globe when it comes to cloud requirements, without any need to modify applications and complete choice with where they run.

Build infrastructure to enable apps, free the apps from the infrastructure components, the first strategy the SDDC, on and off premises, seamless and dynamic, with the SaaS offerings from vCloud Air VMware is delivering on the SDDC and Hybrid Cloud vision with vRealize Operations Management. It was good to see continued investment in solutions to make applications integrate seamlessly into the Software-Defined Datacenter and Hybrid Cloud vision. Especially the integration of VMware’s solutions as part of a Software as a Service offering. This is now the world of hybrid cloud.

One of the biggest announcements that may have gone unnoticed was the announcements of vRealize Code Stream. This will be available on-premises, and continuous integration as a service will be available through vCloud Air. This is a clear attack on Amazon’s status quo for developers. This pushes VMware well into the any app, anywhere, and with Horizon Workspace you can get those apps anywhere. Even for OpenStack, being integrated with VMware, which is in Beta. If VMware can take the complexity out of OpenStack it will be of massive benefit to customers that want choice around all the different components in their cloud stacks from an API perspective. To be honest though, nobody I’ve spoken to likes the vRealize branding for the management suites.

VMware continued to validate the hyper-converged infrastructure message, even to the point that vCloud Air will be built upon hyper-converged infrastructure. This proves that the old way of enterprise IT doesn’t work in a cloud environment, a web-scale environment where things are much more dynamic and you need a much better aligned economic model.

VMware has cloud management market share of 20% and is the leader in the space, leads Datacenter automation with 24% market share. This is set to continue as VMware rolls out further product integration across the suites, rather than just being an integrated SKU, but actually integrated products that work well together. This is something that Microsoft has done very well across their stack. VMware must integrate if they want to effectively compete against Microsoft. This is the Power of AND that the SDDC brings, to achieve the No Limits message that VMware had as the theme of VMworld 2014.

From an infrastructure prespective, networking and network virtualization is clearly the next big opportunity for VMware. VMware will be a major threat to Cisco in the Datacenter and Service Provider networking as a result of VMware NSX, which delivers the ability to choose any underlay networking technology at the physical layer and deliver rich networking services distributed at the software layer. This is Software-Defined Networking delivered. One of the key use cases that NSX delivers is to Decrustify the edge of the datacenter security.

VMware announced the Horizon Workspace Suite, which combines all of their End User Computing products, which will make it more easy to purchase and consume these products, although they are still separate products that will likely require professional services to integrate. Project Fargo and the Cloud Volumes addition will have some great benefits in the future for all environments as it will make it much quicker to deploy applications and use them anywhere, and on any device. Apps and end user delivery at the speed of life. So you can work where you want, when you want. Like in my article about The VMware View from the Horizon at 38,000 Feet and 8000 Miles Away.

Day Two Keynote 

Here is a great summary of the first part of the Day Two Keynote from Barry Coombs:

@vmworld day 2 keynote: here is my first doodle #vmworld. If this of interest please share #vmworld2014 pic.twitter.com/cS7NlVVlMM

— Barry Coombs (The Doodle Guy) (@VirtualisedReal) October 15, 2014

SAP runs one of the largest private clouds in the world for their internal development. 85% virtualized, 75K VM’s, NSX is up next. If SAP can virtualize 80+% of itself on VMware then anyone can virtualize SAP on VMware. The only reason SAP isn’t more virtualized is that customers are still running many legacy Unix and mainframe platforms. The time is right to move off the traditional Unix platforms to a new more agile private and hybrid SDDC environment.

Vodafone – Moving to a fully Software-Defined Datacenter.

1. Pace the technology changes – 3 yrs time
2. Customer Assistance
3. Listen to Customer#VMworld #Vodafone

— Sanjai Kannan (@sanjai2k) October 15, 2014

VMware Integrated OpenStack really is integrated and gives some amazing insights into the applications. VMware has done a great job at integrating OpenStack into the whole VMware ecosystem. Then you can mix and match which partner systems you use, while still getting the benefits of VMware, and the integration and API’s of OpenStack for your applications.

#VMworld VMware integrated OpenStack really is integrated, so much insight. pic.twitter.com/s2eUVndTUB

— Lord WebScale Webster (@vcdxnz001) October 15, 2014

Containers without compromise – Including without compromising performance. The performance on containers within a VM is within 3% of native. Why would you want to miss out on the benefits that virtualization brings for just 3% difference? Complete automation, non-disruptive infrastructure management, higher availability, higher SLA’s.

Docker Containers Performance in #VMware vSphere http://t.co/jGZhS4Mkmg #vmworld pic.twitter.com/M9AV3GbEVZ

— Tony Dunn (@dunntony) October 15, 2014

vRealize Code Stream – Continuous integration and code migration on premises with automation and integration with vRealize Automation. For DevOps and when your managing multiple applications and code migrations paths Code Stream will allow you to automate the migrations, testing and promotion between different environments, without necessarily having to go to a cloud. This allows you to use the app tools you’re used to, including Eclipse, Git, Perforce, Subversion etc. Vladan did a great write up about this here. I really hope the VMware field gets enablement on this product and how to pitch the value to applications teams as this could be a real game changer. Field teams have struggled in the past to pitch the value of VMware tools to applications teams and are much more comfortable talking about infrastructure. This needs to change. You need to be able to talk applications language to applications teams and understand their problems, their workflows, and what solutions they need.

vRealize Management as a Service will be available via vCloud Air, but will it be available via the vCloud Air network? That is the big question. The ability to run your vRealize management tools in vCloud Air to manage both your on premises and hybrid cloud workloads is an important step forward. This is something that I asked about when VMware started talking about Cloud 4 years ago. It’s taken 4 years of hard work to bring this to market.

VVOLS will be important for ecosystem integration, including with the VMware Integrated OpenStack, and all of the management tools. VVOLS will be the language that your VMware tools will use to speak to storage devices of all types and forms. This will increasingly become a must have for storage vendors, rather than a nice to have, which VASA has been up until now. This will be how other storage vendors plug into the VMware Integrated OpenStack, if a customer doesn’t want to use VSAN. VSAN isn’t going to be the only solution, every VMware storage partner, including the hyper-converged partners will have a part to play. I know Nutanix will be playing a big part in this space, especially with it’s web-scale converged architecture advantages.

vCloud Air integration – the biggest problem for Cloud is the cost of network bandwidth required and the explosive data growth that limits portability of systems. So although VMware is brining some great features to vCloud Air you need to be able to consume them. Without 10GbE everywhere it’s unrealistic to have application mobility going everywhere, especially with the explosive growth of data. So Cloud adoption will continue to be appropriate for certain types of applications, or as an interface to end users, while the persistent data may live elsewhere. My view is that while bandwidth may be limited for some time the vCloud Air network gives VMware reach into a lot more places, closer to the consumers of the cloud, and potentially much higher bandwidth at lower prices. This will enable network extension and application mobility to be much more realistic. I think it will be a long time before people are migrated large databases around however.

So Cloud will be limited to the web and app tiers mostly, or configuration DB’s used to run those tiers. Unless the network bandwidth problem is solved, or you’re really just doing hosting or CoLo 2.0. If you’re not going to make regular use of the Hybrid Cloud why would you provision dedicated network links for it also? So that would potentially mean you need to greatly upsize your Internet links, so they can at least be used for multiple purposes, rather than sitting idle until you want to spin something into a cloud. If you’re an enterprise hosting in a large datacenter it’s quite possible that your hosting company may well have their own cloud provisioned across the datacenter floor, or have links to the other larger clouds. This again makes it more realistic to use a Hybrid Cloud. This is something that AWS and Azure have with their direct connect links from large CoLo companies. This makes much more sense.

Final Word

VMware has announced some great technologies, it will remain to see how they are received by the market when they are actually available as GA products. Product announcements and product implementation timeframes have in the past been extremely extended due to the complexity of upgrades, lack of upgrade paths, enterprise project cycles, lack of product integration and other factors.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

Another year has flown by, and what a year it was, and now we’re in a new year and I’m a year older and hopefully a little wiser, we never learn less. The great thing about being in the IT industry and especially being involved with Virtualization, Cloud and Software Defined Datacenters, there is always so a lot to learn and things are changing at an ever faster pace. All the time the economics and customers benefits are rapidly increasing all the time. I mean we don’t just do things because they are cool and technically interesting, there has to be an ROI for our customers, partners and customers organizations. It was great for me to personally be involved in revolutionizing many customers economics of delivering IT infrastructure and applications services throughout 2013, especially with the many Unix to VMware migration projects I was involved with. So this article will reflect on some of the highlights of 2013.

Firstly and most importantly I would like to thank all of you for taking the time to visit my blog and being part of the discussion, longwhiteclouds.com was viewed over 310,000 times during 2013. This is a big jump on the 2012 numbers. You can see the full 2013 report and number crunching thanks to jetpack in my Long White Virtual Clouds 2013 Year In Blogging Annual Report. It’s your feedback and being able to make a valuable contribution to the VMware and virtualization / cloud community that keeps me going. Here is a photo of the Long White Cloud (although a physical one) taken from the top of my street.

A very big thank you to my sponsors for supporting me and enabling me to bring you this content. Some sponsors have come and gone but Unitrends in particular has stuck with me pretty much all year. I want to thank them for their contribution to the VMware and virtualization community. I would also like to thank Cloud Physics for their ongoing support of the VMware community and for sponsoring this blog. Other sponsors throughout the year, which I also thank for their contributions are Nutanix (you’ll be reading a lot more about them this year), and Veeam. There are many other organisations that sponsor peer blogs in the virtualization and cloud community and I’d like to thank them for supporting the community that has been built up. Even though there were only 310K views on longwhiteclouds.com my sponsors received close to 500K impressions.

2013 Year in Review – Highlights

There were a number of highlights throughout the year but here are some that I think were the most memorable.

In early 2013 longwhiteclouds.com was voted by you into the list of Top Virtualization Blogs on vSphere-Land.com. It’s first entry into the list was in the top 25 (#21) out of 243 blogs that you voted from. Thank you so much for your support and I hope to do better next time around. Eric Siebert of vSphere-Land.com has recently released a history of the top blog voting over the years, it’s worth a read.

I was fortunate during 2013 to attend a number of conference events around the world including VMware PEX, HP Discover, VMworld, and vForum’s. At VMware’s Partner Exchange (PEX) I was involved in presenting bootcamps on virtualizing Business Critical Application, and also on the VCDX panels, which I qualified as a panelist for VCDX-DCV. I was very fortunate to be invited to attend HP Discover, which I wrote about in my articles Discovering HP Technology in Las Vegas and HP Discover 2013 Las Vegas Wrap Up. It was a great event and I and the other bloggers enjoyed it very much.

VMworld US was very special this year being the 10th annual event, it was also where we definitely bought back the Monster VM’s and Business Critical Apps in a big way and in the context of a Software Defined Datacenter.  You can see a recording of the VMworld Monster VM Design Panel VAPP4679, which was voted in the top 10 sessions of VMworld. Definitely a great highlight of 2013 to get one of my sessions into the top 10 at VMworld. Big thanks to my co-presenters (also VCDX) who made it happen – Frank Denneman, Andrew Mitchell, Mostafa Khalil and Mark Achtemichuk. This theme of Monster VM’s continued at VMworld in Barcelona and the vForums, where I was joined there by Melvin the Monster VM.

Above are a selection of some of the photos from this years VMworld and vForum events. From left to right. 1. Nutanix VCDX Cluster (we’ll be growing the size of this cluster shortly). 2. Melvin Monster VM with GeekFest DJ. 3. Melvin Monster VM Twins with John Troyer interview. 4. Melvin Monster VM running on a Nutanix block with Bas Raayman. 5. Melvin Monster VM with Cormac Hogan, Ken Werneburg and I. 6. Melvin Monster VM with Martin Casado and Paul Strong.

2013 was the year that Apps loved VMware even more, even low latency apps, business critical apps on VMware exploded with even more monstrous VM’s, and HPC. This was largely because of the release of vSphere 5.5. vSphere 5.5 has been an incredibly solid release and a great platform for all types of business critical apps. Amongst the highlights of vSphere 5.5 we see Record Breaking Network Performance, Microsoft Failover Clustering Enhancements and Jumbo VMDK’s.

During the past year Unix to VMware migrations have become much more common and in 2014 this momentum is likely to continue and gain even more pace. It’s no surprise that Unix system revenues continue to decline by double digit percentages. The economics of migrating Unix applications to VMware and Hyperconverged platforms such as the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform make total sense. The Intel / x86 platforms have matured to the point where you do not have to compromise on availability, performance or service levels for the most demanding applications.

I continued my campaign of Fighting the FUD around Oracle Support and Licensing in a vSphere environment. I wrote a number of articles that can be found on my Oracle Page. This is a resource for you if you want to know anything about virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere. The articles include some very good stories from the field from both customers and partners. It definitely makes for interesting reading.

Late in 2012 based on frustation with the complexity and effort involved in improving security in vSphere environments with SSL Certificates I kicked off a project with VSS Labs, a VMware partner based in Singapore, to provide a solution. The goal, which the solution achieved, was to provide better vSphere platform security for the masses at an affordable price. This involved a complete SSL Certificate lifecycle and compliance tool, which turned into vCert Manager. vCert Manager went GA during 2013 and VSS Labs had a booth at VMworld. The solution provides a simple and automated way of keeping all the SSL certificates in a VMware environment up to date, including integration directly with the Certificate Authorities, as well as reporting on ongoing compliance. It also understands VMware concepts such as Lockdown Mode, Maintenance Mode and Auto Deploy. The demo VSS Labs showed at VMworld is included in my article VMworld USA 2013 by the Numbers.

VMware and SAP were shaking up enterprise apps during 2013 with their announcements around not only running SAP ERP applications in VMware clouds (public/private/hybrid), but also running HANA in VMware clouds, and putting ERP and HANA software on the VMware price book in a pay as you grow by the month subscription licensing model. The subscription based licensing model along really changes the game for enterprise software and especially for it’s consumption in cloud environments. Although these announcements were made in 2013 not all of the component pieces are yet in place. But when everything is delivered it will be one heck of a powerful combination. Throughout 2014 you’ll also see how SAP can be levered in Hyperconverged environments, including on the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. So watch this space.

At VMworld USA 2013 we saw Cloud morphed into SDDC. After a few years of experimentation with Cloud VMware decided that it’s for service providers and for enterprises what is actually needed is a Software Defined Datacenter, and all the declarative, automated, policy driven goodness that goes with it, while allowing for hybrid cloud models at the same time. This was the inspiration for my article titled vCloud Director is Dead, Long Live vCloud Director. There are still a lot of use cases for vCloud Director and at the moment vCloud Director is a great way of enabling components of the Software Defined Datacenter vision, while the other components are bedded down a bit more and become more mature. VMware’s NSX, which was a real highlight of VMworld will also play a big part in the SDDC vision of the future. Abstract, Pool, Automate all with service and policy defined up front and easily consumable.

Converged become Hyperconverged, even for business critical apps. Over the last few years there has been a lot of talk about converged infrastructure. Some vendors did a better job of it than others. Some completely missed the boat all together and instead of converged just delivered pre-assembled. It’s not the same thing. Even so, throughout 2013 Hyperconverged technologies, such as the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform, which combine compute and storage into a single and simple solution, really started to accelerate. There are other solutions in the Hyperconverged category but Nutanix is clearly the leader in this space. Next year this market will go supersonic. Primarily driven not by just convergence of different components, but by the sheer radical simplicity of deploying, managing and scaling the platforms.

Instead of a hodge-podge of pre-certified and pre-assembled components, you get one beautifully elegant, completely integrated solution in a single small package, which is still flexible and capable. This is not only going to go supersonic next year (more so than it did this year), it’s going to swallow business critical apps, including Unix systems. It’s not however going to replace all of the scale up platforms, as they will still be needed for a percentage of workloads, but anything that can work on a scale out platform virtualized computing platform (majority of systems) will be fair game. The units of scale will also keep increasing.

If you don’t believe me here’s proof. Melvin Monster VM running on a Nutanix 3450 block in my lab :).

With all these trends and opportunities it’s no wonder that I joined Nutanix as an employee in late November 2013. The opportunities around virtualizing business critical apps and Unix to VMware migrations on the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform are monstrous. You’ll see a lot more discussion on the architectural considerations as we move into 2014 and I begin to publish reference architectures and white papers on it. Till then you can review my Nutanix articles here and here.

Late in 2013 I had the pleasure of being invited to join other industry experts, such as futurist Paul Saffo and one of VMware’s CTO’s,  in a Google Plus Hangout on the Future of IT. If you didn’t catch the event you can watch the recording on YouTube. Check out my article on this here. This looks at a lot further out than just 2014. But I think you’ll agree there is some interesting things on the horizon.

There are still some unanswered questions about 2013, such as, was it the year of the desktop? Was 2013 the year of flash storage? Well the jury is still out on that. But if 2013 wasn’t either of those things you can be sure that 2014 has a good chance of being both. I would predict both will become pervasive in 2014. End User Computing and Mobility and Flash Storage. Brining flash closer to applications, through Hyperconvergence (i.e. Nutanix) most likely, or through other means. Both support each other, and both are dependant on each other for economies of scale. Again, watch this space.

Final Word 

Last but my no means least I have to look back over 2013 and be thankful that I have a wonderful wife and family that support everything I do. If it wasn’t for their support I would not be able to continue this blog or contribute to the community at large. They put up with my late nights and with my travel schedule. Speaking of which I was only in my home country of New Zealand for 10 weeks during 2013. 2014 will be much more balanced. You know the saying happy wife, happy life, well it’s true. Here is a photo taken shortly after my return from VMworld Barcelona. Thanks to Shiv Diddee, one of VMware’s Super TAM’s from the UAE for the Dubai T-Shirts they made me very popular and we’re getting good use out of them. From left to right, Sebastian (6), Bradley (3), Susanne, Benjamin (1). We’re expecting our 4th boy in April 2014.

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This post appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

You might recognise the title in different terms. It’s very similar to “The King is dead, long live the King!”. As Wikipedia explains the original phrase was translated from the French Le roi est mort, vive le roi !, which was first declared upon the accession to the French throne of Charles VII after the death of his father Charles VI in 1422. In France, the declaration was traditionally made by the duc d’Uzès, a senior peer of France, as soon as the coffin containing the remains of the previous king descended into the vault of Saint Denis Basilica. So what’s this got to do with VMware vCloud Director I hear you ask?

Has VMware killed vCloud Director? What should you do if you have vCloud Director or if you’re thinking about implementing it? What does this mean for the vCloud Director based certifications such as VCP-Cloud, VCAP-CIA, VCAP-CID and VCDX-Cloud. I’ll give you my opinion of the answers to these questions in this article. It’s all about the Software Defined Datacenter.

This year, in August at VMworld USA in San Francisco, vCloud Director was pretty much completely missing from the event. Except of course my session on running Databases at Maximum Performance in a Software Defined Datacenter – VAPP4683 (Presented with Mark Achtemichuk in San Francisco and Andrew Mitchell in Barcelona). Many customers and partners were lamenting the death of vCloud Director. This wasn’t quite what VMware was doing, as I’ll explain during this article. Needless to say some customers and partners I spoke to at the event were not at all happy with the decision. Some customers had invested multiple millions of dollars in vCloud Director projects for Private Clouds.

For anyone that is not familiar with VMware vCloud Director, it’s a software solution that allows any company or service provider to implement a software defined datacenter, or at least a good number of components of it. It allows for self service automated provisioning of virtual machines and virtual applications into a private or public cloud. So you can deploy your applications whenever you want and within minutes they’ll be available. The best use case for private clouds in my opinion is to streamline the software development lifecycle and greatly improve the economics of software development projects. But it also has benefits for production workloads as well, as it takes away a lot of the manual tasks and decisions that administrators would have traditionally had to make when provisioning new applications. I have had customers that have reduced their project development and testing time by 50% using vCloud Director. In addition to reducing the test and development time customers have reduced their defect rate by orders of magnitude, which means their software is more reliable and they find many less defects after the solution has gone into production, which in term improves availability, performance and lowers ongoing maintenance costs.

During VMworld VMware announced a new strategic direction, and vCloud Director wasn’t it, at lest not for Enterprises. The new direction was vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) for Enterprises (private cloud), which was introduced with one of the best integrated demo’s I think I’ve ever seen during the main keynote on day two (called the Mother of all Demo’s). What this meant is that vCloud Director was for only going to be for cloud service providers (public cloud). As part of this change of direction VMware announced that vCloud Director 5.5 (which was released shortly after VMworld) would be supported through to Q3 2017 (4 years instead of the usual 2), and vCloud Networking and Security (Formally vShield) would be supported through to Q3 2016. Neither would be available for sale separately from September 2013, you’d have to have the vCloud Suite. A version of vCloud Automation Center is available and was added to every edition of the vCloud Suite, dependant on the edition purchased. So everyone with vCloud Suite, get vCAC.

vCloud Director is Dead?

So is VMware killing or has killed vCloud Director? No! Far from it. VMware is investing more in vCloud Director, but is focusing the investment on public cloud service provider requirements and the requirements of the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). This is why the title of this article if vCloud Director is Dead, Long Live vCloud Director. It will be around for a long time to come and will deliver ever more value to the world, with a slightly changed focus. VMware will be making the functionality from vCloud Director that is for Enterprise available through a combination of vCloud Automation Center and vCenter, some features of vCloud Director not applicable to Enterprise use cases will not be making the transition (primarily multi-tenancy and multiple authentication domains).

So does this mean you all have to rush out and implement vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) or migrate to vCloud Automation Center or that you have just seen your investment in vCloud Director flushed down the toilet? No! The change in strategic direction isn’t like turning on a light switch and everything is working. Just because marketing might say vCAC is the new way to go doens’t mean it’s actually reality today. Your investment is protected and you get support through to Q3 2017 (vCloud Director 5.5), plenty of time to get a massive ROI, and you’ll get bug fixes and patches during this time. This change in direction from VMware will take place over a number of years, and you will be given time to adapt, and the migration tools to do it. Why is vCloud Networking and Security support ending a year earlier that vCloud Director, I have no idea, especially seeing it’s an important part of a vCloud Director environment.

Right now vCloud Automation Center isn’t even feature equivalent to vCloud Director yet (based on version 5.2).  If you’re using vCloud Director for self service development and test environment provisioning and automation, or self service catalog, it’s either going to be difficult, extremely hard, or impossible to get the same functionality out of vCloud Automation Center, at least the current shipping version and probably the next one also, especially if you don’t want to spend a lot on services (Remember Lab Manager vs vCloud Director 1.0?). VMware also needs time to create migration tools for customers to make the transition to the new way of doing Software Defined Datacenter for the enterprise, as there is no in-place upgrade path possible for vCloud Director to vCloud Automation Center.  Getting the full migration strategy in place for customers is going to take time and it isn’t there yet.

vCloud Director isn’t dead, but what should I do now if I have it? 

Firstly, don’t panic! If you’re an existing vCloud Director customer, whether the project has been delivered and is in use, or still in flight, I would highly recommend you continue down the vCloud Director path. Especially if your use case is self service catalog, self service provisioning of isolated test and dev environments, and you’re going to be using vCloud Director primarily for streamlining your SDLC. I would not recommend throwing in the towel with vCloud Director right now, it is an excellent solution for the right use cases and the right requirements. Having designed and implemented about a dozen private clouds and around half a dozen public clouds with vCloud Director I’ve seen the value it can deliver.

I would further recommend that when the next version of vCloud Automation Center (whatever comes after 5.2) is released that you consider implementing that along side but separately from vCloud Director for self service provisioning of production workloads, or in a test environment so you can at least get used to it. It goes without saying that if you’re not on vCloud Suite licenses you should get there as soon as possible, it’s the best solution for delivering a software defined datacenter and it’s incredibly cost effective compared to purchasing the equivalent licenses separately. vCloud Suite licenses will be a worthwhile investment, and will get you the optimal ROI.

What if I’m a net new customer looking at building a software defined datacenter with vCloud Director?

If your use case for vCloud Director is primarily for production workloads and provisioning and managing the lifecycle of production systems, and you’re a net new user (no existing vCloud Director), then I would recommend you work closely with VMware to plan an implementation of vCloud Automation Center as soon as the next version is available. The reason for this is there is no in-place upgrade path from vCloud Automation Center 5.2 to the next version, it will be a migration. So you might as well wait for the next version to become available if you can, or be prepared to stay on vCAC 5.2 for a while until the migration process is well defined and the tools are there to make it straight forward (or as much as it can be). I know a couple of customers that are on vCAC 5.2 and are happy with it for now for their use cases. Like vCloud Director, vCAC is a great solution for the right use case and the right requirements, and of course it’s part of the vCloud Suite.

If your use case for vCloud Director is making your SDLC, Dev/Test greatly more efficient and streamlined, and you’ve got no current vCloud Director environment, then I’d recommend you go with vCloud Director and the vCloud Suite. It can be implemented fairly quickly (with competent and skilled people), and you’ll get good use out of it till 2017. This’ll give VMware time to get vCloud Automation Center and vCenter sorted out to be feature equivalent (or close enough) to vCloud Director, and for the migration tools to become available and mature. You should work closely with your VMware partner and VMware to plan an eventual transition to vCAC, when the time is right, and once you’ve got your ROI.

If you’re not an enterprise, but a cloud service provider instead, then the choice and long term solution is easy, it’s vCloud Director. vCloud Director is here to stay and will be developed for the service provider market.

What does this mean for the VMware vCloud Director based Certifications?

The vCloud Director based certifications, such as VCP-Cloud, VCAP-Cloud Infrastructure Design, VCAP-Cloud Infrastructure Administration, and VCDX-Cloud will all continue. They will continue to have value to customers that are running vCloud Director, and they’ll have a lot of value for public cloud service providers. VCDX-Cloud will probably be valuable only to public cloud service providers in the future, or to VMware Partners that are providing consulting and services around private and public clouds. It’s likely that VCDX-Cloud will adapt to non-vCloud Director technologies, especially as vCloud Automation Center and OpenStack become more a part of the VMware landscape. I’m in the process of working towards VCDX-Cloud, and this change of direction by VMware has not altered that plan. I would encourage anyone that is working for a public cloud provider or is planning to work for a public cloud provider (based on VMware vCloud Director technology) to go through the vCloud Director based certifications.

Final Word

There are probably many reasons why VMware has chosen this new path for vCloud Director Enterprise customers. vCloud Director was hard to integrate with the other VMware solutions, such as Site Recovery Manager. Partners were very slow to support backing up and restoring vCloud Director, especially the tenant objects (this can be done now with partner provided solutions). If you can’t easily and efficiently protect the data inside the solution it’s hardly suitable for an enterprise production workload right? The adoption rate was probably less than expected, but what do you expect when vCloud Director originally wasn’t feature equivalent to the product it was meant to replace (Lab Manager), had no migration path, and had no training for a long time. vCloud Director was complicated and had lots of moving parts, was hard to understand (I don’t agree with this, but I know some people have this opinion). Maybe many people didn’t understand and couldn’t articulate the value proposition for vCloud Director as it was very different to a traditional infrastructure or virtualization solution. What business problems was it actually going to solve, what was the ROI and what were the benefits (hint: refer to the start of this article for some)?

Whatever the reasons are I think this change is a good thing. It will allow VMware to deliver solutions (over time) that solves the Enterprise and Service Provider use cases, is simpler and more automated, more focused. For Enterprises the solution will have much easier integration into the wider VMware product stack. For Service Providers they’ll be able to more seamlessly integrate with their customers, be more scalable, and have significantly more easier and less disruptive cloud maintenance. It will be easier to deliver the Software Defined Datacenter Vision and Hybrid Cloud. All the while protecting existing investments and providing massive value.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2013 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

This year at VMworld I have three sessions that will be brining you some Business Critical Apps, Monster VM and Database in Software Defined Datacenter performance best practices, trends, design considerations and much more. Places in theses sessions are strictly limited and are filling fast. If you have interest in any of these topics I would recommend that you sign up for the sessions before they are full. There is likely to be a wait list when the sessions sell out. There are also many other quality breakout sessions and panel discussions at VMworld and the VMware booth is also a fantastic place to connect with all areas of VMware. Below I’ll give you links through to the scheduling page for the sessions and also recommendations for other sessions you might like to check out.

VAPP1004-GD – Oracle/General – Group Discussions are a good way to join together with peers, guided by a VMware expert, and discuss a VMware key topic as selected by the group. Come to this session prepared to dive-in, engage, and share best practices.  

VAPP4679 – Software-Defined Datacenter Design Panel for Monster VM’s: Taking the Technology to the Limits for High Utilisation, High Performance Workloads – Designing and architecting an environment that will host many Monster VM’s requires a different approach and different considerations to smaller VM’s to ensure you get the best benefits from the platform. Mostafa Khalil (VCDX-002), Frank Denneman (VCDX-029), Andrew Mitchell (VCDX-030), Mark Achtemichuk (VCDX-050) and Michael Webster (VCDX-066) will lead a panel discussion on the design and architecture best practices and design guidance that applies when you are virtualizing many high utilization, high performance Monster VM’s. The panel will answer your questions on topics such as host and cluster design and sizing, VM sizing, performance tuning, CPU scheduling, memory management, resource management, storage design and much more. Avoid the common traps that could derail your Monster VM virtualization project.

VAPP4683 – Maximize Database Performance in Your Software-Defined Datacenter – Mark Achtemichuk (VCDX-050) and Michael Webster (VCDX-066), two leading experts on Performance and Business Critical Apps take you through a power packed session of architecture design considerations to help you get the most performance out of the Software Defined Datacenter and your Cloud for your database servers. More customers are considering how to design and deploy their largest critical database servers in their Software Defined Datacenter and with VMware vCloud Director. These scenarios have many benefits for Business Critical Applications, such as Database systems, including reduced time to market, increased agility, reduced management overheads and a declarative architecture that can make meeting certain SLA’s much simpler. This session will take you through a performance deep dive when using a software defined datacenter for your database workloads and introduce the architectural and design implications for performance when using new flash technologies. You’ll also learn how to avoid some of the common performance traps. Whether you are deploying databases on vSphere or in your cloud with vCloud Director this session will cover the critical performance considerations relevant to Oracle, SQL Server, and Sybase and other mission critical database platforms.

My recommendations are aligned with many of the other session recommendation lists that have been published such as:

Duncan Epping’s VMworld San Francisco Session Recommendations

Trainsignal’s Top 10 VMworld 2013 Sessions for Active Learners

Final Word

There are many great sessions scheduled for VMworld and it’s often quite frantic when you’re there. I’d suggest that you schedule in early for the sessions you’re most interested in and if you miss out on them you can always try and get into a repeat.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2013 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.

When previous VMware CTO Dr. Steve Herrod coined the term Software-Defined Datacenter and presented the concept at VMworld 2012 a lot of people in the IT industry immediately jumped on the band wagon. The concept of Abstracting, Pooling, and Automating not just compute, but network, storage, security and compliance, make complete sense to many people. I think a lot of people will agree that the vision of a Software-Defined Datacenter(s) is an excellent theoretical goal and roadmap for the future of IT. Since then just about every IT vendor has come out with their Software-Defined Something. But what about the reality?

Many of the technical building blocks are available today or will be in the very near future to allow you to build a Software-Defined Datacenter. Depending on your technology vendor selections you can get Software-Defined Storage (SDS), Software-Defined Networking (SDN), and VMware for some time has been able to deliver Software-Defined Compute (SDC), security and compliance. In fact this image below was my expression of what I thought the Software-Defined Datacenter would look like when you automate security and compliance with DR across primary and recovery locations as I presented at VMworld 2012.

The idea here is that you can provision and protect for DR purposes any workload and also the policies and service classifications that are part of that workload definition, which are automatically applied, that the policy will be replicated to the DR site, and that you can test the applications in conjunction with their policies without disruption to production. This dramatically reduces the time to bring a new service online, ensure it’s protected, in compliance with regulatory and security policy (correct firewall rules, hardening options etc), and know that when it fails over to DR it’ll work as you expect. You will have automated monitoring, performance management and capacity planning in addition, so that your job of operating and managing the environment is greatly simplified and much less complex. This is why VMware created the vCloud Suite as the foundation of the Software-Defined Datacenter.

The rationale for Software-Defined Everything is that resource Abstraction, Pooling and Automation allows much more efficient use of each resources while at the same time still providing quality of service. The same idea was behind virtualization originally. You can take multiple servers, pool them together into a cluster using VMware HA and VMware DRS, and make much more efficient use of the servers compute and IO capacity so that it was not necessary to over-provision, and capacity can be increased just in time. Environments were servers are virtualized have much higher average utilization and therefore cost savings. In enterprise environments today some of the most inefficiently utilized resources are the networks and storage,  and this is where there are some big gains to be made. In effect the Software-Defined Datacenter is all about breaking down silos of infrastructure and applications and having a completely converged environment, and one that can be either private, public or a hybrid. Each application is provisioned where the resources of the Software-Defined Datacenter are best able to meet it’s policy and service definition.

This brings us nicely to the title of this article and application licensing policies, which I believe is the biggest barrier to making a true automated Software-Defined Datacenter a reality. This problem is not technical, it is commercial. The reason this is a problem is that different application vendors have vastly different ways of licensing and many of these are not compatible with the vision of an abstracted, pooled infrastructure. Many application vendors require that you license all of the CPU Cores in a host for their application, which then makes it uneconomic to run other applications on that server, or to license every server for every possible application, which is what would otherwise be required. The result of these physical hardware core based licensing policies is silos of capacity, the exact thing that the Software-Defined Datacenter is aiming to prevent, and is inefficient from a provisioning, availability and operations perspective. Here is an image depicting an enterprise environment with multiple applications that the customer has chosen to license by physical processor and separate into individual silos.

In the case of the environment above every time a new application instance is deployed it needs to be placed in the appropriate cluster. Unfortunately many provisioning engines, including VMware’s provisioning capability (vCloud Automation Center) as part of the vCloud Suite, lacks software licensing placement and management awareness. So right now you still need humans managing software licensing policies and placement decisions in some cases. Having all of these silos prevents greater abstraction, pooling and automation. The best that can be done right now with vCloud Automation Center is forcing certain application templates to provision to certain fixed cluster locations. Even though using the tagging features of vSphere 5.1 Web Client would allow certain flexibility in this regard the lack of a tagging API makes that impossible at this time.

Of course licensing dedicated clusters that are right sized for your applications isn’t entirely a bad thing, in fact it can be very licensing efficient and economically efficient. Especially when you consider the higher cost of applications compared to infrastructure (in the case of things like Oracle, IBM and other enterprise software). Having dedicated clusters that are right sized allows you to maximize the investment you’ve made in your application licenses and also allows very simple license compliance. Once a cluster is licensed for an application you can run an unlimited number of instances of that application provided you have sufficient physical resources and have acceptable performance. This allows you to take advantage of vCPU over-provisioning or overcommitment (assuming performance objectives can be met and not all systems run 100% utilized), which would not be economically viable in many cases if using per vCPU based licenses, while keeping within SLA’s. Being able to get better licensing and system consolidation in this way can save an organization millions of dollars in capital purchases and operational expenses. My point is that dedicated clusters isn’t bad from a licensing point of view at all, it’s just it goes against the concept of the Software-Defined Datacenter and the different licensing methods and complicated licensing compliance makes achieving a true Software-Defined Datacenter incredibly difficult in reality, especially without having that license awareness built into the SDDC Platform itself.

There are some enlightened application vendors in the market right now that offer virtualization and cloud friendly licensing policies, where you can license based on the virtual resources assigned to a virtual machine or license based on the number of users, and move the licenses between private and public clouds. Two examples immediately come to mind, SAP and Microsoft. With SAP because its licensed based on named users you can deploy as many instances as you need and deploy them wherever you want, including the Oracle DB if you licensed it from SAP. With Microsoft provided you have licenses that are covered by software assurance you can migrate the systems between hosts or move them to a hosted or cloud environment as you wish. With the Microsoft licensing for SQL Server for example you have the option of licensing by virtual cpu core (minimum of 4) or physical cpu socket (minimum of 4 cores per socket). So with SAP and Microsoft it is incredibly easy for you to achieve a real Software-Defined Datacenter that is abstracted, pooled, and automated and while remaining in compliance with their software license policies in a very simple way. You also get the flexibility of running your systems in a private, public or hybrid cloud or hosting environment.

I have also worked with IBM WebSphere Application Server and used it with sub-capacity licensing (by vCPU), which also makes it easier to run in a Software Defined-Datacenter (with the IBM License Metric Tool used for compliance management). However because the licenses are based on Processor Value Units (PVU) it makes it hard to use in a cloud environment when the customer may not know the hardware specifications and therefore PVU’s of the underlying servers. This could potentially create a licensing compliance issue.

Final Word

Due to variance in licensing methods, complexity around compliance and lack of tooling to manage and control licensing built into the base platform (VMware vCloud Suite), application licensing will remain a challenge to achieving a Software-Defined Datacenter reality. It is good to see some enlightened application vendors already have licensing policies that work well in the new SDDC environment and are simple and easy to manage. These enlightened vendors give their customers flexibility and choice and we should all support them. I hope the more application software vendors take notice and start to follow their lead. I also hope that customers insist on licensing policies that support license portability between private, public and hybrid clouds, and fully support the concepts of the Software-Defined Datacenter when going through RFP’s. The opportunities for economic savings from the Software-Defined Datacenter are massive, but it will take some time for the commercials and licensing policies to catch up. It’s up to us all to educate our application vendors and encourage them to change their policies to more easily fit into this new paradigm of IT.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2013 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.