My best session was that by Ruben Spruijt for a second day, this time Ruben was joined by Login VSI, they jointly contribute to the site and whitepapers of Project VRC. They were presenting the initial findings of a year long piece of work to understand the impact of various anti virus software on VDI and SBC saturation. If you haven’t check out project VRC I highly recommend you do, those that have know that the analysis so far has concentrated on the saturation point of a HP DL360 G6 with various VDI and SBC workloads. The initial findings that were presented cover Trend, McAfee, Symantec and Microsoft Forefront, one of the biggest findings was the impact of not completing a full scan prior to rolling out your VDI desktops from the golden image, without this initial scan the saturation point of the server was near instant. The surprising winner at this time appears to be Microsoft Forefront with the least impact on the saturation point. Many including the presenters pointed out however this maybe inline with the features offered from the products and no comparison of features was carried out. They are currently completing this analysis and you should see the white paper on their site soon.

Another session I enjoyed was that of Nutanix, who were launching in EMEA today, as mentioned yesterday Nutanix is a building block approach to delivering compute and storage, the CEO Dheeray Pandey was presenting around the subject of big data and how their product takes from the learning’s of Google Approach by adding storage locally alongside compute. Their technology uses a number of new technologies to ensure the storage is highly available (Appearing as a NAS to vSphere) but ensuring the storage is kept local to the VM where possible. They do this not in a traditional VSA way but by using their controller VM on each host to directly interact with the local, Fusion IO, SSD and SATA storage using RDM’s and Direct Path IO. They went on to talk about their unique distributed metadata service medusa and distributed disk maintenance service curator to help allow them to scale but keep availability and performance at the forefront of the solution. I was also lucky enough to have a hands on demo with Rob Tribe the new Regional SE Manager EMEA , I was pleased to see that not only is Nutanics addressing a need particularly for VDI I have seen for some time but they are doing it with a very simple user interface. Watch my blog for a dedicated post on this subject as I dig further and get access to their lab.

The day was rounded off with Brian Madden thanking the attendees announcing that they were looking into doing a BriForum in Australia in November (To the surprise of Gabe and the TechTarget staff, as I understand its only in the investigation phase at present) A large number of attendees then went over to the Nutanix launch party at The Grand Union Bar where announcement’s were met with beer and food. It was good to catch up with fellow vExperts Darren Woollard And Greg Robertson as well as chatting with Brian Madden about everything other than work including Gin and Curry amongst other things.

All in all I have had a very good couple of days, picked up some good tips, made some good contacts and caught up with some familiar faces, I’m looking forward to watching the sessions I was unable to attend. All I would hope for the next year is that the vendor sessions could be tweaked, I know these guys sponsored the event but a number of the vendor sponsored sessions were over an hour of a sales presentation rather than the subject that was in the show guides.

If you get the chance to go there is another BriForum in July in Chicago and Brian suggested that they would be back in London again next year.

Resources

www.briforum.com

www.nutanix.com

www.projectvrc.com

The morning started off after registration with a welcome from Brian Madden himself, Brian reminisced over previous BriForum’s remembering the first that took place in a cinema with many members of his family including his Mum helping with the running, back in those days BriForum was all about Terminal Services, todays focus is desktop virtualisation.

Brian covered how many people including himself spent many years trying to loose the responsibility of the “desktop” and spoke about the great pleasure he had when he gained the key to the datacenter and lost the responsibility of the desktops. Today virtualisation is the sexy bit of desktop virtualisation.

Brian spoke about what the desktop actually was with many people referring to the desktop as the white / black / grey box in front of the user or others the background and icons on the screen, the truth is the desktop hasn’t changed much over the last 10 years, we’re all still staring at the same background with icons, the only difference is today we are trying to wedge Windows onto any device possible whether it is really suitable or not.

Consumerization of IT was then discussed or as Brian likes to call it FUIT, the fact that IT needs to ensure what they are delivering to there end users is a good solution or the end user will soon end up going to the App Store and downloading a touch friendly equivalent. The example that was used was presenting Word to a user on an iPad via VDI, whilst it maybe used for the first week, the user will soon get fed up of not having a mouse, they will search for Word in the App Store download docs to go, soon realise they couldn’t save their apps to their network drive and be using dropbox. We are finally getting to a position where we can have a hybrid outlook to our applications allowing our user to use a mixture or native and legacy applications using the technologies available to us, one example of this would be VMware’s Project Horizon.

Brian went on to discuss the important elements of the desktop, these where summed up under 6 headings, Device HW Interface, The UI, App Runtime, App Launcher. Provisioning Target, App Integration, Security Container, Configuration Container.

Following the welcome the breakout sessions began, my favourite sessions throughout the day were both of the sessions by Ruben Spruijt @rspruijt CTO at PQR, the first was The VDI Smackdown covering many aspects (the bad and ugly) of VDI with common points of failure, the second being Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 demos, Ruben was a great presenter with a lot of passion around his subjects. I highly recommend you read some of his white papers on the project VRC website http://www.projectvrc.com. I also enjoyed the AppSense session where the demonstrated a number of products that they had available for free, in the works or currently in beta these included Data Locker a free DropBox encryption tool, DataNow a corporate DropBox replacement and Project Acorn User (Persona) virtualisation solution for the Mac, I will cover these products in more detail in a later blog post.

In the main hall there were a number of vendors, the main vendor of interest to me was Nutanix who were launching their EMEA team at BriFroum, Nutanix make a storage and compute based product encapsulating both technologies into a build block approach. Nutanix utilise Fusion IO as well as SSD’s and Spinning Disks in their nodes to build a solution that can be quickly and easily scaled for VDI solutions amongst other workloads. I also enjoyed catching up with Atlantis Computing who make an IO accelerator and digging into Liquidware Lab Stratusphere UX for VDI user experience monitoring.

It’s been a very long day for me 5.30am 09.30pm and I will be heading back down to London again for 8am tomorrow, but it has defiantly been a worthwhile visit. I hope to follow up on a lot of the elements learnt at Briforum in more detail over the coming weeks.

esxcli swisics nic remove –n vmk3 –d vmhba43

We received the following error

Errors: Failed to Remove NIC

A quick search found that a couple of people had seen this error and a reboot had resolved the problem, http://communities.vmware.com/thread/257240

Over the last year VMware have been teasing us with information on their continued vision for End User Computing and todays announcements start bringing those visions to reality.

VMware View 5.1

One of the most exciting new features for me in this new release is the VMware View Storage Accelerator, the storage requirements for View and any type of VDI can be an issue for any deployment but probably most relevantly for SMB’s. With the Storage Accelerator up to 2GB of RAM in each of your VDI hosts is used to accelerate the most commonly used storage blocks, meaning there can be up to a massive 80% reduction in peaks IOPS required from the storage device. 

I can’t wait to see this live in some of my customers environments to see what reductions in IO we see after we enable storage acceleration.

This isn’t the only new feature, USB support has been greatly enhanced, RADIUS is supported for greater second form factor authentication support and a number of other features have been enhanced or introduced to further allow greater scale with View, these include user interface response times, allowing View Composer to be installed on a separate server to the vCenter and a further optimised PCoIP protocol.

VMware Horizon Application Manager 1.5

For the first time VMware Horizon Application Manger is available internationally and not just in the US and it  can now be installed on premise with a simple new virtual appliance format. For me this is one of the products I have been waiting for, I think the enterprise application store is going to be an important change in the way we are delivering applications to our end users and Horizon answers two of the most common ways I see applications being consumed moving forward. Horizon Application Manager 1.5 not only allows us to distribute ThinApps to our users but also allows us to manage the provisioning and authentication of cloud based applications that we are starting to see increasingly more common within everyday life as well as within the enterprise. 

I had a chance to play with distributing ThinApps via Horizon Application Manager at VMworld last year and I was very impressed, I have been waiting for a VMware mechanism to distribute ThinApps for some time, for me distributing them via View has never gelled well with me, but the way Horizon Application Manager allows you to do it in the style of an Enterprise Application store I think works really well. At present I am waiting for more information on licensing for this, I understand it is going to ship with ThinApp licences as standard, I want to understand how existing ThinApp customers would be able to purchase App Manager without having to buy more licenses.

VMware vCenter Operations Manager for View

I am a big fan of VMware vCenter Operations Manager and I am pleased to see that a VDI specific version is now being released, which is specifically geared around the VDI workloads and includes elements like PCoIP bandwidth utilisation. This is probably the product I have had the least amount of exposure to thus far as I haven’t been part of the beta for this product, for this reason I will reserve judgement till later. Having said that I think when monitoring end user workloads their are a number of metrics that you need to know below the infrastructure layer itself, such as logon times and application load times, these tend to be the elements that users will notice the most, I also want to be alerted to crashing applications etc, I have had good experience with products like LiquidWare Labs Stratusphere UX for these reasons. It will be interesting to see how vCenter Operations Manager for View compares to their product.

VMware Project Octopus Beta

I have been a big user of Dropbox for a long time now so fully understand the passion end users have for wanting to use this in their work lives as well as personal lives, but in my position as a consultant I can also fully understand the risks to a business and the difficulties an IT manager has over being able to administer, manage and police such an application in the workplace. When I heard about Project Octopus last year I really wanted to get my hands on it and see how good it was! Project Octopus is exactly what you would expect from a corporate DropBox alternative, it is an on premise, file sharing solutions with multiple end point device support. The IT department are in control of external sharing, file retention, versioning and quota’s via policies, the end users can store their files in their Octopus folder much like their DropBox folder, there is then a web interface, Windows and Mac clients and IOS and Android clients. I have been impressed with what I have seen so far from this product and I cant wait to see how it is developed before release. I would love granular controls to be able to manage the types of files being synced as I don’t want to be syncing my users personal MP3’s and Movie collection on my shared storage, the Octopus server is also a Linux virtual appliance so I need to understand backup and recovery of individual files a lot better moving forward. This is also a space that is starting to become very crowded very quickly with Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Google Drive and maybe more relevantly on premise solutions like RES Software’s HyperDrive and Citrix’s Sharefile, so it is going to be interesting to see who comes out on top, if indeed Dropbox doesn’t have something up their sleeves to meet these corporate requirements.

Release Dates and More Information

VMware states that they expect these products will be available in the 2nd quarter of 2012 so watch out for more information. VMware are also running an online conference covering the end user computing announcements tomorrow, to register please view their website here >> https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=450929&sessionid=1&key=66DC78E604772289A3EC818E9C7FD1E0&partnerref=W_EUC&sourcepage=register

To view the whole announcement visit VMware’s website here >> http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-euc-portfolio-05-02-12.html

View Composer agent initialization state error (-1): illegal state (waited 0 seconds)

If you see the above error check the view composer agent service has been installed within the image when you installed the agent, if you installed the view agent prior to VMware tools it is likely even though the install went through it didn’t actually install the agent service.

Failing that look at this kb article http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=2009713&sliceId=1&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&dialogID=296334822&stateId=1%200%20296342425

In the announcement above Dell gave some clues to their intentions for AppAssure with tight integration with the Dell storage portfolio to further assist with the fluid data vision.

Dell will extend the benefit of AppAssure across our enterprise solutions and services portfolio. Initially, it will be a software-only solution, and then over time we will offer additional data protection solutions tightly integrated in our Fluid Data architecture as we’ve done with our other acquired IP, including EqualLogic, Compellent and the Fluid File System. Customers will be able to manage data end-to-end, not in silos of servers and storage, or islands of sites.

Other than a base understanding of the AppAssure product I haven’t got any previous experience with using the product so I will leave those thoughts for another day, but you can see why Dell would want to have a backup product in the fold, the likes of HP, EMC and NetApp are all able to offer a backup product with their storage solutions and quite commonly I am asked what is the best way to backup VM’s from a replica or snapshot which isn’t easily done without a third party product at present.

However Dell have always been pretty good with their relationship with backup vendors particularly Symantec and increasingly Commvault, personally if it was Commvault that had been acquired I wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

Dell and Commvault

Dell and Symantec

My personal hope is that with the acquisition of AppAssure it doesn’t cause Dell to put their guard up against other backup vendors on the market, as a hardware vendor I believe it is important for them to be able to maintain the flexibility to allow end users to use their choice of backup products. I look forward into seeing how AppAssure is integrated into the storage family and also personally learning what AppAssure has to offer.

• Longevity – Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
• Length – It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
• Frequency – Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
• Quality – It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

Obviously I would ask everyone to vote for their favourite bloggers and of course if you follow my blog or listen to the Hands On Virtualization podcast I would appreciate your vote. Some of my favourite blogs that I will be voting for include Alan Renouf http://virtu-al.net and Jonathan Medd http://www.jonathanmedd.net/

To place your vote please visit vSphere-Land.com for the full information http://vsphere-land.com/news/voting-now-open-for-the-top-vmware-virtualization-blogs.html

Please note there is only 1 vote per IP address, if you start the survey you must finish or your IP is blocked.

The Thursday keynote was more visionary and looking back at how IT runs today and what we need to be focusing on moving forward. There were some great statistics coming out of the presentation such as those below.

Between the birth of the world and 2003, there were 5 exabytes of information created. Now that much information is generated in just 3 days. Eric Schmidt

In just 60 seconds

• 600+ New Videos are added to YouTube
• 168 Million Emails are Sent
• 1500+ New Blog Posts
• 320+ New Twitter Accounts

Stephen went on to talk about the challenges facing IT departments today including, billions of always connected end points, the consumerisation of corporate IT and the explosion of, going on to say IT is struggling to cope with today’s demands without even focusing on what tomorrow will bring.

Stephen went on to explain some of the ideas and strategies that Dell have used to tackle their own IT, we should all be looking to remove complexity.

“Hiding mess is never a good solution we should be looking for the source”

I really liked the idea of Dell’s Idea Storm website http://www.ideastorm.com that can be used to make suggestions for products and improvements to Dell, the IdeaStorm community can then vote on it and if popular enough and possible will be implemented by Dell.

Stephen went on to explain that IT departments should be looking into more than just the technology and focusing on the people and processes will help lead to success. The slide below gives an overview of where IT departments should be looking to concentrate today, empowering your end users, running IT more efficiently by shifting from maintaining to innovation and effectively managing your organisation by achieving strategic goals.

Stephen went on to explain how Dell is helping and guiding us with our IT missions in 2012 and onwards, first of all became Dell’s point of view on storage. By now we all know about Fluid by Design, but it is clear that this isn’t only want Dell Storage are doing today but what they are focusing their future on. We need to remove the boundaries from the storage and allow it to be ever flexible around the growing needs of storage for the IT industry.

The final slide made recommendations for the IT industry

• Standardise
• Optimise
• Focus on projects with high business value
• Spend on IT, but spend wisely
• Ensure IT is tightly aligned with business strategy

We moved on to a Q&A session from the audience

Finally summing up with a video recorded at the London Storage Forum, with many people in the audience appearing in, including fellow bloggers Hans and Bruno describing what Fluid means to them.

After the keynote, I joined an NDA session (Cant say anything about that!) and sat the Dell DX object storage Hands on Lab, this helped understand how it was administered but not really how it would be used by a business for me. I also sat the Compellent / vSphere integration hands on lab that was very good and gave me a good overview of the functionality available for VMware administrators when using Compellent.

Below is a photo of some of the hardware supporting the conference.

During lunch the solutions hall was open again, giving some of Dell’s partners the opportunity to speak to Dell’s customers and partners about their offerings. During lunch Emulex gave a talk on DCB which was hard work for the poor guy on stage, with everyone eating lunch and talking he managed to get their attention by throwing model aeroplanes at them! I found the contents of the presentation really interesting as DCB is something I wish to learn more about and we will be connecting with Emulex to find out more in the near future.

My final task of the day was to record some interviews for the HandsOnVirtualization.com podcast (Yes the website is still down, never user NetPivotal.com for your hosting, it should be online with a new host soon!) I interviewed Hans De Leenheer fellow blogger regarding his thoughts about the conference, Nick Dyer of Xsigo regarding their product, Andrew Lawrence of Commvault regarding their product and maybe most excitingly Brett Roscoe (General Manager and Executive Director, PowerVault & Data Management Solution) regarding the announcement regarding the DR4000 and about object storage. I’m hoping to get these interview edited asap and online as soon as I can.

The picture above is taken in the solutions hall with Commvault’s Andrew Lawrence talking to a crowd of attendees. I have known Andrew for a number of years and he actually introduced me to EqualLogic as my first EqualLogic SE.

Conslusions regarding the conference

It’s been a busy few days and a lot of information has been packed into those days, for me the standout element to take away from this event was the access to the executives at Dell, I have never attended a conference before where the executives were wandering around during the day and parties in the evening, willing to talk to anyone that was attending. I feel by being able to speak to these people I have learnt things I would never be able to learn any other way and I felt that my opinions and ideas may get taken away back to the states and in some small way maybe able to influence something Dell is working on.

The sessions covered a great amount of content and I hope they are available online after the event for me to review as I didn’t manage to attend as many as I would like. Maybe in the future their maybe an opportunity for community members and regional Dell employees to submit sessions as it would be good to hear a content from a wider audience.

The Hands on Labs were good, they we no where near as busy as the VMworld hands on labs and I would love to have some deeper content in the hands on labs in the future, configuring and replicating a Compellent maybe, command line, using Powershell etc, although I understand these maybe not easy to put together with the nature of the products. I would love to see EqualLogic and Compellent VSA’s be made available to the community for these kind of deeper dive subjects, not only would they help educate a wider community about Dell’s products like EMC do with their VSA but it would help Dell get the word out about their products.

I found the conference extremely useful overall and I am already looking forward to attending the next one.

Today was the first day of the main event at Dell Storage Forum 2012 in London, the day started off with Darren Thomas (Vice President and General Manager Dell Storage) on stage for the keynote.

Darren Thomas (Vice President and General Manager Dell Storage) spoke about Dell’s products today and their vision which are all part of Dell’s Fluid by Design phrase, the slide below explains some of what Fluid by Design means to Dell. Darren talked about there being a 4 X difference between the different types of drives available today with Cost vs Performance vs Capacity and utilising automatic tiering is key to being smarter with your storage. Darren spoke about the long term goal would be to allow customers to choose which parts of the Dell stack they want where and that they are investigating whether being able to replicate from an EqualLogic at a branch office to a Compellent in a head office for example would make technical and financial sense.

A key part of Dell’s strategy includes storage for backup which brought us nicely to some of Dell’s announcements for today, The first announcement was the new Dell DR4000 a NFS based de-duplicated backup to disk device, with hardware based on the Dell R710 and intelligence from the Ocarina acquisition Dell are offering functionality today alongside Comvault and Symantec, their will be 3 versions of the device with 40TB, 81TB or 135TB effective storage capacities after reduplication.

One of the biggest announcement was probably Compellet storage centre 6, the major announcement was that release is now 64bit, setting the foundations for future enhancements with more memory support. Storage Center 6 has tighter integration with VMware, making it onto the VMware HCL with VAAI support, this update is field upgradable on Series 40 onwards SANs.

The VMware specific announcements were as follow (From the Press Release)

• Dell Compellent VMware vSphere™ Storage APIs for Array Integration offers full copy offload and hardware-assisted locking features that extend Compellent’s existing support for block zeroing. These features speed deployment of virtual machines up to 40 percent faster*, free up network and hosting resources and improve storage performance for data volumes shared by multiple virtual machines.
• Dell Compellent Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for Site Recovery Manager 5 is available for download with support for new SRM 5 features such as automated failback from a disaster and new work flows for planned migration and downtime. Dell Compellent continues its OEM relationship with VMware for SRM 5, allowing all disaster recovery hardware and software support to be provided by the Dell Compellent Copilot support organisation.
• Dell Compellent vSphere 5 Client Plug-In and Enterprise Manager-vSphere 5 Integration allows VMware software users to efficiently manage Compellent virtualized pools of storage resources from either the VMware vSphere 5 or Compellent Enterprise Manager console, giving the ability to reduce administration time.

The third announcement was a new Sharepoint Infrastructure Optimisation Solution featuring the DX range of storage.

The final announcements were around Expanded Support for Dell Force10, Dell PowerConnect and Brocade Storage Networking Solutions.  Darren Thomas was followed on stage by Dell Compellents Phil Soran. Phil talked around Dell adoption of Co-Pilot setting it as the foundation for Dell support and reiterating the strong position Dell are now in with their storage division after acquiring 2 of the strongest players in the market with EqualLogic and Compellent.

Altogether it was a good keynote, there weren’t any really ground breaking announcements but what was discussed and announced was a good strong positive message. I was lucky enough to be part of the bloggers briefing last night, we were joined in the bloggers briefing with Travis Vigil Executive Director Product Management EqualLogic, Pete Korce General Manager (EqualLogic and Exanet), Bob Fine Director Product Marketing Compellent, Neil Stobart Compellent Technical Director Europe (Currently migrating into a new role). We got to sit down and discuss these announcements and Dell’s vision moving forward, the message is there is a lot more integration moving forward not only between products but in the ways the departments in Dell interact with each other to share the intelligence and vision.

My day continued by attending a couple of sessions the first was the Top 10 support issues and how to resolve them session with Darren Miller and @jeff_junker, this was useful session covering the 10 most common support issues, but we also had some time to ask our own questions and their was some good feedback. Laz Vekiarides executive director of software engineering for EqualLogic joined us in this session and was also able to offer some of his insights.

After the session I went and sat a hands on lab one of two I sat today, my first was the Dell Compellent Storage Hands on Lab, this covered the basics of creating a volume, configuring snapshoting (Replays) and recovering data from a snapshot (Replay), it was good to refresh my mind on these basic as I haven’t had a chance to play with a Compellent recently.

My second lab of the day was the EqualLogic SAN HQ Troubleshooting Examples lab, this was a really insightful lab showing what to look out for in SAN HQ when troubleshooting issues. This made me think how much I would like to see Powershell integration with SAN HQ as it would be really cool to write some scripts to query this data for automated health checks.

The rest of my day was spent catching up with people I have known for a while from Dell, Ex Dell and others in the industry and also meeting new and interesting people. What I have found most valuable from the conference so far is how open and willing the Dell Execs are to sit and chat, Laz Vekiarides (Executive Director of Software Engineering for EqualLogic) sat in the blogger lounge for well over an hour, chatting to us about anything and everything, there are not many other conferences or opportunities to have that kind of access to the execs. Tonight we are off to the tower of london for the Fluid Foundation Celebration watch out for some photos later.