The x64 Push Continues with vSphere 4.1

A lot of chatter on vSphere 4.1 is flying through the blogosphere, and rightfully so. Aside from running lots of features into the enterprise-class virtualization suite, a number of requirement changes are being rolled in as well.

When VMware released vSphere, we saw for the first time that ESX and ESXi had hard requirements for x64 processors. It was really to be expected, as enterprise virtualization would not be well served on equipment that cannot support x64 at this time. I encourage each administrator to read through the vSphere Compatibility Matrix (PDF here) as well as the Hardware Compatibility Guide.

Read the entire post at the Everyday Virtualization blog online at Virtualization Review.

Software maintenance: One, two or three years?

One of the fiscal duties of an infrastructure administrator is to ensure that software maintenance agreements are renewed and correct.

There is nothing more frustrating than having to come up with money that you were not expecting to spend. Software maintenance cost is one of those things that can rear its ugly head up and surprise you. One of the big questions administrators and decision makers need to ask is: “How long will we be using this software?” Chances are, the answer to this question just depends.

Read the entire post at TechRepublic.

Mini blades vs. full blades? Pros and Cons

There are a number of advantages to selecting blades for the server platform in the data center. Yet, there are many obstacles to fully realizing the benefits of this form factor. I first saw this form factor during the inaugural Gestalt IT Tech Field Day.

The blade server is great at face value in that there are additional management tools, a reduced space requirement and cost advantages. Many data centers can’t take advantage of blades due to the initial investment or the thought that the requirements would never populate the blades to the break-even cost point. Frequently, the break-even threshold is about 5 or 6 blades within a chassis.

Read the entire blog post at the Network Administrator on TechRepublic.

Looking back on last week’s Hitachi uVALUE, Tokyo and technology

Last week, I had the privilege to attend a special series of events in Tokyo on behalf of Hitachi and Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). There were two primary objectives: receive non-disclosure information about future material from HDS and to attend the Hitachi uVALUE convention celebrating Hitachi’s 100^th anniversary. Going into this event, I didn’t exactly know what to expect. I had a suspicion that due to the fact that a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that was in place, this would end up being materially different than traditional blogger events such as the Gestalt IT and HP events I have attended previously. Here is the group of bloggers, with the requisite modesty applied:

The Japan factor also indicated it would be different as well. The NDA aspect is really like the movie Fight Club, which has the following rules:

1. You don’t talk about fight club.
2. You don’t talk about fight club.

Before I go too far along, a reminder that this event is governed by my blogger disclosure. Our agenda was pretty straight forward, shown below:

Sunday: Travel to Japan, arriving Monday afternoon due to the length of the flight. We had a group dinner that night.

Tuesday: Visit HDS facilities in Japan for fight club (you know, the NDA stuff).

Wednesday: Discuss fight club stuff. Part of this day was free time for us, which was nice.

Thursday: Attend the Hitachi uVALUE Convention in central Tokyo.|

Friday: Returned home to the US.

Based on what I have seen in the past week as well as HDS’ initial Geek Day, I like the potential. The group of people we had access to are high up the chain, informed, aware of the competition and moving in the right direction. If there was a dark horse in storage, I think the saddle says HDS.

One of the objectives I had going into the event is to discern the relationship between Hitachi Ltd. (Hitachi Japan if you will) and HDS. Given that there are a slew of OEM storage agreements between Oracle, HP, HDS and others; it can feel like you are playing seven steps to Kevin Bacon. One thing I found very interesting was that Hitachi’s storage networking group in Japan has a number of interesting relationships that do not exclusively feature HDS products. Thumbing through the catalog, you will see it is all in Japanese but some things will stick out pretty clearly. In the storage networking catalog, the Japanese market can resell NetApp storage to customers. In my opinion, this is FUD nirvana. This is what caught my eye in the catalog:

Not only is the Hitachi Storage Networking business in Japanese market providing HDS products, but also offering competing products that fit the best need. And this is not only to put in front of products like the USP-V to virtualize competing products, but to perform native installations. This indicates to me that, at least for the Japanese market, there is not a directive that states that the service catalog can chose any storage product – as long as it is from HDS. For those who are not new to the larger Hitachi, this should not be a surprise. I consider myself somewhat new to HDS and more so to Hitachi, so it was definitely an eye-opener. When asked about this arrangement, Christophe Bertrandwho is Sr. Director of Product Marketing for Platforms at HDS dismissed it as the right of the Japanese Hitachi to deliver what the customer wants as a full service offering.

Global conglomerate

In a way, Hitachi is a lot like a former employer of mine that functions as a big, global household name. This can be an extreme advantage in some situations. In fact, during our visit to uVALUE; we had a chance to see HDS Senior Director of Product Strategy Michael Haypresent a topic that included materials on Hitachi’s global R&D.

Michael Hay is probably the most compelling personality at HDS that we have encountered. This guy is smart, really smart. During his session, I was expecting HDS is great this and HDS is great that but that was not the case. Michael delivered a great view into the R&D aspect of managing data. In fact, a few Hitachi products are already in place piloting next generation data strategies. One of them is GazoPa,which is a search engine of images. Different than a Google Images search that relies on metadata, GazoPa analyzes the image to perform the search. Hitachi’s research is also working to automatically tag content with metadata. Meta data is truly the key to managing our exploding data footprint. Add automation into the mix, and that is a solution.

What software?

One of the sessions during Thursday’s uVALUE we had the privilege to have a briefing with Shinjiro Iwata, Corporate Vice President and Executive Officer, Chief Executive Officer of Service & Global Business, Information & Telecommunications Systems Group for Hitachi Ltd. Iwata-San also has the distinction of being CEO of HDS from 2001 to 2006, so he was a good resource for the crowd of bloggers, analysts and international press.

During the Q&A with Iwata-San, there were frequent mentions of software on behalf of HDS and the larger Hitachi organization. This is part of a changing perception that Hitachi is a hard-goods only company. Products like GazoPa and value-added software to storage are changing the face of Hitachi in my opinion. Traditional big business is focused on unit margin for goods going out the door. Hitachi sees the value proposition by positioning the software aspect of information technology offerings as a pillar of the global conglomerate. While sure, ensuring that there are goods going out the door is important; but there is more to it according to Hitachi.

Tokyo

Wow! What a city. This does mark my first trip to Asia. Japan has become of particular interest to me recently, as approximately 20% of my followers on Twitter are from Japan. This is thanks to Jason Hiner’s 100 Technology Experts list being translated to ZDNet’s Japan site. Jason is Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, one of the publications I am happy to be a contributor.

I thoroughly enjoyed Tokyo, in every category. The food was great, Hitachi was a great host. Tokyo was a wonderful city, and I felt very safe navigating the largest city in the world. In terms of a similar-sized city, I’ve frequented São Paulo and Mexico City a number of times; and I felt more comfortable going through Tokyo on my own. Considering I speak a functional Spanish and zero Japanese, that’s a testament to the city. Secretly, I’m actually quite jealous of Michael Hay, who is stationed long term in Odawara, Japan (just South of Tokyo) for three years as part of his mission with HDS.

I took a few pictures during the week, which are a public gallery in my Facebook profile. You can see the gallery here:

Overall on the week

The week was a good way to get a deeper view into HDS, as well as a broader look at Hitachi and their vision to the future. The NDA material will be lifted at some point, so then I can talk about fight club. But, until then we’ll have to just wait. I do again express my appreciation to the HDS team to organize the event and be available for us.

Technorati Tags: HDS,Tokyo,uVALUE

Why dynamic disks are still relevant

When Windows made dynamic disks available, administrators were given an incredible amount of functionality to handle the problem of storage growth. Windows Server 2008 (and late editions of Windows Server 2003) offer additional features to manage storage now with the ability to easily expand and shrink disks. So if it’s easy to expand a basic disk in the Disk Management snap-in, are dynamic disks still relevant?

In my opinion, dynamic disks are not quite ready for the IT graveyard. This is due to storage products usually gravitating around the 2 TB limit for single addressable logical unit numbers (LUNs). Some storage processors in storage area network (SAN) products limit LUN sizes to 2 TB for broad compatibility for server operating systems utilizing block storage (fibre channel or iSCSI). Network attached storage (NAS) offer a file-based namespace and frequently can utilize a larger size than the 2 TB limit. In my Windows practice, I occasionally exceed the 2 TB limit, and I learned a bit along the way in my recent post on NTFS allocation unit sizes for large volumes.

Read the entire post at TechRepublic.

Thoughts on rail travel while in Japan

During my recent visit to Japan, we did a number of our excursions on rail travel. In Japan, rail travel is very popular. In fact, I rarely saw a private vehicle in Tokyo. Most of the vehicles on the road were taxis, busses, delivery or otherwise some sort of fleet commercial vehicle. We stayed near the Shinagawa station in South Tokyo.

The Japanese train station is the epitome of my tastes: convenient, timely, clean and full service. The Japanese train station is a hub of more than just transportation, but also full-service as well as quick-service restaurants and shopping. I found it incredibly cool.

On Tuesday, July 20, myself and the flock of bloggers entered into Shinagawa to head to our meetings in Odawara. Here is a photo of Shinagawa taken on Wednesday during our block of free time:

During our morning entrance on Tuesday, we were literally walking in a mass army of people almost dressed in uniform going to work. For men, the dark pant with light-colored oxford shirt seemed almost too common. Occasionally someone would still wear their jacket (it was hot!) or have short sleeves, just to mix it up. The photo above in the middle of the day is slightly a different crowd and there is fashion variety. For Tuesday, we rode the Shinkansen (bullet) train to go to Odawara. This type of train regularly reaches speeds of 185 miles per hour for scheduled destinations, this train is shown below:

For our day off, we went to Akihabara in Tokyo. We took a ‘local’ train to make that journey, for a mere Y160 (approximately $2.00) we were able to go to the Akihabara district easily. That train was not as nice as the bullet train, but nonetheless reliable and a pleasant experience. This is the type of train that we took to Akihabara:

There is one important takeaway from my trip to Japan: I would love to come back with my family. This developed infrastructure and my complete feeling of safety is a big factor.

The trains are on-time, safe and they go where we needed to go. Why doesn’t it work in the US? Well, the reasons are many including inexpensive fuel and lack of serious crowding in most of my circles (the Midwest).

 

Technorati Tags: Shinagawa,Shinkansen,Tokyo

ESXi host Active Directory authentication may impact licensing

One of the most lauded features of vSphere 4.1 is the built-in Active Directory authentication engine for ESXi hosts. It’s very easy to configure, and it works for both free ESXi installations as well as hosts managed by vCenter. The Active Directory-integrated security is configured in the Authentication Services section of each host (see Fig. 1).

So, while configuration is easy enough, I have confirmed with Microsoft that it’s not that easy to manage from a licensing perspective. As it turns out, enabling Active Directory-integrated security to the ESXi host creates a computer account for each host. It’s actually similar to what XenServer did in the 5.5 release, when Citrix added Active Directory authentication.

Click here to read the full post on the Everyday Virtualization blog at Virtualization Review.

vSphere’s VAAI – Start of Good Things?

As we review more details of VMware’s vSphere 4.1 update; we find more nuggets that we can latch onto for which we can find use cases.

One feature that I am somewhat mixed on is the vStorage APIs for array integration (VAAI). I’m not discounting whether or not it is a good feature, but how much of the storage ecosystem will take advantage of this amazing feature. As of its release, only a handful of products support VAAI and they are from the usual suspects: NetApp, Hitachi Data Systems, EMC, 3Par and EMC. I hope that we see the larger storage ecosystem embrace VAAI support. While these are familiar players in enterprise storage, many VMware installations use other products that do not yet support VAAI.

Read my entire post on the Everyday Virtualization blog at Virtualization Review.

Technorati Tags: VAAI,Vmware,HDS,EMC,3Par,NetApp

Processor and USB info, Screen Resolution with PowerShell

There is nothing worse than being given a system requirement and not knowing whether it can be applied to a number of systems. There are countless examples, such as free space on local computers or what levels of JAVA or .NET framework are installed. Sometimes, we may be given more difficult requirements that we may or may not be able to easily determine.

Here are three scripts you can use to get detailed information for specific questions about Windows clients and servers. The scripts are based on PowerShell 2, which can be applied to Windows XP and higher on the client side as well as on Windows Server 2003 and higher on the server editions. For PowerShell 2, it is recommended that you install the Windows PowerShell PowerPack.

Read the entire post at the Network Administrator blog at TechRepublic.

Unlimited virtualization rights price breakeven point for Windows Server

Windows Server 2008’s unlimited virtualization rights feature is a great idea in theory: purchase each underlying processor at datacenter and load up Windows Server installations as much as you can with no additional costs. The issue is that Windows datacenter processors are expensive. So how many virtualized Windows Servers does it take for it to make financial sense for organizations to take advantage of this feature?

Read my take at the Servers and Storage blog at TechRepublic.