Hey guys! Here’s a quick update on Horizon 7.2 that was just released:

Skype for Business has native integration,

• Initial release is for Windows based endpoints
• Removes datacenter hairpinning for video and audio traffic

VMware Horizon Help Desk

• New tool using the new HTML5 interface
• Allows for helpdesk fast end user lookup, session reset and quick troubleshooting detail collection

Horizon 7 and vSAN

• Supports vSAN 6.6 encryption of data-at-rest at the cluster level
• Updates default SPBM policies created by horizon

Scale Improvements

• A single vCenter for Instant Clone and Linked-Clones can now support 4,000 desktops
• Scale increase support for 4,000 desktops with single vCenter and Full clones
• CPA scale increased to 120K sessions across 12 View pods and 5 sites

Android Client Supports Samsung DEX, which allows for desktop orientation of the phone, allowing for the experience “dock the phone, connect to horizon with external mouse/keyboard/monitor”.

HTML Access Supports Dual Displays

Linux VDI 7.2 Release

• USB Redirection support
• Client Drive Redirection (CDR) support
• KDE desktop support for CentOS 6 x64 and RHEL 6 x64
• HTML Access Supports Audio Playback
• RHEL 6.9 x64 and CentOS 6.9 x64 support

 

 

 

I love participating in the vBrownbag, because it helps me refresh my both my technical knowledge and public speaking skills. Seems I always try to reduce the ums and ahs, but it still requires practice. Here’s the video and the slides. Enjoy!

EMEA – VCAP6-DVC Design Objective 3.1 with Joe Clarke

Youtube

Slides

 

With the convergence of networking and shared storage into compute, we’re seeing a pretty unique transition from a professional skills standpoint, that has been a fairly slow adoption curve. My take on the matter in regards to why HCI and SDN has been slow to adopt is predominantly because it involves people and updating of skill sets. Let’s take a look at a comparative example. To illustrate this point, lets look at a non-technical example. If you’re building a house, you definitely need these three roles:

1. Carpenter
2. Plumber
3. Electrician

Each of these roles:

• Has a skill that has been learned over time, usually more than 3 years.
• Is typically well defined in scope.
• Is related to, but not solely dependent upon knowledge of one another.
• Has knowledge of what’s basically going on with the others, but not in-depth knowledge.

So imagine what would happen if I walked up to a team of the above subcontractors that were going to work together on a construction project, and told them:

OK, you guys I need to install a new kind of walls that are prebuilt frames, with pipes and electric cable already run inside.

Well, that’s probably going to cause a lot of grief initially. Why? Because the plumber may have issues with how he’s going to hook up to pre-run pipes, because the electrician is going to have to splice a wire run in rather than a home-run to the panel, and the carpenter has nothing to do but bolt it to the ground. Any way you slice it, it might seem that it is removing a big part of their value.

If you haven’t figured it out already, the analogy I’m drawing here is to the:

1. Carpenter – Compute/Server Sysadmin
2. Plumber – Network Administrator
3. Electrician – Storage Administrator

Also, the new building blocks are representative of HCI with SDN.

A big point that is missed here is that the value of these new building blocks is NOT, to the construction crew. The value of these new building blocks is to the customer, who can get much better time to value and reduce complexity by converging the architecture. Now, the illustration doesn’t completely work, because pre-built walls, come on, that really wouldn’t work. But it does apply to technology stacks.

So what’s the real barrier to success?

What if you told an electrician he would suddenly have to learn carpentry and plumbing? There’s definitely going to be some pushback. Same has been true with HCI in IT shops, those who are protective of their role and skill are typically barriers to change of any kind, but especially one which has potential to reduce their relevance if they do not retool their own personal skillsets. Like it or not, this is the cloud engineer of the future. The roles are converging simply to follow the trends which are providing a return the ultimate customer, the business. If the business sees that they get a faster return with consolidated technology, the technologists must follow this trend and start to branch into the other areas of expertise.

So what’s the point of this post?

As a consultant of 5 years who was a sysadmin for 7 years, my advice to Sysadmins is to stay relevant or prepare to die on the vine of your beholden technology alignment. Unlike the carpentry, plumbing and electrician industries, the technology industry seems to turn itself on its head every 5 years.

 

 

When was the last time you judged somebody because of the brand and type of undershirt they were wearing? Likely never. You may have judged someone for NOT wearing an undershirt (ugh), but that’s a different story. Nobody cares what kind or brand of undershirt you’re wearing. Except for one person. You. Why is that? What do you consider when you’re at the store and need fresh undershirts?

You probably care about several things:

• YOU want to be comfortable. This is the primary reason you stick with an undershirt brand or type, typically regardless of cost.
• YOU want to look professional. Wear an undershirt. My fellow dudes, wear one.
• YOU have to pay money for these shirts, so they can’t be ridiculously over priced compared to alternatives.
• YOU do not want OTHERS to perceive you as bad-smelling.

One of these bullet points has something to do with others. And it’s the last one. Arguably, it’s the single most important reason to wear an undershirt.

When it comes to your choice of hypervisor:

• YOU want to be comfortable with the technology choice
• YOU have to pay for your platform (sometimes the software, at the very least the hardware and support)
• YOU do not want OTHERS to perceive you as providing a bad smelling platform and application experience

The point I’m trying to make here is, your personal preferences for Xen, KVM, vSphere, OpenStack, Hyper-V are just that. Your preferences, battle scars and stories are all about you and your perspective. You also care about others understanding the success you’ve had and enjoyed with solutions in the past.

If you’re a Linux guy with a beard to your belt, you might be more apt to support a KVM environment simply because you can make it do what the others can for less capital software investment, and because you can operate it immediately with less training. Alternatively, if you’ve traditionally been a Windows administrator, perhaps you’re more apt to pay for vSphere, because of familiarity and the ease of implementation and integration. You might be all in on the Microsoft stack and Hyper-V it makes sense given severe cost restrictions and lack of Linux administration experience.

What you prefer, may simply not be the best fit for what you are trying to accomplish, but not for the reason you might think.  When looking at TCO, you have to look at everything involved in a solution, including the salaries for human resources that can run it, cost of hardware, training, support and software.

All the personal preferences, feature capabilities, doesn’t mean anything if you as an IT professional at the end of the day you can’t provide:

• Availability – High uptimes for your platform and application
• Manageability – Your people can own the solution stack. Also, you can easily provide access to consumers.
• Performance – You can size your platform to fit your workload with excellence
• Recoverability – You can recover your solution after accidental deletion or destruction
• Security – Your solution has an update lifecycle and can meet the business security requirements.
• Cost – The solution must operate within the financial constraints.

You can build an on premises cloud today with a standardized HP cloud type server with a standard Ubuntu build and Docker. You can build it with Nutanix and KVM or vSphere. You can build it with vSphere and VxRAIL or VxRACK. Why do you ultimately pick up one over the other? Mostly the same reason you pick an undershirt from the aisle.

If it meets the requirements, you won’t smell bad, and it doesn’t break the bank, it sounds like you’ve got a winner. But just like I don’t care what kind of undershirt you’re wearing, I guarantee you that your end users don’t care what kind of OS on a hypervisor you’re running. They care how well you run their applications. So if your platform choice is ultimately impacting the business or causing them to perceive you in a negative light to due lack of availability, high time to value with capital expenses, or the inability to recover lost information, you might be looking at an indicator that you need to check the market. If not, keep your eye on the cost meter and keep on truckin’.

**Disclaimer: While the illustration used in this post does cater more specifically to men, it is not meant to be gender inclusive. There are tons of excellent IT professionals who are women, to whom this article applies to equally.

I ask people these three questions when they are considering new opportunities for their career:

1. Is it doing what you love?
2. More time at your home?
3. Is it better for you financially?

The past few weeks have been pretty tumultuous at the elgwhoppo house. When your current employer wants to keep you, it’s a usually good thing, because typically you’ve shown value and are a hard worker. When they “go to the mattresses” to keep you, it’s usually an excellent thing, because they see you as a critical piece of the organization’s culture and success. As a result, I’ve been wrestling with those aforementioned three questions over the past few weeks.

The comments about innovation I made in a prior (since removed) blog post remain true; channel partner organizations must innovate and show value on the front end of business by identifying disruptive and profitable technologies and aligning resources and strategy in order to be successful. As I’ve moved through the conversations these past few weeks, it was apparent that I had a massive choice to make. Either I could up and walk from the challenges of front end innovation in the channel and keep myself headlong on the technical boots on the ground path and eventually pivot into management, or I could stay and pivot now to be a part of the team that’s on the bridge of the ship, helping provide direction for the ship course. My decision speaks for itself, as I am now a Principal Architect at Rolta AdvizeX.

In my new role, I will be architecting solutions beyond the marketing to help customers work through the real challenges that come with Hybrid Cloud and Digital Workspace solutions. I am excited to drive new innovation and continue to provide significant value at AdvizeX. From here on out, I start to lean more into people and process to accomplish objectives, rather than mostly technology. It’s a bit of a scary change, but hey, if you never move away from the things you’re comfortable with, you will never grow. Here’s to never stopping the growing and learning.