The Virtual Storage Guy

Cisco Live chat with J Metz of Cisco on FCoE & Putting the Cart Behind the Horse

My Cisco Live misadventures continued with Cisco FCoE product manager J Metz. This was my first time meeting J, a former university professor who these days promotes, evangelizes, and drives the development of FCoE products and technology. I've followed him online for sometime and was pretty jazzed once learning he agreed to our interview. I hope you enjoy...

Vaughn: "What do you think the most difficult questions you’ll be asked here at the show will involve?"

J: "Attendees here are wicked smart. They know their networks better than anyone else on the planet. Very humbling. I’m expecting to get some very specific questions about their environments, and some of those will probably be pretty darn tough."

Note: We quickly ditched the interview script and in favor of last week’s interview with Andy Sholomon where we discussed Ron Fuller’s Virtual Device Context session, was rumored to have attracted 1800 registrants.

Vaughn: "What do you feel is driving interest in Virtual Device Contexts (VDC)?"

J: "You know, Cisco creates wonderful pieces of equipment but there are some many cases where what a customer truly wants is for these technologies to work with in their existing environment, be it technically and operationally."

"Let’s change the approach on this topic shall we? We’ll put the cart back behind the horse… Typically, one of the things storage people are concerned about is that if they hand everything over to the Ethernet admins they will lose control but will be held accountable. For some crazy reason they don’t like that."

Cisco Live chat with Abhinav Joshi of Cisco & Wade Holmes of VMware

My week here in Vegas started with breakfast with Cisco’s Abhinav Joshi, VMware’s Wade Holmes, and NetApp’s Friea Berg. You probably already know this bunch from Twitter or their blogs, but for those who may not know them allow me to share a quick intro:

Abhinav is a Sr. Cloud Solutions Architect at Cisco. He was recognized as a VMware vExpert in 2011 & 2010, and has many technical certifications from VMware, NetApp, Cisco, EMC, & Citrix. His blog can be found at http://blogs.cisco.com/author/abhinavjoshi.

Wade is a Technical Solution Architect at VMware focusing on cloud solutions. He is VCDX#15, and holds a number of industry certifications including VCAP-DCD, VCP4, VCP3, VCP2, CISSP, CCSK, and ABCP. His blog posts can be found at: http://vWade.com.

Friea works in NetApp's alliance organization and is passionate about 'all things' involving Cisco & NetApp like FlexPod.

Here's our conversation from Monday morning...

Thank You VMware for the vExpert Award

From time to time I tend to overcommit myself, which results in a drop in blog posts. My sincerest apologies for the recent dip. I have number of posts and conversations I have to follow up on and to begin I’d like to extend my sincerest gratitude to John Troyer and everyone at VMware including me in their list of community advocates who they have recognized as VMware vExperts for 2011.

A vExpert is someone who shares their technical expertise and experience, provides guidance and direction, and evangelizes the value of VMware virtualization solutions. One of the best attributes of the vExpert community is it’s diversity. As it is comprised of administrators, engineers, and architects from VMware, their customers and technology partners; they collectively bring an unmatched breadth of perspective, knowledge, and innovation to help others achieve their virtualization goals.

I'd like to acknowledge and congratulate all of the NetApp vExperts for 2011. They are all rock stars who if you aren’t already following, I’d encourage you to begin.

Chris Gebhardt aka ‘Dr. Desktop’ @chrisgeb

Scott Baker @lilbaker83

Nick Howell @that1guynick

Glenn Sizemore @glnsize

Thanks again VMware!  

 

Wikibon Survey - VMware Storage Integration

Running VMware on NetApp? Maybe you run on a traditional storage array? Wikibon is conducting a survey looking to determine what storage capabilities and integrations are valuable to you within your VMware environment. If you take a minute to share your thoughts, you might just win an iPad 2!

The Wikibon Project, with it's mission to help IT practitioners learn from each other, is looking for your assistance with a brief survey on storage in VMware environments. Your information will give valuable detail as to how the industry is doing on "The Value of VMware Integration Journey" - see the 2010 research at The Value of the VMware Integration Journey. If you are a company that has installed storage for VMware environments or is in the business of selling/consulting on these environments, we ask you to take this 10-15 minute survey.

Click Here to Start the Survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5KCSR8K

Survey participants who provide their contact detail will be entered in a drawing. The drawing will take place immediately after the survey is closed. The winner of this drawing will receive an iPad2. Your contact detail will only be used to contact you for the prize or for follow-up if you opt-in.For any questions on this survey, please contact us by clicking here.

Welcome Scott Baker and Virtualutopia

Ever feel like you're on a roll where everything is going your way, like the gods are looking down on you favorably? Well, that's how I've been feeling while we've been growing the virtualization solutions business unit and it is my pleasure to introduce you to one of our latest additions, Scott Baker!

Scott has over 20 years of IT industry experience, including 6 years at EMC and a leader in the vSpecialist team. He provides a wealth of knowledge ranging from developing code to helping customers understand and consume technology.

I'd like to share with you a compliment a current (and unnamed) vSpecialist shared he once paid to Scott. He said, "Scott's so talented that rumor has it that Peyton Manning is often referred to as the Scott Baker of the NFL." While it may read as hyperbole, in my opinion that comment is spot on!

I've known Scott for a while now and I suspect you will share the same opinion should you begin following Virtualutopia. Heck, his first post includes Star Wars, NetApp, and EMC! What more could you want?

Welcome Nick Howell and the Virtual Arcade

Our Cloud and Virtualization Technical Marketing Engineering Team recently added the well-know and highly respected industry expert Nick Howell (aka That1GuyNick). I get jazzed every time I’m in the room Nick. He has this energy he brings in the combination of lethal technical chops and unbridled passion to share with others.

Nick’s opened the Virtual Arcade which promises to focus on ‘all things VMware vCloud’ including Director, Connector, Hybrid Cloud, Backup and Business Continuity etc. Knowing Nick's work in area such as virtualizing Oracle, the vArcade looks like it might be one well worth subscribing to.

Gestalt IT Tech Field Day 4 at NetApp!

On Thursday, November 11th Stephen Foskett and the folks at Gestalt IT will spend the morning at NetApp as a part of their visit to Silicon Valley for Gestalt IT Tech Field Day 4! Vendors and independent thought leaders meet to exchange information and views related to the technical advancements and the role of advanced storage capabilities in virtual and cloud infrastructures.

When: Thursday, November 11, 2010: 8 a.m. - 12 p.m. PT
Where: NetApp Founder’s Theater, 495 East Java Drive, Sunnyvale, CA, Building 1. The event will also be streamed online!

Event Schedule:

• 8:00 – 8:15 a.m. PT: Dave Hitz Welcome Address and Kickoff
• 8:15 - 8:30 a.m. PT: Role of Standards-Based Benchmarks in Storage System Evaluation – Steve Daniel
• 8:30 - 8:45 a.m. PT: Fabric Attached Storage in a Direct-Attach World – Steve Daniel
• 8:45 – 9:15 a.m. PT: Bycast - Joshua Konkle
• 9:15 – 9:45 a.m. PT: Tierless Storage – Greg Kleiman
• 9:45 – 10:45 a.m. PT: ONTAP 8.0.1 Overview – Santosh Rao
• 10:45 - 12:00 p.m. PT: Unified Cloud Architectures, FlexPod, & SMT - Vaughn Stewart, Ravi Neelakant from VMware & Thomas Scheibe of Cisco

This event will allow you to learn more about a number of the technologies and solutions shared during our Future Ready event including FlexPod! The event will include live streaming video, blogging, and tweets, so you can interact with the delegates during the event.

• Follow the event with our official Tech Field Day 4: Live Stream
• Watch video on Vimeo and YouTube
• See photos on Flickr
• Subscribe to the Roundtable Podcast on iTunes
• Join the Facebook Group or LinkedIn Group

Join us wont you? I promise you sharing our solutions and technologies with industry experts like the delegate from Gestalt IT is always a rewarding experience.

For more information go to: http://gestaltit.com/field-day/2010-san-jose/

An Interview on Twitter? A Twitterview!

My blog posts have been sparse as of late. With all that's been going on in recent weeks; from the VMworld events to the upcoming NetApp Insight events and a massive fall product launch, I haven't had much time to sleep let alone blog!

I promise I'll correct the latter and return to a regular cadence soon.

It took an opportunity to sit down with storage industry pundit, Stephen Foskett, and the self proclaimed 'Cloud Czar of NetApp' Val Bercovici (who's actually in the Office of the CTO much more often than he's in Moscow) to get me to take a break and join in an online interview via Twitter.

I believe this is our inaugural Twitterview!

So what's on your mind?

Have questions about the future of storage technologies?

Maybe it's a question around Cloud Infrastructures and the integration available to our virtualization & orchestration partners?

Heck, maybe it's as simple as wanting to know who cuts our hair!

It doesn't matter what the question is, you have the floor!

So join us won't you, today at 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET. To participate, just make sure you follow us and show up. I'll see you on Twitter!

Stephen has started sharing thoughts around 'What is Flexible IT?' over at his blog. I share as you may want to give it a read before the interview kicks off.

One Day Remaining to Vote for the Top VMware Virtualization Blogs

Only one day remains for avid blog readers to cast their votes for the top 25 VMware / virtualization based blogs. vSphere-Land (aka Eric Seibert) has been running this poll for the past few years and the number of blogs nominated have grown immensely over this period of time. In fact, this year's poll contains 100 blogs!

If you have a list of blogs which you read religiously and find valuable, please share them with the community by voting! Go vote now before it’s too late!

One Week with an iPad

A week ago today Apple released the 3G iPad and I was lucky enough to pickup the last 64GB 3G model not reserved for a pre-order at the Apple Store. A few questioned why I picked up the 'over-sized iPod Touch'. While this maybe be a fairly accurate description of the device, trust me it's way off the mark. It's so far off the mark, I’d like to share with how the iPad has impacted me this week.

A bit of background

I have what I consider to be one of the best roles anyone could have. I work on a team responsible for product integration testing and validation with platforms, hypervisors, operating systems, applications, and systems management and orchestration tools.

In this role I interface with a wide range of individuals ranging from teammates, product managers, technical directors, etc to partner engineers and PMs, customer decision makers and administrators. Suffice to say, a wide range of individuals each of whom look at business challenges a bit differently.

When it comes to discussing storage concepts relevant to virtual machines, like LUNs, volumes, data reduplication, compression, embedded objects, virtual disks, etc... It's fair to say it's easy to get lost in the conversation. Presentations and whiteboards commonly aide in communication, but these devices aren't portable.

VIRTUMANIA Podcast #8 - Barbecue & Secure Multi-Tenancy

If you listen to podcasts and have yet to discover Virturmania you are missing out. The hosts Rich Brambley with Veeam and VMETC and Marc Farley with 3Par and StorageRap, along with the behind the scenes efforts of the producer Greg Knieriemen of Infosmack, truly make Virtumania one of the most entertaining podcasts I’ve listened to.

This Monday I had the privilege of being on the podcast along with Rick Vanover of Rick Vanover's Blog, where we discussed a multitude of topics ranging from BBQ, Secure Multi-Tenancy, the acquisition of Bycast, and 'datastore-less' VMs.

I encourage you to check it out, Monday’s recording posted yesterday. Trust me, the Virtumania guys are as sharp as they are hilarious! If you need more evidence, check out Marc having fun with various storage vendors at SNW.

I’m a fan of a number of podcasts; the following can be regularly found on my iPhone.

• The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe
• For Good Reason
• Skeptoid
• The Adam Carolla Podcast
• VMware Communities Roundtable
• And of course my latest addition, Virtumania

I'd like to suggest we make this post interactive. If you regularly listen to podcasts please share which ones and why in the comments section.

VMware Community Podcast #85 – VMware View with John Dodge

As some of you may know if I’m not talking to someone (partner, customer, etc...) I’m probably listening to my iPhone. Besides my love for music (I’m a bass player) I listen to audiobooks, courses from the teaching company, and a half-dozen or so podcasts.

Today during my flight from NC to CA (I believe we were somewhere over Kentucky) the VMware Communities Roundtable podcast #85 started playing and John Troyer’s featured guest in this episode was none other than one of my good friends, John Dodge! For those of you who’ve yet to meet John, he’s a Sr. Manager within VMware’s Desktop Specialist Consultants, and he has the following charter:

• Provide delivery capabilities to field teams.
• Develop services IP for PSO field delivery, and share with Practice Development for the purpose of releasing to the entire partner community
• Provide partner enablement, such as working with the largest SISOs on the development of DaaS Reference Architecture and GTM strategies.
• Provide thought leadership through a number of vehicles including PEX, VMworld, podcasts, and blogging.

BTW – I understand John’s team is currently expanding and will continue to do so over the next four quarters (I also understand they need additional NetApp experts).

The Top 10 Storage Vendor Blogs

Continuing with catching up from the topics that I didn't get to post over the past week and a half...

Last week Storage Monkeys announced the results of their Top Storage Vendor Blog poll. NetApp was well represented with three bloggers placing in the top 10. Val placed 5th, Dave 8th, and yours truly finished 6th.

I'm honored to finish in the top 10 ratings of two industry polls each representing two distinctly separate areas of the technology industry.

For those who voted for the three of us, and the rest of the prominent NetApp bloggers like Nick, Alex, Mike, and Brian and team; I thank you for your votes. I've reproduced the final results of the Storage Monkeys poll here, complete with links to each blogs in order to help you add these sites to your RSS reader.

1. Chuck Hollis - EMC
2. Mark Twomey (aka Storagezilla) - EMC
3. Barry Burke - EMC
4. Dave Graham - EMC
5. Val Bercovici - NetApp
6. Vaughn Stewart - NetApp
7. HP StorageWorks Blog
8. Dave Hitz - NetApp
9. Hu Yoshida - HDS
10. Marc Farley - 3Par

EMC definitely had a stranglehold on the top spots. It looks like the rest of the storage bloggers have their work cut out for 2010.

2009 : A Blog in Review

I'm feverishly working to wrap up my edits on version 2.0 on TR-3749 - NetApp and VMware vSphere: Storage Best Practices, and unable to get to my blog queue (to those who I owe a post, I thank you for your patience). Blog posts often take a considerable amount of time with many finishing in the middle of the night. It is pretty easy to discern when my schedule is busy as my blogging frequency typically falls off. I'm currently facing this situation, so I need to keep this post brief.

It hit me today that while my blog was launched in 2008, I believe I hit my stride starting in the spring of 2009 and I thought I'd share some of my more popular posts from 2009. Consider it a year in review.

• vSphere Introduces the Plug-n-Play SAN
• I/O Efficiency and Alignment – the Cloud Demands Standards
• A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware
• VCE-101: What's Next with Deduplication?
• A Customer's Findings: VMware on NetApp vs EMC
• VCE-101: Deduplication: Storage Capacity and Array Cache
• EMC: The Storage Most Integrated with VMware? – The Conclusion
• VMworld 2009 – Storage Integration Sneak Peek
• Run Everything Virtualized and Deduplicated : aka Chuck Anti-FUD
• A “Multivendor Post” on using iSCSI with VMware vSphere
• VMware Communities Roundtable Presents a Multivendor iSCSI Podcast
• VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics
• VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond
• Now Available: The Virtual Storage Console vSphere Plug-in
• SPEC SFS2008 Verifies You Can Run Faster on Fewer Disks with PAM
• Preview: Rapid Cloning Utility 3.0 vCenter Plug-in

Some of my proudest moments were the posts where the community came together to discuss a particular technology and its associated nuances associated for the greater good of the community. I'd like to extend a special thank you to Chad Sakac for playing a key role in making these posts happen.

For those who follow my blog and find the content entertaining, informative, agreeable, or standoffish; I thank you for spending a small part of your day reading my scribes and diatribes. BTW - if you enjoy my posts, please vote for the virtual storage guy in vSphere-land's top bloggers poll.

In 2010 I plan to share with you a wealth of new data around performance and functionality, new product introductions and enhancements, product and integration technical details, and my contemplations and insights around designing storage architectures for green, virtual data centers.

One last thought, if you don't already please check out thoughts and data shared by a number of NetApp's top Virtual Solution Architects over at the Virtualization Effect.

The 2010 Top VMware and Virtualization Bloggers Poll - Vote Today!

For the next two weeks you can vote for your top VMware & virtualization bloggers in a poll setup by Eric Siebert at vSphere-land.

To vote you simply vote for your favorite blogs, ranking range from from 1 to 10 (with 1 being the highest vote) at http://vote.vsphere-land.com. Note: your votes must total 55 and only one vote per IP address will be accepted, so you may need to use your mobile device (on a carrier network), home connection, Starbuck's, etc... in order to vote.

Once all the votes have been cast Eric will weight and tally the votes and announce the Top 25 Bloggers.

TrainSignal is sponsoring this year’s survey and as an added bonus they are giving away two copies of their awesome vSphere DVD training course to two randomly selected voters!

Best of luck to all nominated bloggers!

Mike Laverick on vStorage Plug-in Integration

This morning began with catching up on my VMware related reading. Like many of you I have a list of ‘must reads.’ Over at RTFM Education Mike has shared his PowerPoint presentation on vStorage integration, which he delivered at the 1st Scottish VMware User Group Meeting.

Mike thanks for sharing! This slide deck provides a great overview of the current state of the union and what customers can deploy today (or in the very near future) from NetApp & EMC.

I'd suggest that you check out the PPT and just in case you were afflicted by temporary insanity and have yet to subscribe to RTFM, do so now!

VCE-101: Oracle On VMware Without Limits

After a brief hiatus I am very eager to return to the ‘Virtualization Changes Everything’ series, and today’s post is an impromptu addition to our syllabus. Recently fellow VMware vExpert Steve Kaplan of INX published a rather thought provoking post rallying for the acceleration of the transformation to a 100% virtualized datacenter. Steve waxes poetic advocating acquisition decisions spanning compute, storage and network should be driven by their contribution to data center virtualization success and I would encourage everyone to read it.

In today’s post I’d like to highlight and expand upon the following comment in Steve’s post:

‘Creativity overcomes most obstacles to a fully virtualized data center such as the minority of software manufacturers still refusing to support their applications on VMs. An easy resolution for organizations running vSphere over NFS on NetApp is to FlexClone a Virtual Machine's virtual disk into a LUN and simply present to a physical server. Voila, instantaneous V2P.’

A Follow-up on HP TechDay 2009 with an Invitation for You!

This week HP demonstrated several of their technology offerings to the storage community, and as a part of this event HP provided a hands on lab where attendees to 'kick the tires' of their storage technology offerings. As a part for this lab attendees were able to complete the same tasks with storage arrays and management tools from EMC and NetApp.

These types of educational experiences can really benefit the community by showcasing one’s enhancements and differentiation. I fully endorse these types of labs, sharing information empowers the user community and raises the bar in terms of what we must develop in order to remain an industry leader… except this isn’t what happened.

According to multiple tweets attendees were stating that tests designed to demonstrate storage integration with Windows systems and VMware were the command line interface and Filerview. This caught my attention as these aren't the tools NetApp recommends for our install base. A quick glance at a few of the sites covering the event confirmed the use of these legacy tools.

In fairness I need to highlight that HP did follow the steps provided in our storage best practices documents for VMware TR-3428 (VI3) and TR-3749 (vSphere). I would like to share with you that we are in the process of updating these documents with a goal of reducing their sizes by approximately 40%.

We hear the VMware community loud and clear - simplicity equates to scaling an environment.

VMware Communities Roundtable iSCSI Podcast is Live in iTunes

If missed joining us for the VMware Communities Podcast featuring the 'iSCSI Super Friends' you missed an excellent podcast. John shared with us that episode #66 set a new Communities Podcast record in terms of the number of attendees on the call.

Thru the magic of the 'interweb' you can can catch (and even subscribe to) the podcast via iTunes.

Major props to my partners in crime for making this podcast and accompanying blog post a reality: John Troyer and Andy Banta (VMware), Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand Networks), Eric Schott (Dell/EqualLogic), and Chad Sakac (EMC).

Coming soon: A New Multi-Vendor Blog Post from NetApp, EMC, HP, Dell, and VMware

I’m not giving away any secrets at this time, but let’s just say you may want to stay tuned. Have a good weekend everybody!

Just like Sam and Ralph - Competitors while on the clock, friends when off!

Mike & Scott - Thanks

I’d like to take a minute to personally thank Mike Laverick and Scott Lowe for participating in our preview of the Rapid Cloning Utility 2.1 and the Virtual Storage Console. These technoilogies and more will be on display in the NetApp booth at VMworld.

Neither Mike nor Scott require introductions. Both are respected leaders in the virtualization market and both were kind enough to share their thoughts in online reviews.

How Heavy is your ESX Load?

I can’t tell you how often we are asked for tips around optimizing the performance of virtualized applications. Resolving performance related issues can require investigating a number of variables ranging from the virtualized application including the GOS settings and the data layout, and all the way down to the configuration of the ESX/ESXi server itself.

Vote for the Top 5 VMware Blogs

Eric Siebert has asked the VMware community to make their voices by submitting their votes in a survey of the top 5 VMware related blogs. If you’re a reader of this blog and you haven’t casted a vote please head over to vSphere-Land and do so, it will only take a minute.

Join Rick Scherer on today’s TechTalk: Virtualizing SQL

Today, May 28, 2009 at 11:00am Pacific Time you have an opportunity to join Rick Scherer of VMwaretips.com and a fellow vExpert for a discussion on how the San Diego Data Processing Corporation overcame server sprawl by successfully implementing SQL Server® on VMware®.

In addition to Rick, experts from NetApp and VMware will host an interactive discussion on best practices that will help you weigh your deployment options.

Topics for today’s call include:

* What You Should Know and How to Get Started
* Gain performance advantages when virtualizing SQL
* Optimize storage utilization without impacting performance
* Implement centralized and cost-effective backup and disaster recovery

You can register for the call here

Enjoy the TechTalk. Rick really knows his stuff and has an enormous amount of valuable information to share.