VMware Blogs

System administrators and system integrators responsible for deploying  the VMware® virtual desktop infrastructure can build valuable skills in deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure by attending VMware View: Install, Configure Manage.  This 4-day course teaches you to:

• Install and configure View components
• Create and manage dedicated and floating desktop pools
• Deploy and manage linked-clone virtual desktops
• Configure and manage desktops that run in local mode
• Configure user profiles with View Persona Management
• Configure secure access to desktops through a public network.
• Use ThinApp to package applications.

The course is available in a variety of delivery methods from the

• Traditional classroom as offered June 11-14 in New York which qualifies for a 15% discount or
• Live Online class as offered Aug 13-16 2 9:00 Central Daylight Time where you can attend from anywhere remotely.

Sign up today!  Sign up for a course in the US or Canada that begins before Jun 30 and save 15%.

By Courtney Burry, Director, Desktop Product Marketing, VMware

I’m excited to share that a recent study conducted by Spiceworks with small and midsized businesses (SMBs) revealed that VMware Horizon View is the solution of choice over the competition for a second year in a row.

By an almost 2-to-1 margin, Horizon View remains the top choice with the number of VDI agents deployed increasing from 53 percent in December 2011 to 57 percent in February 2013. The three leading VDI solutions found among SMBs were VMware Horizon View (57 percent), Citrix Virtual Desktop (31 percent) and NComputing vSpace Client (6 percent).

We’ve been working tirelessly with our technology partners to introduce new programs and innovative architectures to bring down the cost of VDI, and today Horizon View is more affordable than ever before. This means that modernizing Windows desktops by transforming them into a centralized manage service is an option not just for big budget enterprises but also for cost-conscious SMBs. In addition, this study validates what we’ve been hearing anecdotally all along from customers and channel partners – they prefer Horizon View because it is easy to use and it works the way they expect it to. This serves as a strong a testament to all the hard work the product management team has put into advancing the product to make it a truly, world-class product.

If you’re an SMB and think virtual desktops might be a good solution for your organization, visit our product page to learn more. You can also download the complete study conducted by Spiceworks here.

* Spiceworks, the vertical network of more than 2.5 million IT professionals worldwide, conducted the proprietary study on desktop virtualization industry trends in March 2013 with nearly

Rob Jenkins, Director of VMware Accelerate Advisory Services in EMEA, presented on the journey to virtualized compute — from server consolidation, to automation, to game changing ITaaS — at IDC’s Cloud and Virtualisation event in Dublin this month. At the time, no one predicted the impact server virtualization would have on the IT industry. VMware’s early customers achieved unheard of cost savings and ROIs, leading to unprecedented adoption of this technology by more than 500,000 customers.

You can follow Rob @cloud_rob

The other day we received this question from a customer via Twitter:

@VMwareCares planning to upgrade to 5.1 from 5.0 vcenter. What’s recommended physical or appliance? Ups and downs side of each?

We thought a few more of you might have the same questions so we decided we would take the opportunity to explain the differences between vCenter server and vCenter appliance and under what situation which one should be opted for, over the other.

The vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) is a preconfigured Linux-based virtual machine optimized for running vCenter Server and associated services. Versions 5.0.1 and 5.1 of the vCSA uses PostgreSQL for the embedded database instead of IBM DB2, which was used in vCenter Server Appliance 5.0 The vCSA embedded postSQL DB supports 5 hosts / 50 virtual machines, with an Oracle DB the vCSA can support 1000 hosts and 10,000 vms. If you configure your vCSA to use an external instance of Single Sign On (SSO), the external SSO instance must be hosted on another vCenter Server Appliance; it cannot be hosted on a Windows machine.

vCenter Server can be installed on a windows Guest OS and can be connected to Oracle or Microsoft SQL. SSO can be installed on the same Guest OS or can be on a different machine. It should be noted that patching of of the vCenter Appliance is not supported.

Below is a table listing more of the differences between the products.

This year will be the 10th yearly VMworld event. (Have you registered for VMworld yet?) In the run up to the event, we’ll be running some features talking about the previous nine years of what I like to think of as the World’s Best (And Most Intense) Technology Conference.

Photo: Peter Tsai/Dell

One of the best parts of VMworld is the deep set of breakout sessions. Deeply knowledgable VMware employees, partners, and customers share their experiences in hundreds of sessions over the week. Some of us go to many sessions; some of us wait until afterwards, but the week is always filled with deep technical conversations during every waking hour. Although the conference is now very large and securely based in San Francisco, even in earlier years the conference team shared with us that it was hard to find locations to hold VMworld US and Europe because, unlike other events, we needed a venue with dozens of large breakout rooms!

So here’s the question – what’s been your favorite session or lab at VMworld over the years? Have any stuck in your head years later? And what makes it stand out in your mind? Was it the speaker, the new idea, or even the funny running commentary from your neighbor? Or was it how you had just the right answer when you got back to work and your boss thought you were a psychic genius? Or were you watching the right video presentation at the right time after the event? You can share stories about waiting in line or not getting the sessions you want, but those tend to be less fun.

Leave your story here in the comments and watch out for our series ont the VMworld Blog recapping the history of VMworld and getting ready for this 10th Annual VMworld 2013 in San Francisco where we will, once again, “Defy Convention.”

Powering and cooling are a substantial portion of datacenter costs. Ideally, we could minimize these costs by optimizing the datacenter’s energy consumption without impacting performance. The Host Power Management feature, which has been enabled by default since ESXi 5.0, allows hosts to reduce power consumption while boosting energy efficiency by putting processors into a low-power state when not fully utilized.

Power management can be controlled by the either the BIOS or the operating system. In the BIOS, manufacturers provide several types of Host Power Management policies. Although they vary by vendor, most include “Performance,” which does not use any power saving techniques, “Balanced,” which claims to increase energy efficiency with minimal or no impact to performance, and “OS Controlled,” which passes power management control to the operating system. The “Balanced” policy is variably known as “Performance per Watt,” “Dynamic” and other labels; consult your vendor for details. If “OS Controlled” is enabled in the BIOS, ESXi will manage power using one of the policies “High performance,” “Balanced,” “Low power,” or “Custom.” We chose to study Balanced because it is the default setting.

But can the Balanced setting, whether controlled by the BIOS or ESXi, reduce performance relative to the Performance setting? We have received reports from customers who have had performance problems while using the BIOS-controlled Balanced setting. Without knowing the effect of Balanced on performance and energy efficiency, when performance is at a premium users might select the Performance policy to play it safe. To answer this question we tested the impact of power management policies on performance and energy efficiency using VMmark 2.5.

VMmark 2.5 is a multi-host virtualization benchmark that uses varied application workloads as well as common datacenter operations to model the demands of the datacenter. VMs running diverse application workloads are grouped into units of load called tiles. For more details, see the VMmark 2.5 overview.

We tested three policies: the BIOS-controlled Performance setting, which uses no power management techniques, the ESXi-controlled Balanced setting (with the BIOS set to OS-Controlled mode), and the BIOS-controlled Balanced setting. The ESXi Balanced and BIOS-controlled Balanced settings cut power by reducing processor frequency and voltage among other power saving techniques.

We found that the ESXi Balanced setting did an excellent job of preserving performance, with no measurable performance impact at all levels of load. Not only was performance on par with expectations, but it did so while producing consistent improvements in energy efficiency, even while idle. By comparison, the BIOS Balanced setting aggressively saved power but created higher latencies and reduced performance. The following results detail our findings.

Testing Methodology
All tests were conducted on a four-node cluster running VMware vSphere 5.1. We compared performance and energy efficiency of VMmark between three power management policies: Performance, the ESXi-controlled Balanced setting, and the BIOS-controlled Balanced setting, also known as “Performance per Watt (Dell Active Power Controller).”

Configuration
Systems Under Test: Four Dell PowerEdge R620 servers
CPUs (per server): One Eight-Core Intel® Xeon® E5-2665 @ 2.4 GHz, Hyper-Threading enabled
Memory (per server): 96GB DDR3 ECC @ 1067 MHz
Host Bus Adapter: Two QLogic QLE2562, Dual Port 8Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express
Network Controller: One Intel Gigabit Quad Port I350 Adapter
Hypervisor: VMware ESXi 5.1.0
Storage Array: EMC VNX5700
62 Enterprise Flash Drives (SSDs), RAID 0, grouped as 3 x 8 SSD LUNs, 7 x 5 SSD LUNs, and 1 x 3 SSD LUN
Virtualization Management: VMware vCenter Server 5.1.0
VMmark version: 2.5
Power Meters: Three Yokogawa WT210

Results
To determine the maximum VMmark load supported for each power management setting, we increased the number of VMmark tiles until the cluster reached saturation, which is defined as the largest number of tiles that still meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. All data points are the mean of three tests in each configuration and VMmark scores are normalized to the BIOS Balanced one-tile score.

The VMmark scores were equivalent between the Performance setting and the ESXi Balanced setting with less than a 1% difference at all load levels. However, running on the BIOS Balanced setting reduced the VMmark scores an average of 15%. On the BIOS Balanced setting, the environment was no longer able to support nine tiles and, even at low loads, on average, 31% of runs failed QoS requirements; only passing runs are pictured above.

We also compared the improvements in energy efficiency of the two Balanced settings against the Performance setting. The Performance per Kilowatt metric, which is new to VMmark 2.5, models energy efficiency as VMmark score per kilowatt of power consumed. More efficient results will have a higher Performance per Kilowatt.

Two trends are visible in this figure. As expected, the Performance setting showed the lowest energy efficiency. At every load level, ESXi Balanced was about 3% more energy efficient than the Performance setting, despite the fact that it delivered an equivalent score to Performance. The BIOS Balanced setting had the greatest energy efficiency, 20% average improvement over Performance.

Second, increase in load is correlated with greater energy efficiency. As the CPUs become busier, throughput increases at a faster rate than the required power. This can be understood by noting that an idle server will still consume power, but with no work to show for it. A highly utilized server is typically the most energy efficient per request completed, which is confirmed in our results. Higher energy efficiency creates cost savings in host energy consumption and in cooling costs.

The bursty nature of most environments leads them to sometimes idle, so we also measured each host’s idle power consumption. The Performance setting showed an average of 128 watts per host, while ESXi Balanced and BIOS Balanced consumed 85 watts per host. Although the Performance and ESXi Balanced settings performed very similarly under load, hosts using ESXi Balanced and BIOS Balanced power management consumed 33% less power while idle.

VMmark 2.5 scores are based on application and infrastructure workload throughput, while application latency reflects Quality of Service. For the Mail Server, Olio, and DVD Store 2 workloads, latency is defined as the application’s response time. We wanted to see how power management policies affected application latency as opposed to the VMmark score. All latencies are normalized to the lowest results.

Whereas the Performance and ESXi Balanced latencies tracked closely, BIOS Balanced latencies were significantly higher at all load levels. Furthermore, latencies were unpredictable even at low load levels, and for this reason, 31% of runs between one and eight tiles failed; these runs are omitted from the figure above. For example, half of the BIOS Balanced runs did not pass QoS requirements at four tiles. These higher latencies were the result of aggressive power saving by the BIOS Balanced policy.

Our tests showed that ESXi’s Balanced power management policy didn’t affect throughput or latency compared to the Performance policy, but did improve energy efficiency by 3%. While the BIOS-controlled Balanced policy improved power efficiency by an average of 20% over Performance, it was so aggressive in cutting power that it often caused VMmark to fail QoS requirements.

Overall, the BIOS controlled Balanced policy produced substantial efficiency gains but with unpredictable performance, failed runs, and reduced performance at all load levels. This policy may still be suitable for some workloads which can tolerate this unpredictability, but should be used with caution. On the other hand, the ESXi Balanced policy produced modest efficiency gains while doing an excellent job protecting performance across all load levels. These findings make us confident that the ESXi Balanced policy is a good choice for most types of virtualized applications.

Back on April 29th we posted an alert: ALERT: Login issue after updating to vCenter 5.1 Update 1 which detailed a scenario whereby customers might be unable to log in using the vSphere Web Client or domain username/password credentials via the vSphere Client after updating to vCenter 5.1

Tonight at 7:30pm PST, vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 will be removed from the VMware download site and will be replaced by vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1a. The primary aim of the 5.1 U1a release is to address the regression that was identified in 5.1 U1.

Customers are urged to read the README included with the new update before they apply the update.

Details of what has and has not been fixed are provided in KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2037410

Post by Brandon Sweeney, Vice President U.S. Mid-Market Businesses

Many midmarket organizations face challenges in equipping their IT infrastructure to support privacy and regulatory protocols and ensure consistent uptime, but those in the health care field have a unique challenge. For a healthcare professional, the reliability needed in their IT environment can literally be the difference between life and death. Finding an IT solution that supports compliance and ensures utmost performance is essential.

Pivotal Turning Points

Laurens County Health Care System, a 90 bed health care organization in Clinton, South Carolina was looking to deploy the Meditech clinical information system to improve patient information and care, as well as enable computerized physician order entry (CPOE). With 30 physical servers in their data center, an offline server could cause multiple facets of their infrastructure to go down. Additionally they found their staff of 11 IT workers often fighting fires instead of proactively addressing business needs. Hospital employees were using so many different laptops and desktops that just maintaining current versions of basic software was difficult. Downtime was up to 40% in the physical data center.

Running Meditech in the current environment was not feasible. Laurens County Health Care System needed to deploy a cost-efficient plan and looked to VMware for a solution.

The Solutions Journey

By deploying VMware vSphere ^®, the IT staff virtualized their domain controllers, then implemented Exchange Server internally and moved it to a virtualized infrastructure. By adding vSphere vMotion, they enabled high availability for their virtualized file and print servers, as well as various applications.

“It’s a nightmare maintaining 50 physical PCs on nursing carts. Today, I can roll out 30 virtual desktops in 15 minutes and manage them all from a central location,” said Joe Lovell, IT Infrastructure Manager at Laurens County Health Care System. “Obviously, there are other vendors out there, but given the technical strengths, ease of implementation, and the centralized management capabilities, VMware was the obvious choice.”

VMware View enabled the organization to employ a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy for physicians, while also solving compliance and security concerns and ensuring the mobility necessary for excellent patient care.

“Physicians are very excited that they can use their own devices from anywhere to access Meditech and review EMRs [electronic medical records] and patient data without physically having to come into the hospital,” says Gina Driggers, IT Director at Laurens County Health Care System.   “With View, no matter what device they’re using, all the computing happens here in the data center, which is a huge security and compliance safety net.”

Immediate Business Benefits and Looking Forward

Using VMware vSphere, Laurens County Health Care System successfully deployed Meditech in a virtualized environment and is on target to Stage 1 of Meaningful Use.

In addition, the virtualized data center servers now see uptime in the 99.999% range. On top of that, by switching from PCs to thin clients, the organization was able to decrease hardware costs by 65%.

Next up, Laurens County Health Care System is looking to tackle disaster recovery with vCenter Site Recovery Manager. “ And VMware is not just for large hospitals,” says Lovell. “It is definitely something that can help smaller hospitals that don’t have the financial resources and the IT resources of a larger organization.”

Read the full success story about Laurens County Health Care System here.

I look forward to continuing to share these stories and demonstrating how VMware can help you simplify your infrastructure and deliver real world results for your business.

Have you faced similar IT or compliance challenges in your organization? How have you solved them?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments.

Until next time,

Brandon

Follow VMware SMB on Facebook, Twitter, Spiceworks and Google+ for more blog posts, conversation with your peers, and additional insights on IT issues facing small to midmarket businesses.

by Geoffrey Murase, Solutions Marketing for End-User Computing

When I was in elementary school, each year, we were administered a standardized test called the “California Test of Basic Skills” or CTBS.  This test involved using “number 2” pencils and filling out a form with boxes from A to E.  I remember thinking that if I didn’t know the answer, I should guess “C” because it’s in the middle.  Today, I can’t remember the last time I actually used a pencil.  However, many schools still use this antiquated way of administering standardized tests to students.

This is all about to change in the next couple of years.  According to the San Jose Mercury News, California, as one of 45 of the 50 states in the U.S. participating, will move toward a broad state-led program called the “Common Core State Standards Initiative.”  This initiative requires the standardization of testing across states by the 2014-2015 school year to ensure consistent performance assessments.  Quoting the article:

“Multiple-choice, fill-in-the-bubble tests alone simply cannot do the job anymore, and it’s time for California to move forward with assessments that measure the real-world skills our students need to be ready for a career and for college,” said California School Superintendent Tom Torlakson.

These next generation assessments will be computer-based and Pearson TestNav™ is a leading test delivery platform in K-12 schools that delivers over 4 million tests annually.  VMware is pleased to announce that our VMware® Horizon View™ desktop virtualization solution has received “TestNav Qualified” certification, ensuring that TestNav tests administered using Horizon View are delivered securely, error-free, and with a good user experience.  In fact, many schools have already deployed the TestNav platform with Horizon View and achieved great results:

“We’ve had tremendous success using VMware Horizon View for Pearson TestNav. Testing season brings a lot of stress to not only students but the staff as well. VMware Horizon View allows IT departments to facilitate these tests in a high availability environment, which is extremely comforting.”

- Brooks Moore, DCS Technology Help Desk Manager, Aledo Independent School District

“Using VMware Horizon View with the Pearson TestNav test delivery system ensures that our tests are administered in a secure environment that preserves the integrity of the results. Test environments are booted directly to our computer labs and if any attempt is made to escape out of the test, the test taker is locked out of the test. We initially rolled out VMware virtual desktops on a small scale in the Summer of 2012 but with the success that we’ve had, we now plan on rolling it out to all computer labs within our district.”

- Chad Branum, Executive Director of Technology, Coppell Independent School District

The good news is that these next generation assessments will hopefully give educators a clearer, more consistent understanding of how students are performing so that they can take corrective action where needed.  The bad news is that guessing “C” may no longer be an option for students in the coming years.

For more information about VMware and education, visit our website at: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/education/index.html

Continue the conversation with us on Twitter and Facebook!

Here in Technical Marketing at VMware, we are fortunate to be able to regularly speak to members of the virtualization community at various events. One of those events is the newly formed  VTUG. VTUG is short for Virtualization Technology Users Group. Run by Chris Harney, this organization has been putting on hugely successful virtualization focused user groups for years.

On May 9th, I did a keynote presentation entitled “Virtualization Security for the IT Guy” for the New England chapter. In this keynote, I talked about how in order to get great security in a virtualized datacenter, you need to collaborate. I’m trying to help the IT guy work through typical issues brought up by Security Guys when they attempt to virtualize workloads.

I’ll be touching on many of the points in the presentation over the coming months as separate and more in-depth posts.

I’d like to thank Chris Harney and the VTUG organization for inviting me to speak at their event and for providing the video of the keynote so I could include it here. I’d also like to thank TechTarget.com for their review of the keynote as well.

Ever wondered how to locate your VMware Workstation serial number after the software has been installed on your machine?

We present you with a new video today, geared towards users of our VMware Workstation product.

The serial number is listed in the order confirmation email you receive for your Workstation purchase. Workstation License Keys that have been registered will be listed in your My VMware account. See Knowledge Base article: Viewing license keys in My VMware (2006831) for additional details.

For additional information, see the associated VMware Knowledge Base article Locating the VMware Workstation serial number (1000069).

Note: For best viewing experience, ensure that the 720p quality setting is selected and view in full screen mode.

I mentioned last month that I would be presenting at the Italian VMUG event in Milan. Well, the VMUG guys recorded the session, so if you are interesting in seeing me talking about some of the cool storage projects we are working on internally here at VMware (such as Virtual SAN, Virtual Volumes & Virtual Flash), you can watch the video here:

The first few minutes are a little noisy, but that gets sorted out after a while. The one thing that is missing from the video is the disclaimer slide which I showed off at the beginning of the presentation. Its the usual stuff, in so far as we make no guarantee around the delivery of these projects. Hope you find it interesting, and much kudos to the folks at VMUG Italia for making this possible.

Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: @VMwareStorage

Today, we are excited to welcome Cloudera officially to the VMware family. VMware and Cloudera have entered into a partnership agreement that is meant to help users of Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution, CDH4, to run in the cloud. As part of this announcement, VMware has tested and certified Cloudera’s Enterprise Big Data software to run on vSphere 5.1 and that Cloudera is now part of the VMware Ready and Technical Alliances Partner (TAP) program.

This month at EMC World, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger stated that over 500,000 Hadoop installations exist today on bare metal servers, with compute and data tied to the same physical server. By breaking compute and data apart, and putting it on fast-to-deploy vSphere virtual machines, big data becomes inherently more accessible, compute times can improve by up to 13%, and datacenters can optimize to provide more types of data services without adding more hardware.

It comes at a time where both the volume of data is exploding and, according to PwC’s 5^th Annual Digital IQ Survey,  83% of their top performing companies believe that harnessing Big Data will give their firms a competitive advantage. As such, many CIOs are formally aligning their agenda to invest in big data this year.

In fact, a study released earlier this year by NewVantage Partners with found that investment is happening faster than we think already. 85% of their 50 respondents (most with more than 30,000 employees) said they were already investing in Big Data.  Many of these are still in Phase I, where they are experimenting with a pilot project. At this point in the adoption cycle, they are finding value and planning on how to expand investment and increase ROI of data mining.

This is the point that both VMware and Cloudera hope to begin to working with these data teams. As they gain experience and focus in servicing their own data needs, they will be looking for ways to do this more efficiently in the datacenter as well as expand Big Data’s reach within the organization—making it more accessible for employees. This is when they should consider moving their Hadoop data loads to the cloud for the following reasons:

• Setup new compute processes in minutes, not hours or days
• Better hardware utilization and consolidation by running mixed workloads
• Performance improvements through pooling of resources
• High Availability/Fault Tolerance through vSphere Enterprise & Enterprise+
• Make Big Data projects more accessible by offering Hadoop-as-a-Service

Cloudera’s CDH4 is available now to run on vSphere 5.1 and above. Additionally, both companies have agreed to collaboratively work together to support calls from customers running the two technologies together, although each company will only provide patches or technical support directly for their respective products.

For more information on running Cloudera CDH4 on vSphere, contact your VMware or Cloudera Sales Rep.

This week’s “Question of the Week” comes from the VMware Certified Professional 5-Data Center Virtualization (VCP5-DCV) Official Study Guide.

Which of the following can prevent a host from seeing LUNs that are on a storage processor to which it is connected?
a. Zoning
b. Shares
c. Permissions
d. Masking

See below for the answer

Not sure of the answer? You can learn more about this topic in our VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage course.

Answer: d. Masking

By: Bill Fathers, GM, Hybrid Cloud Services

A public cloud without compromise. Today it becomes reality. We are excited to unveil vCloud Hybrid Service, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud built and operated by VMware that will enable our customers to achieve the benefits of the public cloud with the applications, skills and management tools they already trust. Built on the foundation of VMware vSphere® and leveraging VMware’s software-defined data center technologies, vCloud Hybrid Service will  provide an easy, fast path for VMware customers to achieve the agility and efficiency of the public cloud.

As we talk to customers, we consistently hear that they want the benefits of a public cloud environment, but can’t afford the risk, cost and time of starting over. They want a credible option that is built on trusted, enterprise-grade technology that can be easily deployed. They also want a partner who can give them a platform that delivers the agility expected by the business and the security and reliability IT demands.

We know there are many cloud offerings to choose from, but only vCloud Hybrid Service is built on the same platform that VMware customers use in their own data centers. Those customers have expressed a desire for a cloud offering that is completely compatible with what they are deploying internally and is built on the trusted, reliable foundation they have come to expect from VMware. And vCloud Hybrid Service was designed to support all of their existing applications as well as the development of any new ones – without requiring any change.

There is tremendous opportunity ahead in public cloud services, and VMware is doubling down on its strategy to accelerate the adoption of public cloud. Since 2008, we’ve believed in a model for IT that spans multiple data centers, leveraging a multi-cloud – or hybrid – architecture. As a result, we believe VMware technology has enabled more private and public clouds than any other technology platform. Today there are more than 200 vCloud-certified clouds globally, and VMware will continue to work with our service provider community to make our multi-cloud vision a reality.

The vCloud Hybrid Service is a natural extension of this approach, making the benefits of the software-defined data center available to our customers – and our partners – as a service. We plan to make the vCloud Hybrid Service technology and IP available to our service provider partners, and we believe our experience operating a cloud service will allow us to more rapidly deliver innovations to them in the coming months and years.

The industry understands the benefits of cloud, and the opportunity ahead is for VMware and our partners to help our customers get these benefits as quickly as possible.  We believe that the vCloud Hybrid Service is the fastest way for VMware customers to get to the cloud.  We call this an “inside-out” approach, where the cloud becomes a seamless extension of the data center. This is the cloud without compromise.

For future updates, follow @vCloud and @VMwareSP on Twitter.

by Kevin Lubojacky, VMware SE, Mid-Market Team

vSphere Host Profiles are an often overlooked valuable feature for virtualized environments. Whether your environment is growing rapidly and adding hosts has become a management nightmare, or there have been too many cooks in the kitchen, and host configurations have gone awry, vSphere Host Profiles can save both time and headaches by creating a template for common host settings. As many of you may know, small inconsistencies between hosts in your environment can cause real problems in the ability to implement common vSphere features.   This is a common discussion I have with my customers.  Below are some advantages and the process for creating host profiles to help you continue advancing your IT infrastructure.

Host Profile Advantages

Host Profiles work by taking an accurate known host configuration and applying those settings to other hosts in your environment. Profiles contain the configuration information that most administrators manually enter when configuring a host, such as, storage, virtual switches, domain, time and vSphere features.   Applying Host Profiles is typically applicable to the addition of a new host or to satisfy the need to easily enforce consistency amongst hosts.   By applying the Host Profiles, you will be able to automate compliance to your configurations.  In turn you will be able to simplify your operational management and reduce errors caused by any misconfiguration.

The Simple Process for Creating Your First Profile

Below I will outline the process of – extracting a profile from a known configuration, checking the profile against another host in the cluster and ultimately applying the profile to create consistency.  The current requirements for Host Profiles are, ESX 3.5 and vCenter 4.0 or later, combined with an appropriate Enterprise + vSphere license.

From the vSphere Web Client, navigate to Rules and Profiles/Host Profiles. Click the green plus symbol and select the host with the configuration you wish to use as the profile (your blueprint) for other hosts in your environment. At this point you are able to provide a name and description for the profile.

Once the profile has been extracted, right-click the profile and attach the cluster or hosts you wish to associate with the profile. It is important to note, this action only references the profile to the hosts, but does not make any changes just yet.

Now that the profiles are associated, right-click the actions tab and select “Check Host Profile Compliance.”  This action will scan the hosts attached to the profile and report back on the inconsistencies. If your host is joined to a domain, you will receive a message stating “Host may require some additional settings.” Simply fill in the credentials for the domain admin and this should clear up.

Once the compliance check is complete, each associated host is designated as either compliant or not complaint. If not compliant, the compliance section can be expanded to show an outline of the differences between the current host settings and the attached profile.

Once the differences are reviewed, you then have the option to enter the host into maintenance mode allowing the profile to be enforced. Once in maintenance mode, it may be necessary to manually migrate your VMs running on this host to another resource.

Once the host is in maintenance mode the host profile can be enforced. You are provided a summary of changes to be applied to the host. Click finish.

After the profile is enforced, the host should be in compliance and can be brought out of maintenance mode allowing VMs to be migrated back either manually or with the assistance of the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).

As you can see, the process for creating and enforcing vSphere Host Profiles is fairly simple and yet also very powerful.

In addition to harvesting a profile from a known configuration, it’s also an option to edit an existing profile. This could be very useful for task such as, adding a datastore to all hosts, or nearly anything that would typically require a manual update to all hosts. Host profiles can also be used in conjunction with Auto Deploy to rapidly add host to your environment.

I encourage you to check out this link which I often provide to my customers to learn more about the Host Profile feature.

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/host-profiles.html

If you haven’t virtualized yet, I encourage you to go here for more information that can help you understand the benefits you’ll gain for your IT infrastructure.

How has the Host Profile feature helped you?  I look forward to your comments.

Kevin Lubojacky

Follow VMware SMB on Facebook, Twitter, Spiceworks and Google+ for more blog posts, conversation with your peers, and additional insights on IT issues facing small to midmarket businesses.

By Girish Manmadkar, VMWare Professional Services Consultant

In years past, some IT managers were not ready to talk about virtualizing SAP due to technical and political reasons. The picture is very different today, in part because of the increased emphasis on IT as a strategic function towards ‘Software–Defined Data Center’ (SDDC).

Virtualization and the road to SDDC expands the cost and operational benefits of server virtualization to all data center infrastructure—network, security, storage, and management. For example, peak workloads such as running consolidated financial reports are handled much more effectively, thanks to streamlined provisioning. Integrating systems because of company acquisitions are more easily managed due to the flexibility offered with virtualized platforms. And finally customers are leveraging their virtualized SAP environment to add additional capabilities such as enhanced disaster recovery/business continuity or chargeback systems.

Many customers have been realizing virtualization benefits ever since they moved their SAP production workloads to the VMware platform. As IT budgets continue to shrink, the imperative to lower operating costs becomes more urgent—and virtualization can make a real difference. Server consolidation through virtualization translates directly into lower costs for power, cooling, and space—and boosts the organizations “green” profile in the bargain.

Organizations Benefit from Virtualizing SAP

The main requirement for any IT manager supporting an SAP environment is to ensure high availability —even a few minutes of downtime can cause loss of dollars, not to mention angry phone calls from executive management as well as frustrated users. VMware virtualization takes advantage of SAP’s high-availability features to ensure that the SAP software stays running without any interruption and helps keep those phonelines quiet.

Greenfield SAP deployments are a great way to start building the environment right from ground zero by utilizing a building-block approach. You will start seeing the benefits of flexibility, scalability and availability of the newly built environment on VMware.

Upgrades comes with two scenario’s

• A. SAP hardware refresh cycle
• B. An SAP Application and/or database upgrade

Upgrades are a part of every SAP landscape and they can be complex and require long-term efforts. I have seen that most of my customers who go through their standard physical environment for SAP upgrades, spend many man hours or even days – if they have the hardware available at their disposal. However, in the virtual environment, the provisioning process is pretty rapid and can be executed in minutes, including the deprovisioning to reclaim required resources back in the resource pool which makes the upgrade process that much more streamlined and efficient. When going through an SAP upgrade – a very time and cost sensitive project, it is very important to provide required resources to the development team in a timely manner.

Time to Move

Let’s say that you’ve decided to virtualize your SAP environment—now the question is timing. I have seen many customers take the SAP upgrade and/or platform or hardware refresh as possible opportunities to move to the virtual platform.

A planned SAP upgrade can be a good time to move. I have seen some customers cash in on the planned move to SAP NetWeaver & other add-ons to virtualize their entire SAP landscapes—with savings of more than half of their capital expenses.

A hardware refresh is a great time to move. Many customers take advantage of the change in hardware to also consider a migration to virtualization at the same time. It allows customer to integrate the hardware refresh and virtualization projects to minimize disruptions and combine staff training for new hardware and software.

SAP Requirements: Security,Compliance and Disaster Recovery

Challenges like compliance and security policies often require substantial infrastructure changes, that can highlight the inherent inflexibility of the existing traditional hardware platform and persuade top management to invest in infrastructure. Many customers have successfully implemented VMware-provided solutions to ensure the security and compliance of their SAP environment so that they can experience the benefits from virtualization.

Disaster Recovery
A Business Continuity plan is imperative for many of our SAP customers. Disasters – a natural or man-made disaster severely impacts operation which impacts the bottom line. Which of course, is the reason why executives often order a review of the company’s disaster recovery/business continuity plans. VMware understands this importance and the risk which is addressed by VMware Site Recovery Manager product.

So is virtualizing your platform for your SAP environment too risky? All IT projects have risk. Is it so risky to pass up the benefits of virtualization? In my opinion, no – not if you follow the advice and methodology offered by my colleagues, David Gallant (Business as usual with Tier 1 Business Critical Applications? – Not!) and Eiad (Knowing Your Applications is Key to Successful Data Center Transformation). I ask you – if you haven’t already virtualized your SAP environment, why not explore it now? There’s been so many advances in technology and alliances, you can’t ignore it any longer.

Today we unveiled vCloud Hybrid Service – A VMware-owned and operated public cloud designed to help our customers seamlessly extend their private cloud resources beyond the data center. Now that I’m able to talk about the service, let me pull back the curtain on part of the architecture and technology behind vCloud Hybrid Service.

When the vCloud Hybrid Service architecture team began designing the service we followed two core tenets; simplify the physical aspects of the design and use VMware software wherever possible and practical. The goal was to deliver a high-quality cloud service that fully embraced the concepts of the software-defined data center.

vCloud Suite 5.1 was in development while we were designing the vCloud Hybrid Service architecture, and fortunately for us many of the new features in the vCloud Suite were directly applicable to our design tenets. For example, we saw an opportunity to use the vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) software capabilities to radically change our networking design.

The resulting network design is simple from a physical perspective. Basic switching and routing capabilities are provided by hardware while more complicated functions are provided by the vCNS Edge appliance in combination with VXLAN. Throughout the course of our development period, we worked closely with the vCNS engineering team to refine our design and deploy it in production.

The vCNS software suite is a feature-rich-networking platform, and here are some of the numerous capabilities we used from vCNS Edge:

• Load Balancing – Used to provide Internet facing services to customers
• SNAT – Used to provide outbound access where required
• SSL and IPSec VPN – Remote access capabilities
• Routing – Routing between internal networks as well as to the Internet
• VXLAN – Isolate customer networks allowing for bring-your-own address space
• APIs – Manage and deploy virtual network infrastructure through automation

In combination, these capabilities provide resilient, high performance core networking services for our customers. Most of these features are also available for customers to employ directly in their vCloud Hybrid Service cloud environment, and all of the vCNS networking technology we are using is available today for on-premise deployments.

The end result is that we now have an agile, programmable network infrastructure that will provide an easy road to upgrade as we continue to expand the capabilities of vCloud Hybrid Service. I’ll cover other parts of our vCloud Hybrid Service architecture in future posts – but in the meantime, feel free to comment below around what’s important to you in a cloud service’s networking infrastructure.

Hosts
Mike Gordon Laverick, VMware @Mike_Laverick

Guests
Adam Bohle, VMware @adambohle

News
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to unveil vCloud Hybrid Service May 21st
Central Ohio VMUG User Conference
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• vExpert Weekly Digest
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• VMware User Group (VMUG)

Around the Community
vBrownbag Podcast
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AdaptingIT – Lauren Malhoit Podcast
Virtualization Security Roundtable
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Establish your Cloud Cred!
Join the Conversation on Google+ Communities – Software-Defined Data Center 

Link to Audio Recording
vCloud Automation Center

Show
VMware vCloud Automation Center

vCloud Automation Center enables customized, self-service provisioning and lifecycle management of cloud services that comply with established business policies. It provides a secure portal where authorized administrators, developers or business users can request new IT services as well as manage existing computer resources from predefined user-specific menus.

Download VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1

[PDF] VMware vCloud Automation Center – datasheet

[VMware Training] VMware vCloud Automation Center Foundation

FREE Instructional Videos on VMware vCloud Automation Center

Part 68: My vCloud Journey Journal – Installing vCloud Automation Center 5.1 (HomeLab)

Part 69: My vCloud Journey Journal – vCenter Setup with vCloud Automation Center 5.1

Download the VMware vCAC Icon Pack

The Integration of vCloud Director with vCloud Automation Center

vCloud Automation Center – VMware community

Additional Links

Last month we announced a new SSL Certificate Automation tool to help everyone with the implementation of custom certificates. Yesterday, we released the second version of it (version 1.0.1). This is a minor update which aims to simplify the replacement of certificates further by adding Certificate Signing Request (CSR) functionality to the tool. This functionality allows a user to quickly generate certificate requests (and consequently the private keys) for submission to the Certificate Authority.  The CSR functionality was the largest portion of manual steps, and as a result the update reduces the number of steps by over 15.

In addition, there are several minor bug fixes which were fixed which impacted tool functionality.

For further details and to download the latest version of the SSL tool see: Deploying and Using the SSL Certificate Automation Tool (2041600)

We hope these additions provide useful for everyone!

I am happy to announce the availability of the VMware vCloud Networking and Security – DMZ Design and Deployment Guide. This paper highlights how securing a virtual DMZ environment using vCloud Networking and Security can be a strategic enabler to your organization as it helps you to reduce your capital expenditure and increase agility, while building a cloud ready, secure and scalable environment for business applications. The paper also highlights the different design approaches to securing business critical applications and enables you to make the choice that is most suited to your organization in the cloud journey. Further, it gives prescriptive configuration guidance to help you get started with the deployment of your preferred approach.

Get notification of these blogs and more vCloud Networking and Security information by following me on Twitter @vCloudNetSec.

AUTHOR: Padmaja Vrudhula

Tomorrow VMware announces the launch of the VMware vCloud® Hybrid Service™ — a true hybrid cloud solution connecting and integrating on-site and off-site IT environments through a common management platform with a design that ensures all (new and existing) applications run the same way. This type of a hybrid cloud solution ought to make most IT personnel and leaders take notice for numerous reasons. (To join the live online event, register here.)

Different industries require different types of business agility. For example, a retailer undergoing aggressive expansion may require the ability to quickly set up new store operations. A financial services company pursuing an acquisition strategy needs to be able to assimilate new entities to quickly realize synergies and benefits. An online gaming company may need the ability to quickly set up a platform in anticipation of a wave of new gamers following the release of a new hit game. In the past few years, to accommodate these types of requests, IT has found itself in a de facto service broker role. The increased sophistication of end users coupled with the ubiquity of external cloud service providers has forced internal IT teams to meet the needs of application developers, QA testers, and even production users as quickly as it takes to enter a credit card number. Therefore, how can IT organizations, which still have the dual task of maintaining the physical environment and an existing virtual environment, transform to meet such expectations?

With vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware utilizes many of the same products our customers use to setup, operate, and manage their existing internal cloud(s). Migrating workloads into the VMware hybrid environment takes no additional process, people, or technology work on the part of customers. This design capability is in stark contrast to decisions to consume from other service providers. In those instances, assuming IT had a say in the matter, there is a completely different set of tools, processes, and skills utilized to manage the external cloud environment; further straining already constrained IT resources.

Yet, the more likely scenario for organizations running workloads in an externally hosted environment is that the decision was made by end users, while their IT organization suffers the consequences of supporting them, at costs often not readily apparent to the business. VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will provide a remedy to this scenario by allowing IT to proactively identify criteria for workloads to be migrated into an external environment. This results in several benefits for the overall enterprise: operational cost savings, ability to utilize existing processes (change management, incident management, help desk), leverage existing skill sets, meet customer SLAs, and provide agility to the business. This list is a small fraction of the outcomes of having a proactive approach to consuming external cloud services. Ultimately, IT can add vCloud Hybrid Service into its service toolkit to better execute on the service broker role.

An enterprise CIO I used to work with used the comparison that IT was like the electric company: no one noticed unless the lights went out. It was his way of highlighting the essential nature of technology services. However, in the era of cloud computing, the “new IT” provides a lot more than just “juice.” IT organizations are becoming one element of the competitive advantage companies seek in the marketplace. This is one of the reasons why hybrid cloud is such a key component the CIO’s toolkit. Leveraging a hybrid cloud solution empowers IT organizations to continue to rise to meet the challenges of their business users, eliminate the “cowboy” mentality of end users making IT decisions, and continue to meet the quality standards for day-to-day operations.
——-

Padmaja Vrudhula is a strategist with VMware Accelerate Advisory Services.

VMware Accelerate™ Advisory Services can help you define your IT strategy through balanced transformation plans across people, process, and technology. Visit our Web site to learn more about our offerings, or reach out to us today at: accelerate@vmware.com for more information.

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An optimized service definition process can make or break the success of hybrid clouds or Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC). But even if you have tools and processes in place to enable automated provisioning, you still need key stakeholder agreement on the makeup of standard services and resource configurations.

• Standardized services need to meet the needs of those who request and consume the services.  But they also need to make sense to those in IT responsible for both automation that delivers the services and ongoing support.
• Standardization helps increase flexibility at the business process level. But rigid service definitions can also inhibit those who both consume and deliver the services.

So how can you meet the needs of multiple groups and find common ground when it comes to defining services?

Find out by joining our next #CloudOpsChat on “Reaching Common Ground When Defining Services” taking place on Thursday, May 30^th at 11am PT.

The event will be co-hosted by two CloudOps pros who have helped multiple VMware customers reach common ground:

• John Dixon, Consulting Architect at GreenPages (see John’s posts on GreenPages Journey to the Cloud blog)
• Khalid Hakim, Cloud Operations Architect at VMware

During the chat, we will answer the tough questions:

• What service components should be included in a standard service definition?
• What components can be flexible for modification around the edges?
• Are there obvious points of abstraction that help balance standardization and flexibility?
• Are there recommended approaches to getting multiple groups of users to reach consensus?
• Are there recommended approaches to balancing the needs of both IT and service consumers?
• What happens if key stakeholders don’t reach consensus?

Here’s how to participate in #CloudOpsChat:

• Follow the #CloudOpsChat hashtag (via TweetChat, TweetGrid, TweetDeck, or another Twitter client) and watch the real-time stream.
• On Thursday, May 30th at 11am, @VMwareCloudOps will pose a few questions using the #CloudOpsChat hashtag to get the conversation rolling.
• Tag your tweets with the #CloudOpsChat hashtag. @reply other participants and react to their questions, comments, thoughts via #CloudOpsChat. Engage with each other!
• #CloudOpsChat should last about an hour.

In the meantime, feel free to tweet at us at @VMwareCloudOps with any questions you may have. We look forward to seeing you in the stream!

by Monty Zarrouk, Product Marketing at NetApp

How will this improve patient care?

VMware® AlwaysOn Point of Care™ architecture helps solve customers’ problems by providing ready access to patient information from any terminal or mobile device. This allows clinicians to make informed decisions regarding treatment plans while protecting the confidentiality of patient information. Providing access to clinical applications in a virtual environment, healthcare providers maintain continued access to their desktop as they move from patient to patient, floor to floor, or building to building. Just like any sector, technology dictates a successful organization. And healthcare is no different. Medicine is changing, and a virtual desktop can mean all the difference in a patient’s outcomes.

Why did NetApp introduce VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care for healthcare?

We recognize the technology that is transforming the medical profession, and NetApp constantly strives to keep the data storage architectures up to speed with the latest technology. The NetApp reference architecture for VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care is purpose-built for healthcare organizations to address the high-availability and disaster recovery needs of mission-critical clinical desktops. To reduce deployment risk, NetApp has designed, developed and lab tested a validated configuration that combines VMware Horizon View™ AlwaysOn Point of Care, NetApp® storage, Cisco® Unified Computing System™, F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery Controller, and Imprivata single sign-on solution, for delivering clinical desktops and patient care applications as secure, non-stop services. This combination of technologies makes it possible to deliver high-performance workspaces over high latency and low-bandwidth connections. This helps healthcare organizations integrate their networking, computing, storage and virtualization resources.

What makes VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care different and distinct?

VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care provides a virtual desktop environment that is secure, cost effective, and easy to deploy, providing clinicians with:

• Non-stop access to desktop with fast logon times
• Desktops that follow the user in the event of a site failure Connectivity to desktops from any endpoint device from anywhere
• A familiar interface to sustain the same application workflow Knowledge that they are viewing the correct patient at the correct time and correct location, resulting in increased patient safety

This helps solve customer problems by providing high availability to clinical applications within the provider environment, delivering response times that meet or exceed application requirements and provides the appropriate security and compliance measures demanded by healthcare environments.

How can VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care help hospitals comply with the HIPAA and HITECH act requirements?

Many hospitals are looking for a cost-effective data storage infrastructure that is easy-to-deploy, and maintains patient privacy with its secure access. NetApp storage and management solutions work in concert with VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care to provide simplified and centralized medical data sharing and archiving across the continuum of care. NetApp helps you reduce compliance risk through improved recordkeeping, monitoring, and oversight. Clinicians can dedicate quality time to patients, knowing that IT has the right controls in place to ensure that state and federal compliance requirements that affect patient care and privacy are met (such as HITECH, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOX, the EU Directive, the Affordable Care Act and others).

Link to NetApp Reference Architecture for VMware AlwaysOn Point-of-Care – Technical Report

Link to NetApp Reference Architecture for VMware AlwaysOn Point-of-Care – Solution Brief

Continue the conversation with us on Twitter and Facebook!

Assigning an IP address and a DNS host record  need to be accomplished during the provisioning process.  VMware vCloud Automation Center supports a number of methods for assigning IP addresses.  These include dynamically assigning them via DHCP,  statically assigning them from a pool of IP addresses stored in vCAC network profiles or allocating them from a custom database.

Many companies use Infoblox IP Address Management  (IPAM) to simplify and automate the process of IP address management.   Infoblox provides a vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) plug-in that can be called from vCloud Automation Center to automate the end-to-end provisioning process including the process of providing an IP address (IPv4 or IPv6) and assigning a DNS host record.    The result is virtual machines provisioned in a matter of minutes instead of days without the errors that can be introduced by manual processing.  The Infoblox plug-in also automates the process of de-allocating an IP address if a virtual machine is deleted as well as removing its DNS host record

Resources
Here are some additional resources to help you better understand the capabilities delivered in this integrated solution and also how to download and configure the Infoblox plug-in to work with vCloud Automation Center.

• Demo Video: vCloud Automation Center Integration with InfoBlox IPAM   (3:44)
• Demo Video: vCloud Automation Center Integration with InfoBlox IPAM – with narration  (9:24)
• The Infoblox IPAM plug-in and installation instructions (82:47)
• The Infoblox IPAM plug-in step-by-step instruction video (41:32)

This and other vCO plug-ins that work with vCloud Automation Center can be found on VMware Solutions Exchange.

Hi folks,

We have a new video today which is brief and straight to the point. This video is specifically geared towards first-time users of our VMware Fusion product.

This video discusses and demonstrates how you can license VMware Fusion.

In this brief video tutorial you will learn how quick and easy it is to license your VMware Fusion product installation on your Mac operating system.

For more information, see VMware Knowledge Base article Licensing VMware Fusion (2014287).

Note: For best viewing experience, ensure the 720p quality setting is selected and view using full screen mode.

This is a guest post from vCloud Service Provider, Bluelock.

If you’re evaluating disaster recovery (DR) options you’re likely looking several options including traditional warm or cold-site solutions, cloud-based Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) DR and maybe even the age-old choice of simply crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

When you’re classifying DR options, think of RaaS as the solution that protects your entire application, not just your virtual machine (VM) or the data within that VM. Cloud-based RaaS leverages consistency groups for application protection; meaning your entire application is recovered as a whole. The data is all recovered at the exact same point in time, so there’s less work needed from your team to stand your application back up after a declaration.

Even though cloud is in the name, the solution isn’t just for workloads currently hosted in the cloud. In fact, cloud-based RaaS can be used as a recovery solution for any VMware-virtualized workload, including those that live in your internal hosting environment.

If your company is new to cloud and wary of the learning curve, RaaS is the easiest on-ramp for new cloud customers.  It allows organizations to learn about cloud’s flexibility, automation and self-service capabilities while keeping the scope manageable for any size department. The primary workload remains in your company’s internal datacenter, while the application is replicated and protected in the cloud.

If you want to learn how RaaS just might be your perfect choice for reliability, affordability and ease of use, register to attend How to Implement a DR Strategy that Works: Recovery in the Cloud, a webinar on Wednesday, May 22nd from 2 – 3 p.m. EDT.

In this hour-long webinar, Bluelock’s Chief Technology Officer Pat O’Day will show you how Recovery-as-a-Service can turn your disaster recovery plan from a pipedream to a reality.  Crossing your fingers won’t even cross your mind after this session.

What you’ll walk away knowing:

Cloud makes DR easy and affordable.

Recovery-as-a-Service is a software-enabled recovery solution that is easy to install, has no agents and maintains a low barrier to entry. It’s easy and it works with any VMware-virtualized environment. With RaaS you’ll bulldoze any roadblocks that kept your team from implementing a DR solution in the past.

Cloud-based DR leaves you confident your entire application is protected.

Your data is important, but not as important as recovering your data in the context of the rest of your application. Cloud-based RaaS protects the entire application holistically and replicates at the hypervisor layer to ensure your workloads stand back up, ready to go immediately. Your team won’t have to put the puzzle pieces together after a declaration, because it will stand back up as a complete picture already.

RaaS prevents costly data and revenue loss with testable, reliable protection.

RaaS promises easy, affordable testing within its solution so you won’t have to take our word that your applications are protected; you’ll see it for yourself. In this webinar you will learn exactly how easy and affordable testing is by hearing the client success stories that will show first-hand how RaaS changes not only how the DR game works, but the way it’s played as well.

I came across a post last week that caught my eye: Don’t let training and skills be the forgotten investment in the digital revolution. You won’t be surprised to hear I agree with its call for companies to invest in continuing education for their IT staff.

“During any economic downturn, one of the first items to be struck from the corporate cost base is training,” worries author Bryan Glick. Which is a big problem considering that, in Europe alone, there will be 300,000-800,000 IT-related vacancies by 2015 as a growing skill gap makes qualified candidates harder to find.

However, I see a lot of companies who understand the value of continually training their IT professionals. When CompTIA interviewed 502 IT managers and business managers overseeing IT staff for its 2012 State of the IT Skills Gap, 57% said they were planning to train or retrain existing staff to address skill gaps.

“IT professionals have a strong propensity for lifelong learning and skills enhancement, so the large majority will welcome the opportunity to broaden their knowledge,” notes Terry Erdle, executive vice president of skills certification for CompTIA. I couldn’t agree more, which is why we are constantly adding new courses to our portfolio.

But lifelong learning isn’t just good for skilled IT professionals, it’s also good for businesses. Verified by a recent VMware study, cloud computing supported by highly skilled professionals consistently elevates the quality and speed of IT and business innovation. By prioritizing training in virtualization and cloud computer technologies, companies put themselves in a position to respond more quickly to an increasingly unpredictable market.

Still not convinced? Here’s one more reason to give IT professionals frequent opportunities to improve their skill sets: It will keep star players on your team.

In Keeping IT Staff Happy, Information Age cited a survey of 200 IT administrators in the UK, which found 73% of IT admins are considering leaving their jobs—the same percentage, not surprisingly, that described their job as “stressful.” Yikes!

While decreasing stress in most IT jobs will be a slow process, the post suggests a great way to improve satisfaction immediately: Give IT professionals fun problems to solve and better skills to help them solve them.

Scott Alan Miller describes the need for education in even more dire terms in his SMB IT Journal. “If an IT professional is not given the chance to not just maintain, but grow their skills, they will stagnate and gradually become useless technically and likely to fall into depression,” he says. “To maintain truly useful IT staff, time and resources for continuous education is critical.”

No more depressed IT professionals, I say! And I think our VMware training and certification programs are one of the best ways to keep your IT staff happy (I might be partial ) so they can help your business keep its bottom line happy, too.

If that sounds like a good idea to you, get started with our VMware Learning Path Tool to see which path is right for you. Or, jump right in and check out our growing list of courses, with flexible formats to work with every schedule and budget.

David

AUTHOR: Michael Francis

I’m a principal systems engineer with VMware and have been involved in the development of our cloud operations services. I’m sharing my experiences through a series of blogs pertaining to on-demand services. In this first blog, I reflect on what got us to this point and will follow this up with a discussion on how on-demand services transform both business models as well as the engagement model between enterprise IT and the associated business. In the final entry I’ll recommend how on-demand services can be delivered effectively—where the rubber hits the road!—and I’ll get into some specifics.

On-Demand Services, Part 1 – Remind me of how we get here again…

I have been with VMware for nearly seven years and in the IT industry for 20+ years—and over that time, like others, I have seen many changes. I think the biggest game changers in the past two decades are the smartphone and tablet form factor computers. Both devices have brought a mobility and price point revolution to computing that has enabled access to information to a very broad population from anywhere, at any time. This combination of form factor and ease of access to information through self-service mechanisms almost overnight changed the relationship between enterprise IT and the end user.

Let’s look back—I had a O2 Windows-based mobile that I used for business in the early 2000s, and it was great. I had access to email in a rich interface and integration with my contacts and global address lists anytime I needed them. And, I could communicate with corporate messaging in a small form factor. However, what it didn’t give me was the flexibility to access information like I could with my home PC—I couldn’t easily extend it to run other applications. And unlike my home PC with its mouse-driven interface, this phone forced me to use the keyboard—which was like trying to navigate in Windows for workgroups using only a keyboard.

Then came the next generation of smartphone and the advent of the touchscreen, which was analogous to the introduction of a mouse to our personal computer. The interface was easier to use and navigate and could be so much richer from a features standpoint. But the real power was that I could access a new universe of applications through a single self-service portal. And, the applications were cost-relevant, which meant they were easy to consume and demo in order to select an appropriate set of applications that worked best for my specific needs. It changed the phone from being a fixed-purpose device with keyboard control to a touchscreen-driven, openly flexible device ready to provide me with access to the world at my fingertips, from wherever I was.

For the consumer, it was the simplicity to access a marketplace of application services and then self provision a service that was the point where so many rapidly engaged in this transformation. This ability to self service combined with the size of the marketplace fueled the prolific use of the successful smartphone and tablet platforms. Consumers had a single storefront with access to thousands of application service suppliers.

The on-demand services built into these consumer devices created a broad ecosystem of suppliers eager to be able to showcase their wares. The single application store provided a single location for consumers to shop for services. Do you see the similarities? In the past, the enterprise IT organization was “everything IT” to everyone in the organization—from manufacturer, to distributor to reseller—and the consumer had little choice. Stepping up to meet demand, software as a service (SaaS) providers are the smartphone application builders for enterprise services, and like smartphone applications, more and more consumers seek their services.

So what’s missing from this equation? What’s missing is an equivalent enterprise-class, consumer-relevant application store with access to all IT services. An on-demand services capability within the enterprise to be the storefront to a varied selection of IT services—some sourced internally, some externally.

There’s another aspect to this transformation—and that’s the ease of creation, delivery and price point of these smartphone applications. All of which created a need for an agile application platform offering a low-cost of entry to feed the demand of so many new suppliers entering the market. Further, the swings in consumption of suppliers’ offerings has perpetuated the need from application suppliers to pay for flexible-scaling, consumption-based models for underlying compute capacity.

To sum things up, the on-demand services in our smartphone and tablet devices opened up access to services and information beyond what was previously available, using a single application store interface that made things simple to consume. It moved the power base of information access from enterprise IT into the hands of the consumer. The velocity of uptake of these consumer devices spawned cloud computing, cloud computing service providers and the concept of service consumption-based computing. On-demand services have transformed consumer information access.

I’ll follow up soon on how the introduction of on-demand services into the enterprise can transform business models and the engagement model between enterprise IT and the business.

—-

Michael Francis is a principal systems engineer at VMware, based in Brisbane.

Would you like to continue this conversation with your C-level executive peers? Join our exclusive CxO Corner Facebook page for access to hundreds of verified CxOs sharing ideas around IT Transformation right now by going to CxO Corner and clicking “ask to join group.”

by Steve Poitras, Solutions Architect, Nutanix

There are two things I normally notice when I visit the doctor – 1) a massive stack of paper medical records and 2) long visit times…

The need…

I’ve always been huge fan of adopting and evolving the IT services utilized in the medical industry.  Here we have an industry who is pushing the forefront of technology for the analysis and treatment of patients – but plagued by archaic IT and paper based records.

In comes the consumerization effect…

The Consumerization of IT has been a big trend for businesses in the last years, essentially giving the “end-user” the ability to have flexibility over devices.  When it comes down to it there are a few key things people care about:

Patients:

• Analysis & treatment
• Quick visit times
• Privacy

Medical Practitioners

• Mobility
• Flexiblity
• Availability

IT

• Security
• Policy & Control
• Compliance

However, a key concern with consumerization is always about keeping data secure and mitigating any potential security risk.  With EMR and VMware® Horizon View™ this is now possible.  Virtual desktops allow IT to centrally manage and host desktops and data from a secure location and then expose these services to end-user devices over encrypted and private networks.

The impact…

Doctors and healthcare providers are always on the move and constantly moving from patient from patient to keep up with patient demands.  Now, what if they had the ability to look at the next patient’s medical records while walking down the hall on a tablet or mobile device?  The ability to view a digital x-ray immediately after its taken?  Mobile crowdsourced collaboration with fellow medical professionals?

What you get is increased efficiency (aka patient turnover), flexibility of devices for doctors and medical professionals and, most importantly, a happy patient.

The answer…

The VMware® AlwaysOn Point of Care™ solution bridges the gap between virtual desktops and EMR solutions.  With VMware Horizon View becoming the first validated VDI solution to achieve “Target Platform” status for Epic , VMware is helping revolutionize how medical practitioners deliver services.

So what is it and how did we get here?  To help highlight the solution I’ve broken it up into the following steps:

Step 1: Make the records electronic → Electronic Medical Records (EMR)

Step 2: Enable for secure and mobile consumption → VMware Horizon View (VDI)

Step 3: Make sure it’s highly available →VMware AlwaysOn Architecture

Result: Delivery of efficient patient services → VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care Solution (EMR + VDI)

To learn more about the solution visit the VMware Solutions for Healthcare Page.  To learn more about the Nutanix + VMware solution for AlwaysOn delivery check out the following Nutanix AlwaysOn Solution Brief.

Final thoughts

I’ve always envisioned a doctor’s office where I can be automatically checked in upon arrival, where doctors walked around with tablets allowing them to access my medical records and view digital x-rays in real-time.  With the VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care solution with EMR, this can finally be a reality.

To learn more or if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me on Twitter.

To learn more about how else Nutanix and VMware can meet your needs, please visit us online and follow us on Twitter: @Nutanix and @vmwarehit

Mid-sized companies face specific challenges when it comes to meeting the changing demands of the business, such as needing to balance limited resources while still remaining agile enough to respond to new business requirements. Indeed, many mid-sized companies cite limited resources as a common barrier to realizing the full benefits of cloud services. The question is, how can mid-sized companies achieve the same benefits enterprises see by moving to the cloud, such as improved flexibility, improved agility and cost reductions, without breaking the bank on initial investments?

Find out on May 21^st – VMware is hosting a live webcast with VMware Executives Pat Gelsinger and Bill Fathers, where they will be unveiling a new cloud service from VMware, The webcast will provide mid-sized businesses with details to better understand the new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service and how they can best take advantage of its potential.

Register now for this free, LIVE online event: http://www.vmware.com/go/vmwarehybrid

For more information, be sure to follow the VMware vCloud blog and VMware SMB Blog, and follow the hashtag #VMwareHybrid leading up to and during the webcast.

VMware is also promoting a chance to win prizes each week leading up to the webcast. By sharing the event and using the hashtag #VMwareHybrid on your social media channels, you could be eligible to receive a Starbucks gift card or a Netflix gift subscription! See full details below.

Follow VMware SMB on Facebook, Twitter, Spiceworks and Google+ for more blog posts, conversation with your peers, and additional insights on IT issues facing small to midmarket businesses.

PROMOTIONAL DRAWING TERMS & CONDITIONS

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. Void where prohibited. All federal, state, provincial and local laws and regulations apply. Promotion commences at 12:01AM PST on April 30, 2013 and ends at 11:59 PM PST on May 17, 2013.  To enter, tweet the May 21st registration link and include the #VMwareHybrid hashtag.  Or, you may enter without completing the survey by sending an email with “Enter Me in the Drawing” in the subject line to: vCloud@lewispulse.com by 11:59 P.M. PST on May 17, 2013.  Sponsor’s computer is the official time-keeping device for the promotion.  One entry per person/email address per survey.  Multiple participants are not permitted to share the same email address.  Any attempt by any participant to obtain more than the stated number of entries by using multiple/different email addresses, identities, registrations and logins, or any other methods will void that participant’s entries and that participant may be disqualified.  Use of any automated system to participate is prohibited and will result in disqualification. Anu comments left on Facebook, via email or other sources will be considered ineligible and will not be included.

Participation constitutes entrant’s full and unconditional agreement to these Terms and Conditions, and VMware’s decisions, which are final and binding in all matters related to the promotion. Winning a prize is contingent upon fulfilling all requirements set forth herein.

Entries that are lost, late, misdirected, incorrect, garbled, or incompletely received, for any reason, including by reason of hardware, software, browser, or network failure, malfunction, congestion, or incompatibility at VMware’s servers or elsewhere, will not be eligible. VMware, in its sole discretion, reserves the right to disqualify any person tampering with the entry process or the operation of the web site. Use of bots or other automated process to enter is prohibited and may result in disqualification at the sole discretion of VMware. VMware further reserves the right to cancel, terminate or modify the promotion for any reason, including inability to complete as planned by reason of infection by computer virus, bugs, tampering, unauthorized intervention, force majeure or technical failures of any sort. In the event of a dispute, entries will be deemed submitted by the account holder of the email address submitted at the time of entry.

Drawing is offered to all natural persons who are at least the age of majority. Employees, officers, and directors of VMware its parent and affiliate companies as well as the immediate family (spouse, parents, siblings and children) and household members of each such employee, officer and director are not eligible. The drawing and the rights and obligations of VMware and participants will be governed and controlled by the laws of the State of California, applicable to contracts made and performed therein without reference to the applicable choice of law provisions.  All actions, proceedings or litigation relating hereto will be instituted and prosecuted solely within the State of California, Santa Clara County.  The parties consent to the jurisdiction of the state courts of California and federal court located within such state and county with respect to any action, dispute or other matter pertaining to or arising out of the promotion. Prizes will not be awarded to residents of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.  Government Employees: VMware is committed to complying with government gift and ethics rules and therefore government employees are not eligible.

(7) Prize winners will be selected by random drawing every Friday from May 3, 2013 to May 17, 2013.   Each receive a Netflix gift subscription OR Starbucks gift card with the Approximate Retail Value (“ARV”): USD $7.99 – $10.  Prizes are non-transferable and no substitution will be made except as provided herein at the Sponsor’s sole discretion. Sponsor reserves the right to substitute a prize for one of equal or greater value if the designated prize should become unavailable for any reason.  Winners are responsible for all taxes and fees associated with prize receipt and/or use.  Odds of winning a promotion prize depends on the number of eligible entries received during the promotion.

Winners will be notified via Twitter and will be publicly announced on the @vCloud Twitter handle every Friday from May 3, 2013 to May 17, 2013. Winners will have 48 hours to claim their prize or a new winner will be selected.  Each potential winner may be required to show proof of being the authorized account holder.  Potential winners may also be required to sign and return to VMware, within ten (10) days of the date notice or attempted notice is sent, an affidavit of eligibility and liability/publicity release (or Declaration of Compliance, if a non-US resident) in order to claim his/her prize.  If a potential winner cannot be contacted, fails to sign and return the affidavit of eligibility and liability/publicity release (or Declaration of Compliance, if non-US resident) within the required time period (if applicable), or if prize notification is returned as undeliverable, potential winner forfeits prize.  If a Canadian resident, the potential winner will be required to correctly answer a time-limited skill testing question without any assistance in order to be eligible to receive a prize.  If the potential winner is a Canadian resident and the question is answered incorrectly, the prize will be forfeited.  In the event that a potential winner is disqualified for any reason, VMware will award the applicable prize to an alternate winner by random drawing from among all remaining eligible entries.  Only three (3) alternate drawings will be held after which the prize will remain unawarded.  For U.S. residents, prizes will be fulfilled 8-10 weeks after the conclusion of the promotion.  For Canadian residents, prizes will be fulfilled the latter of 8-10 weeks after the conclusion of the promotion or 2-3 weeks after receipt of the skill testing question.

By entering the promotion or receipt of any prize, each entrant  agrees to release and hold harmless VMware and its subsidiaries, affiliates, suppliers, distributors, advertising/promotion agencies, and prize suppliers, and each of their respective parent companies and each such company’s officers, directors, employees and agents (collectively, the “Released Parties”) from and against any claim or cause of action, including, but not limited to, personal injury, death, or damage to or loss of property, arising out of participation in the promotion or receipt or use or misuse of any prize.

The Released Parties are not responsible for:  (1) any incorrect or inaccurate information, whether caused by entrants, printing errors or by any of the equipment or programming associated with or utilized in the promotion; (2) technical failures of any kind, including, but not limited to malfunctions, interruptions, or disconnections in phone lines or network hardware or software; (3) unauthorized human intervention in any part of the entry process or the promotion; (4) technical or human error which may occur in the administration of the promotion or the processing of entries; or (5) any injury or damage to persons or property which may be caused, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, from entrant’s participation in the promotion or receipt or use or misuse of any prize.  If for any reason an entrant’s entry is confirmed to have been erroneously deleted, lost, or otherwise destroyed or corrupted, entrant’s sole remedy is another entry in the promotion, provided that if it is not possible to award another entry due to discontinuance of the promotion, or any part of it, for any reason, VMware, at its discretion, may elect to hold a random drawing from among all eligible entries received up to the date of discontinuance for any or all of the prizes offered herein.  No more than the stated number of prizes will be awarded.

The Sponsor of this promotion is VMware, Inc., 3401 Hillview Drive, Palo Alto, CA  94304 U.S.A.

For a list of prize winners and/or a copy of these Official Rules, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to: LEWIS Pulse 575 Market Street 12th Floor San Francisco, CA 94105.

VMware Certified Instructor, Steve Jones, presents what’s new with vCenter Operations since 5.0 including:

Steve Jones, VCI

• First Look Navigation Part 1 for V5.X
• First Look Navigation Part 2 for V5.X
• Operational Insight Through Drill Down Actions for V5.X
• Determining and Planning for Capacity for V5.X
• Using Groups to Manage Resources for V5.X
• Practical Tips for V5.X

Visit the VMware Education Video Site to see these and other topics too.  Begin your learning journey today!

Today we have the third edition of our blog series The Inside Scoop. In this installment we will look at vSphere Databases and more specifically some helpful tips for maintaining them.

In order to obtain some real world perspective, we met up with some of our Technical Support Engineers at our support center in Cork, Ireland and mainly asked them two questions:

1. What are the most common issues they deal with concerning vSphere Databases?
2. What advice do they have for ensuring that a vSphere Database is maintained?

Here is what they had to say….

Common Issues

The two most common issues that come into our Technical Support teams are:

1. Database Corruption
2. Database Performance

These are really the two biggest issues that customers encounter with their SQL databases in their vSphere environments.

Many a database administrator has nightmares about database corruption and when an incident comes along quite often many hours are spent by the DBA trying to rescue the situation. Sadly, database corruption is something that just happens; nobody plans to have it.

If you are or were a system administrator or a database administrator at some point during your career, chances are that there was probably a time when you learned the hard way about not having a recent database backup.

However it is not all doom and gloom when it comes to database corruption incidents. The impact and headaches of such a corruption incident can be minimized and reduced by simply applying and enforcing a policy of regular database backups. Taking regular database backups will not fix the corrupted database but at least your road to recovery will be a much better and less painful one.

Along with database corruption the other big generator for support requests is that of database performance. A database is like the heart of the environment and just like a heart, if it is in a bad or a poorly maintained condition then it is going to experience performance issues.

The vSphere database is what manages and runs the jobs and processes that take place within the environment in any given moment. The speed at which the vSphere environment can run effectively and efficiently is quite often determined by the health of the database. If your database is unhealthy, then chances are you will notice performance impacts within your environment.

What symptoms should I look out for?

Symptoms of database corruption would include the vCenter Server failing to start or crashing on particular tasks.

Symptoms for database performance related issues can be more varied, however some common ones include:

• The vCenter Server taking a long time to start up
• Tasks taking a long time to complete or are timing out

Some Helpful Database Maintenance Tips

When it comes to database corruption scenarios the best thing that you really can have is a recent backup. This will save a lot of time and heartache when it comes to restoring your environment and the more recent the backup the better as it will minimize the loss of data.

In regards to database performance issues, prevention really is the best cure and so here are some steps and measures which will help to reduce or prevent your environment from encountering poor database performance:

1. Monitor scheduled database jobs to ensure they are running correctly – For more information, refer to KB article: Checking the status of vCenter Server performance rollup jobs (2012226)
2. Collect Stats
3. Rebuild Indexes – For more information, refer to KB article: Rebuilding indexes to improve the performance of SQL Server and Oracle vCenter Server databases (2009918)
4. Delete old data – For more information, refer to KB article: Reducing the size of the vCenter Server database when the rollup scripts take a long time to run (1007453)
5. Monitor Database Growth – For more information, refer to KB article:
   Determining where growth is occurring in the vCenter Server database (1028356)

A pdf document on vCenter Server Database Best Practices is available: VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Database Performance Improvements and Best Practices for Large-Scale Environments

by by Pam Takahama, Director of Solutions Marketing, Riverbed Technology

Healthcare turning to VDI to improve patient care

I recently took my daughter to the doctor for an earache, and chuckled when the pediatrician reached into his lab coat for what I thought was an iPad to write up a prescription only to realize it was, ahem, a good ole’ fashioned pad of paper! Spending another 45 minutes filling the prescription had me wondering how far the healthcare industry has come in the last 10 years. Notwithstanding the isolated throwback to the pencil and paper era, the reality is that the healthcare industry is reinventing itself, and in the process reshaping our experiences, and reorienting our expectations from how care is managed, to how it is paid for, to how it is delivered.

Many healthcare organizations are working to embrace innovative solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to improve patient care and provide clinicians 24/7 access to their most current patient data and resources — even during unplanned downtime.

Recently, Riverbed and VMware announced a joint solution that integrates Stingray Traffic Manager application delivery controller (ADC) with the VMware® Horizon View™ AlwaysOn™ Desktop solution. The joint solution ensures end users have continual access to a secure virtual desktop no matter what device they use and no matter where they are.

Moreover, this tested and validated solution augments VMware’s latest announcement with a leading electronic medical records (EMR) software provider for a virtual clinical desktop. Designed for the cloud from the ground up, Stingray™ Traffic Manager will improve overall performance for clinical desktops by delivering around-the-clock access to data and applications even if a primary site fails or is compromised by other unplanned events, all while meeting industry compliance regulations. Customers will be able to quickly modernize their computing environment and provide a highly available cloud-based desktop.

Rx for AlwaysOn Desktop

As healthcare organizations seek to deliver robust and proven desktop solutions to improve how care is managed and delivered, they should consider the advantages that Stingray Traffic Manager offers to help lower costs while ensuring high availability and securing computing endpoints:

Accelerate virtual desktop performance. Offloads performance-draining tasks such as SSL and compression accelerating services, increasing capacity and optimizing implementations. Also, administrators can cache commonly requested content and optimize VDI traffic delivery, enabling healthcare clinicians to gain fast and easy access to their applications and data.

Provide 24/7 access to virtual desktops. By intelligently shaping and directing traffic and avoiding failed or degraded servers, Stingray Traffic Manager ensures users are always routed to the closest available site based on the end user’s geo-location, including continent and country, IP address, and site availability.

Secure virtual desktops. Helps to preserve and maintain a highly secure virtual desktop environment by configuring the solution to admit certain traffic types only, and operating as a deny-all gateway. These capabilities ensure full control over how traffic is internally routed. Additionally, high-performance inspection interrogates any part of a request or response before applying global filtering or scrubbing policies.

Gain better control of VDI environment. Easily manage how users interact with the applications and the infrastructure that they depend on. Administrators can also use Stingray Traffic Manager to shape, prioritize, and route traffic; drain infrastructure resources prior to maintenance; and, upgrade user sessions across application while preserving user performance.

So the next time I’m at the pediatrician’s office and he whips out a pad of paper again, I may have to bring new meaning to an old adage and tell him that “an Apple” a day may help keep the paperwork away.  Click here to learn more about the joint VMware and Riverbed AlwaysOn solution.

So you’ve take either VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.1], VMware vSphere: What’s New [V5.1], or VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V5.1] and want to take your cloud infrastructure skills to the next level?

Then you’ll want to attend: VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale [V5.1]  In this 5 day course, you will learn to:

• Configure and manage ESXi networking and storage for a large and sophisticated enterprise;
• Manage changes to the vSphere environment.
• Optimize the performance of all vSphere components.
• Troubleshoot operational faults and identify their root causes.
• Use VMware vSphere® ESXi™ Shell and VMware vSphere® Management Assistant (vMA) to manage vSphere.
• Use VMware vSphere® Auto Deploy™ to provision ESXi hosts.

This is one of our top attended courses.  Sign up today and find out why it is so popular.  Attend before June 30 and save 15%!

by F5 News

Healthcare providers face a unique challenge: continuously deliver quality patient care that is both effective and affordable. Today, this depends largely on technology – from diagnostic systems to patient record systems accessible by health care professionals dispersed amongst hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies.

Today these organizations increasingly rely on new software solutions from companies like Epic Software to manage every aspect of patient care. Epic infrastructures are the gold standard today, assisting health care organizations around the world to improve patient care through accessible and reliable health care systems.

It is critical that such applications are supported by an equally accessible and reliable IT infrastructure. To assure a high level of quality from top to bottom, Epic carefully certifies IT infrastructure providers that support a disaster-resilient, highly available, secure and increasingly mobile deployment.

Because of its focus on quality, resilience and affordability it has become a great honor to achieve full target platform status with EPIC. And that’s what happened recently with VMware® Horizon View™ – the first desktop virtualization solution to have achieved this status. Using VMware’s AlwaysOn™ Desktop for Healthcare reference architecture, F5 partnered with VMware for this historic launch.

VMware and F5 have long been offering joint solutions targeting desktop virtualization with a focus on resiliency, scalability, availability, security and performance. Together, along with partners such as NetApp and EMC, these joint reference architectures are the basis for secure, fast and available virtualization infrastructures capable of meeting the most demanding standards, such as that of Epic Software.

F5 is also establishing and documenting jointly with Epic a set of best practices for application delivery, designed to improve the scalability and availability of the most common HTTP, SSL, and FTP Epic components. F5 will be providing these best practices both as technical documentation as well as an iApp, to streamline deployment of these critical healthcare systems.

We’re excited about this announcement and extend a hearty congratulations to VMware on this notable achievement.

Continue the conversation with us on Twitter and Facebook!

By Banit Agrawal, Senior Performance Engineer, VMware

By: Courtney Burry, Director of PMM, VMware End-User Computing BU

In the past several years, many customers have turned to desktop virtualization in an effort to drive down costs and improve operational efficiencies.  This year, however, the tide has shifted. In a survey recently conducted by Forrester Research, Inc., and blogged about by David Johnson (Has VDI Peaked? A Change in the Adoption Drivers Sheds New Light, And New Life, April 1, 2013), the number one trigger for customer interest in VDI was actually around the need to support employee access across locations.

Interestingly, the drivers associated with reducing costs and improving manageability have not gone away. These are still very much on the minds of IT as they turn to VDI, thin client or blade PC technologies-but the need to support BYOD and device diversity has become a major focus of a large number of organizations-with many turning to desktop virtualization as a key technology enabler to help them address these requirements.

And while many customers have already made the move and are seeing real benefits, there are a number of organizations that have not. An inability to build the business case is often cited as a barrier, but as Johnson also points out in his blog-many organizations also feel that they don’t have the skills or resources on hand to dedicate to VDI projects.

VMware and Cisco recently partnered up to help take these objections off of the table. Together, the two companies have tested and validated a range of VDI architectures designed to meet the needs of organizations across a wide variety of use cases. These fast track architectures have not only allowed customers like COLT and University of Colorado Boulder to get started simply and cost-effectively but they also provide new customers with the ability to start small and effectively scale on demand.

As storage represents the largest cost outlay to any VDI implementation (Morgan Stanley, 2011), key to these validations was looking across a wide range of storage options including direct attached storage or “on-board architectures” with vendors like Fusion io, hybrid SAN or “simplified architectures” with companies like Nimble Storage, Nexenta, Atlantis Computing and Tegile and “converged architectures”  with NetApp and EMC to help ensure great performance at lower costs.

Additionally, we also looked at storage optimizations native to VMware vSphere and VMware® Horizon View™, including unique features like SE Sparse, Storage Accelerator or Content Based Read Cache, VAAI and Storage Tiering  to help customers further drive down costs and improve user experience.

The result is a wide range of prescriptive, highly automated design options (with plug-ins to VMware vCenter) that will allow customers to more efficiently and cost-effectively tackle VDI and address workplace mobility.

To hear firsthand, how organizations like yours are reaping the benefits of VDI deployed using VMware Horizon View with Cisco UCS, join us for this informative webcast.  You’ll hear from featured speakers from Wipro and UC Boulder, sharing valuable perspectives that can accelerate your ROI on VDI

Webinar: “Customer Insights: Desktop Virtualization On Your Terms”

Or reference the following resources:

VMware Fast Track Program

Cisco and VMware Horizon View Technical Whiteboard

Cisco and VMware Horizon View Promotional Bundle

www.cisco.com/go/vdivmware

Check out these other blogs for reference as well!

Jim McHugh’s Blog “Desktop Virtualization On Your Terms – Flexibility and Choice with Architectures That Fit”

Rick Snyder’s Blog “Accelerating Your Success with Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions”

Continue the conversation with us on Twitter and Facebook!

By Rich Benoit

Back in the day, I would have killed for a tool like vCOps, an analytics tool that uses dynamic thresholds to make sense of the myriad activity metrics that exist in an IT environment. Without dynamic thresholds that identify normal behavior, admins like myself are forced to use static thresholds that never seemed to work quite right. Static thresholds tended either to be set too low, resulting in false positives, or too high, so that by the time they were tripped, the support desk had already started receiving calls from disgruntled users.

Tried, but Failed

• One approach I tried in order make sense of the cloud of data coming from multiple monitoring tools was to combine several metrics to get a more holistic view. Combined metrics also rely on static thresholds and are similarly plagued with false positives. But, they introduce the additional problem of having to try and figure out which of the underlying metrics actually caused the alarm to trip.

• Another approach I tried was using end-user experience monitoring, or end-to-end application monitoring. Instead of trying to estimate the performance of an application by looking at the sum of all of its components, I could instead look at the simulated response time for the typical user and transaction. Another end-to-end monitoring tactic was to employ passive application sniffers that would record the response time of transactions. But with both approaches, I was still dependent on static hard thresholds that were invariably exceeded on a regular basis. For example, it wouldn’t be unusual for an application to exceed its 2-second response time goal during regular periods of peak usage. So I had to know when it was normal to exceed the allowed threshold.  In other words, I had to know when to ignore the alarms.

• Static thresholds also impacted performance monitoring. Other admins would ask, “Did this just start?” or “Is the performance issue the result of a change in the environment?” The monitoring tools wouldn’t provide the needed data. So we would have to roll up our sleeves and try to figure out what happened. Meanwhile the system would be down or just struggling along. Many times the problem would go away after a certain amount of time or after a reboot, only to resurface another day.

In the end, except for a few cases, we just turned off the monitors and alarms.

A Better Approach

That is why I would have killed for vCOps. vCenter Operations Management Suite is built on an open and extensible platform that works with physical and virtual machines.  It is a single solution works with a variety of hypervisors and fits either on-premise or public cloud environments.

It collects and stores metrics over time and works behind the scenes to establish dynamic thresholds. It employs around 18 different algorithms that compete to best fit any one of the millions of metrics it can track. Some algorithms are based on time intervals and others on mathematical models.

With vCops I can now designate specific metrics as KPIs for additional granularity. For example, the tool would learn that it is normal for response times to be in the 2 to 4 second range on Monday mornings, but if it exceeds the normal range, above or below, I can now have a KPI Smart Alert generated.

Another thing that I can use is the Early Warning Smart Alert that detects change in the environment when too many anomalies occur, such as when too many metrics are outside their normal operating range. I can use the various dashboards and detail screens to view the metrics over time, so that instead of wondering whether the issue is the result of a capacity trend or something changing / breaking, I can look and quickly see, “Oh, there’s the problem. Something happened at 1:15 on system X that caused this service to really slow down.”

Now, after more than 20 years in IT, I can finally start to use the multitude of metrics that have been there just waiting to be leveraged.

To get the most out of monitoring tools consider using vCops range of capabilities, including:

• The ability to track KPIs within the infrastructure, such as Disk I/O or CPU Ready, or leverage the vSphere UI so that you know if your infrastructure has additional capacity or not.
• Various KPI Super Metrics within the application stack (e.g. cache hit rate or available memory) that alert you when things are outside of a normal range.
• The power to see exactly how an environment is performing on a given day, and the ability to isolate which component is the source of the issue.
• The means to track and report the relative health of not only your components, but your services as well, without having to view everything as up or down at the component level and guess if the application or service is OK.

And it’s all possible because we can now actually use the lowly metric.

For future updates, follow @VMwareCloudOps on Twitter and join the conversation using the #CloudOps and #SDDC hashtags.

By James Millington, Director Product Management, Imprivata

Virtual desktops are gaining great traction in healthcare, a fact supported by the announcement that VMware® Horizon View™  has been awarded Target Platform status for Epic Hyperspace

The reason for this uptake, is that desktop virtualization is delivering compelling value across the spectrum of healthcare users and decision makers.

Imprivata and VMware have partnered closely in a number of healthcare environments including Johns Hopkins and Metro Health to deliver a combination of functionality that streamlines clinical workflows, helps meet compliance goals and provides flexibility for users and IT.

Lets take a look at the 2 predominant workflows that we see in EMR environments and consider some of the benefits. The first workflow is the workflow that we see in inpatient settings, the roaming desktop workflow. Here we have care providers moving quickly between nurse’s stations, patient rooms, treatment rooms, physician’s lounges etc. The combined Imprivata OneSign and Horizon View environment enables users to simply tap a badge and bring their desktop with them exactly as they left it. Not having to re-launch the EMR application, not having to re-navigate to the patient record. When you consider that care providers may log into different devices up to 70 times in a shift, OneSign authentication combined with desktop roaming is (arguably) the most compelling use case for this technology in any industry, creating compelling time savings and enabling providers to focus on patients, not technology. For IT you have the benefits of centralized data, no PHI left on the endpoint devices to potentially walk out of the hospital with a stolen computer, helping to limit the number of ways data breaches may occur and helping to reduce the potential for hefty PHI breach fines. For clinical leadership, they have care providers that feel that IT is doing something to help them, providing them with a system that works with them, not against them and helps encourage the use of the EMR and work together towards Meaningful Use dollars.

The second workflow is what customers refer to as Epic Secure. This is the workflow used in exam rooms, in ambulatory settings. In this workflow, Horizon View is working in kiosk mode – a shared desktop running nothing but this application. In this workflow, the integration with Imprivata OneSign enables doctors and nurses to keep the application “hot” as they both consult with a patient. The badge tap logs the nurse into the application, they find the patient chart, update the chart, and another tap secures the application. When the doctor then comes to see the patient their badge tap signs them into the application keeping the same patient record on the screen, they can see the latest information without further navigation. The flexibility of the combined Imprivata and VMware Horizon View solution ensures that the technology supports the clinical workflows. When this is the case, adoption is increased, often spreading by word of mouth changing support calls from “I’m having a problem” to “How do I get that?”

On a recent customer visit I had the head of the IT team tell me that the adoption of zero clients had taken client device replacement down from a 2 day process to a 30 minute process. How? He stated that when they received a call to the helpdesk, they would have to identify the machine, find its location and its role. Then find the base image for that machine, then install any other software required, then swap it for the broken device. After that would be a period of troubleshooting as users came along and tried to use it and problems almost certainly arose. With a zero client, after the call came in then went to the location, plugged in the new device, made sure it came up, and left. A huge IT time saving, and a huge increase in convenience for users getting their workstations available in minutes rather than days. With the unique No Click Access support from Imprivata, oh, and add in the cooling and power consumption benefits for good measure, zero clients add yet more value recognizable by users, IT and leadership alike.

The next big thing? What we are hearing from customers is Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances (EPCS). Many customers are planning their move to Epic 2012 as they move towards EPCS and may consider this the time to take advantage of the Target Platform status of Horizon View. Imprivata is the only solution to support all two factor authentication modalities certified by the DEA adding EPCS to the growing list of benefits of desktop virtualization in healthcare.

Continue the conversation with us on Twitter and Facebook!

By Srinivas Krishnamurti, Senior Director of mobile product management, End-User Computing, VMware

Today I’m very excited to announce the immediate availability of two VMware Ready devices – LG Intuition and Razr M by Motorola – on Verizon Wireless.  These devices are now equipped with VMware’s virtualization technology required to run our dual personal solution, VMware Horizon Mobile.  This is an important milestone for VMware as we deliver on our end-user computing vision of managing users, not devices.  We will continue to work closely with Verizon Wireless to enable a broad set of new and existing devices to be VMware Ready. You might be asking yourself what is a VMware Ready device?  Well, in this blog I will provide a quick overview of Horizon Mobile and VMware Ready program.

VMware Horizon Mobile Overview

Perhaps even more profound than the BYOD trend is the change in how employees use their devices.  Irrespective of who actually buys or owns the device, the corporation or the user, most employees tend to download personal apps onto these devices – Facebook, Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc. coexist with work email/PIM.  It is fair to assume then that most devices will have both personal and corporate content (apps, data and services).

Given that the usage paradigms have changed, IT needs to rethink security and manageability of mobile devices.  The old BlackBerry model of locking and wiping the device is no longer in line with how employees use their devices.  IT administrators can now leverage VMware Horizon Mobile to isolate personal content from corporate content and only manage the corporate content on the device.  The corporate content resides in a “workspace” whose lifecycle and usage is managed by IT.  IT can customize what apps are in the workspace and what policies are applied to the workspace, provision the workspace to the user’s device over the air (OTA) and then manage its lifecycle remotely.

If you look at the latest mobile OS market share information, Android is way ahead of other mobile operating systems but if you consider the enterprise subset of that market share, iOS is the dominant platform.  One of the reasons for Android not being dominant is its fragmentation, which makes it very difficult for IT to wrap their hands and heads around a comprehensive security and manageability story for Android devices.  VMware Horizon Mobile leverages device virtualization to normalize that fragmentation and allows IT to deploy and manage its own Android workspace that looks and behaves the same on any Android device.  However, in order to run this solution, you must have a VMware Ready device and hence, the importance of today’s announcement.

You can see the product in action here.

VMware Ready Program

VMware Ready designates VMware’s highest level of endorsement for products and solutions created by our established partners – and on the mobile side, a VMware Ready device is required to experience our dual persona solution.  In the US, VMware is partnering with Verizon to enable a broad set of new and existing devices to become VMware Ready and it’s important to note is that existing in-market devices can be updated over-the-air (OTA) to become VMware Ready devices.

Indeed this is the case with LG Intuition and Razr M by Motorola.  Both of these devices have been in the market for several months and recently received a software update.   The update pushed out by Verizon included the right VMware technologies to enable them to run a second instance of Android and thereby, our Horizon Mobile solution.

Our customers should expect popular in-market devices will receive similar software updates resulting in a broad set of VMware Ready devices in the market.  In fact, we anticipate many new devices will also launch as VMware Ready devices.

We’re looking forward to seeing many more VMware Ready devices in the market and if you’re an Android OEM interested in getting involved with the VMware Ready program, please contact us at mvp-oem-public @ vmware.com for more information.

On a more personal note…  Over the weekend, I had some time to review some of the strategy documents and initial business plans that I put together when we first started on the mobile initiative.  It is personally gratifying to see first hand how all this has come together and reflect on the journey that got us here.

It’s been a great experience getting to this point and we’re proud to walk hand in hand with LG to deliver the first VMware Ready device on Verizon Wireless.  My sincere thanks to all the wonderful folks at LG who partnered with us and worked tirelessly through the various stages of our product development and betas to enable the LG Intuition as the first VMware Ready device on our partner’s network.

So what do you think of our approach to managing enterprise mobile users? Do you like the idea of managing just the corporate workspace and not the entire device? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Today I’m very excited to announce the immediate availability of two VMware Ready devices – LG Intuition and Razr M by Motorola – on Verizon Wireless. These devices are now equipped with VMware’s virtualization technology required to run our dual persona solution, VMware Horizon Mobile. This is an important milestone for VMware as we deliver on our end-user computing vision of managing users, not devices. We will continue to work closely with Verizon Wireless to enable a broad set of new and existing devices to be VMware Ready. You might be asking yourself what is a VMware Ready device? Well, in this blog I will provide a quick overview of Horizon Mobile and VMware Ready program.

VMware Horizon Mobile Overview

Perhaps even more profound than the BYOD trend is the change in how employees use their devices. Irrespective of who actually buys or owns the device, the corporation or the user, most employees tend to download personal apps onto these devices – Facebook, Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc. coexist with work email/PIM. It is fair to assume then that most devices will have both personal and corporate content (apps, data and services).

Given that the usage paradigms have changed, IT needs to rethink security and manageability of mobile devices. The old BlackBerry model of locking and wiping the device is no longer in line with how employees use their devices. IT administrators can now leverage VMware Horizon Mobile to isolate personal content from corporate content and only manage the corporate content on the device. The corporate content resides in a “workspace” whose lifecycle and usage is managed by IT. IT can customize what apps are in the workspace and what policies are applied to the workspace, provision the workspace to the user’s device over the air (OTA) and then manage its lifecycle remotely.

If you look at the latest mobile OS market share information, Android is way ahead of other mobile operating systems but if you consider the enterprise subset of that market share, iOS is the dominant platform. One of the reasons for Android not being dominant is its fragmentation, which makes it very difficult for IT to wrap their hands and heads around a comprehensive security and manageability story for Android devices. VMware Horizon Mobile leverages device virtualization to normalize that fragmentation and allows IT to deploy and manage its own Android workspace that looks and behaves the same on any Android device. However, in order to run this solution, you must have a VMware Ready device and hence, the importance of today’s announcement.

You can see the product in action here.

VMware Ready Program

VMware Ready designates VMware’s highest level of endorsement for products and solutions created by our established partners – and on the mobile side, a VMware Ready device is required to experience our dual persona solution. In the US, VMware is partnering with Verizon to enable a broad set of new and existing devices to become VMware Ready and it’s important to note is that existing in-market devices can be updated over-the-air (OTA) to become VMware Ready devices.

Indeed this is the case with LG Intuition and Razr M by Motorola. Both of these devices have been in the market for several months and recently received a software update. The update pushed out by Verizon included the right VMware technologies to enable them to run a second instance of Android and thereby, our Horizon Mobile solution.

Our customers should expect popular in-market devices will receive similar software updates resulting in a broad set of VMware Ready devices in the market. In fact, we anticipate many new devices will also launch as VMware Ready devices.

We’re looking forward to seeing many more VMware Ready devices in the market and if you’re an Android OEM interested in getting involved with the VMware Ready program, please contact us at mvp-oem-public @ vmware.com for more information.

On a more personal note… Over the weekend, I had some time to review some of the strategy documents and initial business plans that I put together when we first started on the mobile initiative. It is personally gratifying to see first hand how all this has come together and reflect on the journey that got us here.

It’s been a great experience getting to this point and we’re proud to walk hand in hand with LG to deliver the first VMware Ready device on Verizon Wireless. My sincere thanks to all the wonderful folks at LG who partnered with us and worked tirelessly through the various stages of our product development and betas to enable the LG Intuition as the first VMware Ready device on our partner’s network.

So what do you think of our approach to managing enterprise mobile users? Do you like the idea of managing just the corporate workspace and not the entire device? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.