The New VIC 1240 come with the following capabilities.

Advanced Support for Virtualized Environments

The Cisco UCS VIC 1240 implements the Cisco VM-FEX, which unifies virtual and physical networking into a single infrastructure. It provides virtual-machine visibility from the physical network and a consistent network operations model for physical and virtual servers.

The Cisco UCS VIC 1240 supports VMware’s VMDirectPath with vMotion technology, which allows it to:

• “Pass through” the hypervisor layer
• Provide near-bare-metal performance for unified computing systems
• Integrated modular LOM for new generation Cisco UCS blade servers
• Delivers up to 80 Gbps aggregate bandwidth to the servers, with the use of an I/O expander in the optional mezzanine slot
• Near bare-metal I/O performance
• Ease of management
• Exceptional network visibility
• support  Up to 256 dynamic virtual adapters and interfaces

Please read more from the official Cisco UCS site

You can also refer the detail architecture from here

• Integrated modular LOM for new generation Cisco UCS blade servers
• Delivers up to 80 Gbps aggregate bandwidth to the servers, with the use of an I/O expander in the optional mezzanine slot
• Near bare-metal I/O performance
• Ease of management
• Exceptional network visibility

Related posts:

1. Cisco UCS Product Update with B200M3
2. Cisco UCS added new Fabric Interconnect to the Product Line
3. Cisco UCS Rank #3 in Worldwide Blade Server Market

Business are always the key drivers for cloud computing. The main benefits will always go to business rather then Enterprise IT. IT department had been educated to practice cost saving every year in most Enterprise Environment. More than 70% of the Enterprise IT today are focus cost cutting exercise rather than technology innovation for business enablement.Therefore, we are not surprise to see legacy application, devices are always in the production without ownership today.

As the IT leader to roll out the cloud computing, we should always understand the need of business and how the cloud will enable business to be better in future. You may not need all the cloud capability in place to support the business, but you will need the core component require to full fill the business model in your environment.

Cloud computing contains physical infrastructure include networking, security, servers, storage, backup, recovery, DR and etc. Beside the technology, automation and management are the core components which enable self service capability, automated management capability and others core function require to convert existing infrastructure to the cloud computing.

The selection of the technology should always consider compatibility, reliability, simplicity and flexibility. Open standard is another key word we should always remember. All this consideration will secure our investment into cloud computing. Hybrid cloud concept had been in the market for years but lack of practical due to technology constrains such as bandwidth, security concerns, compatibility and etc. Recently, we had seen some success roll out which enable hybrid solution in enterprise environment. To enjoy the full benefit of cloud computing, which usually tie to the phrase of ” Everything on demand”, you will require to ensure your private cloud are compatible, burst able to public cloud hosting at anytime you want. Therefore, the private cloud solution you choose to deploy, will make the huge impact to your future strategy for hybrid cloud adoption.

I had seen many cloud deployment been done lately, which require long deployment cycle and incompatible with public cloud provider platform.  Those deployment sometimes leave them no choices in future to burst their application or compute requirement to others cloud provider due to incompatible issue. This will dismiss the hybrid cloud benefits for the enterprise, to leverage the large compute resource spool in the public at anytime they want. While every principle claim their solution are the best for cloud offering, we as users should always re-think the right strategy and the infrastructure consumption by the business internally before we deploy the enterprise private cloud.

To summarize this, the evaluation criteria of the cloud computing solution, shouldn’t just base on Cost. IT spending is hardly stretched beyond 5% from the total revenue of the company. The agility, reliability and flexibility will provide more benefits to the business, this must been seen by IT and Business together to ensure a correct cloud computing strategy to be chosen.

Related posts:

1. Federated hybrid cloud with vCloud director 1.5
2. Cisco and VMware Submitted VXLAN for Open standard

Today, EMC had launch the VSPEX offering to address the channel market which provide more flexible choice to the partner and users to be considered in smaller scale deployment. vBlock will still be positioned as large scale deployment due to the density of the architecture are design to fit in for different environment.

Below is the high level summary of EMC VSPEX

• VSPEX Is Simple – VSPEX Proven Infrastructures deliver predictable performance that significantly reduces the planning, sizing and configuration burdens of adopting private cloud or end-user computing environments. In addition, EMC’s validation of the VSPEX configuration greatly reduces deployment time. Finally, tight alignment with Windows Server Hyper-V and VMware vSphere cloud infrastructure provide customers a single point of management using System Center for Microsoft cloud and VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite for private cloud deployments.
• VSPEX Is Efficient – Built on EMC’s award-winning VNX™ and VNXe™ unified storage systems and Avamar® and Data Domain® next-generation backup products, VSPEX provides customers with unmatched levels of efficiency. Leveraging technologies such as data deduplication, compression and Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), customers can expect to significantly lower operational costs. By integrating these technologies tightly with the hypervisor and end-user computing environments, customers can also benefit from simpler administration and lower management costs.
• VSPEX Is Flexible – VSPEX allows customers to combine their choice of industry-leading server, network, and virtualization technologies into a proven infrastructure validated by EMC and built on a highly flexible EMC storage and backup infrastructure. Additionally, the customer’s channel partner of choice – who understands the specific customer’s requirements – can customize VSPEX to meet their needs.

For details information, you can refer to the official link from EMC

I notice there are couple of significant improvement from this new generation blade as below

1. 2 sockets base blade servers to provide up to 16 cores with Intel E5 chip by utilizing 1600Mhz DDR3 memory
2. It provide up to 384 GB of memory with 16 GB memory module
3. IO interface through put increase up to 40Gbps per blad

I had done the comparison to B230M2, the B200M3 seems to be a better choice for high density computing which require higher memory but considering to reduce the foot print of the machine.

Great release from Cisco which provide more option for us to consider moving forward in the future.

Related posts:

1. Cisco UCS added new Fabric Interconnect to the Product Line
2. Cisco UCS Rank #3 in Worldwide Blade Server Market
3. Cisco and VMware Submitted VXLAN for Open standard

what if the license server go down, will all the existing connections or sessions been terminated automatically?

He had explained as the configuration in the license server and license files are design to prevent the point of failure in the scenario of license server unavailable due to any failures. You will be given 28 days period of time with unlimited seats in the event of license servers unavailable during the outage.

In normal scenario, assume your license server is functioning with 1000 seats, you will also allow to provision 10% extra within 28 days before you increase the purchased licenses. This will allow you to turn on extra capacity temporally in the short period.

Related posts:

1. New license offer from VMware vSphere 5 on 3rd party VDI solution

He made impossible to become possible especially with the iphone, ipod and ipad that he launched with apple in the past. These devices had become enterprise ready with global adoption. Now we even talk about application or desktop access form the mobile devices that require IT to support. Internet Data and content access anywhere, anytime and any devices.

If  Steve do not deserve the respect, who should?

Let’s talk a little bit more about what is VXLAN and why do we need that. As of today, DR solution are commonly deploy by every enterprise environment. Did you realize 1 of the biggest challenge which always happen on the DNS record, hard coded IP segment, subnet and VLAN which always require human interaction to manually change it, to allow a success fail over of the DR scenario? Well, I think this is just 1 of the major issue commonly face. With Cisco Nexus 7000 come with OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) which allow you to stretch the Layer 2 traffic over Layer 3, with minimal bandwidth requirement. Cisco had done a great job to the enterprise to address this, which now you can have both side learning the same VLAN, Subnet and ip address. A DNS and ip changes is no longer require as both end are transparent with similar VLAN.

What about Cloud? I always think the major challenges on cloud are Network. VXLAN created are mainly to address to concerns of the public cloud provider. That was mainly due to the limitation on the current VLAN architecture, which only allow 4000++ VLAN to be created in the single manage environment. Imagine you as the public cloud provider, you will easily hit the maximum number and you do not want to build another new infrastructure due to this limit too. According to the Cisco Expert during VMworld, the additional header is been added to the bit and byte to enhance the additional number of VLAN could be deploy in the single environment. At the same time, it deliver the similarity of OTV from private to public cloud, which bring the Hybrid Cloud to the reality of tomorrow.

I will try to find out more technical information about this area with my counterpart back to Malaysia, and share again in details with another post. From the intention of both Cisco and VMware, they are pushing hard for VXLAN on this and I do believe this is 1 of the key area need to be addressed before the hybrid cloud environment could continue scale especially on the public cloud provider perspectives.

You can view the full details of the IETF submission from Cisco and VMware from HERE.

With vCD 1.5, you can now manage both private and public as a hybrid mode from the administration with secure federated. It allow you to subscribe, manage, relocate and provision anywhere you prefer, could be internal infrastructure or public cloud provider you choosen and manage in same console. I went through the hands on lab session for this topic and found the setup was great.

It took me sbout 1.5 hours to complete the lab and the lab instruction is clear and no customization required. I would like to thank the folks from vmware who creted the lab and allow me to try it out. Every configuration is web base and wizard base, which allow the administrator to setup and configure easily. Hybrid cloud no longer a concept, whih I believe is real and many users will seriously consider it in the future.

With view 5, vmware emphasize a lot on the security, mobility and application delivery to any end point that could be used by the users today.

On the security, you can now offload the security scan from vm to hypervisor level, which able to prevent IO storm and further harden to secure VDI environment. you could now persue with vshield end point with 3rd party antivirus integration such as trend micro to provide agentless end point protection. This will transform the way how antivirus to be deployed in the future for end point protection on enterprise desktops.

Mobility is always important for enterprise desktop, and vmware have the solution to address this area with the code name HORIZON. In the presentation by the vmware CTO, it showed the capability to support multiple device with single environment wih mobile virtualization on the phone to run multiple environments. Users can now combine the work and personal mobile devices whithout sacrifice the privacy. If the users lose the device, the system will able to remove the accesss to the corporate data to prevent information lost. All changes on the vdi on will be synchronized across to your mobile devices automatically.

The last part of the presentation, vmware demostrated the capability of application delivery via html version 5 which you can now edit the office document file on 3rd party devices without worry on the compability issue anymore. I was very impressed with this new capability which meant a lot to the mobile devices. The code name on this is call Appblast.

Overall of the session, VMware view 5 had make a significant change compare to previous version and I am excited to test it out when I back to Malaysia after the vmworld.

Especially on virtual desktop environment, workload offload is a must to be considered move forward to improve the consolidation ratio and maximize the the performance out of the infrastructure build. If you had not considered about this, you should immediately look into this as security can be another major bottlenecks to your infrastructure today, and of courses all the business units are always concern about it.