VMworld 2017 Recap: The Sessions

This year I attended VMworld on a vExpert blogger pass. To document my experiences, I'm writing up a VMworld 2017 Recap in 3 parts: The Keynotes, The Sessions, and vBrownBag Tech talks. I also recorded a couple of podcast episodes during the conference, you can listen to them HERE. With the second post in the series, I dive in to a few of the sessions I attended that I feel had a lot of value.

Architecting Data Protection with Rubrik

Rubrik is a product I have been following for a while. While their technology is intriguing, what I like about their presentations is that it's not just marketing mumbo jumbo. They provide content that's useful and thought provoking, so I knew this would be a good use for my time in an already packed schedule.

You knew from the moment you walked in the session would not be like the rest.

The session, presented by Andrew Miller and Rebecca Fitzhugh, took a look at not only what constitutes a disaster in IT, but also how to assess and prepare for one. Given recent events, hurricanes and natural disasters are an easy place to start when thinking about disasters. Rebecca presented lessons learned from 2005 when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, and Hurricane Rita struck Texas just a few weeks later. Sure, the DR site is in another state, and what are the odds that massive hurricanes would strike both locations so close? Using Houston and New Orleans should be fine! Until that once in a lifetime perfect storm of events comes together. Deeper thinking about location planning could have helped prevent many IT headaches.

But what about the other types of disasters? Ones not so obvious like power outage, or the most common type of disaster, human error. Business impact analysis is a crucial step in helping to prepare for disasters. For those who may not know what a BIA consists of two components:

• Technical Discovery - data gathering and documentation
• Human Conversation - Speaking with people about:
• What IT systems they rely on?
• What is the monetary impact of a disaster/failure?
• What are the most time critical and informational critical business processes? 

 All of that information is collected and used to help decide what availability or recovery capabilities are justifiable based on the requirements, impact, and costs. The reports generated classify data and systems with priority tiers.

When moving forward with planning after a business impact analysis, be sure that the details and requirements are fully understood. Many places say they need four or five 9's of up time without truly knowing what goes into delivering that type of availability. Also, when planning out Service Level Agreements (SLA), is planned downtime for maintenance and upgrades included in the agreement? Failure to adequately account for those outages could push you into violation of your SLA while trying to keep the environment up and running. One more thought about SLAs. When does the SLA reset? Is it a yearly on January 1st? Quarterly? Weekly? Be sure to have a solid understanding of when the SLA resets so you don't violate it.

Another thought on SLAs; make sure your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) fit within the constraints of the SLA, and vice versa. It should also be noted that the shorter your RTO (the target amount of time to restart a service after an outage) and RPO (the acceptable amount of data loss from an outage), the more expensive the backup solution will be to implement and maintain.

And the final take away from Rubrik's session is that Business Continuity (BC) is different than Disaster Recovery. In environments with developed and deployed BC plans, an outage can occur and the end user will not experience any loss of productivity. Business Continuity tends to focus on the smaller, day to day issues that could arise such as the loss of a piece of hardware and are smaller in scale than a full disaster. BC events should have plans documented so they can be recovered from quickly.

"Complexity is the enemy. Whatever you do. Whatever you buy. Simplify your architecture and expect more." - Andrew Miller

*EDIT*
Official Recording of the Rubrik VMworld Session
Rubrik Slide Deck

HPE vExpert Briefing 

One of the benefits of the VMware vExpert program is access to exclusive content and meetings from vendors. At VMworld, HPE held 2 sessions for vExperts to discuss current and upcoming product information. In my professional world, I work for a VAR that partners with nearly all major vendors in the datacenter space. As I have limited exposure to HPE products, I felt this would be a good session to help me learn more about their offerings, see where they could help our clients, and give me a working understanding should I need to deploy HPE in the future. Plus it didn't hurt that Calvin Zito also lured us with the promise of food and beverages.

While HPE has a large portfolio of products, the part of the session that stood out the most to me revolved around their hyperconverged and automation offerings. Dubbed "Project New Hybrid IT Stack", we were told the actual product name is pending, HPE combines Simplivity with Synergy to create an integrated cloud solution for on premises and public clouds. One of the goals is to be able to assess cost and decide where the application best fits in the environment, whether it's on premises, cloud, etc…

Details of the stack are still being flushed out, including how they will handle the migration between on premises and public clouds. It was said "Given the great partnership with VMware, it wouldn't be surprising that NSX would be utilized". Although no official timeline has been released, we were told to expect the product to be GA in the "nearish-term".

Fellow #vExpert @bknudtson kicking off HPE briefing. If you are a blogger or vExpert, ping me to join Wed at 3:30. #VMworld #HPEatVMworld pic.twitter.com/3KG0xjn2ge

— HPEStorageGuy (@CalvinZito) August 29, 2017

Continuing with the cloud theme, we moved on to Private Cloud Express with vRealize Automation. PCE comes as a pre-integrated hardware and software solution on HC380 hardware with Helion CloudSystem. The solution is currently in beta with relationships being built with public cloud providers for cross platform integration. HPE has certainly put themselves on my radar with this session.

Links provided by HPE:
HPE Hyperconverged Whitepaper
Scott D. Lowe's Gorilla Guide to Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Private Cloud Express

 The Future with Dr. Michio Kaku

In an IBM sponsored session, theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku discussed where science and technology is taking the future of the human race. In what he called the "Fourth Wave", Dr. Kaku called out that humanity's next greatest advances will be in Artificial Intelligence + Cloud Computing, Nanotech and Robotics, and Biotechnology. There was one prediction and one observation that stuck out to me above the rest. His prediction is that one day in the future we will be able to send our connectome, the mapping of our brains, into space on a laser which will give us the ability to explore the world at the speed of light.

Dr. Kaku's observation is on technology and business. To become the next billionaire take a look at a business, any business, find the friction and digitize it. He went on to point out how companies like Amazon and Uber used technology to totally revolutionize their respective markets. As a technologist, this struck me as if he was issuing challenge. How could I make an impact? How could I revolutionize a field; become the next Bezos or Musk? The session certainly left me feeling motivated.

It was a valiant attempt to get my picture with Dr. Kaku

VMworld Daily Top Rated Sessions

While not all sessions are available online, VMware has posted a few of the top rated sessions online for the public to watch. You can find those at the link below.

https://www.vmworld.com/en/us/video/top-sessions.html


If you'd like to join the conversation about VMworld 2017, have any podcast/blog ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook. 

Nutanix Sofware on HPE ProLiant & New Pricing Models: Nutanix Go!

Nutanix Software on ProLiant Hardware & Nutanix Go Pricing Model

Nutanix Software on select HPE ProLiant Hardware

Today Nutanix announced that they will support Nutanix Software running on select models of HPE ProLiant hardware. Nutanix claims that this is part of their mission to "Set customers free from their silos of IT so that they can focus on the apps and services that power the business.". This announcement is similarly in line with last August's announcement of Nutanix on Cisco UCS. This will not be an OEM offering, rather what Nutanix is calling a "Meet-In-The-Channel" solution. Interested customers will purchase the Nutanix software from a channel partner, and the hardware from an authorized re-seller or HPE directly. Either the re-seller or the channel partner will integrate the two for the end customer.

The first two models to be supported are the DL360-G9 and the DL380-G9

Currently under final testing, Nutanix anticipates that the solution will be production ready by the start of the 4th quarter, 2017. They also said should testing go well, it may be available sooner. Bundling will be done in the same manner as the Nutanix/Cisco UCS release, with support and software subscription included. The pricing will be on a per node basis for a fixed term of 1, 3, or 5 years. This, they feel, will provide a complete solution. Acropolis Pro and Ultimate Editions are the first Nutanix Hypervisors to be certified on the HPE platform, as Nutanix wanted to offer the most feature rich editions to HPE's global customer reach.

Support for this solution will be handled the same as the UCS Nutanix deployments. If there is a hardware issue, the customer contacts HPE. If there's a software issue, call Nutanix, and when in doubt, call Nutanix. Both Nutanix and HPE are members of the Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet), so support hand-off between vendors should be seamless. At this time, Nutanix will not support mixed clusters of Cisco UCS & HPE ProLiant.

Nutanix Go: Pay As You Go Pricing

Being touted as a pay as you go offering for the on premises cloud, Nutanix also announced their Go pricing model.This model, which is immediately available in the United States, allows customers to rent Nutanix branded NX hardware for terms as short as 6 months, and as long as 5 years, with varying renewal offerings in between.

 

Customers will have the capability to scale up their solution during the term length, and return the hardware at the end in Nutanix supplied shipping materials. Similar to cloud, this allows customers to scale their physical infrastructure up and down as demand dictates. Nutanix claims that this pricing model helps to reduce some of the risk of projects, especially if the full scale of the project is not known at the start, or if the project viability is in question. They anticipate a quicker return on investment for a smaller sum of money for a shorter period of time versus a large, up front purchase. 

Customers can reach out to their preferred Nutanix channel partner for further information, or to get set up on the Go pricing model. All billing after the fact is handled by Nutanix directly. Much like many other solutions, longer term agreements will yield better pricing versus short term contracts. The Go model is priced with a single SKU which includes hardware, software, support, and entitlements. The model is priced per block per term.

If you'd like to join the conversation about Nutanix's new offerings, have any show ideas, or would like to be a guest on my podcast, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.

Official Press Release Here

 

WIVMUG UserCon Slide Deck - Upgrading to vSphere 6

Here is the slide deck from my presentation at the WIVMUG Super UserCon on 05/24/2016.

2016.05.23 wivmug user con - vsphere 6 upgrade from Paul Woodward Jr

The Deeper I Get Into Virtualization...

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend my first VMUG meeting. The Wisconsin VMUG chapter held a half day session at MATC's Downtown Milwaukee Campus. Frankly, I loved it. There were great presentations from Netech, Daniel Klemz, and Scott Harold, & a Q&A session. I enjoyed being around so many people with a passion for virtualization. Attending this event gave me a bump of motivation towards preparing for the VCP exam.

During the meeting, I was tweeting out thoughts and observations (my Twitter handle is @ExploreVM, if you don't follow me already!), and this tweet is one of my biggest takeaways from the meeting:

"The deeper I get into #virtualization, it becomes more evident that #CiscoUCS may have to be the next step in education"

While listening to Netech's presentation about FlexPod, I had a flash back to a tour of a data center I took a few months beforehand which uses a VCE block system. The common factor, both use Cisco UCS. Now, of course a deep understanding of the ESX hypervisor and the entire suite of VMware products is going to be my entry into the world of data center virtualization, but if I have any aspirations to manage a data center (which believe me, I do), and to become a well-rounded IT professional, learning the Unified Computing System is a likely next step.

The problem with that? Finding the training at a reasonable cost. A quick Google search yields 5 day training sessions and online training courses, but the cost of these courses ($3000+) is nearly prohibitive for a student attempting to further their education. Also, with any boot camp style training sessions, you have to wonder how much you are actually learning and retaining in a meaningful way. An ideal solution would be if the local technical schools or colleges would offer Cisco UCS courses.

Milwaukee Area Technical College offers a great VMware vSphere course taught by amazingly knowledgeable professors, and there has been rumors that the school is working on cloud and storage certificate programs, both of which I would love to attend and I feel help advance the school over other technical colleges in the area. At this point, I would like get on my soapbox momentarily, hoping some of the higher-ups at MATC are listening, and petition the school for a Cisco UCS course. It's becoming more and more obvious that business are implementing pre-configured, converged infrastructure virtualization solutions, and while the VMware vSphere training is an excellent start, adding UCS experience to your graduates portfolio would make them more competitive in the job market, along with increasing their overall technical capability.

Now, my blog may never get noticed by anyone of significance at MATC, but I will close with this, hoping someone is listening. I graduate in 6 weeks, and will be continuing my education at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in the fall, but if MATC adds the Cloud Certificate, Storage Certificate, and Cisco UCS programs, they have me not only coming back, spending my educational dollars at their college, but also touting the IT program to anyone who cares to listen to me.