IBM Lotus Symphony Productivity Software Available On Credit Card-Sized, Keepod Devices . ARMONK, N.Y., PALTO ALTO, Calif., and MILAN – November 17, 2009 – IBM (NYSE: IBM), VMware (NYSE: VMW) and Keepod products family manufacturer NSEC, today announced that they have partnered to offer IBM's Lotus Symphony productivity software suite on Keepod devices for the first time. IBM's Lotus Symphony software suite helps users create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Based on an open, secure platform, the intuitive business productivity offering is easy-to-use and free of charge. With today's news, for the first time, users can access the information they need anytime,...

Palo Alto, Calif., November 17, 2009— VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter to the cloud, today announced that Tod Nielsen, chief operating officer of VMware, will present at the Credit Suisse First Boston Technology Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona on December 3, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. MT/ 9:00 a.m. PT. A live webcast will be available on the Investor Relations page at http://ir.vmware.com. The replay of the webcast will be available for one month. About VMware VMware delivers solutions for business infrastructure virtualization that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. With...

Middleware and Application ISVs Can Now Use the VMware Ready™ Logo to Drive New Sales by Assuring Customers that their Applications are Optimized for VMware vSphere™ . PALO ALTO, Calif. – November 16, 2009 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced an important enhancement to its VMware Ready™ program, expanding the program to allow middleware and application software to qualify for the VMware Ready logo. The logo simplifies the purchase and deployment process for customers and prospects by signifying that qualified applications deliver outstanding performance and reliability when...

It was a normal week again. No exciting announcements just business as usual. Luckily there are always bloggers who publish articles with refreshing views, new technical details or old technical details overhauled. It wasn't difficult to pick this weeks top-5, each article I selected stands out for a specific reason, read them and you know what I mean:

• Frank Denneman - NFS and IP-HASH loadbalancing
  The result of this calculation is 1 (one) The VMkernel chooses the second uplink because it has the same binary representation of the Hash. Hereby balancing outbound NFS traffic across the two uplinks. Using IP-Hash to load-balance is a excellent choice, but you do need to fulfill certain technical requirements to get it supported by VMware and plan your IP-address scheme accordingly to get the most out of this load-balancing Policy.
• Steve Chambers - The end is nigh for Protocol Passionistas
  In the IT world you meet professionals (small p) who have grasped hold of technologies and defend them like their (professional) life depended on it. You don’t have to look far for this in virtualization with VDI desktop protocols (ICA vs. RDP vs. PCoIP etc) or storage protocols (NFS vs. iSCSI vs. FC). Just walk around any data center with one of these professionals and ask them “Why did you choose ” and it’s like you are asking why they chose their wife, like there’s some kind of inferred criticism, like questions and inquisitiveness are bad. Why is this? When the defensive attitude is related to protocols, I negatively refer to these professionals as Protocol Passionistas.
• Jason Boche - Tame Electrical and Heating Costs with CPU Power Management
  A casual Twitter tweet about my power savings through the use of VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) found its way to VMware Senior Product Manager for DPM, Ulana Legedza, and Andrei Dorofeev. Ulana was interested in learning more about my situation. I explained how VMware DPM had evaluated workloads between two clustered vSphere hosts in my home lab, and proceeded to shut down one of the hosts for most of the month of October, saving me more than $50 on my energy bill. Ulana and Andrei took the conversation to the next level and asked me if I was using vSphere’s Advanced CPU Power Management feature (See vSphere Resource Management Guide page 22). I was not, in fact I was unaware of its existence. Power Management is a new feature in ESX(i)4 available to processors supporting Enhanced Intel SpeedStep or Enhanced AMD PowerNow! power management technologies.
• Maish Saidel-Keesing - Patching your ESXi Host – Without vCenter
  VMware Update Manager is the Enterprise tool for Patching your ESX Hosts and for some also the tool used to patch your Windows / Linux Guests as well. This is all fine and dandy, but what is you do not have all of your ESXi hosts connected to your vCenter? Why would you so that – you may ask? Well in my environment, we have several labs that are running their Environment on a ESXi Whitebox,with the free ESXi License.
  
• Simon Long - Testing Network throughput between VMware ESX Hosts
  Have you ever wanted to check your Network throughput between your ESX Hosts? or even between VM’s? Well I needed to do this, and I couldn’t find any straight forward how-to’s. Having been pointed in the direction of a simple application called IPerf by Simon Gallagher I opted to use the Windows version. I’m not great with Linux, and as this is an open source application, documentation is a little hard to come by. So for me, this post is also to remind me how on IPerf works should i need to use it again.
  

Posted by Rick Jackson
Chief Marketing Officer

At VMworld 2009 this past September, we rolled out an updated VMware logo as a predecessor to our overall re-branding efforts.  The obvious change that most people saw and commented on was the absence of the “bug” – that part of the logo that is not our company name.  I.e., “Where did the boxes go?”

The original VMware logo that contained the boxes, formally referred to as the rings, first appeared in 1999, and symbolized multiple virtual machines.  It was simple, and yet incredibly descriptive.  The concept of isolated, multiple machines running in a single environment has had an obvious impact on the landscape of IT. 

Now, as we look at our current offerings based on vSphere, and our vision of delivering the infrastructure for unrestrained cloud computing, the image we are portraying to the market has evolved.  In fact, our message embodies the notion of freeing IT from the constraints of physical resources. Our vision talks to a common infrastructure fabric that spans IT, from the desktop, thru the datacenter, and to the cloud.  In short, our message and our vision transcend the idea of boundaries, and extend beyond the box. What was both a useful and familiar logo element for our first decade at VMware, now compromises the underlying tone of our message. In fact, every branding firm we engaged with during this process recommended this change, based purely on how we described VMware and what we do.

We also decided that the use of a bug with our logo was not necessary.  We believe that VMware, our valued and respected company name, stands on its own. Making a change of this nature is something that deserves considerable contemplation and consideration. But in the end, we felt it was the right thing to do. It is a recognition of the evolving value that VMware continues to bring to the market.  And it is now up to us to illustrate the transformative value that VMware represents, in everything we do.  I.e., manage our brand.

Posted by Rick Jackson
Chief Marketing Officer

VMware has now passed the decade mark, and created what is arguably one of the most important brands in software.  In this case, I am simply referring to the name of our company as the brand.  It is incredible how well recognized we are amongst our primary target buyer – the IT audience. 

As we look forward to what we want to accomplish in the next decade, we decided that it was time to pump up the whole essence of the VMware brand.  And in this case, I am referring to the brand identity – the collection of attributes and image that our overall brand experience delivers to our target audiences.  Without going into the science of brand, of which there is plenty of expert and scientific research, I’d like to reflect one simple, country boy view.  (For the record, I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, thus the “country boy” reference.  Having spent most of my life in CA, I may or may not be entitled to this reference!)

Our approach to brand is holistic, encompassing the image, voice and tone of VMware, all wrapped around a set of core messages that set up our value proposition.  Thus our starting point was one of energy… “Energize the business through IT, while saving energy – financial, human, and the earth’s.”  (See my blog on “Energize and Save – Standing Out in a Crowd”.)

Before

With that core message defined, we needed the other elements – image and tone – to reflect that message.  Consistency is key.  It all has to re-enforce what we want to get across, and not compromise the essence of who we are, and how we best present ourselves.  This is why we are excited to bring an updated look, tone, and message to market in a cohesive package.

The first thing you’ll notice is that our color palette is considerably more vibrant. We specifically chose a wide range of cool to warm colors in tones that complement each other, in order to give us the flexibility to be creative in our execution. But the differentiating image that manifests itself throughout our creative execution is the use of the color prisms.  A simple idea manifested through our creative execution – VMware solutions simplify the underlying complexity.  For example, in some of our treatments you’ll see a reveal – a corner of a piece pealed back to show the underlying complexity illustrated as a grid of color prisms.  In other words, the surface is simple and clear, but the underlying infrastructure is complex and diverse.

After

Brighter, bolder, more energetic.  That was the goal of the image redesign.  With our rapid growth and expansion, it has been difficult in the past to manage a consistent brand.  But now we are entering a stage of our company lifecycle where increasing the depth of relationship with our customers, partners, and broader ecosystem is critical to our ongoing success.  Where maintaining leadership visibility across multiple audiences will keep us in a position of strength.  This evolution dictates that we become more aware and protective of our complete brand, and thus the perception of VMware everywhere.

VMware Leverages VMware vSphere™ Platform, New PCoIP Protocol and Rich Partner Ecosystem to Deliver Complete Desktop as a Managed Service Solution. PALO ALTO, Calif., November 9, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced VMware View™ 4, enabling rapid adoption of virtualized desktops and establishing a desktop as a managed service model. VMware View™ 4 is the industry’s only purpose-built desktop virtualization solution, setting a new quality, cost and scale standard for desktop virtualization environments. Built on VMware vSphere™, the industry’s leading virtualization platform,...

DALLAS and PALO ALTO, Calif., November 9, 2009 – Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (NYSE: ACS) will be providing a more cost-effective way to deliver desktop managed services for its clients through a partnership with VMware (NYSE: VMW). As part of the agreement, ACS will now standardize the deployment of VMware View™, the industry-leading enterprise desktop virtualization solution, at all of its customer datacenters around the world in order to help customers avoid the capital costs, time and IT resources required to build a virtual desktop solution from scratch. Desktop virtualization is an emerging trend in the IT marketplace and essentially allows you to run several “virtual”...

Purpose-built Display Protocol Enables Customers to Deploy Rich Functionality with Support from Broad Range of Third-party Solutions. PALO ALTO, Calif., November 9, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced broad ecosystem support of the Teradici PC-over-IP® (PCoIP®) protocol delivered in VMware View™ 4, also announced today (see news release, “VMware Enables Rapid Adoption of Desktop Virtualization by Driving New Quality, Cost and Scalability Standards with VMware View ™ 4”). VMware View 4 is the industry’s only purpose-built desktop virtualization solution, setting a new...

AMD“Desktop virtualization is a critical gateway between the server and client, enabling dynamic user experiences by taking advantage of advanced multi-core processors,” said Margaret Lewis, director, commercial software, AMD “VMware has delivered a great managed desktop virtualization package with VMware View™ 4, and collaborated with AMD during its development to help ensure that the end user can enjoy a superior experience on systems powered by AMD technology.” Cisco“Many of our customers are looking to extend the power of virtualization beyond the datacenter to the desktop. Cisco is working closely with key desktop virtualization solutions vendors, like VMware, to help deliver...

Posted by Rick Jackson
Chief Marketing Officer

When a company grows as rapidly as VMware has, you know there is real value being delivered to customers.  One of the challenges we faced at VMware was how best to articulate our core value proposition, when there were just so many great things to talk about.  This was a classic exercise in defining the Point That Matters, the core reason why your customers buy from you.  (The Point That Matters is a phrase I borrow from Zoom Marketing, our trusted partner during this process.)

This exercise was a combination of examining our own internal view of our value proposition, compared to an external view shared by our customers, partners, and industry analysts, all of which were quite familiar with VMware and its solutions.  Through this exercise, we heard some not so surprising things, but with a few twists that really made us think about our positioning. 

For example, most people immediately think of cost savings as the primary benefit of virtualization.  While cost savings is definitely a factor in driving organizations to initiate a virtualization journey, it was not the pinnacle of value that was obtained.  In fact, those customers that had pursued more aggressive virtualization adoption were most excited by the achievement of flexibility within their IT environments, leading to significantly reduced management time, and dramatic improvements in their responsiveness to business.  In short, they were achieving IT agility, and in turn helping fuel business agility. 

When asked to rank statements related to our value proposition, both customers and prospects believed that the core value proposition was around the duality of achieving a dynamic, and flexible IT environment, while at the same time reducing costs.  This was something they believed to be unique to VMware.  Most importantly, they believed that this was the correct order as well – flexibility over cost savings.  Frankly, we knew this was a benefit, but have traditionally always led with our cost savings message. 

The other important thing we heard is how achieving flexibility and agility within IT really does put IT in a position to better serve the business – to respond to change and opportunity that can fuel growth.  In essence, they were better positioned to be a strategic partner to the business. 

The problem now was how to articulate a core set of messages around this point that matters, that doesn’t sound like every other IT vendor.  Take a quick browse around some websites, and you’ll find a common theme – everyone seems to promise dynamic, flexible, adaptive, on-demand, solutions for IT.  Hmmm. 

One of the things that stood out to Zoom Marketing during this process was how energetic VMware’s employees, customers and partners were.  During interviews that should typically last 30 minutes, our ecosystem wanted to keep on talking, typically an hour or more.  There was true excitement about the value they were seeing, and in the promise of VMware’s vision for bridging existing IT environments into the era of cloud computing.  This gave us an idea, a way to encapsulate the value proposition of our solutions, with the value that an agile IT environment provides to the business:

Energize the business through IT, while saving energy – financial, human and the earth’s.

The whole point of IT is to fuel the business.  So the whole point of achieving a more dynamic and flexible IT infrastructure is to be more adept at fueling that business, or as we like to say, energizing the business.  But the duality of our core value proposition cannot be ignored.  Our customers talk about real savings, in 3 categories:

• Optimizing Financial Energy – doing more with less.  Significant capex savings. Greater efficiencies in server, storage and networking. Saving financial resources to apply to the needs of the business.

• Shifting Human Energy – shift from serving hardware, to serving the business.  Dramatic reduction in manual tasks, and management time.  Simplified operations, supplemented with automation.

• Saving Earth’s Energy – using less, and using it more wisely.  Doing their part to reduce energy consumption and their respective carbon footprint.

The words are ours, the sentiment belongs to our customers.  What a great opportunity to learn from them, and be in a position to echo their sentiment.

It was an exciting week this week. For some the VCE announcement was not a real surprise for many it seemed to be. Like always some were skeptical and others were enthusiastic about this new initiative. The first post on this Top 5 covers every single aspect, keep in mind that Chad is an EMC employee. I can also recommend the articles by Chuck Hollis on this topic but as he is not part of PlanetV12n he did not make the top 5:

• Chad Sakac - VCE Coverage: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3, Post 4, Post 5, Post 6
  Let’s focus on the “Vblock” management layer. To restate the challenge – the goal is to have a thing that makes utility-like management of a Vblock (or more importantly a series of them), including server + LAN/SAN network (UCS manager does this well for one UCS system) + storage itself. As with all things in the VMware, Cisco, EMC consortium, we know customers need choice – and any one element is replaceable. The value proposition is that the things we build are so tightly focused, so tightly integrated, that if you are looking at something like this – the integration value is so high it’s nearly irresistible.
• Alan Renouf - Virtu-Al VESI & PowerGUI PowerPack & vCheck v3
  I have been teasing people on twitter for a week or so now and have just uploaded my PowerPack to the PowerGUI site, you can download it here. This is a first attempt at providing most of my scripts in one PowerPack and adding to the already great management that VESI and PowerGUI give you.
• Andre Leibovic - Your Organization’s Desktop Virtualization Project – Part 1 & Part 2
  I would anticipate that when your CAPEX is calculated for the next 5 years after the adoption of desktop virtualization your CIO and CEO will not be very impressed only with the numbers, especially if you have incorporated acquisition of Thin Clients to your CAPEX. If you are looking for a justification to adopt desktop virtualization you should focus on your OPEX and cost savings coming from Lower Operating Cost/TCO, Power and Cooling Energy Savings and increased seat utilization, when applicable.
• Mike Laverick - Virtual Compute Environment - VMware, Cisco and EMC Coalition
  So here’s my attempt. It seems the case that whether you like or not - we are creeping steadily away from a best-of-breeds approach to building out datacenters. Everyone yaks endless about the commoditization of IT - and it’s happening right before our eyes. Each of the major OEMs - HP, IBM, Dell have been for sometime junking their valued partner relationships in effort to seal their customers into a one-stop solution. Of course, IBM are probably the company that’s most famous/notorious for this approach. In recent years, HP have been steadily improving their HP ProCurve stuff to the degree that they no longer feel the need to promote/resell Cisco switching gear. To me the VCE announcement amounts to 4th OEM provider coming along to this party. So in short while you will be able to CHOOSE which OEM to shackle yourself too. This choice will be limited to the “Gang of Four”.
• Duncan Epping - How to avoid HA slot sizing issues with reservations
  When you select a specific percentage that percentage of the total amount of resources will stay unused for HA purposes. First of all VMware HA will add up all available resources to see how much it has available. Then VMware HA will calculate how much resources are currently consumed by adding up all reservations of both memory and cpu for powered on virtual machines. For those machine that do not have a reservation a default of 256Mhz will be used for CPU and a default of 0MB+memory overhead will be used for Memory.

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D;

This week HP introduced their Converged Infrastructure Architecture, which is appropriately described as “a blueprint for chief information officers to create elasticity in their technology environments.” This blueprint unlocks currently siloed datacenter resources (including compute, storage and network components) and, with the help of virtualization, integrates them into a pool of very fluid resources that can be smartly and safely allocated to the applications running on top.

Put another way, HP has unveiled a template that helps customers easily build what many are now calling a “private cloud.” The general idea of a private cloud is to bring many of the good traits associated with today’s public cloud vendors (e.g. elasticity, efficiency, self-service, and usage-based resource charges) to a company-owned and operated datacenter—where IT is often more comfortable with their ability to meet performance, availability, and compliance requirements.

VMware vSphere™ was explicitly designed for building the private cloud, and HP BladeSystem Matrix’s out-of-box experience and well-integrated management will help customers more quickly and more easily realize the full capabilities of VMware vSphere. What’s more, even as customers reap the benefits of their private cloud, they’re also laying the foundation to leveraging public cloud resources. Virtual machines are well-encapsulated and largely location independent. Working with HP, we can offer tools and a complete portfolio of services that help customers continue to maintain the control and security they have in their datacenters as they begin to leverage resources in the public cloud. The resulting “hybrid” cloud is depicted below.

Infrastructure and application management in this new world is incredibly important, too, and HP’s capabilities integrate quite well with VMware vCenter™ to push the envelope on this front. I particularly like the integration work HP has done to bring their Insight software capabilities into VMware vCenter. You have to register to see it, but there’s a great demonstration of this at minute 62 of the VMworld 2009 general session.

I’ll stop here in the interest of keeping this blog short, but I did just want to highlight again the excitement I have over holistic solutions built for the fully virtualized datacenter that help enable the promise of the private cloud.  If you would like to see and hear a lot more about VMware and HP’s Converged Infrastructure, be sure to also check out the video from Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s VP of Server Product Marketing.

Unprecedented Collaboration Heralds Business-Ready IT Infrastructure Packages and Single Point of Contact for Design, Service and Support Cisco-EMC Solutions Joint Venture Also Established to Help Enable Customer Adoption. SAN JOSE, California – Nov. 3, 2009 – Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, today introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, an unprecedented collaboration of three information technology (IT) industry leaders. The coalition has been created to accelerate customers’ ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to...

SAP Managed Services, SAP’s Internal IT Infrastructure Provider, Deploys VMware Virtualization Pervasively Across its Datacenter, Providing a Scalable, High-performance Computing Platform. PALO ALTO, Calif., November 2, 2009 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that SAP Managed Services, SAP AG’s internal IT infrastructure provider, has deployed the VMware platform pervasively across its IT environment as the main virtualization platform for agile and adaptable implementations of SAP® solutions. SAP Managed Services provides virtualized infrastructure solutions to internal SAP...

This was probably one of the toughest Top-5's to write as I had the week off this week. I basically had to catch-up with a whole week of Planet V12n. One of the most annoying things about it is that half of the blogs on PlanetV12n enabled "content summary only". Yes I know you will have a couple of extra visits, but isn't blogging about getting people to read your content instead of being "numbers"(visits) focused? Now that I got that off my chest lets move on to what this article is about. It's about the 5 top articles this week:

• Vaugn Stewart - VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 1 – The Basics & VCE-101 Thin Provisioning Part 2 – Going Beyond
  Like the thick format, thin VMDKs are not formatted at the time of deployment. This also means that data that needs to be written must pause while the blocks required to store the data are formatted. The formatting operation only occurs on demand at anytime an area of the virtual disk, which has never been written to, is required to store data.
• Chad Sakac - Solid State Disk will change the storage world…
  But surely, if you were looking for performance, you wouldn’t use the SATA disk, right? You would probably use a 15K RPM FC disk. Those cost about $1000. They do about 200 random write IOPs. So, you would need 20 of them to do what that $115 SSD could do. That’s 0.2 IOps per dollar – or 170x more expensive than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis. Oh, you think SAS 15K drives are a better deal? They are – than FC disks. A 15K SAS disk on Pricewatch costs about $210, and they also do about 200 IOps. that’s 0.95 IOps per dollar – or 37x more expense than the SSD on a IOps/$ basis.
• Luc Dekens - dvSwitch scripting – Part 4 – NIC teaming
  The double Service Consoles and vmKernel connection might look confusing at first. But when you select one these connections, the vSphere client will show you to which uplink a specific connection is going. To increase the availability of the dvSwitch, I will show how to add two pNics and how to activate and configure NIC Teaming. When I created the dvSwitch I configured it for two uplink ports (per host). Since I’m adding two pNics, I will first have to change the maximum number of dvUplink ports.
• Gabrie van Zanten - Design tips for VMware vSphere 4
  Recently at the Belgium VMUG I gave a presentation in which I covered some design tips for VMware vSphere 4. I talked about some business decisions that, how boring they may seem, are crucial for your design. I covered some security requirements you should check with the security department of the organisation and of course advised good capacity planning which also is very important for your design. What the average geek found most interesting where topics like: “What size of ESX host will you buy?”, “How to run vCenter in a VM”, “VMFS best practises”, “Understanding queue depth and lun size” and more….
• Simon Gallagher - iSCSI LUN is very slow/no longer visible from vSphere host
  Due to too many SCSI reservation conflicts, so hopefully it wasn’t looking like corruption but a locked-out disk – a quick Google turned up this KB article – which reminded me that SATA disks can only do so much :) Multiple reboots of hosts and the OpenFiler hadn’t cleared this situation – so I had to use vmkfstools to reset the locks and get my LUN back, these are the steps I took.. You need to find the disk ID to pass to the vmkfstools –L targetreset command, to do this from the command line look under /vmfs/devices/disks