Dave Welch (@OraVBCA), CTO and Chief Evangelist
Revised on September 2, 2014
For starters, I walked right out of the breakfast in disgust to grab a meal on the street. Until now, VMworld has always set the standard for what conference food ought to be. In contrast, this is what the food looked like at VMworld 2013 EMEA:
This is my 10th contiguous VMworld U.S. show. I started in 2005 when there were 3,000+ attendees. The crowd was understandably mostly VMware admins. Today I am to understand there are ~20,000 attendees.
General Session – 9:00AM
It pains me to share negativity regarding the morningβs General Session. Thatβs because I love VMwareβs core technology and its core tooling for what it has done for the world.
EVO VS. VBLOCK
When Cisco got uptight about last yearβs NSX announcement, I thought it was no different than how the other x86 server vendors felt about Cisco getting into the server market five years before. Deal with it. Totally healthy. I didnβt feel that way at all about the VMware EVO announcement. My first impression – this is not healthy. Just when VCEβs Vblock is really picking up appropriate steam as the worldβs leading converged concept, whatβs VMware doing? The Oracle Exa sales teamβs gotta be absolutely loving this. Even EVO βlightβ isnβt justification enough to damage the VCE consortium owner-partnersβ relationship. That can and should have been an addition to or course correction to the Vblock line. Even if VMware absolutely has to do EVO, why is the worldβs premier x86 server vendor, Cisco, conspicuously missing from the handful of EVO hardware providers?
VMWARE’S DATA CENTER PARNTERS
In the only conversation Iβve had with anyone on the general session, my House of Brick colleague CEO Nathan Biggs mentioned VMwareβs data center partners. Theyβre going to be feeling less than good about VMwareβs announcement that it is aggressively expanding its own data center offering.
THE “BRAVE” THEME
The βbraveβ theme is lost on me. Although I sincerely appreciated every one of the motivational statements and definitions, βbraveβ is the wrong reason for enterprises to invest in VMware technologies. It wouldnβt work for me coming out of Oracle marketing and it doesnβt work for me here.
Major Corporation Cancels Oracle Support
I was in horror today when a respected colleague at a scaled nameplate enterprise told me theyβd cancelled Oracle Support and were relying on NSX microsegmentation moving forward for Oracle security. Wow. Iβm neither a networking admin nor a security officer. What I do know is the majority of security breaches come from within enterprisesβ perimeters. Given that, Iβm betting itβs going to take a lot for me to come up to speed on microsegmentation firewalling sufficiently to convince me that it alone is adequate security without also security patching the workload from the inside out against known attack vectors. I asked specifically if the disclosure was NDA and wasnβt told it was. Just the same, out of caution Iβm not disclosing the name of the enterprise at this time.
VAPP1507 β VMware IT Successfully Migrated 13 TB EBS Production to 5 Node 11gR2 RAC on vSphere – A Deep Dive
I thoroughly enjoyed VMware Corporationβs presentation of its own 13 TB E-Business Suite RAC on vSphere database. I paid particular attention to the fact that the VMware ops team achieved a 30 minute cut-over outage through combining array tooling (EMC TimeFinder in this case) with physical Data Guard in async mode. I also paid particular attention to the world-leading layer-2 segment simulcast software Cisco OTV in the stack. (GE Appliances & Lighting also leveraged Cisco OTV when it took its EBS RAC vSphere stack live two years ago.) The presenter said this now constitutes 100% virtualization within VMware.
vCAC DBaaS PRE-ANNOUNCEMENT
During that same session, it was announced VMware will be coming out with vCAC Database as a Service (DBaaS) hopefully in three months. It will start as a single VM offering but soon graduate to multi-VM. No doubt the multi-VM comment was offered due to the fact this was a RAC virtualization session.
Must Have Books on Virtualizing Oracle Databases
Theyβre finally here: two must-have books on virtualizing Oracle databases. The first I should have mentioned months ago: Virtualize Oracle Business Critical Databases by lead author Viscosityβs Charles Kim and contributors Hortonworksβs George Trujillo, and VMwareβs Steven Jones and Sudhir Balasubramanian. The second by VMware Corporationβs Don Sullivan and Kannan Mani is Virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere. Don told me yesterday the bookβs due out this October. I tip my hat to these authors. Donβs accomplished a lot in his professional years. But he tells me heβs never undertaken a project with overhead like this.