Although it got less fanfare than the elimination of vRAM licensing restrictions, VMware’s announcement of VMware vSphere 5.1 on was no less important… especially if you happen to care about performance and scalability.

In both hardware and software, you have choices. Among other things, you get to decide whether you get more value by finding and assembling the right combination components among different vendors, or whether you can buy from one vendor and simplify.

I attended a thought leadership session at Vmworld today,  “Conquering Costs and Complexity in a Virtualized Environment”. In 1996, there were roughly 6 million servers. In 2009, that number has increased to nearly 32 million servers. In the presentation link below, HP & IDC outline graphs of expenses and the rise in costs which are baffling. What is the largest cost? People. Next? Power & cooling. A big point brought up at the session was, ‘who heard of power capping from the local utility center 10 years ago’? Well, no one. But with city infrastructures being tapped too hard, it had to happen. Draw these lines for expenses for management, power and cooling and utility costs on a graph looking five years out - it will be unmanageable. A few great comments that came out of the meeting: “Find that real estate management person who’s paying the power bill and that one will help you make the argument for virtualization and justify consolidation.”  and “5 ‘9s’?  no. need all ‘9s’. 100% availability. Web commerce doesn’t wait an hour.”

Virtualization is helping but needs to attack the growing costs and ongoing management of the datacenter, flipping the expense of operation to expense on innovation. The session leaders spoke of the data center as a system relationships & new innovations and management tools need a holistic approach.

From Mark Linesch, the HP session leader:

Virtualization has sparked an overall industry discussion on the changing face of the datacenter. It has helped increase utilization rates and been a major disruptor to traditional data center operations. With the number of virtual machines exploding however, virtualization has also introduced new challenges and opportunities on the transformational journey to conquer costs and complexity and move toward a shared and service-oriented data center environment.  

Our session at VMworld 2009 is all about tackling the issues AFTER those first early successes have been achieved. Armed with the latest research from Michelle Bailey at IDC, we discuss the facts about virtual sprawl and the need to rethink IT management and processes. 

For example, many organizations are beginning to use vMotion-type capabilities in their production environments. As part of our session, we discuss how customers can further lower costs and dramatically increase their ROI from VMware with automation tools and experience. We also tackle energy as IT managers re-architect the datacenter and implement a broad range of solutions to fit more servers into existing power and space constraints. It still amazes me that today’s G6 ProLiant servers from HP can increase  performance by up to 10x while reducing power consumption by 10x – saving costs and lowering energy consumption. But this is just the beginning of a comprehensive strategy that is needed to lower costs and reclaim power within existing data center environments.

Here are some take-aways from the session:

•       Download our whitepapers:

−       Orchestration for the Business-Driven Data Center http://www.eds.com/insights/whitepapers/5846/ 

−       Realizing TCO Savings with HP BladeSystem Virtual  Connect Flex-10 Technology, IDC Whitepaper

         http://www.hp.com/go/realizing-tco

•       Navy Marine Corps Intranet case study:  http://www.eds.com/insights/casestudies/nmci-virtualizing-servers.aspx

Here are the slides from HP & IDC presented at the session. http://www.slideshare.net/HPintheEnterprise/conquering-costs-and-complexity-in-a-virtualized-environment

Presenting today were:
Mark Linesch Vice President, Strategy and Portfolio Management, Enterprise Servers and Networking
HP
Rob Taylor Vice President, Data Center Services, Infrastructure Services, EDS an HP company
HP
Michelle Bailey Research Vice President, Enterprise Platforms and Datacenter Trends
IDC

We would look forward to any feedback and thoughts on this topic.

Tuesday brought the opening sessions for VMware & HP, first out of the gates in the morning at VMworld. The buzz at the Moscone Center was strong all day, the HP booth humming high.

Here are the HP announcement highlights from the morning Super Sessions:

Insight Control suite for VMware vCenter:

The first product of its kind, HP Insight Control suite for VMware vCenter delivers powerful HP hardware management capabilities directly into the vCenter management console.  This exciting new product enables virtualization administrators to remediate both Virtual guest and host issues directly from the vCenter console.

Virtual desktop infrastructure:

Virtual desktop infrastructure is a server-based computing model that gives users a PC desktop experience, while securing all applications, management and processing in the data center. The HP Virtual Desktop Reference Architecture for VMware View specifically addresses the performance bottlenecks and management complexities of other offerings. Customers can test the solution in select HP solution centers worldwide.

We will post the videos from this morning once they are published.

• See a few photos from the opening sessions


• Read the full press release


• Let us know your thoughts on these announcements by commenting on this blog

I attended the HP VMworld session on Tuesday Sept 1st on

This session provides a step by step guide describing how to evolve from a standalone environment to a fully virtualized dual site environment using VMware Site Recovery Manager. This case study starts with a series of VM's running an assortment of applications, including MS-Exchange 2007, MS-SQL Server 2008, IIS, and both Windows and Linux-based file servers. It then progresses in a phased approach showing how to incorporate both VMware SRM and dual-site, bi-directional array-based replication to provide a fully automated infrastructure for failover, non-disruptive failover testing, and failback.

The discussion started out with the driving point: your business objectives drive your backup strategy & decisions. Key questions from Alex at the start of the session today included:

• What is the time objective?


• Define recovery point objective?


• Bandwidth capacity & peak loads?


• Adequate InterSite Link technology?


• Sync (costlier!) or Async?

CommandView
Protecting Virtual Machines - hierarchical relationships of SRM Objects
Define Replication Groups
VMs & Storage Layout Planning, and Optimizing I/O paths
Failover considerations.. Test test test. And retest.
VMware SRM & EVA best practices - Keep it simple
Implementation caveats

Tool to help: analyze Datacenter Replication Designer.

Download the full VMworld session presentation here. Session topics include:

SRM Best Practices
AD and DNS can be virtualized