VMware Blogs

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.

Author: Mark Sarago

Most of my career as a chief information officer was in the financial services field, including mortgage banking, insurance and auto lending/leasing. Financial services companies, as well as healthcare providers and insurers, have heightened sensitivity to industry compliance rules and customer privacy concerns. As a result, the IT organization often prioritizes its focus on a tight security profile.

Compliance and privacy concerns range from restricting access to customer Personally Identifiable Information (PII), patient healthcare records (HIPAA compliance), and the company financial data or customer equity and bond trading transactions (SEC compliance). Breaches to data security that result in violations of compliance and privacy rules can result multi-million dollar fines or severely tarnishing a well-established brand.

It was not uncommon for my organization’s chief risk officer or chief legal counsel to forcibly mandate that no company or customer data move beyond the “four walls” of our dedicated data centers.

Recently, as a VMware Accelerate Advisory Services strategist working with a global financial institution, I saw this security mandate extend to a prohibition against the use of public cloud services or the use of multi-tenant, co-located data centers for business software application development, quality assurance procedures, and high-volume stress-testing activities—even when the underlying test data was completely fictitious! (click on image to download related case study)

The main concern with using a public cloud is that services are typically provided in multi-tenant environments. Multi-tenancy is the norm because it significantly reduces the operating costs for the public cloud provider. As a result, financial services, healthcare and insurance companies usually bypass pubic cloud solutions in favor of implementing private clouds within wholly owned or dedicated data centers.

The capabilities offered by the software-defined data center (SDDC) are perfect for private clouds, and accordingly, are an appropriate fit for financial services, healthcare and insurance companies that operate dedicated data centers.

SDDC provides software systems and technologies to virtualize networks and storage, as well as servers. SDDC implementations result in reducing overall CapEx and OpEx costs while enhancing automated workload provisioning, pooling resources and application security.

Financial institutions, healthcare and insurance companies that are early adopters of SDDC technologies are focused on implementing the components in dedicated private clouds. I expect this trend to continue as SDDC features become more widely adopted in the near-term future.

—–

Mark Sarago is a business solutions strategist with VMware Accelerate Advisory Services.

VMware Accelerate^TM 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.

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 Moe Khosravy, Vice President of Product Management, End-User Computing, VMware

A quarter has almost passed since we first introduced Horizon Suite and VMware continues to be the only vendor in the market offering a suite with a level of integration unmatched by any other solution.

The industry is beginning to acknowledge our efforts and leadership in end-user computing, most recently in CITEworld with an article titled “The audacious vision of VMware Horizon: Manage access, not devices,” among many others that have also highlighted our brave new approach. But it doesn’t stop there.

VMware Horizon Workspace has also been selected to be a contestant in the “CTIA 2013 Emerging Technology ‘Online Pick’ Award” which is another testament to the groundbreaking work the VMware team has done in developing a new approach to managing enterprise mobility, balancing personal and corporate workspaces, and securely offering online/offline collaboration. However, what’s unique about this award is that each one of you can directly help make it a winner.

This award allows online users everywhere to vote for their favorite solution up until the deadline on Monday, May 20 at 5 pm PT. Voting is very simple and takes less than 2 minutes.

So let’s see if we can get critical mass from everyone who believes it’s time for a new approach to end-user computing, that the traditional desktop management model needs to be refreshed, that enterprise mobility and management needs to be re-thought, and being forward thinking and innovative should be rewarded.

Please take 2 minutes of your time to vote following the instructions below and help bring home the trophy!

How to Vote

1. Click on the voting link: http://ctiait.ctia.org/etech/2013/public/index.cfm/viewEntry/740
2. In the upper right hand corner of the page, click on the red hyperlink Sign Up/Sign In to vote
3. Follow the instructions on the next screen asking for your email address and CAPTCHA verification
4. In the upper right hand corner of the page, click on the red hyperlink Click to Vote for this Entry

Let us know you voted on Twitter and Facebook!

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

In the runtime name of VMFS datastore vmhba1:0:2:4, to which storage processor is the datastore connected?
a. 1
b. 4
c. 0
d. 2

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. 2

We are excited to announce the launch of our VMwareSMB IT Hero search!

Does your business have an IT pro that you couldn’t work without? Are you an IT whiz that keeps your company’s tech running smoothly? We want to hear from you! The VMware SMB team is on the search to recognize the unsung IT Heroes that make a business hum. An added bonus: the IT Heroes selected will win some awesome prizes and VMware loot!

Enter Today!

Over the next 6 months we’ll be searching for IT professionals who have performed so well at their jobs that many would call them an ‘IT Hero’.  Nominations are open to individuals who are themselves IT Heroes as well as anyone who would like to get their IT Hero some recognition. Each month a committee from the VMwareSMB team will review the submissions received and select one to represent that month’s official IT Hero. We’ll recognize a total of 6 VMware IT Heroes over the course of our search.

Once selected, monthly IT Heroes will win a prize pack from VMware plus special graphics for their social media channels to highlight their IT Hero distinction. Each hero will also be recognized on the VMware SMB blog to share their IT insights and best practices with the community.

What are you waiting for? Make your nomination today! 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.

For more contest information and official rules, see Terms and Conditions below:

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 May 14, 2013 and ends at 11:59 PM PST on November 17, 2013.  To enter, submit your entry through the IT Hero Facebook Application found on the VMware SMB Facebook Community Page.  Or, you may enter without completing the survey by sending an email with “Enter Me in the IT Hero Contest” in the subject line to: VMwareSMB@lewispulse.com by 11:59 P.M. PST on November 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. Any 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 based on submissions received and judged by a VMware committee each month from  May 14, 2013 to November 17, 2013.   VMware branded prize bundle AND Social Media Recognition on VMware SMB accounts AND custom digital awards in the form of Facebook cover photo, Twitter Background and Blog Badge: Approximate Retail Value (“ARV”): USD $80 – $100.  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 email and will be publicly announced on the @VMwareSMB Twitter handle every month from May 14, 2013 to November 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. For U.S. residents, prizes will be fulfilled 8-10 weeks after the conclusion of the promotion.  For Canadian residents, prizes will be fulfilled 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.

By Eiad Al-Aqqad, VMWare Professional Services Consultant

This decade has offered more Data Center transformation options than most IT Professionals were able to keep up with. Virtualization has dramatically changed the way things were traditional done in the datacenter. Having the largest Data Center is not something to brag about anymore, as it might be a symbol of inefficiencies. Next, the Cloud Computing storm hit the datacenter and while IT Professionals started to digest it, the Software Defined Data Center concept has evolved. While each of these Data Center Transformations has offered great advantages to adopters, it had its own challenges and quite frankly, planning was not optional for a successful implementation.

Planning is critical for Data Center transformation and does not stop at the infrastructure planning, but extends to understanding your applications.

Most organizations are good at conducting the infrastructure portion of planning, but have difficulties in planning their applications for transformation. I’ve witness many transformation efforts where the customer team has a hard time answering these  simple questions:

1.      What are your Applications Priorities?
2.      What are your Applications RPO/RTO and how are you planning to achieve them?
3.      What are the security requirements of each of your APPs ?
4.      What does your Application Dependency look like?

It is critical to know your applications well enough before starting any transformation effort. The four questions above are a good start. While the first three questions can normally be answered by collecting bits and pieces from contacting the right SMEs & business units, Application Dependency is more challenging and is what I want to focus on in this article. For more thoughts on workload classifications, please check out my colleague David’s post:  Business as Usual with Tier 1 Business Critical Applications? – Not!

Application Dependency has proved to be more challenging due to many reasons including:

1.      Applications Dependencies aren’t static and can change on daily basis.
2.      Most organizations have inherited legacy applications with very little   documentation.
3.      Current Change Management systems while helping to document changes are still lagging when it comes to documenting Applications Dependencies.
4.      Application Dependencies are always filled with unexpected surprises that no one wants to admit, like having a critical application dependent on a DB running on a PC hidden under a developer’s desk.

While Application Dependency Planning without the right tools might be challenging, the point is, before any data center transformation, thorough planning and investigation is required for a successful end game. Tools definitely help with your efforts but even more importantly, making sure you ask yourself the questions above is really the first step before anything.

At last the good news is the availability of tools and services that help automate the process of creating an accurate application dependency mapping of your environment.  ADM & the Virtualization Assessment service (includes the use of Capacity Planning & Application Dependency Planner (ADP)) offered by VMware can be quite handy in creating an Application Dependency Mapping for applications within your environment. For more information about ADP, please visit:  My VMware Application Dependency Planner Post

Some customers are still running into issues when logging into the vSphere Client and we want to re-publicize the fix for this. If you see either of the following two messages:

unknown user or bad password

or:

The authentication server returned an unexpected error: ns0:RequestFailed: 
Internal Error while creating SAML 2.0 Token. 
The error may be caused by a malfunctioning identity source.

This is caused by a configuration issue related to the groups on the local Operating System having Active Directory users in them.  There is an easy fix to the issue, removing the localOS identity source from vCenter Server Single-Sign-On(SSO). All of the steps are detailed in KB article: Logging in to the vSphere Web Client fails with the error: ns0:RequestFailed: Internal Error while creating SAML 2.0 Token (2043070) but you can think of this as an addendum.

Before you go ahead and remove the local identity source, one should be aware that any local users will no longer have login access once the local identity source is removed.  Also, a domain account should be configured with SSO administrative privileges before removing the identity source.

To remove the identity source, log in to the Web Client using the SSO administrator,(admin@system-domain, go to Administration, then Configuration under Sign-On and Discovery and then remove the Local Identity Source (local machine name) as shown.

A couple of common questions:

Q – What if I can’t log in with SSO Administrator credentials?
A – See Unlocking and resetting the vCenter Single Sign On (SSO) administrator password (2034608)

Q – How do I add an SSO administrator?
A – Log in to the vSphere Web Client as an SSO administrator. By default, this user is admin@system-domain.

In the home page, click Administration > Access > SSO Users and Groups.

Click on the plus sign and add account from identity source.

In this video, Peter Shepherd shows you how to use vCenter Orchestrator in the vSphere Web client, designed to help you automate and orchestrate activities and tasks.

By Tisa Murdock, Group Manager, EUC Healthcare Solutions and Farid Agahi, Sr. Business Strategist, VMware Healthcare

It is official! VMware Horizon View (both 5.1 and 5.2) is the first VDI solution that has achieved Target Platform status for delivering Epic Hyperspace to clinical users. Target platform is determined after performing a wide range of usability, performance, and scalability tests plus documents are created to provide sizing guidance to customers.  Valuable experience and data points from customers already running Horizon View were used to share best practices with the larger community.

This is a milestone achievement for Horizon View and it reflects how VMware along with Epic and our joint customers act as change agents to push transformation in healthcare.  Together we are solving real problems with tested, validated and scalable solutions.

What are those problems?

Desktop Management and Costs

Healthcare organizations were caught off guard when they moved to paperless EMR and were forced to double or in some cases triple the number of desktop devices out on the floor and patient wards.  Plus we continue to see many personal devices being used by physicians such as smartphones, tablets, MACs and personal PCs. The cost to support these divergent hardware devices has become unsustainable and unaffordable… unless you move to a cloud-based virtual desktop model.

High Availability

In healthcare when you are dependent on an electronic device and that device is not cooperating, there can be some serious consequences. But VMware has never been a company to shy away from solving tough challenges so we created the VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care solution. This solution was built to withstand any outage and remain “AlwaysOn” so a clinical desktop with patient care applications and data is readily available wherever and whenever the caregiver needs it.

Patient Privacy and Data Security

Virtual desktops mean there is no data stored at the end point so no fear of a data breach from a lost or stolen laptop. As a matter of fact IT no longer has to manage end points – now they manage users and access to resources.   Scott Lundstrom, IDC’s GVP IDC Health Insights writes…. “Healthcare providers continue to look for the positive return on their compliance investments in EMR.  Creating value from information requires the delivery of actionable advice and information to the caregiver at the point of care.  Advanced solutions to support improved communications, mobility, and analytics at the point of medical decision making require new, agile and flexible deployment options.  We expect cloud based solutions that focus on delivering data to any device at any time will dominate this market in the long term.”

Cloud-based desktops from Horizon View solve these challenges PLUS they improve the overall experience and workflow for the clinicians using the system – now they can move from device to device and immediately resume their desktop session in state. It is fast and seamless.

Think about it…. Are you finding that managing your clinical desktops has become more difficult and are you looking for a better way to provide access to patient care applications, resources and data?  Tell us what you think…

Continue the conversation on Twitter and on Facebook!

VMware Horizon View 5.2 simplifies desktop and application management while increasing security and control and delivers a personalized high fidelity experience for end-users across sessions and devices. It enables higher availability and agility of desktop services unmatched by traditional PCs while reducing the total cost of desktop ownership and end-users can enjoy new levels of productivity and the freedom to access desktops from more devices and locations while giving IT greater policy control.

Recently, we published two whitepapers to provide a performance deep-dive on Horizon View 5.2 performance and hardware accelerated 3D graphics (vSGA) feature. The links to these whitepapers are as follows:

* VMware Horizon View 5.2 Performance and Best Practices
* VMware Horizon View 5.2 and Hardware Accelerated 3D Graphics

The first whitepaper describes View 5.2 new features, including access of View desktops with Horizon, space efficient sparse (SEsparse) disks, hardware accelerated 3D graphics, and full support of Windows 8 desktops. View 5.2 performance improvements in PCoIP and View management are highlighted. In addition, this paper presents View 5.2 PCoIP performance results, Windows 8 and RDP 8 performance analysis, and a vSGA performance analysis, including how vSGA compares to the software renderer support introduced in View 5.1.

The second whitepaper goes in-depth on the support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics that debuted with VMware vSphere 5.1 and VMware Horizon View 5.2 and presents performance and consolidation results for a number of different workloads, ranging from knowledge workers using 3D desktops to performance-intensive CAD-based workloads. Because the intensity of a 3D workload will vary greatly from user to user and application to application, rather than highlighting specific case studies, we demonstrate how the solution efficiently scales for both light- and heavy-weight 3D workloads, until GPU or CPU resources are fully utilized. This paper also presents key best practices to extract peak performance from a 3D View 5.2 deployment.

By: Mathew Lodge

On March 13 at the EMC VMware Strategic Forum for Institutional Investors, Pat Gelsinger and Carl Eschenbach announced VMware would offer its own public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), what we’re calling the vCloud Hybrid Service. Since that time, we’ve had hundreds of conversations with our customers and partners, and you’ve made it even more clear there is a need for – and much enthusiasm about – a true hybrid cloud service. On May 21, we’ll launch that service, and you’re invited.

A common theme is the (healthy) tension between business teams striving to launch new products and services, move into new markets and generally drive growth, and overloaded IT organizations that are rewarded for avoiding outages and cutting costs – very different incentives. Public cloud has the potential to benefit both, helping to increase agility and also reduce cost (both real costs and opportunity cost). But today public cloud deployments are not the norm, or even widespread inside the average company.  So why is that?

Part of the problem is that while public clouds can be simple to use for development, they also uncompromisingly assume you can make all your application and systems fit their way of working in production. For application teams, using public cloud can mean having to modify or re-write an application to become a fully redundant distributed system that can handle any disruption and still soldier on. Then there is the packaged software your business depends on that just doesn’t function that way. Multiply that by the number of applications a business uses, and it’s a bottleneck: you can’t make that journey overnight, and that limits the cloud velocity of a business. Over in IT, the desire is to be able to take a supporting role without abdicating important responsibilities around operating costs, uptime and security.

VMware believes a new approach is necessary, one that starts inside your data center and extends out to support all applications – both the new “born in the cloud” application and your existing systems. We believe the hybrid cloud should allow you to seamlessly extend your data center to the public cloud leveraging the same infrastructure, same network, same management and skills.

By extending the very same platform (and operations model) that you use today in your data centers to the public cloud, you will be able to deploy and run all your applications onsite, offsite or both — without compromise and with less risk. This is true hybrid cloud.

Powered by the Software-Defined Data Center & the VMware Ecosystem

What makes this hybrid approach possible? Two things: the software-defined data center and VMware’s broad ecosystem of service providers, systems integrators, ISVs, and channel partners.

The software-defined data center – where compute, storage, network and security are all virtualized and automated by software – means customers can create a unified hybrid cloud architecture spanning data center and cloud with common processes and management. The software-defined data center is the “glue” that automates migration, management, and security.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because this vision for the hybrid cloud is not a new one. VMware and our ecosystem of partners have been advocating an “inside out” approach to cloud for years. With roughly 55,000 partners worldwide, chances are likely that your first experience with our technology was through one of our partners. And we plan to make it easy for you to get VMware’s software-defined data center in a new way – as a service – through the channels you’ve always used.

VMware is about to change the way you think about the cloud, and we hope you’ll join us on May 21 to learn more.

Last week we talked about how My VMware had turned one (year old), and the changes that have come about since its inception. Today, we present a list of Knowledgebase articles that have been published to explain new features. Chances are good you’ve been looking for one or more of these features.

• Viewing Subscription Services in My VMware (2045030)
• Viewing Subscription Service details in My VMware (2045031)
• Requesting Subscription Service Add-ons in My VMware (2045033)
• Viewing Subscription Services billing statements in My VMware (2045036)
• Viewing Add-on Requests and Add-on request details in My VMware (2045041)
• Viewing available Add-ons for a Subscription Service in My VMware (2051356)

Effective May 13, 2013, VMware Lab Connect can be purchased together with select courses, listed below, or as a standalone offering*:

Practice the skills learned from the instructor-led training class attended or dive deeper into features of interest or get extra practice time before your certification exam.  Sign up for VMware Lab Connect today!

In this post I am going to address a common question about the security and performance impact when multiple logical Layer 2 networks are mapped to one multicast group address.

As mentioned in earlier post here, vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) Manager is responsible for mapping the logical Layer 2 networks to multicast group addresses. If you provide less number of multicast group addresses than the logical layer 2 networks, vCNS manager will assign the logical layer 2 networks to multicast addresses in a round robin fashion. For example, if there are 4 logical L2 networks (A1,A2,A3,A4) and 2 multicast group addresses (M1, M2), Logical networks A1 and A3 will be mapped to multicast group address M1 while A2 and A4 are mapped to M2.

Let’s take a look at the packet flows to understand any security or performance impact of mapping multiple logical networks on one multicast group. To simplify the drawing, as shown below, we will use a two logical Layer 2 network deployment with one multicast group address.

Example – Two logical networks mapped to one multicast group address

As shown in the diagram above, both logical networks have virtual machines connected. Virtual machine MAC1 and MAC2 are on VXLAN 5001 (green vwire) and virtual machines MAC3 and MAC4 are on VXLAN 5002 (red vwire). When the virtual machines are powered on, IGMP join requests to multicast group address 239.1.1.100 are sent out by the respective VTEPs on the host.

IGMP packet flows

The diagram above shows the packet flows

1. Virtual Machine MAC1 connected to VXLAN 5001 is powered on
2. IGMP join message to multicast group address 239.1.1.100 is sent out by VTEP on Host 1
3. Virtual Machine MAC 4 connected to VXLAN 5002 is powered on
4. IGMP join message to multicast group address 239.1.1.100 is sent out by VTEP on Host 3

To show the security implication in such deployment, we will take an example of broadcast traffic generated by virtual machine MAC 1. The virtual machine is connected to the logical network VXLAN 5001 (green vwire). The broadcast packet generated by this virtual machine should only be received by other virtual machines connected to VXLAN 5001 and not by virtual machines on VXLAN 5002.

Broadcast packet flows

As shown in the diagram above the packets flow as follows

1. Virtual Machine MAC1 sends a broadcast packet
2. VTEP on Host 1 encapsulates the packet in UDP header with destination IP address as the multicast group address 239.1.1.100.
3. The physical network delivers the packet to all the hosts that joined the multicast group 239.1.1.100.
4. The VTEP on the Host 4, after receiving the packet, checks if the VXLAN ID matches “5001” or “5002”. In this case the packet is sent from the virtual machine connected to the logical network with VXLAN 5001 (green vwire), and thus the packet will be only delivered to the virtual machine (MAC2) connected on that network.
5. The VTEPs on Host 2 and Host 3 will also receive the packet, because those hosts had also joined the multicast group 239.1.1.100. However, after VTEP checks that the packet is only destined to virtual machines connected to VXLAN 5001 (green vwire) the packets are dropped.

Even if the physical network delivers the broadcast packet from one logical network to all VTEPs, the individual VTEP on the Host do not forward packets unless they are destined to a logical network identified by the encapsulation header, and virtual machines are connected to the logical network on that Host. In this example, the VTEPs on Host 2 and Host 3 don’t have any virtual machines connected to logical network VXLAN 5001, and thus broadcast packet is not forwarded. The broadcast traffic on one logical network is not seen on the other logical network, even if the multicast group address is the same. So, there shouldn’t be any additional security concerns because of mapping multiple logical Layer2 networks to one multicast group address.

In terms of performance though, multicast traffic is suboptimal in such deployments. As we see in this example, Host 2 and Host 3 don’t have any virtual machines connected to logical network VXLAN 5001, but they still receive the broadcast traffic. This is because those hosts have virtual machines connected to logical network VXLAN 5002, and that logical network is associated with same multicast group address as VXLAN 5001. The physical network only knows that Host 2 and Host 3 are interested in listening to the same conversation as Host 1 and Host 4.

I hope this post clarifies the impact of mapping multiple logical networks to same multicast group address.

In the next post I will cover how VTEPs build forwarding table with virtual machine MAC address and associated VTEP IP address entries.

Here are the links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

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

VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) is the highest level of VMware certification, achieved by dedicated  professionals who have demonstrated exceptional skill in VMware enterprise deployments. To earn a VCDX, professionals must create a complete enterprise VMware design and undergo an arduous defense at the hands of some of the world’s most sophisticated VMware experts.

Now, for the first time, there’s a comprehensive guide to VCDX defense: VCDX Boot Camp. Based on the legendary standing-room-only boot camps led by VCDX co-creator John Arrasjid, this guide captures the unsurpassed personal experience of three pioneering VCDX certification holders, program developers, and defense panelists.

Order your copy and get started today: http://bit.ly/10rg0gZ

For more information on VCDX, visit: vmware.com/go/vcdx

Data center security is often cited as a primary concern for organizations considering a move to a public, private or hybrid cloud environment. As a service provider, are you confident that your virtual environment is keeping your customers’ data secure?

Ease your fears next Thursday, May 16 at 11am PT as VMware partner Trend Micro discusses the advantages of their virtualization-aware Deep Security solution. Trend Micro is the industry leader in virtualization security, supporting compliance and providing adaptive protection for your customer’s virtualized and cloud deployments, in addition to their physical infrastructure. New multi-tenant architecture also enables service providers to offer customers a secure public cloud, isolated from other tenants.

During the webcast, hosted by VMware partner Ingram Micro, experts will share how Trend Micro Deep Security can:

• Maximize operational cost reductions;
• Prevent data breaches and business interruptions;
• And achieve cost-effective compliance.

Service providers who attend will also receive an overview of sales and licensing details with solution positioning, and will be able to see a live demo of Trend Micro Deep Security in action.

Your customers trust you to keep their data secure – don’t miss this opportunity to learn how Trend Micro Deep Security can help you deliver better than traditional security to your customers. Register today!

Ingram Micro is promoting this product with a special offer of a $250 Ingram Micro credit memo when service providers purchase Deep Security before June 28.

For future updates, be sure to follow us on Twitter at @VMwareSP and @vCloud.

Back in December, we posted the support alert: vCenter Server 5.x does not function correctly when installed with Oracle 11.2.0.3 Patch 10. The support alert was documented fully in KB article: vCenter Server 5.x does not function correctly when installed with Oracle 11.2.0.3 Patch 10 (2039874).

There is news on this alert. Oracle has since resolved the issue in the Windows Oracle Client 11.2.0.3 p16656151 (Patch 19) 64-bit, which can be downloaded today.

VMware Certified Instructor, Joe Desmond, discusses VMware vCloud Automation Center including:

Joe Desmond, VCI

• vCloud Automation Center Overview – upgrading Dynamic Cloud Automation Center from v4.5 to vCloud Automation Center
• vCloud Automation Center Approach to Cloud Computing
• DCAC Pre-upgrade Steps and Database Upgrade
• DCAC Upgrade Prerequisite Upgrade Checker Demonstration
• DCAC vCloud Automation Center Server Agent Upgrade Demonstration
• DCAC vCloud Automation Center Distributed Execution Manager (DEM) Upgrade Demonstration

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

We just received word from one of our support engineers working on the front-lines that some customers are reporting problems wherein Sysprep fails on Virtual Machines that have IE10 on them.

The issue is not a VMware bug, it’s an Registry location problem, but customers might still reach for the phone to call us first. We thought we’d try and get the word out today to try and save you some steps (and time).

The problem manifests itself when you attempt to Sysprep a Virtual Machine that has IE10 on it.  In the Sysprep setupact.log log file (located at C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep\Panther), you see:

Error[0x0f0085]SYSPRP LaunchDll:Could not load DLL C:\Windows\SysWOW64\iesysprep.dll[gle=0x000000c1]

The registry entry for the location of certain files is incorrect. For further details and resolution, we refer you to KB article: Sysprep fails on Virtual Machine installed with IE10 (2051620).

It’s a key question in developing a private or hybrid cloud strategy: “What processes should we automate?”

There are plenty of candidates: provisioning; resource scaling; workload movement. And what about automating responses to event storms? Incidents? Performance issues? Disaster recovery?

To answer the question, though, you need to first establish what you’re looking to gain through automation. There are two basic strategic approaches to automation, each with specific value propositions:

• task automation – where the proposition is more, better, faster
• service automation – where you’re looking to standardize and scale

In my last post, I looked at how the automation strategy determines your HR needs.

In this post, I’ll highlight a simple economic model that can be used to cost justify task automation decisions. Next time, I’ll refine the math to help analyze decisions about what to automate when pursuing a service automation strategy.

The Cost Justification for Task Automation – the Tipping Point

From a cost perspective, it makes sense to automate IT tasks if:

• the execution of the automated task has a lower cost than the execution of a manual version of the task.
• the automated process can be run a large number of times to spread the cost of development, testing, and ongoing maintenance of the automation capability.

Brown and Hellersten at the IBM Thomas Watson Research Center expressed the idea in a simple model.[1] It compares the fixed and variable costs of manual process versus automated version of the same process. The cost calculation is based on the variable N, which represents the number of times the automated process will execute.

IT organizations typically automate existing manual processes. So we consider the fixed cost of developing the manual process as part of the automated process costs.

With these two equations, we can solve for an automation tipping point Nt. Nt, then, is the number of times a process is executed at which it becomes cost effective to automate the process.

Changing the task automation tipping point

Now, what actions could we take that would shift the tipping point? We might:

1. Reduce automation fixed costs. If we can drive down automation fixed costs, automation becomes economically attractive at lower number of process executions.

Automation fixed costs include purchasing and maintaining the automation platform, as well as standardizing process inputs, ensuring the process is repeatable, developing policies, coding automation workflow based on those policies, testing each automation workflow, documenting error and establishing exception handling procedures. We also need to add in ongoing maintenance and management of automation routines that may change as IT processes evolve. If any of this work can become highly standardized, Nt will be lower, which will in turn increase the scope of what can be further automated.

2. Minimize automation variable costs. Reducing automation variable costs also makes automation attractive at lower number of executions.

Variable costs include both the cost of each automation execution and the cost of managing exceptions that typically are triaged via manual resolution processes. With a very large number of process executions, the variable cost of each incremental automated process execution would essentially be zero except for costs related to handling exceptions such as errors and process failures. Standardizing infrastructure and components configurations, and thus management processes, reduces exceptions and lowers the tipping point.

3. Pick the right tasks.  Automating manual processes with high cost of execution is an obvious win. The slower and harder the manual task, the higher the cost of each execution, and the lower the tipping point for automating the process.

Benefits other than cost reduction

Automation offers benefits beyond cost reduction, of course. In the cloud era, demand for agility and service quality are also driving changes in the delivery and consumption of IT services.

Automation for agility 

Agility is key when it comes to quickly provisioning a development or a test environment, rolling it into production, avoiding the need for spec hardware, accelerating time to market and reducing non-development work. Typically, 10-15% of total development team effort is spent just configuring the development environment and its attendant resources. Automation can make big inroads here. Note, too, that agility and speed-to-market factors, which generally have a revenue-related value driver, typically aren’t included in task automation tipping point calculations.

Automation for service quality

Automation promises greater consistency of execution and reduced human error, quality-related benefits that also aren’t factored in the calculations above. Downtime has a cost, after all. Deploying people with different skills and variable (and often ad hoc) work procedures at different datacenter facilities, for example, directly impacts service quality. Automated work procedures reduce both human error and downtime.

Back to the math

Really, we should add the quality-related costs of error and inconsistency to our manual variable processes costs, since they mirror how automation error recovery costs are calculated.

To account for the manual process quality costs, the tipping point calculation could replace “Manual variable costs” with “(Manual variable costs + Manual quality costs)” in the denominator.

Doing that would further lower tipping point number that justifies automation.

Here’s how I sum up these concepts applied to task automation environment:

• If a manual task is easy, it is difficult to justify automating it because the tipping point number will be very high or never reached
• If a manual process is hard and error prone, it is easy to justify automation i.e. Nt is a low number
• If there are a lot of process exceptions that result in a large percentage of process executions that result in a manual intervention – it makes it harder to justify automation
• If automation routines are hard to program, or take a lot of time and effort to tweak and maintain over time due to ad hoc run book procedures – it makes it harder to justify automation

In the next post, I’ll explore the economic justifications for automation under a service automation strategy.

Follow @VMwareCloudOps for future updates, and join the conversation by using the #CloudOps and #SDDC hashtags.

I’m at Interop Las Vegas today presenting a talk entitled How to Manage Your Cloud of Choice. The motivation for this is talk comes from our customers trying to wrap their heads around hybrid cloud and understand how to make the best use of it.

The most basic question customers ask about hybrid cloud is whether it makes sense for their organization to adopt or not. As you can imagine, there are tradeoffs in security, performance, SLA guarantees, cost, and much more between private, hybrid, and public clouds. Each organization will have different constraints and priorities. Thus the decision of whether to move to hybrid or public cloud – or more specifically what apps, data, and services to move – will be different for each organization.

In my session, I talk about how to architect your datacenter to provide the flexibility to make changes over time. The right architecture will enable you to move between private, hybrid, and public cloud seamlessly, without impact to services and be completely transparent to users. And this is exactly the point of hybrid cloud: it’s about flexibility and choice. But in order to avoid lock-in, you need the right architecture.

But what does the right architecture look like? We’ve found that the answer is a self-service architecture. While it may seem a bit of a leap from hybrid cloud to self-service, the point is that the cloud that you use to run your infrastructure should be considered an implementation decision, not an architectural decision. And in order to achieve that, you need the right abstraction layer between your users and services and the backend infrastructure they utilize.

Ok, so how does self-service achieve this? It’s instructive to look at non-technical, real-life examples for inspiration. In my talk at CloudConnect Silicon Valley last month, I used the example of FedEx. As a customer, FedEx gives me a very simple interface with three input variables: where my package is going, how much it weighs, and when I want it to get there.

Assuming the price is right, I print my shipping label, put it on my box, and drop it at a drop location. This is all I see as a customer. However, on the backend, there is an amazing amount of complicated logistics to get my package to its destination on-time. But really, as a customer, do I care if FedEx uses a truck versus a plane to get my package to its destination? Do I care that they optimize to avoid making left turns? No – so long as my SLA is met, I don’t. Thus exactly how FedEx gets my package to its destination is an implementation detail that I as the customer don’t see or care about. More importantly, they can change this implementation detail as frequently as they’d like without affecting me (so long as my SLA is met!).

The question before us is how we can architect a datacenter such that we have the same clean separation between the customer (user) and the backend implementation chosen by IT. We believe that self-service is the answer our customers are looking for.

So what should you be thinking about if you want to build a self-service datacenter? The first piece of the puzzle is a self-service portal. This is a place where users can provision new services and manage their existing services. Like FedEx, each service would have an associated cost and users would need to decide if their business needs justify the cost of the service. If they do, then the user can start the process for provisioning that service. Whether that service is provisioned into the private cloud or the public cloud is of little concern to the user so long as the SLA they specified is met. And that’s exactly the point: all the user sees is the self-service portal, they’re unaware of exactly where this service has been provisioned.

It’s important to note the importance of this self-service interface. Typically in today’s IT environment, all requests for new services are made through a ticketing system. Within this system, the user requesting the service must provide very detailed specs for every aspect of their service, sometimes including the physical hardware or virtualization solution their service will run on. Because the user is deeply involved in specifying the backend infrastructure for running their service, it means IT has little wiggle room in case it decides to change vendors or technologies. This significantly ties IT’s hands and results in “silos” being created – different technology stacks for different applications (e.g. the Windows stack is different top-to-bottom from the Linux stack is different from the Tier 1 apps stack).

In the end, users are good at creating and running their services, not managing the underlying infrastructure their services run on. In the self-service model, IT handles the infrastructure choices and users can focus on their services. This gives IT the freedom to change technologies, move from the private cloud to the public cloud or vice-versa, test out new ideas on a small percentage of the services before rolling the change out to all of them, etc. And there are many benefits with having a clean separation between service and infrastructure implementation!

So what else should you be thinking about in build a self-service datacenter? Well, questions like “how can I automate the provisioning of services?” or “how can I prevent this self-service datacenter from turning into total chaos?” or “how do I operate a self-service datacenter?” should be top of mind. The answer in two words to all of these questions is: management tools. In particular, you’re looking for two types of management tools: cloud automation and cloud operations.

Cloud automation tools take care of wiring up and connecting all the disparate services you have in your datacenter. To provision a service, you need to contact vCenter Server to deploy the VM from a template, talk to the networking gear to set up a vLAN, portgroups, and configure network settings for the service, connect with the storage backend to provision a new LUN or NAS mount, talk to vShield or some other security service to configure firewalls and anti-virus, and much more. Previously, all of these were tasks manually performed by IT admins, which could take days. Cloud automation allows you to automate all of this so that it can be done in seconds. At the same time, to prevent the “total chaos” scenarios so many IT admins worry about in self-service scenarios, you need to be able to specify and apply policies to different services and workflows.

VMware’s vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) solves the cloud automation problem. It is designed specifically for hybrid cloud scenarios, where a company’s datacenter spans private cloud, public cloud, and even (gasp!) physical servers. There are three primary components to it: a fully-configurable self-service portal, automated workflows, and policy-based governance. The self-service portal is straightforward enough – this is the web page where users go to provision and manage services and you have very granular control over the look and functionality of it. In terms of automated workflows and policy-based governance, vCAC allows you to create “blueprints” that specify the steps that are taken after a user selects a service in the self-service portal. Sometimes that service request will need approval, say from the user’s manager or the LOB’s VP. Other times the request is small enough that no approval is needed. This is completely configurable by IT, and this is just one example of how the right cloud automation tool can allow you to avoid the theoretical chaos associated with self-service architectures by inserting the right control points. Assuming the request is approved, vCAC then provisions the service. As mentioned in the preceding paragraph, this involves connecting to APIs for many different infrastructure components, including virtualization, network, storage, and security. Again, this is all automatic based on the blueprint specification.

vCAC and other cloud automation tools are the glue that hold the system together. Moreover, they abstract away the specifics of the infrastructure from the user. All the user sees is the self-service portal. Behind the scenes, vCAC orchestrates a lot of components and potential complexity, but due to the data-driven nature of the blueprint, it makes it very easy for IT to manage it all. You can simply specify what components are involved and what you want to happen, and vCAC takes care of it for you. This is where the benefits of the architecture start to show themselves. While a blueprint might call for deployment in a private cloud, the admin could easily change it to a public cloud without any users knowing. The user would only see the service name and some of its characteristics, but would not know where it was being provisioned. Thus vCAC provides that separation layer that gives IT flexibility in moving between private cloud and public cloud (and back!).

Once services are provisioned, you then need to think about how you’ll manage their ongoing operations. This is where cloud operations tools come in. vCenter Operations Management Suite (vC Ops) is VMware’s solution in this space. Like vCAC, it was designed from the ground up for hybrid cloud scenarios – both private and public cloud (and yes – even physical servers too!). vC Ops covers a wide range of functionality, including performance, capacity, configuration, compliance, log analysis, in-guest monitoring, and much more. For this discussion, the most important items to think about are performance, capacity, and compliance. Performance issues are certainly top of mind in hybrid cloud scenarios. Public clouds often give you an SLA, but how do you know the provider is meeting that SLA? Or if there is a problem, is it on the provider’s side or yours? vC Ops has powerful analytics to help answer these questions.

With regard to capacity management, a self-service model necessitates you think differently. Typically, capacity management is done by IT on a per-request basis. A new request comes in, IT works with the user to understand infrastructure requirements, and then new hardware is bought and provisioned for that service. And this can take months. If we want to provision new services in seconds, we need to have the physical hardware ready before the request comes in. But how can we do that? Well, FedEx does it. I mean, have you ever gone to a FedEx drop location and found that all their trucks were full and they couldn’t take any more packages? Of course not! FedEx analyzes historical trends to understand customer demand and ensures that enough trucks are ready as the packages come, even for busy times like the winter holidays. Similarly, IT should start doing capacity trending – analyzing usage to understand when and where capacity shortfalls will occur. vC Ops provides these capabilities and will accurately forecast future capacity availability.

Compliance is another big issue for the hybrid cloud. IT needs to ensure that its datacenters are in compliance, irrespective of whether they’re in a private or public cloud. vC Ops provides automated configuration information collection and compliance assessment against that configuration. It will automatically flag items out of compliance and can automatically remediate them if IT so desires. This way admins can be assured that no matter where a workload is running, it will be in compliance.

You also no longer need different management tools for different environments. vCAC and vC Ops work across all your environments – private, hybrid, and public clouds – so you can create blueprints or check compliance in the same way and from the same screen regardless of the underlying infrastructure. This means that your admins can quickly get up-to-speed on new environments.

Together vCloud Automation Center and vCenter Operations Management Suite are crucial for enabling a self-service datacenter and with it, offer greater flexibility in your hybrid cloud strategy. Have you given them a try?

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