The Virtual Data Center

I’m packing up the polos and heading down to VMworld next week, and yep, for the first time in a long time, I’ll be on booth duty (egats! someone trusts me with booth duty?). If you get a chance, swing on by the F5 booth and I’ll show you why I’ve been so quiet on the blog recently. Lots of great material about the evils of virtualization, how to overcome those d[a]emons, etc. All kinds of cool stuff I’ll post about here in the weeks after VMworld, but beat everyone to the punch and come learn how to save your infrastructure at VMworld. See y’all there.

Oh, and I’m getting there early enough to spend a few hours at the Pinball Hall of Fame. I like to gamble as much as the next person (assuming the next person is someone who likes to gamble in the first place) but I’d rather drop my hard-earned cash on rows and rows of pinball machines rather than a casino any day.

I know I’ve picked on Cisco’s Data Center blog a few times here, but they make themselves such an easy target, how can I let it slide? Case in point, this post from a few weeks ago called “The Dreaded V Word.” This posts starts on a good note: Doug jumps right into the hype of the “V Word,” although I think it surpassed SOA sometime last year both on the CIO hype scale and with companies claiming to have a buzzword of the year solution. This is one of the reasons I love answering the “Isn’t Service Virtualization just SOA?” question. “[Buzzwords] are colliding!! George is getting very upset!!”

But ironically enough, Doug actually makes the virtualization buzzword factor exponentially worse. Here’s how he defines virtualization:

“Virtualization as a technology rooted in the data center requiring network, storage and server to work together and thus drives IT collaboration. It allows the business to extend the lifecycle of capital assets they’ve already invested in and then reduce the operational expenses for remedial tasks (e.g. administrative change control, server batch moves, etc.) which allows them to free up more resources to focus on business critical applications and strategic new market entrances and such.”

Huh? Rooted in the Data Center? Drives IT collaboration? Extend capital assets? Reduce operations expenses for remedial tasks? Wow. Virtualization does all that? If I had a sales guy from a company come into my IT department and give me that answer when I asked him why I need to start looking at virtualization in my DC, I’d toss him out on his ear. That doesn’t tell me anything about what virtualization is, the problem statement, or the business benefit. Talk about using a lot of buzzwords. The term only becomes “dreaded” when you define it like that.

Wait, I just got it: now I know what Doug is trying to say:

• I call up my network guy (IT collaboration)
• Tell him to cancel the order for more Cisco switches (Extend Capital Assets)
• I’ve decided to consolidate in the DC (Free up resources)
• And move all my L2-4 switching over to all those awesome Application Delivery Controllers I just bought (Reduce OpEx for remedial tasks, ie switching)

Seriously, I couldn’t agree more that we’re still dealing with the virtualization buzzword, but to address the issue from a company like Cisco, who obviously has vested interest and virtualization technologies in the data center, is really a bad idea. And then to throw in Green IT and “Data Center 3.0″ all in the same post…a term you know I can’t stand. Did no one at Cisco cleanse this post before it went out or pass it through the Buzzword BS Meter first?

And while we’re at it, have you seen one of Cisco’s other blogs, Virtual Worlds, or basically their Second Life Marketing Blog? If I was new to data center virtualization and I wanted to get Cisco’s take, from their blogs I would think that Cisco is one big publicity company that’s more concerned with marketing names, buzzwords, and playing virtual games than the infrastructure of my Data Center. I know that’s not the case, and I know they have some deep virtualization technologies, but that’s the face their presenting through these blogs. It’s one thing to spout poetic on a personal blog; it’s something completely different when your spouting via a domain named blogs.cisco.com. I hope someone in the Technical Marketing team over there is reading this and their own blogs.

I’m headed out to take the VDC message on the road next week. This trip will be focusing on the business benefits of “Future-Proofing” the Data Center and blowing out the smoke that the vendors are telling customers today. The basic premise is to architect your Data Center and your long-term Virtualization plan around your applications, not around single-point virtualization solutions like OS virtualization and the hypervisor. I’ve been working out the kinks in my “VDC as a Service Model” presentation, and it’s almost ready for primetime, so it’s going to be nice to focus on the business benefit of the VDC on this trip and talk about what happens after you adopt the Service Model.

I’m sure I’ll come back with all kinds of stories, rants, suggestions, etc…

With all the technology we all work with and talk about, it’s the smallest things that remind us that everything is error prone. John Peterson, CEO of Montego Networks and blogger at vmwaresecurity.com, posted a comment on April 1st to my post about their new software switch security VMs and built-in hypervisor security. Well that comment was lost in the ether until today. So click on through to the original post to read John’s insightful feedback where he answer a good bit of my questions. And I love his (paraphrased) “it may not be elegant but it’s a great start” response; touche.

Now I’m off to find the virtual gremlin in Wordpress that’s stealing our comments. Makes me wonder how many more there may be…

A quick blog status update: Last week was a quiet week on this end (certainly not on the virtualization front; I’ve got my RSS consumption cut out for me) due to a much enjoyed vacation.  This week I’m down in Vegas visiting Interop, talking to a ton of great people, and speaking at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS).  My session, aptly titled “Virtualized Data Centers – Beyond the Virtual Sum of Virtual Parts,” is on Thursday at 4:00 PM followed by a break-out Q&A session at 5:30 PM.  If you’re here and signed up, swing on by.  More info here.

…and then next week it’s all catching up and back to normal.  Until then…

Just a quick note: I’ll be going dark next week as I head down to the Bay area for a few days for RSA, and then even farther south to Palo Alto to present the Virtual Data Center at SAP Virtualization Week.  It’s going to be a fun week…

FULL DISCLOSURE: This blog runs on software from wordpress.org, which is completely different than the software at wordpress.com that offended me below.

Prior to becoming the management and virtualization junkie that you read here, I worked in data security. I was a security freak. No, strike that: I still am a security freak. I’m overly paranoid. I shred everything. I only use one credit card for online shopping. I get in arguments with my family when I find out that they use weak passwords. We don’t even say passwords out loud in my house, it’s that bad. I have passwords for securing other passwords in password “safes”. I keep my GPG keys on write-once media in a safety deposit box. Yes, I’m a freak when it comes to security.

So you can imagine my shock and horror a few days ago when I created a WordPress blog. I thought it was about time I had a personal, non-technology related blog, so I created both WordPress and Blogspot sites to compare features and usability. So I did my thing, created blog/site names for each service, matched those to an account name, and waited for my respective confirmation emails. With Blogspot, it’s tied to one of my GMail accounts, so no problems there. Google’s SSO Dashboard environment is awesome (btw, I’m addicted to iGoogle).

WordPress has an email confirmation system, notifying me when my account was set up and ready to go. However…and it’s a HUGE HOWEVER…the confirmation email from WordPress included my username, links to manage my blog, and MY PASSWORD IN THE CLEAR! THE FULL PASSWORD…IN THE CLEAR! If I seem aggrivated, well, welcome to my world. It’s freakin’ 2008, and a site as pervasive as WordPress is sending full passwords in the clear, via the most insecure data transport system ever devised, email?! C’mon!

I promptly logged into WordPress and changed my password, and will most likely end up at Blogspot b/c of this snafu. So kudos to WordPress for making my decision much easier.

And for your viewing pleasure, here’s the email from WordPress (pertinent user information changed, obviously).

New WordPress Blog: ExampleBlog
Your New WordPress.com blog has been successfully set up.

You can log in with the following information:
Username: exampleblog
Password: alice123
at http://wordpress.com

We hope you dig your new weblog. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know!