another webinar about free tools??! oh yeah! David Davis and I are once again presenting our infamous VMworld presentation. I don't have to talk about it any more. Just know that since this is being sponsored by TrainSignal there will be some vSphere 5 Training Give Aways, which is always fun.

It's taking place on Wednesday 1/11/2012 at 3:00pm EST. Hope to see you there!

Register Here!

I'm amazed every day by the amount of effort people in VCE contribute. VCE has that VMware Labs feel to it. If you see a hole that needs to be filled, go fill it. Do you have an idea that you want to make into a project, run with it. It's innovation and ideas that keep things moving forward.

Today, VCE released a new tool for its customers called the Vblock Version Tool. This program will allow a partner/customer to gather all the required firmware/software level versions on their Vblock and compare it against the Official Release Matrix.  If you don't know, the Official Release Matrix is a chart/martix/pdf that gets updated about once or twice a quarter (depending on how many and what types of firmwares are released) and plays into VCE's strategy of a Pre-Integrated & Pre-Tested Product. Every component in the Vblock (Storage, UCS, VMware, MDS, Nexus, 1000v, PowerPath V/E, UIM, etc) all have some sort of firmware or software level tied to them. VCE's goal is to release a product that adheres to specific firmware/software levels to ensure complete interoperability and superior performance. The Official Release Matrix contains all the software/firmware levels for specific Vblock models and can be found internally on VCE Portal or partners can get it on VCE Partner Portal.

The Vblock Version Tool shows the continued effort VCE makes in building the industry's ONLY integrated stack with true differentiating characteristics.  VCE is continuing to help customers realize the value in Vblock above and beyond the best of breed hardware components. The VCE Vblock Version Tool can be found on the VCE Partner Portal and customers can get the tool from VCE Support Portal.

I received an email today from the product manager at VKernel asking about additional features the community would like in their free product SearchMyVM. If you're not familiar with SearchMyVM it can be described as a "google-like" interface for your vCenter environment. You can run queries against your environment, and do searches. It's an appliance based VM so you don't pay any licensing cost, and the product is absolutely free. It's a great way for admins to let other people in IT see what resources are being consumed and are free within the virtual environment. SearchMyVM has also been on my Top 10 Best Free Tools list. If you haven't checked it out, I encourage you to.

The product management wants to know what YOU would like to see in their new version. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment or send me an email kendrickcoleman [@] gmail [dot] com and I'll relay it back to the team.

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There are two spiking trends in the market that I see today. The first is Enterprises and Service Providers are looking to build some sort of cloud infrastructure. I know everyone has a different definition of "cloud infrastructure", but I'm referring to companies that are focused higher in the stack. Speeds and feeds are great, new hardware is great, but at the end of the day those are capital expenditures and make IT departments a cost center. The goal of a cloud infrastructure is to start your ROIC, Return on Investment Capitol, as soon as possible so the business can gain value. While you keep acquiring new equipment, it still takes weeks or months for it to even be implemented as part of your production cloud. I say that it takes this long because a true cloud solution is not only based off of virtualization, but you need to have an orchestration strategy that automates the provisioning of new resources. Picture this, Cluster A only has 10% of free RAM available, a warning is sent to the cloud admin to investigate the situation. The cloud admin finds out that workloads cannot be dispersed to another cluster so an order for 2 blade servers are placed. Once those new blade servers are shipped, the cloud admin inserts those blades into free chassis slots. From there, automation takes over. The chassis recognizes new blades, applies a pre-defined service profile, auto-deploys ESXi, and the ESXi configuration tasks take over to add the new blades to the cluster for HA and DRS resources, along with mounting datastores and configuring networks. The cluster is now at 30% free RAM.  That is called cloud automation and many companies see the light today using products such as Cisco IA, vCloud Director, and vCenter Orchestrator or even using custom code. This is the new wave of innovation that developers and admins need to be prepared for.