I was in a situation last week where someone asked me why they should use our VMware-specific software vs. the incumbent software that they already had for their physical servers. Luckily for me, one of our sales guys was there who thinks quickly on his feet and said back to the guy, "Do you golf with just one golf club?" After a good chuckle we all agreed that you should always choose the right tool for the job. The golf analogy just seems to fit perfectly.
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Posted by Doug Hazelman on 03/22/20116 comments
Being a gadget lover, I can't help but follow all of the news that came out of the Consumer Electronics Show last week. One thing that really stuck out for me is what Motorola is up to with its Motorola Atrix 4G, HD multimedia dock and laptop dock. I think that technology has major implications for the future of virtual desktops.
Consider the fact that you almost always carry your phone with you. Now imagine that, rather than turning on your laptop, you just slip your phone into a port on a laptop-like device (keyboard, screen, mouse). Your smartphone already has everything you need for VDI: a screen, Internet connection and numerous "clients" that can connect to a remote desktop. At the office, no problem: Dock you phone and get a bigger screen, full keyboard and mouse, connect to your office Wi-Fi (or wired connection in the dock) and bring up your desktop ... from your phone's client. This solution addresses several issues that have held back widespread adoption of VDI:
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Posted by Doug Hazelman on 01/12/20113 comments
As I was watching TV the other night,
a commercial caught my attention
. It featured a woman trying to get one good picture of her family. She had several pictures on her computer, but each picture had one issue or another--a teenager texting, younger kids rough-housing and so on. Finally, she proclaimed, "To the Cloud." Then she took pieces from each of the imperfect pictures to create the perfect picture of her family. The mom then said, satisfied, "Windows gives me the family nature never could."
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Posted by Doug Hazelman on 11/18/20107 comments
When I asked, "
Are You 100% Virtualized?
" one of the answers many people give is that they don't trust their ability to reliably back up critical data and apps when they're working in a virtual environment.
I thought again about this response as I read the initial results of an international survey that Veeam conducted. To put it mildly, IT is not getting the full benefit of virtualization when it comes to backup, and, surprisingly, they're still having a great deal of trouble with their legacy physical backup solutions.
Bruce Hoard wrote up a hilarious blog post based on the survey. I highly recommend you read it. But for those who haven't already done so and don't plan to click through, let me summarize the findings:
- Doing a full recovery of a backed-up VM still takes nearly five hours. That's not really much shorter than recovering a physical server.
- About half (47 percent) of these full recoveries are unnecessary, if IT is using current technologies. The problem is, they are having to do a full restore to recover a single file or e-mail.
- No matter whether the recoveries are for physical or virtual machines, nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of organizations experience problems every month when attempting to recover a server.
- On average, the annual cost for failures is more than $400,000.
I suppose the lesson that most people would take away from this survey is: "Why virtualize my really critical apps and data? The results are no better than they are for physical backup, and I've already got a physical backup system that I understand."
If virtualization technology for backups wasn't advancing, I'd agree, but it is advancing, and rapidly. Consider the following capabilities: Recovering individual items from a disk image, and eliminating about half of all full recoveries Getting the server running for end-users in mere minutes while a full recovery is underway Automatically and quickly testing every backup to ensure recoverability.
The good news is, all of these capabilities are either now possible or will be very soon. In fact, it won't be long before virtualized backup will be superior to physical backup in terms of speed, ease of management, cost and reliability. By the end of this year, I wager people won't be asking, "Why should I virtualize my most critical apps and data?" Instead, they'll be asking "Why do I have anything on physical servers at all?"
Posted by Doug Hazelman on 10/21/20107 comments
The more systems and applications that have to be managed at a company, the more people you have managing them. This generally leads to the creation of several different groups within IT, each of which possesses specific expertise of, and distinct responsibilities for keeping the IT infrastructure up and running. Typically, this also means that IT ends up with several different administrative domains that for sound operational and security reasons, require special permissions to be maintained. It's bad policy in a large IT environment to allow just anyone to go wherever they please.
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Posted by Doug Hazelman on 09/08/20101 comments
It seems everyone you talk to these days is talking about "The Cloud." I'm not here to try and define exactly what is and isn't cloud -- there are plenty of people already doing that. But, what are some of the first steps, "baby steps," if you will, that companies can make towards the cloud? The biggest opportunity I see today is Storage-as-a-Service. As Jerome Wendt points out in his blog, consumers are already using storage-as-a-service on sites like Box.net, FilesAnywhere, Flickr, GigaSize.com, Mozy and Photobucket. Wendt also goes on to say that the consumer market is nowhere near as picky as the enterprise (or health care) markets are when it comes to choosing storage as a service provider or services.
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Posted by Doug Hazelman on 08/24/20102 comments
VMworld, now less than a month way, is a trade show that has something for everyone. Since I represent a vendor, most of my time will be spent on the show floor trying to be available to prospects, analysts and friends as they stop by to say hi and find out what we're up to. For others, the draw is the sessions and hands-on labs dedicated to the technology ecosystem VMware has helped create. And of course when you bring together so many smart and dedicated people who are passionate about a particular technology, the networking opportunities are limitless. Many of the top virtualization bloggers will be there, as well as many of the "vRock Stars" from various vendors that you may have heard about or follow on Twitter.
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Posted by Doug Hazelman on 08/06/20102 comments
In my day-to-day communications with potential and existing customers, I'm often asked why Veeam doesn't provide solutions for physical servers. I then ask back, "Why aren't you 100 percent virtualized?"
I'm not trying to be a jerk when I answer their question with another question. I'm truly interested. Why aren't you 100 percent virtualized?
I raise this question because, the way I see it, there are so many benefits to virtualization, why wouldn't you try and virtualize as much of your infrastructure as possible? Better DR, less power, less cooling, more flexibility, the cloud! The list goes on and on. Most analysts agree that all future x86 infrastructure should be running on a virtualization platform.
Truth be told, virtualization is still a "young" technology. Who would have even dreamed of a 100 percent virtualized data center in 2004? At the current rate that virtualization is being adopted, though, I think we're close to the tipping point. If the history of IT tells us anything, it's that new, disruptive technologies can be somewhat slow to get started, but then see a tremendous surge (a wave, if you will) of adoption.
Think of the transition from dumb terminals to the PC. It didn't happen overnight, but took several years. It took several more years for the x86 platform to take over mainframes and become the standard for all new applications in the data center. True, mainframes aren't gone, so I don't think we'll see physical servers going the way of the dodo, but I still feel that there's no reason why 99 percent of your x86 infrastructure can't be virtualized.
So today we have a "chicken and egg" situation. If vendors support both physical and virtual infrastructures, are they prolonging their reliance on physical? For software companies that already have solutions for physical systems, they have to adopt virtualization. For software companies that focus purely on virtualization, does it make sense for them to "back fill" and support physical systems? How many new software companies were "born" out of the x86 adoption wave? How many of them also supported mainframes?
Posted by Doug Hazelman on 07/15/20100 comments
Doug Hazelman is traveling on business this week and asked if I would write a post and provide some advice on using a cloud service provider as a backup option for your virtualization backups. My name is David Siles and I am the Director of Worldwide Technical Operations for Veeam Software. I am also a VMware vExpert and VMware Certified Professional.
In my job, I am continually asked by customers, partners, and service providers who purchase our backup and replication product the best way to utilize our solution to interact with the cloud. While this sounds ominous, dealing with backing up data into remote hosted storage or cloud storage has been around for some time. You may be familiar with services such as Dropbox, Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3), Rackspace CloudFiles, and the like already. They are great for protecting your personal documents and sharing items with colleagues for collaboration. However when it comes to backing up virtual machines for remote data protection and business continuity additional questions arise.
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Posted by Doug Hazelman on 07/15/20101 comments
How virtualization-aware is your operations team? Not the team that actually sets up VMware or Hyper-V environments, but the team that is in charge of monitoring your entire infrastructure, from physical to virtual? Do the people in the NOC understand the impact of transparent page sharing and memory swamping at the hypervisor level? Do they know what memory ballooning is? These are just some of the new terms and metrics that virtualization has introduced which can have a serious impact on your organization.
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Posted by Doug Hazelman on 05/24/20105 comments