At Par 4 Technology Group, we take great pride in our ability to identify compelling emerging technologies.   We are partnered with ServiceNow; today’s fastest growing Software Company in the US. Join us for an executive dinner on March 25th at the Back Bay Grille in Portland, ME. This exciting and stimulating dinner features speakers from LL Bean who will discuss the following topics:

• LL Bean’s ITSM Technical and Business Challenges
• LL Bean’s ITSM Evaluation Criteria and Process
• Why they chose ServiceNow for ITSM Automation
• Initial Implementation Results and Next Steps

Enjoy a four course dinner and wine pairing while networking with other IT executives from Maine-based companies. The event is complimentary but seating is limited. Please register now to reserve your seat.

What: Executive Dinner with Par 4 and Service Now featuring speakers from LL Bean

When: Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Location: Back Bay Grille, 65 Portland Street, Portland, ME

Time: 6:00pm

RSVP: Register Now

For questions, please contact Sara Schiavone at sschiavone@Par4tech.com

We are putting on this really unique event combining technology and some good old fashioned fun. Join us for great way to learn a little more about virtual I/O and Xsigo, meet some of your peers, and blow off some steam at one of the best shooting facility’s in the Northeast. Whether you are an expert or beginner, SIG SAUER Academy is committed to helping you become a better shooter. Enjoy this truly unique event while networking with other IT professionals.  The event is complimentary but space is limited. RSVP to marketing@par4tech.com

When:  Thursday, February 9th

Time/Agenda:
3:00-3:30—Xsigo Presentation
3:30-4:00—Saftey Tips
4:00-7:00— Lock & Load! Shooting Time
We will break at 6:00pm for Pizza and Soda
Location:
SIG SAUER Academy
233 Exeter Road
Epping, NH  03042
603-418-8181

RSVP to marketing@par4tech.com

How -
VMware is moving away from processor licensing because processors have become so fast and RAM is the hot commodity. OK so VMware still retains the processor entitlement, however with each processor it provides a “pool” of vRAM. vRAM is VMware parlance is the amount of RAM allocated to a virtual machine while it is POWERED ON. So if you have 100 VM’s sitting there powered off, it doesn’t count against your entitlement. This is very important to the VMware strategy I will delve into later. VMware had to still have processor entitlements so they could transition licenses from 4 to 5, but at the end of the day vSphere 5 is priced in powered on VM RAM (vRAM). VMware also made sure you couldn’t cheat by just powering lots of things off by still requiring a CPU license per socket. So if I had 4 sockets and 24 GB of vRAM, I would still need 4 CPU licenses, just to enter the stadium. Think SRM (DR) folks…. Smart. VMware will allow you to pool vRAM across hosts, clusters, and linked vCenter, so from that perspective it is quite flexible.

Summary: vRAM is the amount of RAM provisioned to a virtual machine, ONLY if it is powered up.

Why -
VMware uses the word flexibility however the marketing people at VMware know that the current sweet spot in computing right now is a 2 socket server with 144GB of RAM, which is 72GB per processor (ouch!) Roll them off the assembly line, for under $10k. That would mean under current vSphere 4 license structure two vSphere licenses (each license is up to an 8-way CPU, E+ 12-way). In vSphere 5, for VDI you normally overcommit so 144GB will now require 4.5 licenses for equivalent processing power, ouch. Part of the problem with licensing per core is that it was punitive to AMD with their 12-way CPU’s (buy an E+ or THREE Enterprise licenses per 2-way) and an Intel Xeon with an 8-way (16 thread with HT) would only take two licenses on a two way. Not fair. AMD’s next generation processor “Bulldozer” goes to modules versus cores so that makes licensing more difficult. It’s not because each modules is two “light” cores, but it is enough to confuse many. In all fairness all of these processor configurations won’t matter anymore, because vSphere 5 licensing makes sure vRAM is the bottleneck not the processor, unless you want to do DR. I will introduce a simple commodity metric known as price per gig of RAM (“PPG”) to help users evaluate what the cost impact is between versions and how to transition from vSphere 4 licensing from a budgetary perspective. At the end of the day vRAM entitlements is just UBB (Usage Based Billing) in disguise. Sooner or later the cloud providers and VMware will charge you on what you use no differently than Verizon or AT&T.

VMware provides a monitoring tool for entitlements in vCenter 5, but how do you manage it? This is how VMware marketing ensure that customers don’t use only the hypervisor but are gently nudged into VMware’s operational management package known as vCenter Operations. vCenter Ops is a repackaging of a number of VMware tools including ADM, CapIQ, Config Manager, and Integrien Alive!. It’s the virtual nirvana of monitoring and management tools. The gotcha with vCenter Ops is that it is licensed by VM per vCenter, so even if you have powered off VM’s you need to have licenses. There are multiple levels with different cost structures, but one of the nice features of this product (it really is a great ops tool) is that it can help “slim” down your vRAM.

Even when customers moved to virtualization in most cases they grossly oversized vCPUs and vRAM, because they were “free” (caps of CPU licenses or RAM were ever hit). There was little cost to vCPU’s because VMware’s scheduler did a great job of managing idle CPU’s and in most cases enterprise customers never overcommitted (using more vRAM than physical RAM) because they were afraid of performance when ballooning kicked in. Well now provisioning 16GB of vRAM for a server that uses 4GB is going to cost you. So now you have to put your VM’s on a diet and vCenter Ops is the diet center that you pay every month to keep the bulge down. It will cost you to consume resources now… Welcome to the dreaded UBB and the tools to manage them.

OK, so now VMware has sold you all of its datacenter products. Let’s move on to Desktop…

How Does vSphere 5 Affect Desktops and VDI?

So we have digested the new licensing scheme and have vCenter Ops watching the servers to keep the waistline down, but what do we do with those desktops? Server virtualization is baked, however we are just scratching the surface on virtualizing the “user experience” and with Apple vs Droid we are seeing devices as powerful or more than my Wyse thin client that is 2 years old. I guess that explains how 4G on my Thunderbolt is like passing a 2011 Prius on the highway with a 1972 Olds Delta 88. Fill up that battery. Anyways if you look at the new vSphere5 licensing, running this on VDI would cost an enormous amount. How much? First you average Windows 7 desktop running Outlook, Office, Browser, and a few home grown apps, this is going to take about 1.5GB of vRAM (+physical overhead of about 100MB), and 2GB if you do anything fancy or have sloppy developers. In VDI you can overcommit (if you use SSD) so a conservative setup you can get 90-100 active sessions on a 2×2 server w/ 144GB. Here is an example of a typical medium sized environment with 180 desktops with 3 servers (n+1) under the new licensing schme.

Example: 180 VDI sessions (1.5GB vRAM) using 270GB of vRAM (3 servers 2×2 144GB pRAM in each):
[288GB vRAM] vSphere Standard + VC: (12 lic) * $995 + $6K (VC) = $17,940 $62 PPG or $93/VDI
[288GB vRAM]vSphere Standard + AK = $10,000 (192GB) + 4 Std ($995) = $13,980 $49 PPG or $73/VDI
[288GB vRAM]vSphere Enterprise + VC (9 lic) * $2,875 + $6k VC = $31,875, $111 PPG, $166/VDI
[288GB vRAM]vSphere Enterprise + AK = $17,495 + 3 Ent ($2,875) = $26,120, $91 PPG, $136/VDI
[288GB vRAM]vSphere Enterprise+ + VC (6 lic) * $3,495 + $6k VC = $26,970, $94 PPG, $141/VDI
[288GB vRAM]vSphere Enterprise+ + AK = $21,995, $76 PPG, $115/VDI
vSphere 4 Essentials+ (n+1), meaning only 66% utilization, 6 CPU licenses, 1 Year prod $4,370 = $15 PPG or $24/VDI
vSphere 4 Standard (8CPU) kit, $12,500 (note this is now capable of 3+1 or 270 sessions and 432GB + Support = $29 PPG or $43/VDI

Takeaways: The clear winner of the new and improved (meaning more $$$) pricing model is vSphere Standard using the Acceleration Kit at $73 per VDI seat concurrent, assuming vSphere 5. However the new model doesn’t even come CLOSE to the vSphere 4.1 offerings and they come bundled with support (SnS) for one year. So looking at standard to standard, moving to 5 is going to cost you 80-90% more if you now factor in SnS for vSphere 5. If you are keen you can go the essentials+ route and save a cool 400%. Holy Netflix It’s worth noting that the pricing scheme for Enterprise usage that Enterprise Plus (E+) has a lower PPG than Enterprise ($76 vs $91) so no doubt that is a strong economic incentive to move customers into Enterprise+ where addons will ultimately open up new revenue opportunities for VMware down the road. This only provides the hypervisor licensing, however it doesn’t yet consider the desktop environment (VDI) licensing, persona management, desktop monitoring, thin clients, security equipment, etc which are all additional. No matter how you slice it, the new VMware licensing scheme is brutal unless you are a large enterprise.

VMware View and Everyone Else

Seeing that customers would be up in arms and the channel complain because VMware View is licensed by concurrent user with NO vRAM or CPU limitation and Enterprise+ entitlement, while others running Citrix (XenDesktop) or the like would have to pony up big bucks to get into the game, they had to provide something fair. A check on that for a 1.5GB VDI session would run a Citrix user $115 per seat (E+ like View) just for the hypervisor license, and then they would have to pay the Citrix licensing on top of that. VMware View Enterprise clocks in a $150/seat to start. So VMware quickly went to a dual Desktop licensing model, VMware View and vSphere Desktop. As a best practice for licensing it is always easier to keep VDI licensing separate from regular vSphere licensing because the VDI licensing is now per concurrent user (no CPU/RAM limitations), so tracking it will be an administrative nightmare that a visit from vCenter Ops can cure.

VMware View Licensing

VMware view licensing can be confusing because the EULA allows the user to purchase the number of licenses for peak concurrent seats (like vRAM) , however the View EULA also allows customers to run “ecosystem” VM’s directly supporting VDI in that license entitlement. For instance your vCenter database (if separated), View security server, any VDI monitoring tools, virtual storage appliances, domain servers, etc directly serving VDI are included. This greatly simplifies licensing if one deploys VDI in an isolated pod configuration so the EULA terms can be defensible on an audit. VMware View comes in two flavors, Enterprise $150 and premier $250 per concurrent user. http://www.vmware.com/products/view/howtobuy.html

View Enterprise has the following components and can be bought in packs of 10:

vSphere for desktops – This is Enterprise+ with no practical entitlement limit and the EULA allows VDI desktops in addition to the ecosystem VDI server VM’s
vCenter
View Manager – Essentially the connection broker and protocol (PCoIP)

View Premier adds to Enterprise 4 key components:

View Composer – This is the linked clone technology that allows you to provision and manage desktops from a “golden” image.
View Client with Local Mode – This is the “disconnected” desktop which allows you to run a VM on a laptop, and when you reconnect to the network it syncs with your master VDI image in the datacenter.
vShield Endpoint – This allows you to run border security products at the hypervisor level than within each VM. For instance you can run virus scans at the hypervisor level and never have to put virus scanning in a desktop.
VMware ThinApp – This is VMware’s application virtualization program. Virtualizing applications is critical to creating a lean non-persistent desktop.

VMware ESX 5 vSphere for Desktops “The Rest”

As I stated earlier the new vSphere licensing was outrageous for VDI so VMware is creating a VDI light which allows for hosting VDI sessions on vSphere without entitlement caps (no vRAM limitations). This will allow you to run your favorite flavor of broker or desktop manager. However there are a few caveats:

No vCenter – You will have to purchase it, unless you purchase a View Accelerator Kit which is about the same.
The price is $6,500 for 100 desktop ($65/VDI VM) only. No finer granularity. View allows packs of 10 or 100. So for those with 110 desktops, you need to think hard on how to manage that.
You cannot convert vSphere licenses to vSphere for desktops. So this forces you to buy net new VDI licenses and reallocate old vSphere licenses or simply stay on the old licensing scheme. You can always hold out to see how the competition (RedHat, Citrix, Leostream) puts pressure on VMware.
Once you upgrade licenses to vSphere 5, you must accept the EULA which means you are now under UBB (vRAM).

Now you have to start doing the math to see if it makes sense to stick with VMware for the hypervisor (RedHat, Microsoft, Xen) is being aggressive here), or you go for the full VMware ecosystem and ditch Citrix or your other favorite broker. Remember ELA’s are a great way to get a discount, so that is always an option.

What Other Options are there?

VMware is doing a Netflix and making you choose if you want DVD and Streaming (View) or just streaming (vSphere Desktops). Luckily for VMware their datacenter product is not lacking, however if you go the 3rd party route then the math is in favor of VMware View for software licensing if you stick with the VMware hypervisor. Some people will throw up their hands and look at Microsoft, Xen, or Redhat hypervisors which offer excellent products also, or some will forego the VMware datacenter features and go with the free ESXi hypervisor which has the same stability and excellent quality (it is the same code) as the licensed products. Since there are no enterprise features or management, one will have to use a 3rd party tools or write to the vSphere APIs. I would recommend such a move only to very small environments < 50 desktops or to service providers not looking for top SLAs. The emerging virtual storage appliances may allow a pod architecture so that the basic hypervisor is all one needs. Keep tuned on posts on that. No matter how you slice it VDI is about ROI and VMware just rewrote that equation.

vSphere 5.0 License Configurations

Home user, small tester, no vCenter: VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) -> Free with an option for Production support. This is the full production ESXi, but without datacenter features such as vMotion, HA, DRS, vCenter, etc. However the VIC (VMware Client) still works. There are third party tools out there that can emulate vCenter for little to no cost, and VMware GO provides an option for managing small environments.

SMB: “Essentials” and “Acceleration Kits” This is the small shop that wants the enterprise features of VMware without the cost and full feature set. These folks will be hit hardest by the new licensing model, because their hardware resources are precious and in many cases overcommit memory, which will end up costing them money. As a lagniappe VMware is introducing the VSA (VMware Storage Appliance) that will allow you to turn your small build into a SAN without having to buy an external SAN. That in itself can pay for the upcharge. vCenter foundation is also baked in here. More later.

Service Provider : aka VSPP, colo, public cloud. The licensing model moved to vRAM last year, and the service providers I have spoken to are not thrilled. While this won’t generally impact companies today, if you are looking to move into a public cloud, ultimately the service providers will have to pass that additional cost along to you in the near future.
Enterprise: VMware has a number of flavors, and vCenter is licensed separately. High level:

Standard – 8-way vCPU, a paltry 24GB vRAM, basic backup, HA, update, vMotion…
Enterprise – 8-way vCPU, a little better 32GB, adds zones, VAAI, FT, storage multipathing, storage vMotion, DRS, etc
Enterprise+ – 32-way vCPU, OK 48GB vRAM. Enterprise+, all the high-level datacenter automation, network virtualization, security, and storage tiering “Storage DRS”

Detailed info: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html

ELA: Enterprise License Agreement. VMware or a premier partner like Par4 will work with you to come up with the best basket of software, support, and service offerings to meet the customer needs. I have seen ELA’s in the five figures, so this is probably the best bet for most mid to enterprise companies. These are 100% custom, tailored to the customer, and you can “convert” your existing licenses to an ELA.

Other: This includes OEM (Dell, IBM, HP, etc), Application Service Providers, and others depending upon country.

Questions?

Feel free to post comments to our blog on par4tech.com or drop me a note in my email: delefante@par4tech.com

Click here to learn more about EMC World in Las Vegas 2012

Click here to read more.

Click here to read more.

What: HP 3PAR Workshop followed by Celtics vs Mavericks game
When: Wed, January 11
Time: 6:00pm
Location: TD Garden, Boston, MA

Details:
Par 4 Technology Group, along with HP, is hosting a Technology Slam Dunk, one of the best events of the year. Join us for a workshop on HP’s 3PAR followed by one of the most anticipated hoop games on the season….Boston Celtics vs Dallas Mavericks- Winner of the 2011 NBA Championships! At the workshop, learn how the exclusive virtualization features of HP 3PAR Utility Storage take sever virtualization to the next level.

Highlights:

• Decrease acquisition and operational costs by 50%
• Reduce storage management time by 90%
• Cut storage capacity requirements by 50%

Agenda:
6:00-6:30pm Registration & Appetizers
6:30-7:15pm HP Presentation on 3PAR
Registration, appetizers and presentation will take place in TD Garden’s Meeting room. Customer will be given tickets and will move upstairs to TD Garden’s Premimum Suite to watch the game.
8:00pm Start Time, Boston Celtics vs Dallas Mavericks.

Responsibilities (based on your position) will include:

• Install & configure VMware vSphere suite of products
-Conduct and Manage P2V migrations.
• Administration of VMware Infrastructure solutions
-Participation or conduct Project Management activities.


Requirements:


• 5+ Years of Technology Infrastructure experience.

• 3+ years virtualization experience using VMware’s products
.
• VCP Certification will be given priority.

• 3rd party Certifications a plus (MSFT,CSCO,EMC,RHT).
• ESX shell / Powershell scripting experience
.
• P2V Migration Experience.
• Ability to work with (migrate/deploy) various operating systems on large scale.
• SAN/NAS storage expertise a plus.

• Project management experience or experience managing a P2V project.
• Experience supporting complex technical environments.
• Ability to communicate and present ideas to technical staff and management concisely.

Skills:

• VMware ESX
• VMware Admin
• Windows Administrator
• P2V Migrations



Par4 Server Virtualization engineers are responsible for the design, implementation, and management of virtualization solutions, in conjunction with our storage, networking, and data center teams. The position is also responsible for performing knowledge transfer to customers and pro-actively looking for additional opportunities to help our customers improve their server environments. You will accomplish this by:



• Working with Par4 sales team to qualify and scope project opportunities.
• Delivering world-class virtualization customer projects, leveraging best practices and best-of-breed technologies.
• Interfacing with IT architects, storage engineers, and networking engineers to architect modern data center solutions.
• Translating IT issues and requirements into actionable projects.
• Participating in the development of strategic practice initiatives and development of new data center solutions.
• Developing strong customer relationships with data center customers in conjunction with Sirius sales teams. 


Your toolset should include:

• 3+ years of experience designing, implementing, and managing virtual infrastructure environments.
• 3+ year of experience engineering enterprise solutions.

• Consulting experience preferred.

• Expert in VMware vSphere, vCenter, & Site Recovery Manager (SRM) products; prefer experience with vCenter Suite (vCloud, AppSpeed, CapacityIQ, vCloud, etc.) products
* VMware VCP certification; pursuit of VCDX certification preferred
.
• In-depth knowledge of industry standard server blade and rack-dense server technologies, including IBM and Dell.
• Experience working with storage area network (SAN) storage and networking technologies.
• Must have strong leadership qualities, and experience working with internal/external customers to achieve IT goals.
• Strong verbal and written communications skills, proven leader, and capable of working independently.

• Must be currently eligible to work in the United States.

Skills:
Expert in VMware vSphere, vCenter, and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) products; prefer experience with vCenter Suite (vCloud, AppSpeed, CapacityIQ, vCloud, etc.) products 


Responsibilities (based on your position) will include:


• Conduct assessments of customer end-user-computing environments
• Design VMware View architecture and images

• Install & configure VMware View for enterprise customers

• Thinapp packaging

Requirements:

• 5+ Years of Technology Infrastructure experience

• 2+ years virtualization experience using VMware products
• Experience implementing VMware View including design and deployment

• Thinapp packaging
- Experience with major Storage solutions a plus
• VCP Certification required
• 3rd party Certifications a plus (MSFT,CSCO,EMC,RHT)

Skills:

• VMware ESX
• VMware VIEW
• VMware VDI
• Windows Administrator
• vSphere
• Thinapp Packaging