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Virtualization Short Take #31

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 12 comments

Welcome back to yet another Virtualization Short Take! Here is a collection of virtualization-related items—some recent, some not, but hopefully all interesting and/or useful.

  • Matt Hensley posted a link to this VIOPS document on how to setup VMware SRM 4.0 with an EMC Celerra storage array. I haven’t had the chance to read through it yet.
  • Jason Boche informs us that both Lab Manager 3 and Lab Manager 4 have problems with the VMXNET3 virtual NIC. In this blog post, Jason describes how his attempts to install Lab Manager server into a VM with the VMXNET3 NIC was failing. Fortunately, Jason provides a workaround as well, but you’ll have to read his article to get that information.
  • Bruce Hoard over at Virtualization Review (disclaimer: I write a regular column for the print edition of Virtualization Review) stirred up a bit of controversy with his post about Hyper-V’s three problems. The first problem is indeed a problem, but not an architectural or technological problem; VMware is indeed the market leader and has a quite solid user base. The second two “problems” stem from Microsoft’s architectural decision to embed the hypervisor into Windows Server. Like any other technology decision, this decisions has its advantages and disadvantages (these technology decisions are a real double-edged sword). Based on historical data, it would seem that the need to patch Windows Server will impact the uptime of the Windows virtualization solution; however, this is not to say that VMware ESX/ESXi are not without their patches and associated downtime as well. I guess the key takeaway here is that VMware seems to be doing a much better job of lessening (or even removing) the impact of the downtime through things like VMotion, DRS, HA, maintenance mode, and the like.
  • Apparently there is a problem with the GA release of the Host Update utility that is installed along with the vSphere Client, as outlined here by Barry Coombs. Downloading the latest version and reinstalling seems to fix the issue.
  • And while we are on the subject of ESX upgrades, here’s another one: if the /boot partition is too small, the upgrade to ESX 4.0.0 will fail. This isn’t really anything too new and, as Joep points out, is documented in the vSphere Upgrade Guide. I prefer clean installations of VMware ESX/ESXi anyway.
  • Dave Mishchenko details his adventures (part 1, part 2, and part 3) in managing ESXi without the VI Client or the vCLI. While it’s interesting and contains some useful information, I’m not so sure that the exercise is useful in any way other than academically. First of all, Dave enables SSH access to ESXi, which is unsupported. Second, while he shows that it’s possible to manage ESXi without the VI Client or the vCLI, it don’t seem to be very efficient. Still, there is some useful information to be gleaned for those who want to know more about ESXi and its inner workings.
  • I think Simon Seagrave and Jason Boche were collaborating in secret, since they both wrote posts about using vSphere’s power savings/frequency scaling functionality. Simon’s post is dated October 27; Jason’s post is dated November 11. Coincidence? I don’t think so. C’mon, guys, go ahead and admit it.
  • Thinking of using the Shared Recovery Site feature in VMware SRM 4.0? This VMware KB article might come in handy.
  • I’m of the opinion that every blogger has a few “masterpiece” posts. These are posts that are just so good, so relevant, so useful, that they almost transcend the other content on the blogger’s site. Based on traffic patterns, one of my “masterpiece” posts is the one on ESX Server, NIC teaming, and VLAN trunking. It’s not the most well-written post I’ve ever published, but it seems to have a lasting impact. Why do I mention this? Because I believe that Chad Sakac’s post on VMware I/O queues, microbursting, and multipathing is one of his “masterpiece” posts. Like Scott Drummonds, I’ve read that post multiple times, and every time I read it I get something else out of it, and I’m reminded of just how much I have yet to learn. Time to get back out of that comfort zone!
  • Oh, and speaking of Chad’s blog…this post is handy, too.

That’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned for the next installation, where I’ll once again share a collection of links about virtualization. Until then, feel free to share your own links in the comments.

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Storage Short Take #5

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 in Storage by slowe | 6 comments

I’ve decided to resurrect my Storage Short Take series, after almost a year since the last one was published. I find myself spending more and more time in the storage realm—which is completely fine with me—and so more and more information coming to me in various forms is related to storage. While I’m far from the likes of storage rockstars such as Robin Harris, Stephen Foskett, Storagebod, and others, hopefully you’ll find something interesting and useful here. Enjoy!

  • This blog post by Frank Denneman on the HP LeftHand product is outstanding. I learned more from this post than a lot of posts recently. Great work Frank!
  • Need a bit more information on FCoE? Nigel Poulton has a great post here (it’s a tad bit older, but I’ve just stumbled across it) with good details for those who might not be familiar with FCoE. It’s worth a read if you haven’t already taken the time to come up to speed on FCoE and its “related” technologies.
  • What led me to Nigel’s FCoE post was this post by Storagezilla in which he rants about “vendor flapheads” who “are intentionally obscuring it’s [FCoE's] limitations”. You’ve got that right! Wanting to present a reasonably impartial and complete view of FCoE was partially the impetus behind my end-to-end FCoE post and the subsequent clarification. Thankfully, I think that the misinformation around FCoE is starting to die down.
  • This post has a bit of useful information on HP EVA path policies and vSphere multipathing. I would have liked a bit more detail than what was provided, but the content is good nevertheless.
  • Devang Panchigar’s recoup of HP TechDay day 1, which focused on HP StorageWorks technologies, has some good information, especially if you aren’t already familiar with some of HP’s various storage platforms.
  • Chad Sakac of EMC has some very useful information on Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA), VMware vSphere, and EMC CLARiiON arrays. If you using EMC storage with your VMware vSphere 4 environment, and you have a CX4, and you’re running FLARE 28.5 or later, it might be worthwhile to switch your path policy from NMP to Round Robin (RR).
  • Speaking of RR with vSphere, somewhere I remember seeing information on changing the default number of I/Os down a path, and tweaking that for best performance. Was that in Chad’s VMworld session? Anyone remember?
  • If you’re looking for a high-level overview of SAN and NAS virtualization, this InfoWorld article can help you get started. You’ll soon want to delve deeper than this article can provide, but it’s a reasonable starting point, at least.

That’s it for this time around. Feel free to share other interesting or useful links in the comments.

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A Few Quick Thoughts on the VCE Coalition Announcement

Tuesday, November 3, 2009 in Gestalt, Networking, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 21 comments

VMware, Cisco, and EMC made their official announcement of the VCE Coalition and the joint venture Acadia this morning. You can read one of the press releases here via MarketWire.

Acadia is interesting, but it really isn’t the meat of the announcement, in my opinion. The real substance of the matter is the nature of the coalition. There are many interesting questions/thoughts circling in my head right at the moment:

  • What impact will this have on VMware’s relationship(s) with HP, IBM, and Dell? “Throwing their hat in the ring” with Cisco’s UCS, so to speak, may greatly endanger VMware’s much larger (with respect to revenue) relationships with other OEMs. What will happen to VMware if those OEMs “throw their hat in the ring” with Microsoft and Hyper-V? This is not a good place to be.
  • The acrimonious Cisco-HP relationship adds further fuel to the concerns over VMware’s close alliance with Cisco’s computing platform.
  • Does this new coalition signal a move away from the “arms-length” relationship between EMC and VMware, a move that some (competitors, notably) have been talking about for some time? If so, what danger does that put VMware in with regards to storage relationships?
  • It seems to me that VMware has the most to lose here. What does EMC lose if this doesn’t go well? Nothing, really. What about Cisco? Nothing, really. VMware, on the other hand…well, it could be ugly.
  • What does this coalition offer that the three companies couldn’t deliver without the coalition? Why risk important relationships? This is a big question in my mind. Lots of technology companies have delivered validated designs without any sort of formal coalition. Why is one necessary in this case?
  • On the other end of the spectrum—keeping Acadia out of the picture for the moment—is this “new coalition” really anything more than what the three companies have already been doing? Is this really anything more than each of the companies dedicating resources to this effort? I know from my own direct interaction with at least one of these vendors that resources had already been dedicated to the VCE technology intersection before any sort of formal announcement. So, does this formal announcement really mean anything at all?

I don’t have any answers (yet), but you can at least read my thoughts—and contribute back to them via the comments—without having to pay $499 to some analyst firm.

By the way, if you’d like some other viewpoints on this matter, here are a couple from opposing viewpoints:

NetApp - Jay’s Blog: The Importance of Being Open
Chuck’s Blog: Announcing the VCE Coalition

Feel free to speak up in the comments below (courteous comments only, please, and be sure to include full vendor disclosure where appropriate). Thanks!

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How To Create a MetaLUN

Friday, October 23, 2009 in Storage by slowe | 12 comments

MetaLUNs are a way of expanding a LUN for either additional I/O capacity (using a striped MetaLUN) or additional space (using a concatenated MetaLUN). A striped MetaLUN, as the name implies, stripes data across multiple component LUNs. Each of these component LUNs resides on a different RAID group, so creating a striped MetaLUN allows the MetaLUN to utilize all the spindles in all the RAID groups. A concatenated MetaLUN, on the other hand, fills up one component LUN before moving on to the next component LUN. I/O capacity is essentially unchanged, but storage capacity is expanded.

This article has some good information on MetaLUNs.

While trying to learn more about MetaLUNs, I searched high and low for a “how to” guide on creating MetaLUNs. Surprisingly enough, I didn’t find anything. So, here’s my take on how to create a MetaLUN. EMC experts, feel free to refine my process, correct my errors, and provide general guidance.

The equipment used in my experimentation is a CLARiiON CX4-960 running FLARE 28 (as best I can tell). I performed this task using Navisphere 6 running under Internet Explorer 6 on Windows Server 2003.

OK, ready? Here we go:

  1. Create the necessary RAID groups to house multiple LUNs. Based on my limited experience thus far, it seems like RAID 5 (4+1) is the most common configuration for a RAID group unless you know you need something else.
  2. Create LUNs with the exact same size and settings in each of the RAID groups you created. For maximum performance, ensure that the LUNs are created on separate buses. I used LUNs on three separate RAID groups: one on Bus 0, one on Bus 1, and one on Bus 2.
  3. Right-click on the first LUN you created and select Expand.
  4. Click Next to start the wizard.
  5. Select Striping and click Next.
  6. Select each of the LUNs. Hold down the Control key to select more than one LUN. Click Next when you have selected all your component LUNs.
  7. Make sure Maximum Capacity is selected and click Next.
  8. Click Finish.

When the wizard is done processing, the LUNs you created in the RAID groups will be moved into the Private LUNs container, and a new MetaLUN object will appear in Navisphere (under LUN Folders > MetaLUNs). You can then present this MetaLUN out to one or more servers in the same way you would present any other LUN object.

If I’ve misrepresented something or have provided incorrect information, please let me know by speaking up in the comments. I’d also love to hear any recommendations from EMC experts on the use of MetaLUNs, advantages and disadvantages of using them, etc. Share your knowledge!

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Learning About EMC Storage

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 in Storage by slowe | 20 comments

Despite repeated incidences of being called a “storage expert,” I remain firmly convinced that I am far from being a storage expert. Case in point: I really don’t know that much about EMC storage, how to configure it, the caveats/gotchas/pitfalls when you’re setting it up, etc. Fortunately, I’ve recently been given the opportunity to spend some hands-on time with an EMC Celerra. Due to the Celerra’s architecture, this also means that I get some hands-on time with the EMC CLARiiON CX4 that sits behind the Celerra.

So far, my hands-on time has been fairly limited, but I expect that will all be changing very soon. I can tell you that I’m no fan of the web-based Celerra management interface. The web-based Navisphere 6 interface for the CX4 is better, but I haven’t tried it on a non-Windows system yet. I suspect I won’t be quite so happy when I try it on some other system. (Will it even run on a non-Windows platform?) I guess I’ll be learning the command-line interface (CLI)…

So, here’s a request to my readers: what resources have you found useful in learning how to work with EMC storage products? I’d welcome any and all feedback on useful white papers, blogs, free training, etc. Thanks in advance!

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VMworld Day 0 Wrap-Up and Links

Tuesday, September 1, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

Today was a crazy day. I started the day with the second day of the Partner Technical Advisory Board (PTAB) meeting.

Of course, VMware released a bevy of press releases this morning, and being stuck in the PTAB meeting I haven’t really even had the chance to digest the news announcements. The announcements included:

Next-Generation VMware Partner Network Helps Partners Increase Virtualization Expertise to Expand Business Opportunities
VMware Ushers in a New Era of IT Management to Drive Business Agility with VMware vCenter™ Product Family
VMware Introduces VMware Go™—A New Service that Will Make Virtualization Even Easier for First Time Users
VMware Signs Agreement with Intel to Expand Reach of VMware vSphere™ 4 to SMB Customers
Broad Virtualization Ecosystem Rallies Behind VMware vCenter™ Product Family to Deliver Integrated Solutions for Simplified Datacenter Management
VMware Continues Its Reign as the Lowest Cost Per Application Leader with VMware vSphere 4″

That wrapped up about lunchtime, so I joined Crystal and Kathleen Troyer (John Troyer’s wife) for lunch at Amber, an Indian restaurant just behind the San Francisco Marriott. (Turns out Duncan Epping was eating lunch there, too.) After lunch was complete, the afternoon flew by; Crystal and I barely had time to squeeze in dinner at John’s Grill before heading over to the reception event.

The reception was good; I worked the vExpert booth with a number of fellow vExperts around, like Jason Boche, Rich Brambley, Eric Siebert, Steve Beaver, and a couple others. There wasn’t as much traffic to the booth as I had hoped there would be, but that’s OK.

When the reception ended, Crystal and I headed over to the Clift Hotel for an event in the Spanish Suite with EMC, VMware, and Cisco. I chatted with some Cisco and EMC folks (not so many VMware folks), and ran into Duncan (yet again). That was a great event but horribly crowded, so we left around 10 and headed back to our hotel.

Of course, the biggest news of the day was that my book, Mastering VMware vSphere 4, is sold out at the conference bookstore (or very nearly sold out). Unfortunately, there won’t be any way to get more before the conference ends. Sorry, guys, but take consolation in the fact that Amazon.com is still carrying the book in stock.

Here are some other blog entries about VMworld 2009 Day Zero:

VMworld 2009 - Day 0 Highlights
VMworld 2009 conference coverage from SearchServerVirtualization.com
3 Word Challenge - VMworld Reception and Monday Night Tweetup
VMworld Sunday and Monday - Monkeys Fly
Random VMworld 2009 Thoughts
VMworld 2009: Day 1

Tomorrow starts bright and early with a vendor meeting, and then we’ll quickly move into the Day 1 keynote, sessions, more vendor meetings, and more notes from the exhibit show floor. Stay tuned here for updates throughout the day tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!

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Virtualization Short Take #29

Thursday, August 27, 2009 in Networking, PASS, Storage, Virtualization by slowe | 2 comments

I wanted to go ahead and get another issue of Virtualization Short Takes out the door before VMworld, as I suspect that I’ll be covered up both during and for some time after VMworld. So, here’s my latest collection of links and articles about virtualization, storage, and anything else I find interesting.

  • Chad Sakac brings up an important issue for EMC CLARiiON users also using vSphere and iSCSI; be sure to read the full post for all the details. Basically, this bug in the FLARE code puts us back to using multiple IP subnets to scale iSCSI traffic. Bummer. I imagine they’ll get it fixed up pretty quick, but until then it’s back to the old way of scaling IP-based storage traffic. Chad’s posts on VMware-storage integration (Part 1 and Part 2) are good reads as well.
  • Nick Triantos weighs in with a good post on how to configure ALUA support and Round Robin I/O in vSphere. This looks useful; too bad the old NetApp gear I have in the lab won’t run the latest Data ONTAP version so I can test this myself. Oh, and you should also check out Nick’s post on the NetApp Collector and Analyzer for Virtual Environments, which looks like it might be a handy tool for sizing NetApp storage environments.
  • Duncan Epping points out a couple of issues related to VMFS block size in this post on snapshots and block size. Good find!
  • Ben Armstrong puts up a great post about competitive arguments. I have to say that I have a new respect for Ben after reading this post. He’d always presented himself very professionally, but his open approach to comparing virtualization products is very refreshing, and one that I wish more people would adopt. I’m particularly impressed that Ben quoted Proverbs 27:17 in his post.
  • Aaron Sweemer posted a newsletter from a co-worker on his site that has some great information. You should definitely have a look, I think you’ll find something useful there.
  • Rick Scherer posted the steps necessary to remove a rogue vCenter Chargeback plug-in. Useful, but I wish all plug-ins provided a mechanism like this.
  • Jason Nash brings to light a bug in Cisco Nexus 1000V when used in conjunction with CNAs. Be sure to have a look if this has any similarity to your environment. Like Jason, I have some Gen 1 Emulex CNAs so I may run into the same issue myself as I build out the Nexus hardware in the lab.
  • The Systems Engineer (no name provided) gives a handy one-line command to map ESX datastores to EMC CLARiiON LUNs. I’ll have to give this one a try once I get my CLARiiON up and running.
  • Somewhere along the way I picked up the URL to this VMware KB article about problems with iSCSI or NFS over an EtherChannel link. Hmmm, that looks interesting, but when you read the article it points out that the issue exists when you are using EtherChannel but the vSwitch is configured as “Route based on originating virtual port ID.” That’s a configuration mismatch—of course you’re going to have problems! Simply change the vSwitch to “Route based on ip hash” (the strongly recommended setting when using EtherChannel) and the problems go away.
  • Stevie Chambers (formerly of VMware, now with Cisco) posts about 10 technology advances since 2005. The article is mostly about the Intel Xeon 5500 CPUs and a couple other features specific to Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS); namely, the Palo adapter and the Catalina ASIC. While he wanders a bit, I think Stevie’s point is about how virtualization architects and operations staff need to understand the impact of these technologies and how they affect the virtualization solution—a useful point, indeed.
  • Paul Fazzone has a couple of great posts on the Cisco Nexus 1000V: first an article with an overview of VM network security with the Nexus 1000V, then a second article describing how the Nexus 1000V compares to multiple vSwitches. Both are good reads for people seeking a bit more information on deployment scenarios for the Nexus 1000V.
  • Computerworld posted this article about the 7 half-truths of virtualization. The underlying point behind all of these “half-truths” is that in order for an organization to really reap the benefits of virtualization, that organization needs to change, to adapt, and to grow with the virtualization initiative. If you just virtualize and don’t change anything else, your ROI will be limited at best. I particularly agree with #5: if you’re investigating VDI for short-term cost savings, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
  • This is kind of cool. I might put this on my home network.
  • I haven’t had my chance to talk with Arista yet, but I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more buzz around their announcement of vEOS. In fact, I had to hear about it (other than a very brief e-mail from Doug Gourlay) from a Cisco contact! How crazy is that? I suppose, as I mentioned on Twitter, that Arista is going to make a big push next week during VMworld 2009 in San Francisco.

That wraps up this edition of Virtualization Short Takes. Next week will be a busy week; look for lots of coverage from the conference in San Francisco as well as summaries of my vendor meetings (and there are lots of them!). Until then, take care!

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TA2259 Ask the Experts at VMworld 2009

Friday, June 12, 2009 in Virtualization by slowe | No comments

Shamelessly copied (mostly) from both Yellow Bricks and VMwareTips.com. I didn’t think either Duncan or Rick would mind very much.

I am proud to officially announce the VMworld 2009 - Ask the Experts Panel Session. This session will feature virtualization experts Rick Scherer, Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Chad Sakac and Tom Howarth answering your questions on virtual infrastructure design. In the next week or so we will be posting sections on our blog sites for you to submit questions for review during the session, so stay tuned!

Session ID: TA2259
Session Title: Ask the Experts - Virtualization Design
Track: Technology and Architecture
Abstract: Are you running a virtual environment and experiencing some problems? Are you planning an upgrade from VI3 to vSphere 4 and have some questions about the infrastructure architecture changes required? Do you have a virtual infrastructure design and want it blessed by the experts? Come join us for a one hour panel session where your questions are the topic of discussion! Join the Virtualization Experts: Rick Scherer from VMwareTips.com; Scott Lowe, author of Mastering VMware vSphere 4 and blog.scottlowe.org; Duncan Epping from VMware and author of Yellow Bricks; Chad Sakac from EMC and author of Virtual Geek; and Tom Howarth from planetVM.net as they answer your questions on virtualization design.

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The Return of Virtualization Short Takes

Friday, June 5, 2009 in Networking, Virtualization by slowe | 4 comments

My irregular “Virtualization Short Takes” series was put on hold some time ago after I started work on Mastering VMware vSphere 4. Now that work on the book is starting to wind down just a bit, I thought it would be a good time to try to resurrect the series. So, without further delay, welcome to the return of Virtualization Short Takes!

  • Trigged by a series of blog posts by Arnim van Lieshout on VMware ESX memory management (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), Scott Herold decided to join the fray with this blog post. Both Scott’s post and Arnim’s posts are good reading for anyone interested in getting a better idea of what’s happening “under the covers,” so to speak, when it comes to memory management.
  • Perhaps prompted by my post on upgrading virtual machines in vSphere, a lot of information has come to light regarding the PVSCSI driver. Some are advocating changes to best practices to incorporate the PVSCSI driver, but others seem to be questioning the need to move away from a single drive model (a necessary move since PVSCSI isn’t supported for boot drives). Personally, I just want VMware to support the PVSCSI driver on boot drives.
  • Eric Sloof confirms for us that name resolution is still the Achilles’ Heel of VMware High Availability in VMware vSphere.
  • I don’t remember where I picked up this VMware KB article, but it sure would be handy if VMware could provide more information about the issue, such as what CPUs might be affected. Otherwise, you’re kind of shooting in the dark, aren’t you?
  • Upgraded to VMware vSphere, and now having issues with VMotion? Thanks to VMwarewolf, this pair of VMware KB articles (here and here) might help resolve the issue.
  • Chad Sakac of EMC and co-conspirator for the storage portion of Mastering VMware vSphere 4 (pre-order here), has been putting out some very good posts:
  • Leo Raikhman pointed me to this article about IRQ sharing between the Service Console and the VMkernel. I think I’ve mentioned this issue here before…but after over a 1,000 posts, it’s hard to keep track of everything. In any case, there’s also a VMware KB article on the matter.
  • And speaking of Leo, he’s been putting up some great information too: notes on migrating Ubuntu servers (in turn derived from these notes by Cody at ProfessionalVMware), a rant on CDP support in ESX, and a note about the EMC Storage Viewer plugin. Good work, Leo!
  • If you are interested in a run-down of the storage-related changes in VMware vSphere, check out this post from Stephen Foskett.
  • Rick Vanover notes a few changes to the VMFS version numbers here. The key takeaway here is that no action is required, but you may want to plan some additional tasks after your vSphere upgrade to optimize the environment.
  • In this article, Chris Mellor muses on how far VMware may go in assimilating features provided by their technology partners. This is a common question; many people see the addition of thin provisioning within vSphere as a direct affront to array vendors like NetApp, 3PAR, and others who also provide thin provisioning features in the array themselves. I’m not so convinced that this feature is as competitive as it is complementary. Perhaps I’ll write a post about that in the near future…oh wait, never mind, Chad already did!
  • File this one away in the “VMware-becoming-more-like-Microsoft” folder.
  • My occasional mentions of Crossbow prompted a full-on explanation of the Open Networking functionality of OpenSolaris by a Sun engineer. It kind of looks like SR-IOV and VMDirectPath to me…sort of. Don’t you think?
  • If you are thinking about how to incorporate HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 into your VMware environment, Frank Denneman has some thoughts to share. I’ve been told by HP that I have some equipment en route with which I can do some additional testing (the results of which will be published here, of course!), but I haven’t seen it yet.

    • OK, I guess that should just about do it. Thanks for reading, and please share your thoughts, interesting links, or (pertinent) rants in the comments.

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    VMware, This is Wrong

    Thursday, May 28, 2009 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 11 comments

    UPDATE: VMware has clarified their position; they will allow competitors to exhibit at VMworld. The text in the exhibitors agreement was legalese—supposedly consistent with other major vendor-sponsored conferences—meant to give them an out in the event an exhibitor behaves inappropriately.

    I sincerely hope that Brian Madden is wrong about the recent change to vendor policies for VMworld.

    This is exactly the wrong thing to do in this sort of competitive landscape. You know, earlier this week on the Virtual Thoughts podcast, I was defending VMworld’s move into the territory of their former ISVs with products like vCenter Data Recovery, vCenter Chargeback, and vCenter ConfigControl. After all, VMware is a publicly owned company, and they have to show value to their shareholders. But this? This doesn’t have anything to do with showing value to the shareholders. This is like a spoiled little kid saying, “This is my sandbox, and you can’t play in it.”

    What are you going to do, VMware? Let’s see, you’re expanding into the territory formerly handled by many of your ISVs, and now you’re blocking access to competing products at VMworld. So who will be at VMworld? Let’s see…

    • Vizioncore can’t come, because vRanger Pro overlaps functionality VMware will provide in vCenter Data Recovery. And vFoglight overlaps with CapacityIQ.
    • VKernel can’t come; again, they overlap with CapacityIQ.
    • As Brian Madden mentioned, Quest won’t be there due to a conflict with VMware View.
    • Microsoft won’t be there, because they won’t be able to talk about Hyper-V. True, they could come and not talk about Hyper-V, but I suspect they’ll also act like a spoiled child by saying, “If we can’t play by our rules, we won’t play at all.” Hmm…considering 90-95% of all the workloads running on VMware are Microsoft Windows, that’s an interesting situation to create. Oh, and VMware: are you prepared to be excluded from Tech-Ed too?
    • Ditto for Citrix. And probably ditto for being allowed to exhibit at Synergy. So much for VMware vSphere being the best platform on which to run XenApp—you won’t get the chance to make that claim!
    • Leostream? Nope—conflicts/overlaps with VMware View.
    • What about Hyper9? Not sure, vCenter Server 4.0 does provide a Search feature now, so that could potentially preclude Hyper9 from coming, too.
    • Surely Veeam could come, but they can’t talk about Veeam Backup (conflicts with vCenter Data Recovery).
    • esXpress? Nope.
    • Hardware vendors—IBM, HP, Dell—will be there.
    • Storage vendors—EMC, NetApp, HP, Compellent, Dell—will be there.
    • Networking vendors like Cisco and HP will be there. Unless VMware thinks that HP’s networking functionality isn’t complementary enough to its own virtual networking functionality…

    I’m sure that I’ve overlooked some companies, but it sounds to me like the vast majority of the third-party ISVs now find themselves precluded from exhibiting at VMworld, in addition to finding themselves competing head-to-head with VMware in their own markets. Looks like the exhibit hall is going to be a lot less crowded this year!

    Is VMware the new Microsoft? I’ll let you answer that one on your own.

    Disclaimer: Before anyone jumps the gun and says otherwise, note that these opinions are mine, and are not endorsed by my employer or any vendor or other organization.

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