Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: CenterStage, EMC CenterStage, EMC Documentum CenterStage
Thanks to Storagezilla for finding this flickr account.
Links to the images here.
For the record these screenshots constitute significantly more than one product but it is a good overview of what the D6.5 family is going to looklike. (Webtop, CenterStage, DA, WebPublisher, etc all have pics in there)
Filed under: EMC CenterStage | Tags: CenterStage, CenterStage Essentials, EMC CenterStage, Magellan
Be More Productive with EMC CenterStage
Here is one of the posts about it on the developers network. Having spent some time with this product I can say that I am seriously impressed. A link with good screenshots can be found here.
More details will come in the near future and hopefully soon we will be able to talk more openly about all the features. If you are interested in it make sure to sign up for the beta from the EMC developers network homepage.
From the Beta page:
About the Beta Program
In the coming months, EMC will introduce its next generation knowledge worker offering named CenterStage that will offer a best of breed user experience and put business users in control of their content enabled applications. CenterStage includes CenterStage Essentials which provides basic content services to enhance individual and team productivity and CenterStage Pro which focus on Web 2.0 functionality to empower business users to be in control of their business applications.
Over the next months, EMC will be conducting a CenterStage Essentials Beta program. The CenterStage Essentials Beta program is expected to run from September, 4th, 2008 to December 15th, 2008.
The purpose of the CenterStage Essentials Beta Program is to enable EMC is to obtain feedback from customers and partners regarding CenterStage Essentials’ configuration, functionality, and usability to validate market readiness and to help ensure successful adoption.”
Not sure if anyone bothered to read my last post about COIN theory but this stuff is so applicable in the business arena. There is a great intro article here.
Dealing with counterinsurgents is very much like competing against the big guys *cough*Microsoft*cough*.
Winning over the hearts and minds of citizens overseas is like trying to win the hearts of serious business customers. Anyway, I indulged my academic side enough for one post. It is worth the time to read through it and consider the applications.
Filed under: vmware | Tags: Chargeback, Virtual Appliance, VKernel, vmware, Vmware management solution
Big title, Big problem.
I think anyone here gets the basics and probably has a VCP or some other certificatation to prove they know what they are doing. On a technical level I have my fair share of challenges right now (SQL2k to 2k5 upgrade of the VC, an ESX Host that has decided two of its NICs are dead, and a variety of client issues) but those are pretty straight forward. VMware support has been challenging lately(see my earlier post on how they told me SQL2k was no longer a support DB backend with VC2.5 and told us we HAD to upgrade) but with the forum and other people out there posting I don’t think anyone ever hits a “unique” technical problem.
What we all hit that is unique is our management structure, our IT structure, and the ever changing requirements of the security teams. These not technical obstacles have always proven to be the limiting factor in my deployment and I doubt I am alone.
Let me set the stage a bit for the discussion that will follow. Right now our environment is working on at least three major new products and providing sustaining and support for at least twelve others. Our average machine profile – 1 cpu, less than 2gb of ram (1gb avg), under 60GB total hard disk space. The problem is we add or remove a dozen or more a day and have 100+ users with Virtual Machine Administrator rights.
The tricky problem comes in when you take a look at 26 hosts spread across more than five business units. Now that we are fully utilizing DRS the “I bought this host and therefore it is all mine” mentality becomes challenging. If one team has excess capacity shouldn’t they be part of the solution rather than hoarding an easily reclaimed resource?
At EMC we have this concept of “One|EMC” to try and bring all the acquisitions together. There are good things and bad things with this policy but I think this is an opportunity to do a real good. In this effort my management team has been very supportive with “lending” our excess capacity to other teams.
My BU owns the hardware, licensed the software, and pays for all upgrades and maintenence. There are a ton of costs associated with this effort and we have no intention of “charging” for utilizing idle assets (exactly what VMware excels at). What I do need to do is provide “cost visibility” to my management and the business units we work with. In order to do this we have purchased and are implementing VKernels “Chargeback Appliance.” The plan will be to provide scheduled reporting based on the following levels:
Deployment Total
Business Unit
Project teams within each BU
(Other reports as necessary)
The great thing is that these reports will be ready at anytime and I can give a login right to my management structure so they don’t have to ask me to generate reports for them. We will also be going one step further to show just how much we save by buying big iron – we will create a cost in VMware vs a physical system cost. VKernel has provided a great baseline for costing out the big numbers as well as all those little things that I just assume will be there (like electricity). Metrics matter and here they matter more than at most places. We know we have had a great thing for the past few years but now I finally have the tools to collect the metrics to show the big guys exactly how much money we are saving.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Just because I have had a challenging week with VMware support around this issue I needed to publicly state that it is supported. It is always bad when as a support guy you provide the support note that proves you wrong.
Apparently Pi is hot. I am very excited about the fact that Paul is going to take over VMware. I hope my colleagues (sort of EMC’ers) over there will welcome him and embrace his enthusiasm. If he can continue to bring the top notch effort that I have seen coming out of his former division than I think we have good things coming.
As always StorageZille sums it up nicely – “Have you stopped freaking out Yet” covers all the bases
Filed under: vmware | Tags: vmware, VKernel, V-Kernel, Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer, vCharterPro, Vizioncore, Vmware management solution
This review is long overdue. A quick trip around the country to meet with customers and setup a new Virtual Infrastructure Lab have put me behind schedule. Mea Culpa
First, I want to comment about the support I received from both VizionCore and V-Kernel. Glen P from Vizioncore kept them in the running a lot longer than anyone else could have. Kudos to him and that team for trying to work through all the “glitches” we ran into. The whole team at V-Kernel was also very helpful and successful in diagnosing and resolving the defects I hit.
That being said I hit major defects with both of these products. Both teams released patches or provided workarounds in short order but the ability of V-Kernel to quickly adapt and address new problems was definitely a positive mark for them.
In the end we never got vCharterPro working 100% due to some data collection issues. After two months of working with support and their team I had to compare their “sort of” product against one from V-Kernel that was now doing everything it promised it would do.
When comparing features I found that my deployment was not par for the course. Anyone who has read my previous posts understands that my mantra is that “Hosts Don’t Matter!” All my vms live in the Virtual Machines and Templates views in a heavily nested folder structure. Running reports against business units is a breeze if the application is aware of this folder structure.
vCharterPro had no awareness of the folder structure. It assumed a Host or Cluster based reporting model (kind of silly when you have a huge Cluster running DRS and two or three departments sharing it)
V-Kernel has a native folder level awareness. They let me easily create groups for analysis based on the nested folder structure or via the traditional host/cluster method. This flexible group creation was ultimately the winning feature. Having lots of data in bad groups is useless but if we can get the data into meaningful reports or views it adds immediate value.
Where vCharterPro clearly excelled was in the looks department. Both products are bringing back roughly the same data (vCharterPro has a fixation on disk I/O vs actual space used) but vCharterPro presents it in a very pleasing fashion. Utilizing their parent companies framework they provide a seriously customizable interface to really tweak the dashboard view to be exactly what you want.
V-Kernel CBA has clean looks but it is nothing to get excited about.
As I am sure it is now apparent that I went with V-Kernel’s product suite. We chose it because it had intellegent grouping that worked with my environment as is rather than requiring me to reorganize everything from scratch. It collected all the data I needed accurately and efficiently (vCharterPro wanted a 4cpu box with 2GB+ ram versus CBA which is 1 CPU with 1 GB ram). I really appreciate that V-Kernel is going with a ready made appliance that is easy to deploy and just as easy to upgrade.
In the near future I will start sharing some of the reports that I am running and the value add I get out of them. I am very interested to see what other people see from this data. We will also be implementing V-Kernel’s ChargeBack product within the next few weeks (pending the next release). At that point I will share some pictures of that.
Also – Check out Rob’s blog over at the V-Kernel main site to get an interesting take on a variety of challenges facing the virtualization industry. I promise it is worth at least a quick perusal.
Safe in Fort Collins, Colorado getting ready to rack up a new CX3 box and a group of ESXi servers. Crossing my fingers that everything works according to plan.
Friday night to Orlando then Monday night to Denver with a drive to FC and then back home Saturday night. It is going to be a very long week but good stuff will get completed and that is what matters.
If you have read my earlier posts you will know I am a big fan of Mozy. I think it is a great idea and I have an actual account (not just the free ones). My problem is that I am more than a month out of sync with Mozy because of stupid errors.
The latest error is – DB_ERROR[1]: no such table: restores
To find out what errors are causing your mozy to wander off in the wrong direction check \program files\mozyhome\data there is a file in there called mozy – open it in textpad and see what this little program has been up to.
I am at my wits end now and am thinking of canning the whole approach entirely. After multiple uninstalls and reinstalls it won’t start the mozy service now “cannot find the file specified” when I try and start it.
For the record I don’t mind this kind of additional effort when getting FreeNAS to work or building a Gentoo box. I do mind it when it is my backup solution and my data is at risk because it fails to function. Another continuing concern is what all these threats of charging for bandwidth used will do to cloud based computing. I don’t think the model can sustain the ISPs siphoning off revenue. Just my two cents.
Filed under: Magellan | Tags: DCTM, Documentum, Knowledge Worker, KW, Magellan
These are the latest builds being demoed on Youtube. Unfortunately I can’t go into too much more detail on this upcoming release other than giving pointers to what product management has already released into the wild.
Take a look – it is very cool stuff!
*Edit – OK so it is just a rehash of EMC World. I will see what I can do to beg some fresh kibble for us all.
