Veeam Management Suite Wish List

We've been running Veeam Backup & Replication (B&R) for a couple of years after I saw it demoed at the London VMUG. It's a great product that works well and has proven itself many times when we've had to restore a VM. It's not perfect (what is?) but overall, it's definitely our go-to backup product.

The Veeam Management Suite is a package that combines B&R with Veeam ONE, itself a suite of three products: Veeam Monitor, Reporter and Business View.

Veeam ONE competes with other VMware monitoring and reporting solutions such as VMware's vCenter Operations (VCOPS) and VMTurbo Operations Manager.

We opted for Veeam ONE as it provides a good balance between cost and features. Personally, I prefer the VCOPS user interface (especially the way it now integrates with the vSphere Web Client) and it's a seriously powerful product, but the cost is prohibitive in our environment.

We did look seriously at VMTurbo, and while I think its "Intelligent Workload Management" and "Economic Scheduling Engine" are very clever, I didn't think that the interface was accessible enough for our IT operations support team. Very whizzy, but too complicated.

In contrast, although Veeam ONE is less sophisticated than some of the above products in certain areas, the Veeam ONE Monitor interface is very functional and gives clear remediation steps for alarms. We needed to get a product that could help us with our proactive monitoring and ongoing capacity planning, and Veeam ONE meets these needs.

With both products due a version 7 refresh this year, these are the highlights that I'm excited about:

vCloud Director support

Without a doubt, this is the "must-have" feature for us and the arrival of version 7 will coincide with the deployment of vCloud Director (vCD) into our environment.

Having the ability to backup all the vCloud metadata and restore vApps back into the vCD infrastructure is an essential component that has, until now, been unsatisfactory. Veeam should be rightly proud that they have the first vCD backup/restore solution.

vSphere Web Client plugin

From vSphere 5.1, the Web Client has become the primary interface to vCenter. Veeam B&R 7 will introduce a plugin that allows visibility into backup jobs through the Web Client.

It looks pretty decent and this kind of integration reduces the number of applications vSphere admins have to open  in order to keep track of their infrastructure.

Tape support

Tape is dead. Except for all the places where it isn't!

For many organisations, bandwidth costs mean off-site backups can only be effectively done using tape. Apparently any tape drive or library that can be seen by Windows will be usable and this will help many organisations overcome a clunky backup approach that currently consists of multiple backup applications.

WAN acceleration

I'm tentatively excited about this because although the compression ratios look impressive, I'll need to do some testing when B&R 7 is released to see how effective it is in our environment. Certainly having another option alongside the much wanted tape support would be good for those really important, mission-critical VMs.

The Wishlist

Although the above additions will make Veeam 7 a compelling upgrade in itself, there are some features I'd like to see:

A vCenter specific backup job

There has been a long running "challenge" in backing up vCenter using VSS. The provided solution is to manually add the ESXi host on which vCenter is located and backup that way. Which is fine until the vCenter VM is moved to another host (via automated DRS, manual vMotion or the result of an HA failover).

Given that computers are designed to automate repetitive tasks for us, I'd like to see a Veeam backup job type that is designed specifically for vCenter and when run, queries vCenter to find out which host its on and then directly connects to that host to perform the backup.

I appreciate that there is likely to be more complexity under the hood to solve this problem, but the current method is unsatisfactory and requires too much manual intervention.

NetApp snapshot support

Veeam has obviously got a good relationship with HP and has introduced the ability to backup Lefthand SAN snapshots. As a NetApp customer, I'd love to see the same functionality for the NetApp filers.

SRM-lite

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is very impressive and allows an admin to define a "run book", essentially a series of steps to perform should DR be invoked. This includes the order in which VMs should be started, any IP address changes or network settings that need to be modified for the remote site, etc. With it, a site can be failed over (and back) by clicking a button.

Although Veeam B&R is currently focused on replication of VMs to another site, there appears to be a huge gap in the market for something that sits above the replication functionality and provides SRM functionality at a lower price point.

Backup and Restore Self Service

vSphere 5.1 is bundled with the VMware Data Protection (VDP) appliance. Based on EMC Avamar technology, this basic (and limited) backup product has a couple of nice features. Firstly, it integrates seamlessly with the vSphere Web Client (as will Avamar 7). Secondly, it provides a self-service interface that allows end users to restore their own files (as demoed on Chad's blog). I know that Veeam Enterprise Manager has similar functionality, but I'd like to take it a step further.

It would be useful to give users the ability to specify their own VM backup and restore jobs. As vCloud Director enables end users to provision their own VMs, there needs to be a way to allow these VMs to be scheduled for backup and then restore them in the future, without the need to log a call with IT.

I appreciate that there are lots of factors to consider when allowing end users to run their own backups such as how to quota backup repository space or prevent developers from backing up their VMs every hour ("just in case"), but in a multi-tenant environment, having the ability to delegate this functionality becomes important.

It's possible that this functionality may be in version 7 (I don't know, I'm not a beta tester).

Veeam ONE UI integration

There is some UI inconsistency across the Veeam ONE products. Monitor is a traditional Windows application, while Reporter and Business View are web applications. None of the above look like the Backup & Replication user interface.

Similarly, the Veeam Enterprise Manager is a web application, but has a different look and feel to the other products.

Although it's not the end of the world, I'd like to see some tighter integration between the three ONE products, Enterprise Manager and B&R to enable the oft-promised "single pane of glass". At the moment, the multiple separate icons on my desktop highlight how there is more integration to do at the front end.

As I've previously commented, I like it when applications smoothly integrate with vSphere Web Client. VMware have done this with VCOPS Foundation, and Veeam themselves will with B&R 7. This would be the logical conclusion of a UI merge for Veeam ONE.

And while the existing interfaces are functional, they're not beautiful and lack the "wow" factor when compared with vCenter Operations Manager.

Veeam ONE appliance

Okay, so this is unlikely to happen, but many of the competing solutions come in the form of virtual appliances on Linux. They don't require a separate database install or Windows licence. With VMware moving towards a Linux based appliance for vCenter Server, this appears to be the future.

I'm not really expecting this one, since Veeam support both VMware and Hyper-V, but hey, it's a wish list.

Chargeback Reporting

I've not had the opportunity to dig into all the reports thoroughly, so this functionality may already exist (but I've not found it after a quick look).

Veeam Business View provides a way to group VMs logically, such as by business unit. I'd like to see the ability to be able to define costs for vCPU, vRAM, datastores and operating systems and be able to assign these properties to specific business units (or Business View entities). With the addition of a report pack, we would then have the ability to generate custom chargeback reports for our vCloud environment.

If this sounds like VMware Chargeback Manager then its because Veeam seem to be almost there with it. Most of the pieces are already in place and it would be a useful addition.

Final thoughts

The Veeam Management Suite, especially the ONE products provide a lower cost alternative to the expensive, do-everything VMware solutions. Veeam could expand its existing products to compete in other areas where VMware is not affordable to many companies, specifically in the areas of disaster recovery and VM chargeback.

Last year's "free" upgrade for vSphere Enterprise Plus customers to the vCloud Suite Standard Edition has given many organisations access to vCloud Director and vCloud Networking and Security. But the vCloud Suite Standard Edition lacks chargeback and SRM functionality.

This has to be an opportunity for third parties such as Veeam...

vSphere 6.0 wish list

In recent history, VMware have adopted the Intel-like "tick/tock" approach to software releases. In other words, each "tick" is a major release (e.g. 5.0) and each "tock" is a minor release (e.g., 5.1). This has occurred on an annual basis for the last few years.

If this approach continues, then vSphere 6.0 is presumably due out later in 2013. With that in mind, here are some of the things I would like to see in the next release... (I'm not a beta tester, so this is all pure conjecture).

Make vCenter Server easier to install

vSphere 5.1 changed the architecture of vCenter Server and introduced separate Single Sign On (SSO) and Inventory Services. My experience of installing all these components on a single server has been fairly easy, but a quick look around the forums and blogs show that some people have had real problems updating existing installations or doing more complex architectures.

One way to make this easier would be to...

Make the VCSA a first class citizen

The vCenter Server Appliance has been an alternative to the "traditional" Windows-based vCenter Server for the last couple of releases. The advantage of the VCSA is that it is extremely easy to deploy and update. The downside is that it does not have all the features of the Windows vCenter Server and using the built in database is only suitable for small deployments (five hosts and 50 VMs). Bigger installations require an external database.

A VCSA that fully supports all vCenter functions (including things like linked mode) and can handle large workloads without requiring SQL Server or Oracle would be a step in the right direction. The dependency on third party databases could be resolved if VMware were to...

Bundle vFabric Postgres

VMware products support a number of different databases:

• Traditional vCenter Server supports SQL Server, Oracle and DB2
• The vCenter Server Appliance supports its own internal Postgres database or external Oracle database
• vShield Manager bundles its own Postgres database
• vCloud Director supports an external Oracle or SQL Server database. The vCloud Director appliance bundles an internal Postgres database
• vCenter Operations Manager supports Postgres, Oracle or SQL Server

While the internal databases are suitable for lab work and test environments, for production workloads there is a currently a requirement to use a third party database with the licensing overheads this incurs.

VMware have their own vFabric Postgres database (itself a virtual appliance) and bundling this could allow VMware users to point all their application servers to a single, scalable database server, without needing to buy database licences. Bundling a cut-down version of vFabric Data Director would make management easier and also expose VMware admins to the vFabric product suite, gaining mindshare in the process.

Make vCloud Director easier to install

vCloud Director runs on a Linux VM and has a dependency on either an Oracle or SQL Server database. There are a number of manual steps to get a vCloud Director cell installed that requires some messing around at the command line to configure bits, followed by running SQL scripts to setup the database. I'm not adverse to the Linux command line, but would prefer it if the install was more straightforward.

VMware provide a vCloud Director appliance for testing, but it's not currently supported for production workloads. It would make sense for VMware to enhance the appliance and make it a fully supported option for production use, removing unnecessary complexity in the setup process.

This theme of turning all VMware products into appliances extends to the...

VUM appliance

Please can we have a Linux based VMware Update Manager appliance? If everything else is moving to appliances, having a dedicated Windows host for patching seems overkill. Alternatively, bundle the functionality in with the VCSA.

Update vCNS Manager

The vCenter Network and Security Manager is a rebranding of what was previously called vShield Manager. The web UI of this product is looking pretty dated and provides a completely different user experience to the new vSphere Web Client. It would be good to see this UI refreshed for the next release and to integrate it more closely with vSphere and vCloud Director.

Make the vSphere Web Client faster

The vSphere Web Client looks very nice and instantly makes the old .NET client look dated. However, for day to day operations I still find myself using the old client, simply because it's faster for most operations.

I want to use the new client, but it seems really sluggish a lot of the time, or perhaps it's simply that my Windows PC isn't quad core with 16GB RAM. VMware need to spend some time refactoring and improving the performance of the web client.

Infrastructure Overhead

This is more to do with those of us with home labs, so I'm not seriously expecting VMware to do anything about this...

The system requirements for VMware management servers is getting ridiculous and, while I appreciate the new functionality, there doesn't appear to be much effort going on to minimise system resources. For example:

• vCenter Server with Inventory and SSO services on the same VM: 10GB RAM recommended
• vShield Manager: 8GB RAM required
• vCenter Operations Manager: 10GB RAM required

While these requirements might be fine in large, production environments, for those of us wanting to build a decent lab, it's possible to use all your resources just building the infrastructure, with no capacity left over to actually run VMs!

Make vCenter Operations Manager easier to buy!

The current way of buying VCOPS is missing some obvious options:

There is a free version (VCOPS Foundation) which is missing loads of features.

vCenter Operations Manager Suite can be bought standalone in Standard, Advanced and Enterprise  editions, licensed based on the number of VMs or physical hosts monitored, but not using a per-processor licensing model.

It's possible to buy vSphere with Operations Manager (VSOM) which provides per-processor licensing. Regardless of which vSphere edition (Standard, Enterprise or Enterprise Plus), you get a copy of vCenter Operations Manager Standard.

The vCloud Suite Advanced bundles what looks like Operations Manager Advanced per-processor licensing.

The vCloud Suite Enterprise bundles what looks like Operations Manager Enterprise per-processor licensing.

But what about those of us who had vSphere Enterprise Plus (pre-VSOM) and took advantage of the offer to upgrade to vCloud Suite Standard? Can we get a per-processor licensed version of VCOPS added?

Not that I can see. We're stuck with VCOPS Foundation.

The point is moot for me. We recently bought Veeam ONE for our monitoring and reporting solution. While it's not as sexy as VCOPS, it's a lot more affordable and we were able to buy it with per-processor licensing.

VCOPS is a great product but it's licensing is too difficult and not flexible enough. And it's still too expensive.

Roll on VMworld...

Although I won't be attending VMworld this year (boo!), I'll be watching the keynote, blogs and Twitter to see what new products are announced. I think the core products are pretty much done, so at this point I think it's about improving ease of deployment and management. Whether any of the above wishes are actually implemented will become clear in a few months...

Home Lab: Storage Upgrade

I've been quiet over the last few months due to a very busy work project. With that now out of the way (for now!), I can update on a few of the things I've been doing with the home lab...

As detailed in a previous post, I've been running my NAS/SAN on Nexenta. This was originally running as a VSA under ESXi. While this configuration worked very well for me, I did notice that on the Microserver, the Nexenta VM was being CPU and RAM constrained. When my old ML110 G5 was replaced by the G7 servers, I decided to reprovision the Nexenta VM onto dedicated hardware.

The ML110 G5 has six SATA ports and I configured them as follows:

1. 250GB SATA
2. 60GB SSD
3. 1TB SATA
4. 1TB SATA
5. 1TB SATA
6. 1TB SATA

The Nexenta operating system is installed on the 250GB disk. While this is not mirrored, there is nothing particularly important on this disk and if it dies then it can be replaced, Nexenta re-installed and the important zpool reimported.

The 60GB SSD is configured as a L2ARC (read) cache device.

The four 1TB hard drives are configured in a RAID10 configuration. This gives better performance than my original configuration which used RAID-Z (aka RAID5) and is used for both NFS and iSCSI shares. It's where the "important stuff" is stored.

I added a Lights Out board for the ML110 G5 which I found on Ebay. All my other servers have lights out and it means I don't need to have a monitor attached.

In addition to the capacity and improved performance due to the faster RAID, the other advantage of going physical is that I can dedicate the entire 8GB of RAM in the server to Nexenta (up from 4GB on the VSA). Nexenta also benefits from having two Xeon cores dedicated to it, a significant increase over the cores in the Microserver.

I've not had the chance to benchmark the new build, but it "feels" faster than running under a VM and it also frees up CPU and RAM on my Microservers for more VMs.

How a disposable email address shows who is sharing your details...

I bought my iPhone 3G from an O2 store on the day of its release. A couple of years later I upgraded it to an iPhone 4, again from the same O2 store.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've had a number of missed calls to my mobile. No voicemail, just a missed call from a number I didn't recognise. I entered the number into Google and it appears to be associated with the Carphone Warehouse. The search results revealed a lot of people complaining that Carphone Warehouse were cold calling their mobiles to try and sell an upgrade.

Annoying, but since I'd missed the calls, no big deal.

Then, today, I received an email from Carphone Warehouse telling me I was eligible for an upgrade. Now, I'm not a customer of the Carphone Warehouse, so how did they know I was eligible?

The answer is in the email...

I use Yahoo mail for non-important stuff because it has disposable addresses. Basically you create a new address such as "mymail-" and you can then append a word to it depending on who you are dealing with. In this instance, the email was addressed to "mymail-o2@yahoo.co.uk". This address (and I've modified the first bit as it's not really "mymail-") was used when I signed up with O2.

I don't use it for anything else.

So if Carphone Warehouse are sending me emails to this address, it means that either a) I've given Carphone Warehouse my details using my O2 address (I haven't), or b) that O2 have passed/sold my details to a third party.

To be fair, it's probably hidden in the small print, but it's not cool. Who here likes receiving cold calls and junk email?

No, didn't think so.


So I complained on Twitter:

And got a reply, which started a conversation:

I'm not sure why me being a PAYG or Pay Monthly customer matters, or why recently upgrading would make a difference. I'm going to give the O2 Twitter operator the benefit of the doubt here. It's possible he/she doesn't know that the data is passed on.

But the reality is that somehow Carphone Warehouse have an address that should only exist in O2's customer database.

The last message I received today from O2 was:

That I will. And update this post.

Of course, if the data hasn't been intentionally passed to a third party, then there is always the possibility that O2 have experienced a data breach... (I don't honestly expect this to be the case).

Perhaps someone from O2 would like to clarify how Carphone Warehouse know the private address that only O2 and I know, unless the data is passed on?

Remember, O2, actions that result in your customers getting cold called and spammed is BAD.

And Carphone Warehouse? No. Not a chance.

*** UPDATE 19th December 2012 ***

Carphone Warehouse continue to spam me:

O2: Please make this stop. I have sent a STOP message and forwarded the text to the O2 spam reporting number.

VMworld Europe 2012: Wrap up and the next steps...

Having blogged about VMworld Europe 2012 as it happened, I felt it was important to summarise the week and highlight the key points that will shape the next 12 months:

1. Get the basics right

A solid infrastructure foundation is essential. As vSphere deployments grow, both in terms of number of VMs and complexity of applications provisioned, the need to ensure best practices for storage, networks and vSphere configurations is a pre-requisite of any new projects. This can be accomplished through the following of vendor white papers and policy management tools such as Host Profiles.

However, a pragmatic approach needs to be taken to balance any performance gains against operational complexity. For example, while it may be possible to tweak the round robin path selection parameter, or implement jumbo frames on storage switches, the additional complexity can introduce additional management problems later on. So, while tuning the number of IOPS per path may result in a performance improvement for a small number of VMs, the benefit may be negligible when dealing with a large number of hosts, datastores and VMs. Similarly, jumbo frames may provide a minor throughput improvement, but if a new switch is added later, the system administration team must remember to apply the same settings to the new switch or else experience frame fragmentation.

In other words, keep it simple.

2. Learn to automate

VMware vCenter Orchestrator is moving from being a peripheral product to a core part of a complex cloud infrastructure. Therefore, I'd consider it a must-have skill to acquire in the coming year. The knock on requirement is that vSphere admins will need to have a basic understanding of programming languages and development methodologies.

What about other scripting approaches such as PowerCLI? In many ways, Orchestrator and PowerCLI are complimentary. PowerCLI scripts can be used to make repetitive individual tasks easier to perform, while Orchestrator is more about enabling workflow (of larger tasks). It's probable that PowerCLI (or other PowerShell) scripts will be called as part of an Orchestrator workflow.

Bottom line: Learn both.

3. Virtualise more

VMware's "Software Defined Data Center" (SDDC) strategy extends the existing virtual infrastructure and introduces the automation and orchestration of edge devices. If implemented well, this means that provisioning new services should be faster and less error prone. The opportunity to upgrade Enterprise Plus to vCloud Suite Standard enables the rollout of vCNS and vCloud Director, thereby forming the first step in moving to this new "agile" data centre, and also provides the foundations to build a private cloud on top of vSphere.

In order to ensure that a private cloud implementation is "done right", the VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit will be followed. This will dictate some changes to the existing infrastructure, further extending the use of a dedicated management cluster and separate production clusters.

There is one challenge to consider: The added complexity that comes with the additional functionality makes the learning curve significantly steeper. Today, it is possible for the IT generalist to work with VMware in addition to their regular day job (which may involve supporting everything else in the IT estate). At first glance, the SDDC makes this a lot more difficult. There are more virtual devices to manage and more places to configure more settings.

The responsibility is therefore on the VMware senior administrators/architects to design using clear principles, document and create the orchestration workflows to ensure that complex tasks are well managed so that the IT staff responsible for operations can do their job without needing to fully understand the complexity of the environment.  

IT architects: Be prepared to invest time learning how all this fits together.

4. Make it easier for users

The truth is that today, end users have to jump through too many hoops to get their VMs provisioned and the cost model is still unclear.

Although VMware have demonstrated vCloud Automation Manager, capable of handling the provision request/approval process, by limiting it to customers running vCloud Suite Enterprise, the rest of us are left with no ability to provide a request/approval mechanism for VM creation. It is likely that something will need to be written in-house, perhaps using something like WaveMaker Studio front-ending a series of Orchestrator workflows.

There are other ways to make life easier for our users. As admins, we currently use vSphere templates to make VM deployments simple, but this should be extended to create a full vCloud Director application catalogue for our end users. For example, if our end users want a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server with Apache Tomcat already installed, we should be in a position to make a catalogue item available for this purpose.

Using the vFabric suite to deploy these applications is probably overkill, but there are alternatives. It would be a useful exercise to do some work with Puppet to look into the provisioning of applications.

5. Monitor and plan

Finally, as things get more abstracted and complex, there is a real need to manage this infrastructure and proactively plan for future growth. VCOPS Foundation will be the starting point for this, but it's possible (probable?) that a fuller featured edition may be required over time.

There is going to be a real need to perform capacity planning to ensure that existing infrastructure resources are utilised properly, and that additional hardware is available when required.

Rationale

The above needs to be done in order to allow IT to keep up with the business demands of our users.  We need to stop being a stumbling block and instead come up with ways to deliver services faster.

The amount of servers and applications we now manage is greater than ever before and there is no sign that this will change in the near future (probably the opposite, and demand will continue to increase!).

We can't keep doing things the same way (it doesn't scale and it's too slow). We need to be smarter and more proactive about managing our infrastructure and providing the applications and environments our users need.

VMworld Europe 2012: Day Three

The final day of VMworld began and I again opted to spend the majority of my time in the hands on labs.

Back to the Hands on Lab

The first lab of the day was based around the new features and capabilities built into the vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) product, previously known as vShield Edge and App. This product is a virtual appliance based firewall with some advanced capabilities such as IPsec VPN and load balancing. Previous versions of vShield sat at the border of a vSwitch port group and provided only two interfaces (inside and outside). The new version can support multiple networks with the example given being a traditional three legged design for external, DMZ and internal networks.

Another useful feature of vCNS is the ability to put two appliances in an active/passive configuration. As part of the lab, the active instance was powered off and the failover kicked in, losing only three ping packets before the peer picked up the load. As previous versions of vShield Edge represented a single point of failure, this addition is welcome for mission critical or highly available environments.

The second lab was an epic example of tying a number of products together to illustrate the automation and provisioning of applications. Understatedly titled "Deliver Your IT Services in the Cloud", the lab utilised VMware Service Manager to request a new vApp as a consumer, Zimbra for the administrator to receive the request and then action it in VMware Service Manager, which then kicked off a workflow in Orchestrator that provisioned a VM in vCloud Director and then installed the web application using vFabric Application Manager. This advanced level of automation and integration across the various products provided perhaps the best illustration of where VMware are going with its Software Defined Datacenter strategy. In contrast, it's interesting to see how little focus there is on the "traditional" VMware strengths of virtualising compute, network and storage. A hint to competing hypervisor vendors: the world has moved on and it's now about building and managing automated application stacks built on top of public/private/hybrid clouds.

The third lab was a focus on the new features of the Distributed vSwitch. As new Enterprise Plus users, the Distributed vSwitch will be a new addition to our infrastructure and the lab provided some useful troubleshooting tips.

The final lab covered the new features in the latest release of VCOPS. The analytics engine and presentation of data in VCOPS is amazing (no change there) and it was interesting to see how this is becoming the management platform for VMware.

vCenter Operations Manager

By which point my brain was struggling to assimilate any new information! There was no big bang event to close the conference, just a steady stream of people finishing up and heading back to their hotels.

There is still much to reflect on, and my deliberate strategy of tackling the Hands on Labs at the expense of attending the sessions means there will be significant ongoing catching up online over the coming weeks and months.

The value of attending a conference such as VMworld is that it gives an opportunity to deeply dive into the technology we use everyday, familiarise ourselves with the developments that will be with us soon, and allows us the space to think, plan, learn, discuss and ultimately equips us to do our jobs. For those of us who are passionate about the work we do, it's an amazing experience and I'm personally very grateful to my company for making it possible to attend.

VMworld Europe 2012: Day Two

Day two started with another keynote, this time focused on "end user computing". VMware demonstrated a number of new features to View, Horizon and application delivery to iOS and Android devices.

None of this really interests me, so, meh.

My first session of the day was around the vCloud Architecture Toolkit, which I only stayed in for the first ten minutes. The pace of the presentation, along the presenter providing a definition of cloud (really? It's 2012!), led to me bailing and going the Hands On Lab instead.

Hands on Lab

At the lab, I took several sessions throughout the day. Two sessions were based around the vFabric Application Director and vFabric Data Director. These two products are designed to facilitate the provisioning of applications to a cloud environment. In the first lab, you had to provision a database (MySQL), application (Tomcat) and web (Apache HTTP) server, connect them dynamically, and then scale out the middle tier. The resulting blueprint is then built as a vApp which is available through vCloud Director. Clever stuff, but quite a steep learning curve (following the guides were easy, but starting from scratch would be a formidable challenge!).

Of interest was the list of options of components that can be used in building an application blueprint. In addition to the open source stacks were objects for SQL Server and IIS, although the lab didn't touch on these components.

The vFabric Data Director lab was similarly interesting, providing a single web front end into the management and deployment of Oracle and Postgres databases. The database instances could be cloned, resources hot-added and SQL run through the interface. Of interest to me was that the underlying mechanism to manage these instances is to manipulate and clone VMs. In other words, the object that is being managed is a VM. The application doesn't appear to be doing anything to enable multi tenancy within a single database installation (or if it does, this wasn't covered in the lab). It was very impressive to be able to take a Postgres 9.0 installation, rapidly copy the VM using linked clones, and then apply an upgrade to 9.1!

For more information (and to see what the above looks like):

A short video introduction to vFabric Application Director
A short video introduction to vFabric Data Director

The final lab of the day was on the new vCenter Orchestrator, a product most of us VMware admins have had for years, but few of us have used. This lab went through the creation of workflows that are then run against objects in vCenter. The lab then extended this with the use of plugins, showing how Orchestrator can be used to manipulate Active Directory. This is something that deserves a greater look and as a result, I bought the VMware Press book, Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator.

While in the lab, I noticed a plasma with a display that looked as if it was showing a Splunk dashboard. On wandering over to the screen, I discovered that this was labelled "VMware Strata". On enquiring with the lab staff, no one appeared to know what it was, but they thought it may be a new product based on a VMware acquisition that would eventually make it into that all-powerful monitoring and reporting tool, vCenter Operations Manager.

Mysterious VMware Application

Following the labs was the "Hall Crawl", providing another opportunity to meet the vendors. This included a very useful discussion with HP on the use of 3PAR storage and the unique features it provides. The thin provisioning and zero reclaim are very impressive ways to optimise and manage storage usage, although there is currently no deduplication or compression as found in NetApp filers.

The day was finished with the VMworld Party, a huge event with a cool 80s retro computer games theme, many activities and games, live acts and a constant supply of food and drink that ran late into the evening.

The VMworld Party