The software-defined networking is the new buzzword for network centralization, which is also known as OpenFlow or network virtualization. The idea is to centralize the control to a server (or a cluster of servers) called controller.
With the acquisition of Nicira by VMware, the software-defined networking has caught many eyeballs from the community. From there, VMware extended it to a new vision called software-defined datacenter which includes three elements of computing: compute, network, and storage. Read more... (690 words, estimated 2:46 mins reading time)
To my curiosity, I attended the session “Building UI Add-ins for System Center 2012 SP1 Virtual Machine Manager” by Jonobie Ford, who is the program manager of the add-in SDK. As you may know, I wrote several docs on vSphere Client plug-in and helped many partners to develop their plug-ins during my days at VMware. Read more... (706 words, estimated 2:49 mins reading time)
I flew to Vegas this week for Microsoft Management Summit 2013, which happens to be in the same hotel (Mandalay Bay) as VMware Partner Exchange one and half months ago. The organizations and activities of both conferences are pretty similar – keynotes, breakout sessions, hands on labs (HOL). It’s pretty exciting to learn new technologies and meet new people.
Hands On Labs Read more... (756 words, estimated 3:01 mins reading time)
I went to the VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas last week. It’s always nice to see old friends and colleagues in the conference that I’ve been attending consecutively since I first joined VMware in 2007.
I spent quite some of my time in the hands on labs (codenamed Project NEE), which turned out to be a great experience. I took 7 labs covering the Nexus 1000V with VXLAN, vCenter Orchestrator(vCO), DynamicOps (now has a fancier name called vCloud Automation Center), etc. With the bundling and deep integration of the vCO into vCenter Web Client, I think the prime time for vCO as the automation tool for vSphere has finally come. Read more... (448 words, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)
While reading articles about Microsoft Hyper-V, I found that Hyper-V seemed to have different states for virtual machines from VMware vSphere. The virtual machine in Hyper-V is represented by the Msvm_ComputerSystem class. If you are familiar with VMware vSphere, you know the equivalent in vSphere is VirtualMachine. At first sight, the Hyper-V APIs may not look straight-forward. The Hyper-V APIs is actually based on Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which is essentially CIM from DMTF. Read more... (519 words, estimated 2:05 mins reading time)
Last week VMware formally announced that it would form a virtual team with EMC to take cloud service and middleware market. There was a rumor about it the week early which turned out to be mostly true. If you are in IT industry nowadays, you simply cannot under-estimate the power of rumors. I think most of the VMware and EMC employees might hear the rumor before hearing it from their management teams. 
Read more... (660 words, estimated 2:38 mins reading time)
In my previous article, I introduced the Remote Desktop Connection Manager. It’s highly recommended to use it over the virtual machine console which all goes through the ESXi management IP therefore is not good for performance especially when there are many concurrent connections to virtual machines running on a same physical host.
Even if you are convinced on connecting to virtual machines directly, you will find it’s not convenient to add many virtual machines to the Remote Desktop Connection Manager. That is why I decided to write a small tool to automate it. Read more... (402 words, 2 images, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)
One of the key new features in vSphere 5.1 is the Single Sign On. Because it’s new and also complicated, I’ve heard it’s not easy to get it right the first time. Experts recommend that you should play with it in a test or staging environment before upgrading your production environment. Read more... (791 words, estimated 3:10 mins reading time)
I know it’s well past the GA date of the product on September 10, but I still decide to write this what’s new for the completeness of vSphere SDK FAQs.
As I always emphasize, the SDK/APIs are “view” to the product (you can think it as “model” here). Therefore to understand a SDK/APIs, it’s important to check out the product first. No exception for the new features: what’s new in vSphere decides what’s new in vSphere SDK/APIs. For that, you want to check out the What’s New in VMware vSphere 5.1 at VMware website. Read more... (389 words, estimated 1:33 mins reading time)
While trying latest Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Express, I also played with the C# samples of the VMware vSphere SDK. Unfortunately, there isn’t direct support for VS 2012 but for VS 2010, 2008, and 2005. However, you can easily create project files for the VS 2012 by yourself assuming you are already familiar with the Visual Studio environment. Read more... (477 words, 2 images, estimated 1:54 mins reading time)
The vRAM was the license model VMware used in vSphere 5.0. It basically limits the usage of virtual memory, which is different from physical memory, per license. When first announced last year, it created a lot of angry customers overnight even though VMware estimated that the license scheme wouldn’t affect most of the existing customers. Later on, VMware doubled the amount of virtual memory and implemented a cap per license, and insisted to roll out the modified license model despite strong objections from customers. Read more... (979 words, estimated 3:55 mins reading time)
About two weeks ago, CRN published an article about VMware Zephyr project. According to the article, VMware plans to launch a public IaaS cloud to compete with Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and more directly with existing VMware vCloud service providers. The reason for the move is “because none of its service provider partners are moving fast enough. Look at the adoption rate of vCloud Director with service providers — it is non-existent.” Read more... (562 words, estimated 2:15 mins reading time)
In my last article, I analyzed the real motivation behind the VMware’s recent intention to acquire Nicira. In this article, I am going to review VMware’s past strategies and predict its long term strategies. In short, VMware’s past growth strategy is “vertical,” and its future growth strategy should be “horizontal.”
Past Strategy Review Read more... (906 words, estimated 3:37 mins reading time)
VMware’s acquisition of Nicira posted a big risk on Cisco’s future control of networking market. The risk was in fact there from day one of VMware ESX with virtual switches and then distributed virtual switches, which reduces the need for customers to buy physical geeks from Cisco because virtual machines use “free” virtual ports. For the inter-physical server communication, customers still need Cisco and other vendors even though the volume is not as high as otherwise. That is why Cisco quickly came up with its own distributed virtual switch Nexus 1000v to stay relevant in the virtualization market. Read more... (840 words, estimated 3:22 mins reading time)
On this past Monday VMware announced to buy Nicira for $1.26 billion. Congratulations to many of my former VMware colleagues who joined Nicira and will return back to VMware soon.
Overall this deal aligns well with VMware’s newly found vision on software defined data center. You must have read many of similar explanations and comments from various sources including this one from VMware CTO Steve Herrod, and this one by Nicira cofounder and CTO Martin Casado. Read more... (534 words, estimated 2:08 mins reading time)
I recently use quite a lot of VMware View because my development environment is a VDI desktop. By default, the PCoIP protocol is used and things just work as expected.
As a power user, I didn’t find PCoIP convenient sometimes, especially when copying files between my physical desktop and my virtual desktop. I ended up using a FTP server instead of drag and drop. It worked but not as quite convenient as I expected it to be. Read more... (313 words, 2 images, estimated 1:15 mins reading time)
Integrating VIX API into vSphere API is a great decision VMware made for its vSphere 5.0 release. Instead of working on two separate APIs, you now have one to deal with. It also solves the portability issue of VIX APIs which is tied to a specific platform – VIX has three versions for Windows, 32-bit Linux, and 64-bit Linux. Read more... (529 words, estimated 2:07 mins reading time)
Thanks to John Troyer and VMware community managers, I successfully changed my email for login with the community recently. During this long weekend I spent a little time checking out the developer community.
I found that the static contents out there are largely outdated. In my estimation, it hasn’t been actively maintained for more than one year. Listing outdated contents not only confuses the community, but also lets go a great opportunity to educate and influence developers. Read more... (412 words, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)
Today is the last day of VMware Partner Exchange 2012. There’s no keynote, therefore I went directly to breakout sessions.
The first one I attended was “SRM 5.0 and vSphere Replication – Understanding the Use Cases and Implementation Options.” The SRM used to manage the storage array that actually replicate LUNs to pair arrays in remote sites. This results in a restriction that the storage arrays must be compatible, which means they must come from same vendor and probably same model. When I was at VMware, I helped several partners with their storage array adapters for SRM. With vSphere replication, the replication happens at higher level thus the restriction goes away. Coming with the flexibility is slightly slower performance. Like anything else, you simply cannot have all the best but you can apply right technology for certain use case, for example, use vSphere replication for ROBO (remote office, branch office) use case. Read more... (508 words, estimated 2:02 mins reading time)
Same as yesterday, the conference started with keynotes. The first one was by Carl Eschenbach, VMware Co-President of Customer Operations, followed by a motivational keynote by Bill Taylor, founding editor of Fast Company Magazine. As a technical professional, I always try my best to get more business insights and perspectives therefore I attend business related keynotes whenever possible. Read more... (675 words, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)
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