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• The Future of IT

  For some I agree that it is going to be harder to justify VMware costs in the future (but it really does help to drive costs down). I believe there is a major importance of Windows 8 and Linux in the future. However I do believe from the infrastructure arena that the virtualization layer will be a major component to get companies to the Cloud. The future of technology is Clouds (hybrid/private/public) which is compute, networking, and storage as shared services which is the cornerstone of virtualization.
  
  

  VMware’s virtualization is the Key to all of the technology advances of the last 10 years.  VMware is closely tied to all of the cores, Server, IP network and Storage. I currently do think that the vApps and security components need a lot of work. To have full integration of virtual apps (virtual/cloud aware apps) well less just say we are a long ways from that.
   
  VMware is the “cornerstone” of the architecture tying all other needed components together (Server Core, IP Core, Storage Core and IO Engines (IE - Microsoft, Linux, AIX, etc). It is the product that spans all datacenters within a true enterprise.
   
  VMware is the component that makes Microsoft useful and effective for IO engines and end users.  As well as geographically dispersed datacenters with Geo and Intra Datacenter load balancing and spanned IP networks with Active - Active workload between datacenters (IE: OTV or VXLAN (not ready yet)). Virtualization will help get us out of the ‘4 walls” of the datacenter as we need to eliminate the limits\constraints of a single physical network. We need for datacenters to be more agile.
   
  Microsoft\Windows is now only a small component of the datacenter IO engine layer. The need for Microsoft/Windows Clustering is small to none now that Hardware HA (VMware, IBM, HP, and Cisco) is so fast. PLUS: Now that we have Virtual Load Balancers within the industry that maintain 100% uptime within a single datacenter and across geographically dispersed datacenters “clustering” is just an abstracted term used to indicate a SERVICE.
   
  I have always had the skills and mind set of - Future Vision/Technical/Business Oriented = Provide technical knowledge to add value to the business as you lead them to more/bigger business (faster). I will continue to grow my Cloud knowledge and help others with this new technology.
  My belief is the OS (whichever that may be) is the IO engine for business applications. So the OS will be closer to the business as opposed to an infrastructure layer. The business applications live within the OS at this time and the foreseeable future. I also believe the business’ belief in relation to infrastructure components is “it should just run”.

  These are only my opinions and do not reflect anyone or any company's opinion or view - Ronald Barefield

• Hyper3 vs. VMware

  MS's new version seems to include WAN vMotion... wow without OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) or at least that what I’m reading. It will be very impressive to have WAN vMotion for many reasons including DR/BC>...  Great article here on CIO:

  http://www.cio.com/article/690019/Microsoft_Cracks_Live_Migration_Problem?taxonomyId=3112

  The MS version of HyperV3 will give us the right things we "need" not wants. VMware gives us something’s for free or at least until you move to Vsphere5 and get hit with the vTax. They did make some changes to licenses but not enough to stop people from looking at other products that get the job done! HyperV-3 vs vSphere 5 - http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/hyper-v-virtualization-windows-server-8-vsphere,1-16.html

  I truly think that over time we will see the virtual scene change to more of a tiered approach. VMware is the lead today but what the future brings is going to have to wait and see! I think based on cost and seeing some try to put virtualization directly in at the chip level, its going to get fun for us engineers and admins.

  Ivan Pepelnjak has a great article on VXLAN-LISP-OTV ----http://blog.ioshints.info/2011/09/vxlan-otv-and-lisp.html

  Great reading from Thomas Mauer - Hyper-V & UCS combo: http://www.thomasmaurer.ch/2011/05/how-microsoft-hyper-v-and-the-cisco-ucs-changed-our-lives/

• Motivation For Your Team

  This is a great article on how to movitate your IT teams....

  The what moviates?  is so true.

  I have been in posiition where people just dont get this! In technology we want to learn - grow and "DO" the work... for some of us if you don't do it you can't know/learn this. 

  http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-manager/want-to-motivate-your-team-here-are-20-things-to-start-doing-now/7021

• Vblock™ – 3 of the World Technology Leaders

  Vblock™ – 3 of the World Technology Leaders Come together (something rarely seen)

    To start out I am NOT an employee for VCE/EMC/Cisco. This is based off of my own opinions and experiences.  Now let’s get started J

  The future of technology seems to be about effectively using datacenter resources and underutilized hardware. I believe that you need to converge infrastructure components to effectively use a datacenter. To me, a Vblock™ is basically a Technology Appliance that allows organizations to raise the bar for infrastructure utilization. In order to maximize you’re spending (OPEX - operating expense) as well as your infrastructure utilization, you will have to have convergence and Vblock™ does this effectively.  I also believe that Vblock™ will allow you to build and get to a cloud model in a much faster well-organized way.

   

  What I believe and have seen with the Vblock™ is that it allows an organization to move more effectively toward a Private Cloud model as well as maintain a high-level of performance to their customers. The Vblock™ alone will NOT get you to a “cloud model” but it’s a major step in the right direction. Vblock™ allows you to have a converged infrastructure that allows you to pool storage, computing and networking to optimize datacenter infrastructure (lower TCO - total cost of ownership). Seemingly, you get better performance in a black box at a lower cost. Vblock™ has full scalability. It is flexible from storage to networking components to Cisco UCS blades & chassis (opinion - which in this day and age is one of the leaders in the industry for server hardware) and supports many different configurations. In my opinion Vblock™ technology allows you to virtualize and consolidate your systems while continuing to provide a high-level of performance that has been tested prior to running in your datacenter environment (validation of an outcome).

   

  Vblock™ (Standard components and devices based on my experiences):

  ·         Cisco UCS blade chassis 5108s.

  ·         Cisco B230s and B200s UCS Blade Models

  ·         VMax and VNX 7500 Storage Models (EMC storage devices).

  ·         Cisco networking switches (6140s & 55xx) and FCOE inside UCS blade for connectivity (Standard Vblock™)

  ·         EMC RecoverPoint™ SAN replication (Block Base) with native splitters on the storage devices.

   

  Vblock™ allows an organization to standardize on what I call a ‘complete infrastructure framework/platform’ with many different components (Compute/Network/Storage). This can simplify an organization’s support as well as help companies move away from a fragmented infrastructure. This convergence (pooling) allows you to share resources to infrastructure components at the same time. Vblock™ allows for higher density level in a datacenter which can reduce your physical footprint. I have seen where Vblock™ technology allows cost savings by reduction in hardware maintenance cost (smaller carbon footprint) as well as consolidation on the virtual side. UCS manager allows companies to profile their systems for specific settings based on what application may run and where it will run (server profiles) for fast deployments and provisioning. This builds in versatility when you have hardware failures. Finally, Vblock™ model has allowed for ease of management from my experiences.

   

  In addition, Vblock™ does enable disaster recovery plans/exercises and effective off-site recoverability to be more structured (i.e. simpler to perform) from my experience. That’s not only the Vblock™ but a major component of disaster recovery and business continuity. I have also experienced EMC RecoverPoint™ deployed with Vblock™ technology to perform state-full SAN replication on the backend with EMC storage to do block replication. This type of replication allows for a smaller RPO (recover point objective). I have also experienced EMC Data Domain® and Avamar® Grids deployed for effective virtual machine and database backup and restore capability. The replication from Vblock™ to Vblock™ allows us to focus on true “application” DRs vs. infrastructure DR opportunities.

  My Opinion:

  The Vblock™ is designed, to make IT life simpler (infrastructure framework) and more cost effective (an appliance) for an organization.

   

  The views and opinions expressed above are the author's opinions and not do not necessarily reflect his employer’s policies or positions and the author does not intend to so represent his employer.

• VMware - Kubernetes thoughts

  I've been working with VMware a long time and it works really well when you want to separate environments (IE VMs, clusters), have a single management tool set and save money via server consolidation.

  We are now turning a new leaf as we move away from datacenter centric environments to application centric environments. I think that Kubernetes potentially will become the gateway to infrastructure. Being able to take an action directly against the ESXi kernel that run Kubernetes removes a lot of complexity.  However, I do believe that VMs and containers will be here for a long time, apps aren’t that easy to refactor.
  
  There are many ways of doing Kubernetes. I do think VMware got it right by making Kubernetes part of the vSphere platform natively (ESXi kernel). This makes Kubernetes containers a 'first class citizen' on infrastructure instead of Infra-VM-OS-Container-app. This new way allows applications to scale as the application requires. That means that we will be able to manage 'both 1st class citizens (VMs and containers)' with one tool (VC) on one platform (vSphere) that enables operations and developers to do their job more efficiently! VMware DRS will still to the resource placement for workloads-the scheduler is very good at what it does.
  
  This means that automation will be built-in to the platform to simply scale based on application's needs via policies and configurations. Today we simply automate what humans are doing as repetitive tasks, scripting things to be more efficient. But what we don't do is script application needs. As an example, imaging an application that needs more resources. You can now 'spin up another VM/container' or script logic to spin up another VM on another host. This builds resiliency into the application layer while keeping configuration consistent. Now we will be able to simply configure a policy to always have 3 containers up and running in a pod which can be built across hosts (IE ESXi cluster) and scale up as the application requires. The new way of automation where we won't need other agents, or to react, but the system will simply do it based on the configuration/policy is the future.
  
  Kubernetes has a logical construct called a namespace which can be a collection of many things including VMs, PODs, and services along with other objects. A namespace allows for polices to be applied to it just like if it was a VM or storage or network, awesome right! Think about Kubernetes cluster running beside a VM cluster in the same Virtual Center that allows developers to run API commands directly to Kubernetes – there’s no need to learn a new tool.
  
  Also, I would like to note that Kubernetes will run across all of the cloud providers as VMware is on top of them today. This should allow for multi-cloud models that are app centric! What if we were able to run an application with a node on-prem and 2 nodes in different clouds?
  
  There are a lot of things that will mature over the next year. It will be great to learn and grow as a powerful platform continues to enable organizations to build modernized applications and support them.

  
  

   

• IT Execs go small - Is this smarter?

  http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222234/Big_fish_little_pond_Some_IT_execs_go_small_and_love_it

  I am a end to end person with Cloud Architect skills as well as overarching skills of Cisco UCS/VMware/Storage including VCE.

  End to end is about design, architect, implement, support or handoff the support then decommission (lifecycle cradle to grave).

  This applies to applications, datacenter infrastructure and all processes; these can and do meet ITIL/ITSM standards. I do a lot of application integration with virtual environments. I know virtualization very well as well as DR and BC (via a BIA).

   

  I consolidate and save money with infrastructure via virtual implementation as well as add value back to the business with simple solutions that resolve challenges. Method is to keep it simple.