Today I was attending a seminar that contained some sessions for the virtualization technologies, specifically for VMware like VDI, and SRM. Unfortunately it turned out to be a complete disaster by itself that really needs some attention from VMware, and in fact the customers as well overhear in the ME region.

The vendor ignorance, and the customer unawareness:
This is the two reasons I claim here that will put Microsoft ahead in the competition and will soon get it to dominate the virtualization market across the ME. I remember an article posted by MikeD sometime back regarding Microsoft lying to their customers for some licensing aspects, and I replied there that I ran into a number of similar situations with Microsoft reps over here, who were giving wrong information mostly because of their ignorance.

Today I saw VMware doing the same thing but in a completely deferent scenario. They were actually giving completely wrong and bad information about their own products, and answering the audience questions in the seminar with an out-of-this-world information! The presenter actually had no clue what he was talking about, and there were good questions from the audience that would have distinguished VMware from any other competitor if the presenter was knowledgeable enough to give the right answers. What was the result? A complete bad look of the products being presented, and giving the impression that VMware has no advantages over any other products like Hyper-V or XenServer!

The customers are not stupid, they are just not aware of this fairly new technology across this region, they are confused and fascinated in the same time with all this cool things they hear about HA, FT and DR, and assuming that everything is presented to them is a fact by default! But most importantly, they don’t have any source or neutral reference to go back to for verifying what they hear and see.

To VMware: you might still see that the ME region has no potential with regards to virtualization, compared to the US and Europe, but it’s still a good and very fast-growing market that you should penetrate. Every time I attend a similar seminar I see an extreme interest from the audience about this technology and how they want to adopt it, but with such weak presentations and wrong information passed to the customers, you won’t have much luck compared to the aggressive actions taken by Microsoft in this space.

To Microsoft: I don’t want to give a wrong impression here. I’m trying to be neutral in my blog as much as I can, and I never posted something bad about Hyper-V (nor will ever do) like so many blogs out there, but I just can’t see why I should migrate my environment from VI3 to you yet. Hyper-V is definitely getting there, and I’m preparing some tutorials to come for it over here, but this doesn’t mean also that I don’t see that you still have so many things to accomplish in order just to catch up with what VMware already have. I already have a number of bookmarks for Microsoft blogs like: VirtualBoy which is an excellent source I’m following everyday by the way, and I think that Microsoft should encourage more of this blogs like what VMware is doing with the Planet V12n, and the new vExpert award. (I know about the MVP, but where is it in the virtualization space?)

Now to the most important part, I gave my blog url to a couple of attendees in today’s seminar and I promised them to correct some of the wrong information given across the deferent sessions:

1 – Microsoft Support:
Audience: Microsoft told us that they will not support specific products under ESX, and that I must use Hyper-V instead, is this correct?
Presenter: You can either get the premier support from Microsoft and they will support you, otherwise you can map your os/app on a physical server, get your problems solved with Microsoft, and then go back virtual.
My comment: The presenter never mentioned the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) from Microsoft and the fact that VMware’s ESX was the first hypervisor to achieve the certificate over there (with certain configuration guidelines for the VMs). I can’t believe that this issue is still being debated on by both parties till now.

2 – Storage-VMotion:
Audience: We all love the storage-vmotion from VMware, but we hate the command line and I’d like to know if there is anything in VMware’s roadmap to have a GUI for that instead of using third-part plugins?
Presenter: The DRS takes care of your storage-vmotion operations, you don’t have to worry about that.
My comment: As far as I know, DRS has nothing to do with the storage (and please correct me if I’m wrong), the DRS takes care of distributing the VMs across the allocated resources based on certain guidelines you put yourself (Automated, manual ..etc). But would it really hearts if the presenter would have mentioned that the storage-vmotion GUI is part of the next vSphere release, and that there are even some screenshots for it out there.

3 – vSphere:
Audience: Can you tell us anything about the next release of VMware?
Presenter: Sorry, I can’t even tell you the name of the product, VMware has chosen already a name for that but I’m not allowed to disclose it.
My comment: The new name, vSphere, was already out by Jason Boche last December, and VMware had many announcements about it in last VMworld2008, and even some technical sessions in VMworld-Europe-2009.

4 – Snapshots:
Audience: Microsoft has a cool feature for taking a snapshot of the VM every 15min on Hyper-V for backup, can VMware do that?
Presenter: of course we can do snapshots, and it’s a great tool for backup! And yes we can schedule that. There is also other things like VCB.
My comment: I’m not sure which Microsoft tool is doing that snapshot thing, I believe it’s the DPM SP1’s support for Hyper-V, anyways the snapshots in VMware should never be looked at as a backup solution. The presenter should have focused on the VCB and gave fair information about it and how it can be an excellent tool for taking a crash-consistent VMDK image level backup, and the wide integration with many backup solutions out there like Symantec NetBackup for example that can take one backup image, and do two kind of restores, one for the VMDK, and the second as a granular file level restore. There is also another VMware tool coming this year called: Data Recovery

5 – VMsafe:
Audience: how can you protect and ensure security between two VMs?
Presenter: Through VMsafe, which is a virtual appliance inspecting the traffic going in and out of each virtual machine.
My comment: VMsafe is an API not a virtual appliance. It’s a new framework announced one year back from VMware that allows other security vendors to do security at the VM level. This framework will be available in the next release of VMware, but there are many solutions out there for protecting the VMs from each other, like Altor virtual firewall, and Reflex virtual IPS that can do a deep traffic inspection between VMs based on known vulnerabilities and exploits ( I will be doing a complete tutorial for that very soon).

6 – SystemCenter Virtual Machine Manager:
Audience: Microsoft has another cool tool, their VMM can manage your environment, so can your vCenter manage Hyper-V?
Presenter: No we can’t (period)
My comment: I think the presenter should have mentioned that SCVMM can manage VI3 only because VMware wants to. There are open APIs that facilitate this to Microsoft (and another vendors) to do that, it’s not like Microsoft can do better job than VMware. It should be mentioned as well that SCVMM can’t replace vCenter and that it lacks important integrations with things like SRM for DR.

7 – SRM:
Audience: The SRM sounds cool, but it doesn’t make any sense when it comes to bringing the VMs on the production site, how can the VM work if it has the original IP address while it’s running now in a deferent subnet?
Presenter: well, you have to do things like routing on the recovery site to overcome that problem.
My comment: SRM has the capability and options for changing the IP address through the recovery planes, it’s called (IP address mapping) and it’s described in the Admin guide page 53, and even in U1 you can do batch changes through CSV files. You may want to check out my video tutorials for SRM to get you started before reaching this advanced level.

I hope this was useful to the confused attendees of today’s seminar, and that my message will reach both VMware & Microsoft after all.

We've all worked with our traditional Windows clusters and enjoyed the great availability it can deliver to us, but we've been only limited with the so-called "cluster aware" applications in order to enjoy this great uptime. Then when we all experienced the great virtualization technologies, and saw what VMware HA can deliver, no matter what OS/Application we want to protect, we thought that was it, the magic solution for protecting our application and grant high availability for them. But again it was annoying to have this abnormal shutdown and reboot of the VMs.

New technologies are coming now from both the physical and virtual worlds to address this issue, it's the Fault-Tolerance! Marathon everRun FT has a great product (that I may be publishing demo videos about soon) that work on both the physical and virtual environments to achieve this "zero-downtime" and true fault tolerance for any application.

Recently Marathon announced their partnership with Microsoft to deliver this technology to Hyper-V, and by that Microsoft will be running head-to-head in the competition with VMware's FT which will be released in their next vSphere platform coming sometime this year.

Here are some videos to show you how great technologies will soon become the standards for our highly available applications:

VMware FT: http://www.vmware.com/products/fault-tolerance/
Marathon everRun FT: http://www.marathontechnologies.com/product_demo.html
Citrix XenServer + everRun VM: http://www.marathontechnologies.com/media/everrun_vm/everrun_vm_demo.html

This is the forth and last tutorial in the SRM series. We will install the SRA, configure it, and then complete the SRM setup to test our first Recovery Plan, actually this was originally two videos, I tried to merge them to avoid too many episodes in this series.

Please let me know you feedback via comments or email to know if you would be interested in more advanced SRM tutorials in future.

01 – SRM Installation
02 – SAN Setup using LeftHand VSA
03 – SAN Replication
04 – Configuring the SRA and completing the SRM setup

It seems that Screencast.com can't keep up with my Videos bandwidth usage, I mean the actual amount of data transfer not the storage space. I've just received a warning email saying that I've reached 90% of my allocated quota. In fact this is kind of good thing, as my videos have been uploaded since 1 week only, so I guess that they've been viewed pretty well

The good news is that I have around 2TB of monthly bandwidth on my current hosting provider, so I guess I'll be uploading the previous videos to my current hosting account instead of linking to ScreenCast.com or Vimeo.com. I've also recorded 2 new videos, one for the (SRA configuration), and the other one for the (Recovery planes in action), so stay tuned, and thanks for viewing.

This is the third video in the SRM series, here we configure the SAN replication between the two datacenters, and then configure the ESX hosts to connect to the new  iSCSI SAN.

Tutorial List:
01 – SRM Installation
02 – SAN Setup using LeftHand VSA
03 – SAN Replication
04 – Configuring the SRA and completing the SRM setup