The VMguy

First up this morning is Sameer Dholakia, VP Cloud Platforms Group. He kicks off by defining what cloud is (this should be good.) He talks about the many interpretations of cloud and then talks about what cloud is not. For this he introduces Geva Perry, Cloud Strategist. Geva talks about the adoption of Cloud in the world. He describes how the adoption has happened from the bottom up. Because of this, CIO’s are often unaware that their companies are using Cloud Services and strategies (very true). He shows an interesting survey from 2010 where they asked which group in the organization was the first to start using cloud computing. The Development group was the clear leader in the survey. He references the similarities of cloud adoption with other technologies: Salesforce.com, open-source software, PCs even. All of these technologies were adopted from the bottom-up. He describes one of the drivers for cloud adoption: The consumerization of IT. The expectation that our access to applications and data will be the same weather we are at work or home. He recommends that customers do not fight it, they should embrace it.
Sameer is back. He describes how Amazon built their EC2 cloud and the rate they have been growing. He describes the Citrix CloudStack platform and how they have the pieces needed to put together your own Amazon-style cloud. He makes a great statement, “Cloud is not next generation virtualization.” He segues into a presentation for XenServer (first time I’ve seen it mentioned in a keynote since I got here.) He mention how virtualization is a scale-up technology, blending the layers (storage, compute, network,etc) together. Cloud is a scale out technology so that you scale to the needs of the business horizontally across datacenters.
The presentation goes on to demos of CloudStack, NetScaler VPX, Sungard, and Engine Yard.
After 60 minutes of product pitch and demos, Sameer is back to discuss Project Avalon again. Project Avalon was announced yesterday at the very end of the Keynote. It is the Citrix grand-scale idea of a cloud offering. (Think vCloud Director and connector together with View and SRM included). It the all-encompassing picture of the integration of their products.
He concludes with reiterating was the Cloud is not. Cloud is not…Scale Up, Proprietary, Next Gen Virtualization, Vendor Lock in (Obvious jabs at VMware here) and the crowd exits.

What a difference from yesterday. Citrix Summit completed yesterday and had about 2,000 partner attendees. Today is a bit different with the kickoff of Synergy with over XXXX customers in attendance. The room is full with customers, partners and employees. If I may make one suggestion: two words – Blogger Tables.

Kicking off the day at 10:39am PST is Mark Templeton Citrix CEO.

Mark welcomes the crowd to much applause. Mark starts by saying they have two topics: mobile and cloud. He starts with some updates. GoToAssist is now available on Android as of today. Secondly, in conjuction with Wyse, they announce the Zenith 2 – a thin client with better graphics and performance. Next update is on VDI in a box. Citrix is announcing a license upgrade program from VDI in a box to XenDesktop. He also announces that VDI in a box won the Best of Interop 2012 award yesterday in cloud and virtualization. The next update is appDNA. Mark gives a little background on the product. Today AppDNA 6.1 launches. Simplified installation, simplified user experience and better analyitics. The next update ondeck is XenClient. They announce the acquisition of Virtual Computer. VC provides enterprise wide deployment. XenClient will run $175 per user. The next update is with Microsoft (slight groans from the crowd). Talking about the integration with SC2012, Win8, etc.
Mark moves on to talk about moving from the PC era to the Cloud era. He talks about oder times when poeple worked in an office and the exception was mobile. Wireless and cloud were the exceptions and now they are the standard and wired, on premise and office are the exception. He says that when you can support these users in both situations the incremental cost is zero. He states that the exceptions of the cloud era are the norm in the cloud era. He talks about the work life time in a 24 hour period. He explains how we use to work for 8 hours and the rest was spent on life. But now work and life intermingle. We have a slice of work, then a slice of life (using a pie chart). He explains that that transition from one to the other is the important part. Creating mobile connectivity options to ease and smooth that transition.
He shows a demonstration of Podio, a social collaboration platform for actually doing work. He shows how it integrates with GoToMeeting and upcoming integration with Citrix Receiver.
Mark changes topics to ShareFile. He announces the addition of Storage Zones in sharefile. It allows you to pick where a specific folder is stored. This would be where files can be stored in the public or private clouds. He introduces Jesse Lipson, VP and GM, Data Sharing. Jesse give a demo of the Outlook integration with ShareFile. Jesse shows the options in the Outlook Plugin that are available. He also demonstrates ShareFile Sync (think dropbox) where copies of files in a folder structure are replicated to the cloud. Lastly Jesse demonstrates the ipad app. (Very cool stuff, Project Octopus team, pay attention).
Mark moves on to Citrix Receiver and the integration of ShareFile for Follow-me data. They will be shipping Citrix with Follow-me-data in July.
Mark introduces Brad Peterson – Chief Demo Officer (nice title). Brad shows Citrix Receiver connecting into Cloud Gateway. He shows how applications are deployed, how sharefile data is included and integrated in receiver.
He shows how receiver can deploy applications directly to the iPad (think Project Horizon). Mark announces Cloud Gateway 2. How it can be used as a single point to provide the apps and data for your users no matter what device they are using.
Mark talks about the TVO – Total Value of Ownership. He describes FlexCast which gives you all the methods you need to connect to your apps and data. They are announcing Remote PC as another connection method. It’s connecting back to the physical PC in the office.
Next up is the enhancements in HDX. HDX 3D Pro is announced. It provides full 3D apps with less bandwidth with lower CPU and GPU cost with better compression.
Mark introduces the HP All in one Zero Client. It runs 13 watts and runns off of power over ethernet! Thats pretty impressive. Brad comes back out to demo it and it’s really impressive. He goes as far as to pick up the screen (leaving the wireless keyboard and mouse behind) and walks out to the crowd. With just an ethernet cable toting behind him (what happened to the first slide which said Wired was the exception?) Still very cool and impressive.
The last topic is Citrix Netscaler. He recaps the release of Netscaler 10. He gives an overview of Netscaler 10 with TriScale technology.
He wraps it up saying, “We create a world where people can work and play from anywhere.”

Tech Support Mode is a great feature of ESXi that lets admins and support personnel access the command directly on a ESXi hosts.  This can be done via SSH or thru the host console.  The security risk is that the console does not shut down automatically by default.  There is a simple fix for this however, you can set the auto-timeout so that Tech Support Mode will shutdown automatically after a certain time has passed.  You can find a great article on tech support mode here.

To enable the Tech Support Mode Timeout via the vSphere Client (from the KB Article):

1. Select the host and click the Configuration tab.
2. Click Software>Advanced Settings.
   ESXi 5.0: Change the UserVars.ESXiShellTimeOut field to the desired value.
   ESXi 4.1: Change the UserVars.TSMTimeOut field to the desired value.
3. Click OK.

And now the Enterprises can start upgrading to v5.  Finally we have 5.0 Update 1.  You can download ESXi here and vCenter here.

As always, here the What’s new from the ESXi Release notes:

The following information describes some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware ESXi:

• Support for new processors – ESXi 5.0 Update 1 supports new AMD and Intel Processors. See the VMware Compatibility Guide for details.
• Support for additional guest operating systems – ESXi 5.0 Update 1 adds support for Mac OS X Server Lion 10.7.2 and 10.7.3.
• New or upgraded device drivers – ESXi 5.0 Update 1 adds support for Native Storage Drivers for Intel C600 series chipset and upgrades LSI MegaRAID SAS driver to version 5.34.

Resolved Issues – In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

Here’s the What’s New from the vCenter 5.0 Update 1 release notes:

The VMware vCenter Server for Windows 5.0 Update 1 offers the following improvements:

• Guest Operating System Customization Improvements: vCenter Server adds support for customization of the following guest operating systems:
  • Windows 8
  • Ubuntu 11.10
  • Ubuntu 11.04
  • Ubuntu 10.10
  • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2
• Resolved Issues: In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

You have probably read my last post on when to use Ephemeral Port Bindings on distributed switches.  As mentioned in that article, Static port bindings should be the standard going forward.  When you create a port group with a Static port group binding, you set how may ports are dedicated to that port group.  The default is 128 ports and can be changed if need be.

There are some important numbers to remember from the vSphere 5 Maximums doc:

• Distributed virtual network ports per vCenter: 30,000
• Static port groups per vCenter: 5,000
• Ephemeral port groups per vCenter:  256
• Distributed switches per vCenter: 32