A couple months ago now, I sent out a cryptic tweet: “Its like Christmas in September. I’m spending some time this evening with a new product. More details to come soon on the blog…”  Soon being a relative term, I didn’t expect almost 3 months to pass before I revealed the device and my experiences with it.  But I am excited to finally talk about my experiences with the NextIO vNet I/O Maestro, officially released in mid-October.

The NextIO vNet is a converged PCI interconnect solution which takes standard PCIe network and fiber channel adapters and provisions them in a shared way back to individual rack mount servers.  The vNet extends PCI outside of the physical server through a special (albeit simple) riser PCI card then via cables to the vNet.   The provisioned resources can be reassigned to different physical hardware, if required, offering a level of portability for systems and disaster recovery.  In addition, the vNet does not add any specialized drivers or software on the hosts and the host simply see a PCI device presented to it from the vNet.   The nControl management software handles creating virtualized WWID and MAC addresses that are assigned to the individual rack mount servers through an intuitive interface.

Configuration & Testing

Installation of the vNet was very straight forward.  The unit is 4U in size and installs into any rack.  To bring the unit online, we connected power and a single network cable for management.  Once connected, the unit retrieved an address by DHCP.  Once it got an address, we were free to configure it to a static address (as most enterprise would like do).

The unit required very little configuration on our part.  The unit had two Ethernet and two Fiber Channel cards loaded on the interconnect slots.  These dual port cards were presented in the nControl management console along with all 30 possible servers which could be connected via PCI on the back-end.  The administrator is free to create profiles on any of the available server connections and these virtualized WWID and MAC addresses are portable between profiles, meaning that in the event of a failure for a critical system, the addresses could be reassigned to new hardware and the system brought back online (assuming similar enough hardware that the OS will not complain and the ability to move the OS disks to a compatible model server).

On the rackmount server side, we only needed to install a small PCI pass-through card and connect the cable from it to the vNet and it was ready to be powered on.  After this, all configuration is done in nControl.  Drivers for the Fiber Channel and Network adapters is done as normal in the operating system.  The cards I received in my demo were newer than ESX 4.1 and required us to add a OEM vendor supplied driver to ESX and the same would be true for Windows.  But in many cases, the OS vendor will bundle appropriate drivers and the solution will just work.

The management interface is easy to use with drag and drop and the vNet also supports command line configuration through SSH.  The command line interface reminded me of a configuration similar to our HP or Cisco managed switches.  Commands were easy to understand and I found no limitations of what could be configured and viewed from command line, which I know will make some Unix administrators happy.

I have always believed that a picture is worth a thousand words, so below is a logical view of how a vNet connects to a set of rack mount servers.

For my internal testing, I had two ESX hosts setup on the vNet and I was able to test network throughput between virtual machines on both boxes at amazing speeds. I was never able to get the device SAN connected to truly test some advanced features such as vMotion and disk IO due to limitations of my test hardware.  The vNet requires PCIe card slots, so users should know that going in they will not be repurposing a lot of older equipment onto a vNet, although anything produced in the last 3 year should be compatible with the solution.  I ran into issues with available hardware for my abbreviated testing since my systems were older Proliant DL380 G4′s.

I did not see boot from SAN as an option since the fiber channel card did not show during the POST of the test rack systems.  I believe this may be an option depending on the fiber channel card, but I cannot recall the exact discussion I had with NextIO about this.   Boot from SAN would greatly improve the ability to make OS profiles portable between rack servers since you no longer have to manually swap OS disk drives.  Boot from SAN could mean a remote administrator could perform a hardware failover while offsite.

Advantages

The advantages that I see with the technology are very similar to the benefits I initially show with HP Virtual Connect, although a little different since it is with more industry standard hardware.  Some of the advantages include:

• Reduced need of ports for Fiber Channel and Network, which is really useful when few applications can consume the capacity of an 8Gb fiber channel port or a 10Gb Ethernet port.   As with virtualization in its first phase which sought to increase utilization of processor and memory in hosts, this technology can be used to increase utilization of under-utilized connectivity.
• Less costly upgrades to the newest technology allowed by adding a single PCI card of a specific technology and then sharing the new features to the backend rack mount systems.
• Server to server traffic not interacting with systems outside of the vNet’s domain does not need to leave the vNet device and can travel between systems at PCIe native speeds.
• Very intuitive and easy to learn interface to provision interfaces to backend nodes.
• The special PCI riser cards are pass-through modules with no firmware or intelligence to patch and maintain.
• Interconnect cards are industry standard PCI cards – nothing special or proprietary.
• PCI traffic passes through the vNet unit even without the management module in service, meaning that a firmware upgrade or other outage in the module would not cause downtime.

Disadvantages

To be fair, I can see some downsides to this approach and these are downsides I have found with the HP Virtual Connect solutions.

• Converged solutions sometimes introduce new complexities for maintenance and patching firmware on the PCI interconnect cards and due to share nature, it could be difficult from a coordination stand-point.  This is a consideration when deciding what to run on a vNet, and in my mind makes cluster nodes and virtual hosts good candidates so that you can fail workloads onto nodes on a different vNet to enable maintenance periods.
• The solution could introduce a single point of failure, but this is easily overcome with the use of two vNet devices, although that does double the cost for both interconnect cards and vNet units.
• In some ways, it introduces a new black box to the environment whose traffic cannot be inspected which is a downside on the security end of things.

For a number of reasons, I think this solution could have a good use case with virtualization.  Particularly with a customer who is just adopting virtualization, this solution could give them the ability to repurpose fairly new servers and connect them to SAN and 10Gb Ethernet with ease.

In addition, I think that a customer who needs to limit the number of SAN and 10Gb port investment would find the technology beneficial.

vCenter Orchestrator is installed by default along side of vCenter Server Standard edition and can run on the same host, but in other environments, it may make more sense to deploy it as a vApp instead.  If you’re interested in deploying a vApp (which I did not do), see this post from Cody.  I’m going to detail my installation procedures as an example of the install, which is fairly simple.  These are by NO means the official procedures, just my experience and anything I learned along the way.  But first…

What does vCenter Orchestrator Do?

vCenter Orchestrator is, at heart, a workflow tool.  It is used to string together a series of tasks that can be kicked off repeatedly and performed on different objects within vCenter and with additional system, using additional plug-ins.  It is used to automate repeated tasks that are done in the environment, handle bulk operations and handle integration points.  It can be used to receive actions from help desk and monitoring systems and kick off actions based on tickets or alerts.

As I have written about before, I have come to define a cloud as an pool of compute, storage and networking resources with a self-service portal and lifecycle management to automate provisioning, management and decommissioning systems.  The key to this definition is in the automation and workflow of processes.  Although it is not as advanced, I think vCenter Orchestrator can represent a solid first step towards automation and workflowing deployments and management of datacenter assets.  Said another way, I think its a solid first step for many organizations towards the cloud.

My Installation Procedures (as an example)

In our environment (and I assume in most), vCenter Orchestrator is installed by default along with vCenter Server.  The primary requirement to bring up vCenter Orchestrator is an additional database, either Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server. Before you begin, you will want to know the following things:

• Database server, user account and password and database name for vCenter Orchestrator
• Basics of your LDAP configuration and have an account with read access to LDAP
• Have a LDAP group which can be assigned as the vCenter Orchestrator administrators group.
• The name of vCenter Server and an active user account to access the license for vCO.

General

To begin the installation process, you navigate to the VMware folder on the Start menu and choose vCenter Orchestrator Configuration.  A web page launches and you login with the generic vmware/vmware login to begin configuration.

• For security, the first step is to change the generic password to something specific for your environment.  To do this, click the “Change Password” tab under the General section.

Network

The next step is to configure the network configuration, which is fairly simple.  Choose Network on the left sidebar.  Once it loads, there is a drop-down list of IP addresses assigned to the server along with the DNS name to get to the vCenter Orchestrator configuration.  Click Apply Changes and we’re moving along.   In addition to the network, the SSL Certificate is also located here.

• I chose to use the same SSL certificate as my vCenter Server, so to do that use the “Import from URL” option, type in the URL of your vCenter server, and click Import.  The URL would be similar to “https://vcenterserver.domain.int“.

LDAP

After network, you should configure your LDAP integration, so choose the LDAP option on the left sidebar.  You will need an account capable of reading your LDAP (likely Active Directory in many shops).  You have a choice of Active Directory, eDirectory or Sun Java Directory as the LDAP client mode.  Fill in the server names of your LDAP servers (domain controllers).  You will fill in the LDAP root, for instance “DC=domain,DC=int“, depending on your configuration.  At this point, fill in your username. For Active Directory, it can be DOMAIN\username, username@domain.int, or full LDAP distinguished name format.  In my configuration, username@domain.int format worked.  Fill in a password and then apply changes.

Go back down to the “User lookup base:” option and then click Search located to the right of the text field.  If everything is configured correctly above, you should be able to query the LDAP server and locate the OU or CN where your users are located.

• One problem that I ran into with a generic AD configuration, with users stored in the default “Users” folder, is that Orchestrator expects an OU and not a “CN=Users,DC=domain,DC=int“.  I had to configure the User and Group Roots to be the same as my Root.  Your mileage my vary depending on your LDAP configuration.

Last, but not least, you must choose a group in LDAP that defines who is an administrator in vCenter Orchestrator.  So at the “vCO Admin group:” option, choose Search and find the group.  Apply changes, and then use the Test Login option to test everything.

Database

Next up is the Database configuration.  This is fairly straight forward.  Choose the type of database from the drop-down menu.  Enter the username and password to login to the database server.  Enter the FQDN of the database server and the port that the database is listening on.  Finally, enter the database name and instance (if needed).  For Windows Authentication, you may need to enter a domain and tick the “Use Windows authentication mode (NTLMv2)” option.  Apply Changes and if everything communicates, you will be presented the option at the top to install the database (initialize it with the vCO schema).  If there are communication errors, those will be presented.  Just continue to tweak the configuration until everything communicates.

License

Finally, license.  vCenter Orchestrator shares a vCenter license, so it will communicate with vCenter’s licensing service and pick up its license.  You will need to fill in the name of the vCenter server, the port that web services are running on (443 is default, unless you have modified the configuration).  The path will be “/sdk” and then you should add a username and password who can login to vCenter.

• I do not know what permissions this account needs in vCenter to read the license, but from a security perspective, I would try to limit it to only the permissions required.  I’ll take that as a to-do for myself.

Once the configuration is done, you’re ready to restart services and hopefully everything starts up with green lights all the way down the left-hand sidebar.  I found the installation very intuitive and simple to complete.  I was able to have vCenter Orchestrator up and running in just an hour or so.

Learning More

I have scheduled a couple of the out-of-box workflows to handle some weekly tasks in my environment.  It is fairly straight forward to do this, but I’m just getting my feet wet at this point.  Building a workflow seems daunting at this point, even if its just drag and drop.  So, I have pre-purchased and I would recommend Cody’s forthcoming book  to help you and I get a better handle on how to leverage vCenter Orchestrator.

I have, also, lamented in the past that the value of vSphere seems to be eroding, but I believe that a powerful workflow tool like Orchestrator could be a big boost to the value in many organizations.  It is up to customers, like myself, to leverage the weapons that VMware provides and bundles for free to increase the value that vSphere provides. 

Getting a few minutes to talk with Cody was one of the more useful conversations during my trip to VMworld.  I have found a great foundation of information through his blog that you will find helpful, too.  Check out all of his (free) resources on his blog at ProfessionalVMware.com.

I thought it worthy to post about this since I used patch management as my example of how VMware eroding value from the vSphere suite by removing functionality between the version 4 and version 5 product lines.  In many ways, this eases the pain, though patch management does still come at an additional cost for an additional product with vCenter Protect Essentials.

VMware is clearly positioning the product for the small to medium business (SMB) space.  Billed as ‘a complete on-premise management system’, vCenter Protect Essentials will handle patch management and previous Update Manager users will gain a good bit of functionality not previously available to them, such as the ability to stage patches to occur, scanning hosts organized by their Active Directory structure (and assuming still by their VMware hierarchy), and additional alerting capabilities to administrators and users.  In addition to VMware guest systems, vCenter Protect Essentials appears to be able to scan and remediate physical systems through the use of agents, just as NetChk Protect did before.  For NetChk Protect customers, it appears that more integration with vCenter is found in the new product along with a small list of other enhancements.

VMware has a second level of vCenter Protect Essentials, named the Plus version, which includes antivirus protection using SunBelt VIPRE Enterprise Antivirus and basic configuration management features.  The configuration management features include the ability to download templates for regulatory audit baselines like PCI, SOX and HIPPA which can be compared against systems and then remediated.  I assume that this version includes less features than vCenter Configuration Manager, but as I said before, it is a product being positioned for the SMB space.

What is unknown today is whether the vCenter Protect Essentials product will work as Update Manager did using the same network ports to scan hosts and VM’s which are behind a firewall or if it will have a new security implementation.  For users who are familiar with NetChk Protect, I would assume it would function the same, but having no prior experience with NetChk, I cannot say, but the at least there is now a solution for the SMB’s where Configuration Manager did not fit due to cost or complexity.

I am not a VMware basher, just the opposite actually.  I serve as a primary VMware advocate in my company.   But, my company has not embraced the vCloud vision of VMware.   I am a VCP3 and VCP4 and hope to be a VCP5 in the near future.  I know their products well and use them on a daily basis, both at work (vSphere) and at home (Fusion).  But it is harder for me to make a technical or business case for their product.  The first issue is cost.  The second is the “good enough” factor, since we are not using some of the additional value they have added to their product in vSphere 4 and 5.

There are already good cases in the datacenter where all the advanced VMware features don’t matter, and in those cases my company has already adopted XenServer as a secondary hypervisor.  And XenServer works well, which becomes a problem.  We have proven its ability to run our workloads and consolidate servers.    In some cases, the applications we run on it were built with high availability and fail-over and the tried and true VMware features like clustering, HA and DRS do not matter, specifically our XenApp servers .

In other some ways, VMware is erroding the existing value of their vSphere product suite by pulling features its customers are using.  The primary reason I have heard to do this is because there is overlap with new products they have purchased or developed.  Guest patch management is an example of this.  Since their Configuration Management product handles patch management, a feature that has existed in vSphere for two generations, Update Manager is now being downgraded to only patch vSphere hosts.  But the kicker in this case is that Configuration Manager does much more than patch management and is priced as such.  We aren’t seeking the additional features and VMware has priced themselves out of the game for us.

VMware’s decision on patch management leaves companies with a big void to fill.  But no solution, including the VMware Configuration Manager, fills the void as seamlessly as the Update Manager product that once patched my systems.  Because we have firewalls in between our vCenter and hosts, Update Manager worked well because it used the same vCenter ports for patching.  Configuration Manager and other solutions do not, which is actually kind of a pain.

VMware has cast a vision of the vCloud and added API sets for storage, security and networking that help to pave the path to the cloud for companies.  In our case, we have not embraced the cloud vision and while we may in the future, today, the enhancements added to vSphere have not added real value to us.  Unless a company embraces VMware’s vision and adopts these technologies, the vSphere suite continues to erode value.

The cloud is a vision I have written about before and I stated then that it’s one that systems administration groups have little to do with influencing in organizations (see my original post here).  This is a particular challenge for VMware and its advocates.  It is, frankly, a problem that worries me as a VMware believer and administrator.  But, as the tides change – such as the transition from Netware to Active Directory, we as administrators move where we need to and adapt, like the chameleons that we are.  But I am also wondering what other VMware administrators are feeling?  There was a time my company used all the features in vSphere.  Has VMware left you to in a corner while they focus on the cloud?  Talk back to me…

VMware is positioning itself as the developers’ friend, much in the same way Microsoft did when the desktop era dawned.  The 2009 acquisition of SpringSource that left many, including myself, wondering what VMware was thinking, but the technology is now emerging as a critical part of the VMware ecosystem and vision for the future.  The middleware for developers is a critical third piece of the VMware vision of cloud which will bridge the two other primary foci of the company.

VMware has long been the king of the virtual infrastructure game.  Their vSphere suite and the type 1 ESX hypervisor are a mainstay in nearly all datacenters around the world.  VMware also got its beginnings with its type 2 Workstation and now VMware Fusion hypervisors.  But as enabling the cloud, a true run-anywhere architecture and bring your own hardware initiatives have emerged, the two disparate product areas left a gap the company has been working to fill.

Based around the virtual infrastructure VMware has developed, the cloud posed a new set of problems that could only be solved by rewriting traditional client/server applications into cloud apps with distributed data models, distributed processing and distributed display logic across multiple datacenters.  And when thinking of cloud, the first thing to come to mind are applications that Google and Facebook have written and how they are architected to be highly available and redundant.

What is vFabric?

The vFabric line up is a multi-product library of solutions to provide developers with the frameworks and middleware needed to build out products on cloud architecture.  The focus is clearly on web applications using customized or VMware-branded versions of the Apache Web Server and Apache Tomcat, known as vFabric Web Server and vFabric tc Server, to develop Java web applications which use the Spring framework.  In addition to the presentation and processing layers, there are also products to handle messaging, monitoring and data storage.  In particular, this year VMware announced innovation to add to the GemFire data models, including a new in-memory SQL solution called SQLFire.  GemFire and SQLFire both seek to upend competitors like Oracle and Microsoft’s traditional relational database products, which VMware is calling out as bottlenecks.  Even while the bottleneck may be true, the real idea is a distributed data model where the data does not exist in a single instance database but rather in a mesh of systems on a cloud architecture.  To me, that is the real difference and news with GemFire.

Looking back & moving forward

While I don’t claim to be a Java developer, I can certainly see a clearer picture of the vision VMware has for cloud.  I was not fortunate enough to attend VMware 2010, so perhaps things would have began to be clearer had I attended, but 2011 certainly provided the clarity I needed.

The unfortunate side to all of this is that VMware is now attempting to engage a new audience of developers, which are catered to in a very different way than the systems administrators and infrastructure staff they have traditionally engaged with.  Saying it in a different way – they have moved past me a bit, as one of the systems guys, and are working on things that excite me less.  I realize we must have applications, but I’m not the guy who writes them, so the thrill of announcements at VMworld 2011 was less for me, than at past conferences.

VMware certainly has a learning curve of how to engage developers, too, but the SpringSource acquisition provided them with a solid foundation and a good set of roots in the open-source community.  For now, I hear that the user communities will remain separate with VMUG’s and Spring User Groups existing beside one other, which is smart.  Hopefully, the same will hold true for the future with VMworld and other events as well.  What I most hope is that their message does not become muddled and muddy because they now have two different audiences to cater to.

I think that the political issue is easier to explain, so I’ll begin there.  Unlike virtualization or virtual infrastructure, the decision to move to the cloud is not going to come from the systems group in most companies.  The systems groups may be able to advocate the change and provide the reasons for it, but it is going to have to be a strategic move from higher management.  The tangible monetary benefits of cloud are less clear than with virtualization, whose primary motivators were increasing utilization of physical machines and reducing the number of physical machines required which saved money.  In other words, the IT systems group is not going to be the primary advocate or decision maker when moving to the cloud.  Cloud is going to need to meet some higher business need rather than a technical need, although there are technical benefits.

I have made the mistake of calling my vSphere deployment at work a “private cloud.”  As I have written about before, I realized earlier this year how incorrect this actually is.  A cloud, by definition, includes automation and a service catalog and includes things like distributed file systems for storage.  Cloud apps are truly things like Google Apps, Facebook and Salesforce.com.  Cloud apps are written differently to make use of new data models and programming techniques to handle distributed computing across multiple machines or even datacenters.  My vSphere deployment at work does not meet these requirements to be a cloud.  We have simply virtualized client and server applications.  My inaccuracy was underlined during the keynotes of VMworld 2011, from both CEO Paul Martiz and CTO Dr. Steven Herrod.

In both keynotes this week, a large amount of time was spent understanding a middle layer which VMware is building to enable developers to build cloud software which is fundamentally different than our “legacy” client/server applications.  There is a push away from relational databases towards distributed models which can be spread over multiple sites.   With tools from the vFabric product line, VMware is seeking to enable developers to adapt their software to work in the cloud.  This week, VMware introduced SQLFIRE, an in-memory SQL product which can do very high performance, low latency data lookups in the cloud.  SQLFIRE joins GemFIRE in the data subset of vFabric tools.

Perhaps it is a lack of experience with the cloud, but it seems like the entire thing is foggy, if you’ll forgive the pun.  Unlike virtualization, that instantly clicked with me, cloud doesn’t make as much sense.  I see the reasons for distributed computing across multiple datacenters, both internal and external, makes sense.  It allows for flexibility in how companies deploy applications and services.  It enables users to consume these services on any device and instantly, but that brings me back to a political issue again.

In many corporate environments, the user’s personal devices are not allowed to be used for corporate access.  That is going to be another major political shift in companies between management and security officers.  I am glad to see that VMware is spending time in making tools to deploy these applications with IT’s controls setup in the beginning instead of an afterthought, but the entire model will make many security officiers cringe.

In addition to security officers, there are great leagues of developers engrained in ‘their’ way of coding who may balk at the new paradigm.  As Steven Herrod said during the Tuesday keynote, a lot of the code written for the cloud is going to come from those under the age of 35.  It is a key demographic for VMware who have yet to become so set in their ways and who are open to change.  But these folks face political resistance from management and from co-workers as they take the cloud journey.

With all of this said, however, I think it is absurd for systems admins and managers at VMworld to simply stick their head in the sand.  Cloud appears to be here to stay and all major vendors are embracing it.  Whether it is a completely private or hybrid cloud model, all companies should be investigating this.  We now have more information with which we can make educated decisions and the mass public can begin its journal upward to the cloud.  But it is not without great challenges, which I believe VMware saw early, and it seems that the vFabric part of the VMware portfolio is the critical piece as the years move forward.

VMworld 2011 will have a lot of new information to share about the newly released vSphere 5, which went live yesterday.  vSphere 5 has a slew of new features, including the introduction of Storage DRS, rearchitected high availblity (HA), port mirroring in vSwitches, VMFS5 and filesystem enhancements, and many more.  I hope to learn more and write about Storage DRS in more depth, as its one of the bigger feature sets added and it encompasses a lot of technology and capabilities.

The week is also one of the best networking (as in people, not wires) events of the year.  With over 17,000 attendees planned this year, it is by far the largest of events I have ever attended.  I’m looking forward to seeing some folks I met at HP Discover this year and hopefully meet some other folks I’ve run into on Twitter.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to next week.  I always come back to work with some grand ideas after VMworld, so I expect this year to be no different.

Unfortunately, when multiple vendors’ products are coupled together as a solution, support can become nasty as vendors point back and forth at each other while trying to get to a resolution.  The more complex the solution, for instance a SAN, the more difficult to troubleshoot through the multiple layers of software, firmware and hardware, even multiple vendors of the solution.  And, I believe, the hassle has made customers seek a better way.

Finding a better way

In my employer’s case, they chose to standardize with a single vendor long before I joined the staff.   We have stuck with servers and storage hardware from the single vendor, including their certified part upgrades (no third party upgrade components).  We chose to do this to simplify our support and avoid finger-pointing.

The vendor we standardized with was HP, and the reason was that they offered an entire line of products under their umbrella to meet our needs.  By the time I joined the staff in 2006, we were already HP heavy, except where a specific Unix was required by another vendor.   What we wanted as a customer was the quickest and easiest route  to a resolution, with the least resistance and finger-pointing, when a problem came up.  Even beyond the hardware solutions, HP has handled our software support for Microsoft, RedHat and VMware for many years.  We wanted this because the software companies could not finger point at the hardware or vice versa – HP was doing it all.  Sure, it might happen between teams in HP occasionally, but we could easily escalate our case and have a manager bring this to a resolution.  It has worked well for our needs.

Having all this expertise in-house is an advantage that HP is now branding under the name “Converged Systems” or the “Instant-On Enterprise”.  Earlier this week, I attended a webinar for the Blogger Reality Contest where HP unpacked more of its converged solutions strategies.  HP is bringing together all of the pieces spread throughout its portfolio into specialized solutions.  Its not a new concept, in my opinion, but one that some customers have been already using for years on their own.  HP has improved on this by tweaking configurations  to squeeze performance out of configurations and adding software to ease installation and management of the solutions.

Building Upwards – HP VirtualSystem

HP introduced VirtualSystem in June as a modular, easy and quick way to implement virtualization in customer datacenters.  The VirtualSystem solution is a full package of storage and compute resources plus the software tools to quickly and easily deploy a virtual stack in an environment.

For HP VirtualSystem, the key benefits are:

• Quick built out timeframe
• Automation through Insight Control suite components
• Monitoring through the Insight Dynamics suite components
• Improved virtual machine performance, cost and scale due to purpose built hardware
• Ability to upgrade to CloudSystem for fully automated IT
• Single point of contact for support – HP for compute, storage and software, including hypervisor

HP VirtualSystem comes in 3 levels (shown below).  The VS1 is built out using rack-mount, Proliant hardware for both the server hosts and for the storage and features a P4000 series iSCSI storage array.  It is rated to handle up to 750 virtual machines and can scale up to 8 physical hosts.  The VS2 is built out using HP BladeSystem with a P4800 iSCSI storage array (covered in depth last week).  It is rated for up to 2500 virtual machines and can scale up to 24 physical hosts.  The third offering is the VS3 which is built on HP BladeSystem and the 3PAR Utility Storage platform to provide ultimate scale and performance.  VS3 introduces fiber channel storage capability and scales up to 6000 virtual machines with up to 64 hosts.

In terms of choice, VirtualSystem supports all three major hypervisors from VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.  Using my company as an example again, the multi-hypervisor datacenter already exists.  We are utilizing VMware vSphere heavily and then some Citrix XenServer.  When it came to planning upgrades for our aging MetaFrame/XenApp farm, we looked at virtualization.  As we evaluated XenServer, we found it to be “good enough” for running Citrix XenApp on top of it.  XenApp has its own failover and redundancy built into the application layer, so many of the VMware advanced features did not matter.

For VirtualSystem, HP is also handling all support for both the hardware and software for these solutions.  Having experience with HP’s software support teams, I can report that they do a good job at it.  I would not say they are always perfect, but in general, they have solved our issues and advised us well, so in reality this is a big benefit.  For those who want not on break/fix support, HP offers Proactive 24 Services for an additional level of preventative support.

Building to the cloud – HP CloudSystem

As I learned at HP Discover, just because you have a large virtualization pool in your datacenter does not mean you have a private “cloud.”  The critical difference between a virtual infrastructure and a cloud is orchestration and automation.  Built on top of HP VirtualSystem, HP CloudSystem is a solution that offers all of the necessary orchestration, service catalog and workflows to turn virtual infrastructure into a true cloud.  There is a clear and clean upgrade path from VirtualSystem into CloudSystem.  And for those starting fresh or who want to evaluate the HP solution, there is even an HP CloudStart service which will deliver a rack with CloudSystem into their datacenter and have it fully operational in 30 days or less.

CloudSystem is offered in three levels: CloudSystem Matrix, CloudSystem Enterprise and CloudSystem Service Provider.  CloudSystem Matrix is targeted towards those looking to automate the private cloud, customers who are looking to add automation and orchestration to their existing virtual systems.  It provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and basic application provisioning in minutes.  CloudSystem Enterprise extends upon Matrix and allows for private and hybrid cloud, enabling the bursting of workloads to public cloud.  It is a platform for hosting not only IaaS, but Platform as a Service (Paas) and Software as a Service (SaaS).  CloudSystem Enterprise provides application and infrastructure lifecycle management and allows for management of traditional IT resources in addition to virtualized resources.   The CloudSystem Service Provider edition extends upon the Enterprise edition and allows for multiple tenants on a single infrastructure, securely without exposing customer data between customers.  It is intended to host public and hosted private clouds for customers.  The editions in CloudSystem are more about capabilities and less about limits, compared to VirtualSystem.

Since automation and orchestration is the key of CloudSystem, that is where I wanted to focus.  The base of CloudSystem is the Matrix Operating System, which is the same combination of HP software found in the HP VirtualSystem solution.  On top of the Matrix Operating System, the CloudSystem Matrix solution includes Cloud Service Automation for Matrix.  This software includes Server Automation for lifecycle management for physical and virtual assets via a single portal and set of processes and HP SiteScope, an agent-less monitoring solution for performance and availability.

The enterprise and service provider editions include a beefed up version called, simply, Cloud Service Automation.  It includes the entire orchestration, database and middleware automation pieces of the pie and a cloud controller software.  These additional pieces allow not only the automatic and streamlined provisioning of physical and virtual servers but also the provisioning of the required glue that sits in between the apps and the servers.  The diagram below from HP shows all the moving parts of Cloud Service Automation better than I can explain in words.  And because, Cloud Service Automation is total lifecycle management, there are the pieces for monitoring and performance management which would be needed.  In addition, the centralized portals serve as point for both end users and IT professionals to manage the cloud.

Cloud Maps are another feature of CloudSystem and these are predefined automation workflows for deploying software and platforms easily.  These are the piece of the puzzle that allows for improved deployment times and also allow for drag and drop creation of new workflows and processes in the cloud.  HP has worked with its software partners to create these maps of requirements and automate the process of deploying their solutions.

Beyond all of the capabilities, HP is working hard to make this an open solution by making it compatible to burst workloads into third party clouds, whether its Amazon’s EC3 or a vCloud service provider.  This was a point stressed during the announcements at HP Discover and during the call on Tuesday.

This is post number two for Thomas Jones’ Blogger Reality Show sponsored by HP and Ivy Worldwide. I ask that readers be as engaged and responsive as possible during this contest.  I would like to see comments and conversations that these entries spark, tweets and retweets if it interests you and I also request that you vote for this entry using the thumbs up/thumbs at the top of this page.  As I said earlier, our readers play a large part in scoring, so participate in my blog and all the others!

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about CloudSystem.  In June,  I posted about my take on CloudSystem Service Provider from a potential service provider’s perspective.  I encourage you to take a look at that post, too, after you take a minute to comment and/or vote on this post.

Early on, I got a taste of success (particularly for a blogger with NO following) by blogging during VMworld 2008 about the announcements being made from VMware.  It was the first time I had content picked up and linked to from others, and I’ll admit, it felt good.  To this day, my blog still gets some traffic from web searches about VMware’s Fault Tolerence feature.

Those early results did not turn into overnight success.  After VMworld 2008 and 2009, the blog has received relatively low numbers of visits, participation and readership. I allowed it to languish with only a few updates here and there.  The growth has been relatively slow, but recently doors are opening up.  Opportunities, like attending HP Discover and the Blogger Reality Contest, are allowing me to attend great networking and technical events,  to report on great new technology being introduced, and to refine my skills as a blogger.  The future for this blog is looking as bright as ever and I just wanted to to take time to thank those involved for the opportunities, support and encouragement.

1:30pm – Updated with revised judging panel.

When I think of a reality show, I think of people competing for prizes, being judged and getting voted out of the house, off the stage or off of the island.   Take that concept and apply it directly to tech bloggers and what would it be?  It would be a very cool contest that I’m going to be taking part it starting the first week in August.

Thomas Jones of NikeTown588.com is hosting a blogger reality show for up and coming tech bloggers. I was lucky enough to meet Thomas during my recent trip to HP Discover and I was really excited when he announced the Blogger Reality Show contest.  I was even more stoked when I got the email that said I had made it INTO the contest.

Thomas has put together a great program which will pit blogger against blogger, duking it out in a war of words – either written or video.  The contestants will attend three online classes, then formulate our blog entries about each class, one a week for three weeks.

The cool part is that you, our readers, will be assisting in the judging process.  Each week, my fellow bloggers and I will create our entries based on the class we attend and then you get to comment and vote for our posts.  Each of the blogger’s sites will have voting somehow built into the posts. In addition to your comments and votes, re-tweets of our information on Twitter will also count towards the scores.  Readers, you hold a lot of power in this competition!

In addition to our readers, my fellow bloggers and I will have a slate of more established bloggers judging our work to make up a second portion of our scores each week. John Obeto (@JohnObeto), Stu Miniman (@Stu), Kristi McDonald (@KRISLMC), Matt Davis (@Da5is), and S. Copeland (@TeckieGirl) will serve as our judging panel for the competition.  Each of our judges are well established bloggers with a significant following online.  They are obviously knowledgeable about social media, blogging and how to do it right.

Since we have judging and scoring going on, that also means, like American Idol, someone is going home each week.  Two bloggers, actually, with the lowest scores and will be leaving the contest each week.  When I read that, it was the first time I got nervous about the contest.  No one wants to fail, but such is life, we can’t all be winners.  Or can we?

The overall winner of the contest will be announced during VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas the last week of August.  Each of us has been awarded with the trip to Las Vegas for the announcement, as well as, attendance to the VMworld event, you could say we have all won already.   The contest is graciously being sponsored by HP and Ivy Worldwide.  There are several other prizes that will be awarded to players, in addition to the overall winner.

It is always good to know your opponent, but in this case, its my first time ‘meeting’ most of these other bloggers.  After reviewing their sites, it is clear that I’ve got some very good competition.  Some of the bloggers are more established and have a significant advantage in readership and experience.  I encourage you to check them out, also, and make sure you read their blogs during the competition.  And now for my competition, the bloggers are…

• Matthew Norwood (@matthewnorwood) (http://www.insearchoftech.com/)
• Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) (http://technodrone.blogspot.com/)
• Michael Letschin (@mletschin) (http://thesolutionsarchitect.com/)
• Luigi Danakos (@nerdblurt) (www.nerdblurt.com)
• Matthew Brender (@mjbrender). (http://itechthereforeiam.com/)
• David Hurst (@the_super_dave) (http://thesuperdave.com/)

As a side note about the sponsors, HP and Ivy Worldwide brought a significant number of bloggers to the HP Discover event to cover it.  It is extremely good to see a corporate sponsor realizing the value of tech bloggers and the role we can play in disseminating news, perspectives, solutions and our own experiences with their products.  I certainly wanted to send along my thanks to them for underwriting the competition and to Thomas Jones for envisioning and coordinating the opportunity that they have collectively presented to all of the bloggers involved.  I cannot wait to begin!  Let the competition begin! So, readers, help me stay in the competition and not get evicted, fired, or voted off the island.