VMware announces vCenter Operations

"VMware to Integrate Performance, Capacity and Configuration Analytics to Streamline Management of Intelligent Virtual Infrastructure."


-Yahoo! Finance


What does this mean to you, VMware admin?

We can all admit after many years of working with VirtualCenter and vCenter, that there are some things left to be desired, where we depend on third parties to come in and tell us things VMware should already be able to tell us about "their/our" environment.

vCenter Operations appears to be bridging that gap.


From Yahoo! Finance, here are the main coverages:

• Proactively ensure service levels in dynamic cloud environmentsReal-time performance dashboards with patented analytics and powerful visualization of the health of the environment will allow IT to proactively pinpoint performance issues and risks before they become problems and impact SLAs. 
• Get to the root cause of performance problems faster 
  The combination of patented analytics and infrastructure-awareness will allow vCenter Operations to more accurately and rapidly determine symptoms so that infrastructure and operations teams quickly get to the root cause of performance problems. By enabling a more collaborative approach, vCenter Operations can speed problem resolution and change management cycles and reduce manual efforts by 40 percent. 
• Optimize deployments in "real-time" to enable self-service provisioningvCenter Operations will provide real-time analysis of performance and capacity to help teams make fast, informed decisions on deployment. This capability will be critical to enabling rapid and reliable provisioning needed in self-service environments. 
• Maintain compliance in the face of constant changeAutomated provisioning and configuration analysis will ensure optimal configuration by automatically detecting configuration changes and enabling rollback to help IT maintain continuous compliance with operational best practices and industry or regulatory compliance requirements. 

Further:

vCenter Operations Pricing and AvailabilityvCenter Operations is designed as a set of products and solutions that will bring together the performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities VMware has developed and acquired, including VMware vCenter CapacityIQ™, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager and Integrien Alive™. vCenter Operations will be available in three editions to meet the needs of customers managing both VMware vSphere-virtualized and physical environments.

• vCenter Operations Standard offers performance management with capacity and change awareness for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
• vCenter Operations Advanced adds more advanced capacity analytics and planning to vCenter Operations Standard's performance management for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
• vCenter Operations Enterprise offers performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments and includes customizable dashboards, smart alerting and application awareness.

The first versions of these editions will be available in late Q1 with prices starting at $50 per VM. vCenter Operations will be available through VMware sales and via VMware's more than 25,000 channel partners.

SOURCE:  http://finance.yahoo.com/news/VMware-Delivers-New-iw-792427071.html?x=0&.v=1

Oracle on VMware...YES AGAIN!

So, here we are, early 2011, and we're still having conversations about whether or not VMware is capable of handling high-end, mission-critical, Oracle workloads.  Really?!  *sigh*

I read this post from Chad Sakac yesterday (Chad, not calling you out, just using it as reference to show vendors are still "selling" the "idea" of virtualizing Oracle!) and realized that this battle of ideals is still very new and fresh, even though it isn't.

I'd like to think I've become one of the bigger offensive players in the virtualization of Oracle on VMware, but that's most likely my own fantasy.  Realistically, maybe I'm a bit more like Michael Moore....a mostly unknown, annoying fat man running around poking everyone with a stick publicly.  Yea.  That sounds more like it.

Let's review what has taken place the past couple of years in this space (and please understand I'm glossing over here...)

In the beginning, when we first truly started talking about virtualizing tier 1 workloads, SQL was the easy kill (which should have been a sign, but people chose to ignore the correlations between it and Oracle) because being a Microsoft OS/app made it fairly easy to P2V, and run in a virtual environment.  For the same reasons, and with the performance increases we saw in vSphere4,  Exchange was also a pretty easy victory because, again, it was essentially a Microsoft app. Easy to P2V, configure for multiple drives, external storage (iSCSI/RDM LUNs), etc.  What was mostly overlooked was Microsoft's generally open, accepting stance of virtualizing and their being quick to define standards and "supported configurations" that their apps could be run on.

Then we came to Oracle.  SCREEEEECH!   The brakes got put on.  What happened?!  Father Larry and the Oracle Marketing Machine went to town.  And it worked.  Fear mongering, support statements (or ambiguously dancing around them), as well as their complex multi-core multiplier licensing format, did not bode well for running software in ANY sort of virtual environment.  With very open eyes, a few of us saw through this as they introduced their own product, OracleVM, and launched what turned into one of the biggest fear campaigns I've ever been a part of.

What that has ultimately led to is YEARS of customers asking the same two questions:

1) "What about support? Oracle doesn't support VMware."  (truth: Yes, they do.)
2) "Yea but if we use VMware, we have to license the whole host!"  (truth: This is a GOOD thing!)

...and those questions ultimately lived on because Oracle just sat back and let it spread like a virus without directly answering them.  Way to go, Oracle sales & marketing.  Well, maybe I'm saying that pre-emptively, because technically, wouldn't you have seen explosive growth in OracleVM as a product?   Yea.  We haven't.  Oops.   Inadvertently, what you have done, is scare everyone off of virtualizing the Oracle software stack altogether!  Regardless of hypervisor, soft or hard provisioning....you've killed it, buried it, and those of us activists out here are left with the task of ressurecting the idea and bringing it back to the masses.  So, against the grain, the rumor mill, peer pressure, co-workers doubting, long-time DBA's laughing, I have found that I am typically the one with the last laugh.

Why?

Example.  I attended Oracle OOW2010 on behalf of VMware to speak in their booth in the Expo specifically as a customer reference.  It was amazing to me how LITTLE we talked about virtualizing the Oracle stack, and how much Virtualization 101 I did.  It was a shocking revelation.  None of these DBA's know about virtualization?!**  Holy crap!

**I say "none" loosely, but it was definitely a majority of conversations.

Self:  "Well, if they don't know about virtualization, that means they don't know about all the "built-in, bolt-on" things like HA, vMotion, Storage vMotion, Fault Tolerance.  Why are we even talking about support and licensing?!  We need to be EDUCATING so that they KNOW the benefits, and don't think they are just swapping one complex framework/infrastructure for another one for no gain!  Holy underhanded sales tactic, Batman!"


And therein lies the point of this post.

*Let us stop focusing on what Oracle has spread as the fear mongering.  (support/licensing)
*Let us all stand up and start focusing on the GAINS you get automagically just by simply virtualizing a workload, Oracle or not.
*Let us step back and re-focus on core fundamentals and features when talking about Tier 1 workloads, because they (for the most part) have somehow been lost in the FUD/fodder/dustcloud of new release of addons and "the next big thing," whatever it might be that week.

Sell the PRODUCT, and the idea will sell itself. You won't have to have the arguments anymore.

For the record:

1)  Oracle DOES support their software stack running on VMware. PERIOD.  They do not "CERTIFY" it.  They also do not CERTIFY it on most hardware vendors that it runs on in the physical realm either.  This is not game changing at all.  It is pure fear mongering in an effort to steer you to their OracleVM product.

At worst, and I mean WORST case, you will be asked to reproduce your problem on a physical platform.  Don't you already reproduce your environment regularly for test/dev anyway?  This isn't as huge of a task as most people make it out to be.

2)  Oracle requiring you to license the entire host is a GOOD thing!  Because guess what?!  Once you do, you can run an unlimited number of virtual machines on that host(s)!  And if you only run ONE virtual machine on a cluster of two hosts, well, thats exactly what you would be doing in the physical world as well, right?  Think about it.  No really.  Think about it.  You're getting WAY more bang for your buck.

As a side effect of this, you also get, OUT-OF-THE-BOX, VMware HA, vMotion, Storage vMotion, Fault Tolerance.  Doing away with all of that complicated software (*couDATAGUARDgh*) to make your backups and redundancies.

I'm not in sales.  I don't have to sell this, because this sells itself, if the customer is educated properly by the sales teams.

Vendors, resellers, et al.  Please help steer the customers away from the Support/Licensing discussions that are non-issues, and get back to core fundamentals of virtualization, and what they get just by simply virtualizing a workload.  Throw in the idea of image-level backups, snapshot-based DB backups that take seconds or minutes instead of hours, and you'll see their eyes light up and ear-to-ear grins emerge on their faces.

How do I know?

I saw it countless times at Oracle OpenWorld, and have continued to see it and be thanked for "showing them the light."

"RAC on VMware dramatically optimizes every aspect of the workload's product life cycle. It is the Cadillac of high availability solutions."

- Dave Welch, House of Brick's CTO & Chief Evangelist  source