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Scott Drummonds on Virtualization

Turning Your Virtualization Project Around

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Recently an former VMware colleague of mine sent me an email. His new employer’s IT department encountered a variety of problems with the virtualized deployment of their custom application. Now they are reluctant to put business-critical applications on vSphere. The tide of virtualization is crushing them from all sides so they know that they need to figure out what has gone wrong and produce a functional virtual environment. But where to start? And how can they mitigate risk and avoid any more failures?

At my friend’s request I spent some time thinking about this. I sent him a long response and thought I would share it with you.

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vShield Clarification

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote on vShield. As I said then, the Asia Pacific and Japan vSpecialists have spent a lot of time on this wonderful product. We love it. The purpose of my blog entry was to highlight a best practice that would avoid an annoying issue. That issue is that vShield App installation on ESX hosts running a vCenter virtual machine can disconnect vCenter from the network. The workaround–documented in the vShield Administration Guide–is to run vCenter and vShield manager on a management cluster. Case closed. Well, not yet.

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Bring Storage and VI Admins Together

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Three years ago I was not a very big fan of EMC.  We at VMware worked very hard to show the world that we were not under EMC’s thumb.  In many respects, this meant pursuing projects with EMC’s competitors before engaging EMC.  EMC was partly to blame for this. EMC’s best argument to win the VMware footprint was based on a claim of majority ownership.  That pointless claim offends VMware employees and does not translate into value in VMware environments.

But things started changing a couple years ago.  Through the heroic efforts of Chad Sakac, EMC stopped acting like it deserved the business of VMware’s customers and more like it had to earn that business.  I noticed this in the way we partnered at multiple EMC Worlds and VMworlds.  I started to hear EMC’s name mentioned when we were prototyping features and products like VAAI, SRM, and SIOC.  EMC employees started treating us more like partners than indentured servants.  And then EMC started releasing products that were making the lives of VMware’s customers easier.

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Physically Separate Management Cluster

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My recent foray into the world of vShield produced a contention recommendation from my friends at VMware. Today I want to ask you to educate me and our peers. I want to know: do you think it is a best practice that management products should be run on their own in a vSphere cluster?

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vShield, vCenter, and Management Clusters

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I recently tweeted looking for VMware customers using the vShield products in production. There was very little response. It seems that vShield Edge and App are barely being used at all in production. It is possible that some rough patched need to be sanded down to polish vShield to its appropriate luster. But if you are not playing with these products now, you owe it to yourself to download the trial versions.

Our fantastic APJ vSpecialist organization has been spending with vShield. Many of us believe vShield to be one of the most exciting editions to the VMware portfolio in a long time. It is simple, elegant, and very powerful. But there is a very big danger with vShield: improper use can disable the network connection of vCenter virtual machines. Fixing this problem is not intuitive.

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