Veeam Community Podcast

The Veeam Community Podcast is focused on giving the global virtualization community a new resource for connecting with industry experts, bloggers and peers, as well as for staying up to date on the latest industry news, developments and trends. Each 30-minute weekly episode of the Veeam Community Podcast will be available through RSS subscription and the Apple iTunes store. The podcast is hosted by Rick Vanover, a writer, blogger, VMware vExpert, VMware Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified Professional, Microsoft Certified IT Professional and a Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator. He currently works as Software Strategy Specialist at Veeam.

In this episode, Rick Vanover hosts Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman. Both Duncan and Frank are based in the Netherlands and work for VMware . In this episode, Duncan and Frank explain their roles at VMware and the challenges they face. Duncan and Frank also explain the motivation and process they go through to write their popular books , including HA and DRS technical deepdive. Aside from books, Duncan writes the Yellow Bricks blog, and Frank writes the Frank Denneman blog which are among the most popular blogs out there.

Both Duncan and Frank are in the hot seat for “Three views from you.”

Rick: Hello, and welcome to the Veeam Community Podcast. This is Episode 15, virtualization excellence with Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman. I'm your host, Rick Vanover, and guys, I'm so happy I've got two of the best out there. Duncan, Frank, how are you guys doing?

Duncan: I'm fine. Thanks for having us, Rick.

Frank: Yeah, thanks Rick. I'm fine.

Rick: I'm so happy that I could, first of all, schedule both of you guys together. So I offered up 24 hours a day, whatever it would take. This is great. I've kind of dialogued a lot with Frank and Duncan over the last, I don't know, couple of months really, because of a featured webinar program where I've been handing out some of your popular book. If you guys don't know, this book is literally flying out of my office all over the world. I've got a really cool Google map, and there are no two better people to write this book. If you don't know, now you know. Duncan writes the YellowBricks.com blog, and he's on Twitter @DuncanYB, and Frank is on Twitter @FrankDenneman and writes the Frank Denneman Blog at FrankDenneman.nl.

So, let's start with you, Duncan. Can you just introduce yourself and tell people about the man, the myth, the person that you are?

Duncan: I wouldn't call myself a myth. I'm very much real. Anyway, my name is Duncan Epping. I work for VMware as a Principal Architect, as part of the Technical Marketing Department, which I actually recently joined. Before that, I was one of the cloud architects on our cloud team. Currently, I'm focused on all the vStorage initiatives. So think about things like VAAI, Storage I/O Control, VM Universe. That's all part of my responsibilities.

On top of that, I'm working on a cool project that I'm, basically, trying to figure out what some of the operational issues are that people are facing when migrating to ESXi. A funny anecdote around that basically is that we actually noticed that not many people are actually having operational issues because of all the supporting tools that we provide today.

On top of that, I'm a VCDX, and I co-authored a couple of books, one of which you've already mentioned. The other one is the "Quick Start Guide" that I did with a couple of other guys. I also co-authored a book, which is called "Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4." There's a new book coming up, which is going to be out on USENIX SAGE, and it's going to be around vCloud Director.

Rick: Wow, you're a busy guy. And not to be outdone, Frank, can you tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

Frank: Well, after hearing his intro, it's a little bit disappointing to do mine.

Duncan: Sorry, Frank.

Frank: So, my name is Frank Denneman. I'm a Consulting Architect working for the Professional Services Organization of VMware. I usually work on designs, either creating designs or reviewing designs for big companies in Europe, Saudi Arabia or actually Arabia, and Africa. I'm a VCDX as well, and I participate on the VCDX defense panels.

Rick: Oh, yeah. You guys both are . . . I know Duncan, you're the coolest number ever, 007. And Frank, what number are you?

Frank: 29.

Rick: 29. Awesome, awesome. Well, we'll jump into the questions I had in just a second, but you brought up a good point, Duncan, when you said you're addressing the issues that people have and their journey to ESXi. In my case, I went to ESXi right from 3.5 to 4, and that was, for me, the right time to go. I didn't have anything that . . . I think it's more of an opinion, right? At this point now, features are on par. I think that's pretty clear with 4.1 Update 1. But I think that it's really a comfort level thing, right? Is that kind of what you're finding?

Duncan: Yeah, that's basically it. It's a mindset. So people got so used to actually logging into the console and doing all sorts of stuff, which they probably shouldn't have been doing anyway, at least in my opinion. But some of that functionality isn't around anymore, basically, to make sure that the platform is stable and works well. So, those are some of the issues they are actually hitting today. As soon as we explain that we have a lot of alternatives for that in PowerCLI, the vCLI, or even completely baked into VMA, then people figure out that that's probably the best way to go. We actually see customers, when we explain to them how easy things are with PowerCLI and the vCLI, that even if they stick with ESX, they actually move out of the service console and actually move to a solution like that.

Rick: I know that when I made the change, you probably don't want to do this ongoing, but temporarily, I even had clusters mixed of VSXi and ESX, while I was upgrading. In fact, they were even cross version, so we had some 3.5s and some 4s. Once they pick up and go over to ESXi, leave them there for a little bit, get comfortable, assuming you've done your testing and you know where to look for all your issues, the normal places, you might have to go to different tools. But if you put forth the time, I don't think that's a big issue. I know I've always been a big proponent of ESXi from the start really, primarily because that was the clear direction. On top of that, just simply put, it's more efficient, so I was down with it for that reason at least.

Duncan: I think it's the same for most people, actually, and I think a lot of people actually wanted to migrate. But most of the operational procedures, for instance, they were all aimed at ESX. So rewriting all of those is quite a lot of work, so that might be a reason why some people are not migrating at the moment. But we do see a large portion of our customers actually move into ESXi as we speak.

Rick: Yeah, and I think also people starting anew. The new customer, they're still out there just getting started with virtualization. It sounds crazy, but they're still out there. I think if you're starting now, of course, it's definitely the way to go. In a sense, that might be easier. I don't know, Frank, if you've come across people that haven't even started with virtualization. I don't even know if there is such a situation out there.

Frank: Yeah, they are there. So we call them the second wave. As most companies have been in the virtualization area for a long time, those companies are really enthusiastic about virtualization. The second wave of customers are just more . . . well, how do you call it? I don't know how to say it properly.

Rick: Well, you can say it in Dutch. I've got a lot of Dutch listeners. That'll work.

Frank: Well, it's an accepted technology already. So they have more critique about certain features or certain features that are lacking. It's different working with a customer who has been in the game for a long time and who is new to the virtualization game. So yeah.

Rick: And I have that, too. In my role at Veeam, I talk to people that . . . okay, Veeam in the business of data protection for virtual environments. I talk to people that have never adjusted their data protection strategy for their virtual infrastructure. So in a way, that's another wave. We talk to people every day that they want to do something different, they want to do something better. Just in the course of talking to people, you'll find, "Let's do it this way, let's do it that way." And that's all really cool in my opinion. I love talking to people and getting their different requirements identified. Honestly, not to say I like dealing with problems, but I like dealing with challenges and the solutions. You can kind of open up somebody's eyes and show them the way. That's a lot of fun to me. I don't know if you guys enjoy that.

Duncan: Well another thing, now that mentioned some of the changes in technology, another thing that Frank and I actually notice on a daily basis is that a lot of customers do migrate, do adopt virtualization, but they don't change their operational procedures. So, for instance, what I've seen in projects is that these guys have the state of the art infrastructure. I'm talking about vBlocks, vSphere, ESXi. You name it, they had it.

But their operational process was still the same old legacy process they had ten years ago. So it took actually six weeks to provision a virtual machine, which is exactly the same amount of time that it would normally take them with a physical machine. On top of that, the cost associated with a virtual machine was actually the same as the cost associated with a physical machine. Now try to explain to their customers that there are benefits to a virtual machine. So it's not only the technology and all the supporting technologies that need to be updated, but on top of that, all the procedures need to be updated as well. That's where probably a large portion of the work actually is for most people who are adopting or have adopted virtualization in the first place.

Rick: Yeah, you're right. And having working in financial services myself, setting up the virtual machine is the easy part, but getting the whole IT environment to be on the same page and move at the rate that these technologies are capable of, that's the hard part.

Duncan: Indeed.

Rick: So hey guys, let's talk a little bit about . . . wait, I've got it right here. I've got the special, one of a kind, single issue, 350 page, double print copy. Well, it's not quite double print. I guess at page 113, it went again at the end. So I finished, and then I have page 113 through the end. So I've got this really thick copy, and I'm keeping this one for myself. I was thinking about handing it out. But we're talking about HA and DRS technical deepdive for vSphere 4.1. I don't even know how many of these we've sent out on the webinars. But what I really want to ask you guys is, can you tell us a little bit about what was your motivation for writing the book, and what have you taken from that to maybe think about other projects?

Duncan: So, I think it's roughly two years ago when I started writing the "Quick Start Guide." Basically, before that, I had an idea to do short topics for deepdives on a single topic. For some reason, that actually never lifted off. I already made a start with some of the HA stuff. I basically had four or five pages, but never actually continued working on it, because we were working on the "vSphere Quick Start Guide," which was a lot of work by itself. So, Frank and I actually spent a lot of time on airplanes, in hotels. We did a lot of projects together. During one of those projects, we actually started discussing writing a book together, because we both are bloggers. We write a lot. So that basically was the next step that made a lot of sense, at least in our opinion.

So we took my HA deepdive and my DRS deepdive, and Frank was already one of the experts, at least in my opinion, one of the experts on DRS. So I asked him to actually start working with the material that I had and all the material that Frank had already put out on his blog and transform it into a full section for a book. So both of us started writing separately, and out of that came over 200 pages on HA and DRS by itself, which was way more than we expected in the first place. Because our aim was, if we could have 110, 120 pages, that would have been great. We never expected it to be over 200 pages. But I think both of us are really, really happy with the results.

Frank: Yeah.

Rick: I like your answer, Frank.

Frank: That's all I've got to say is yeah.

Rick: Well, you know what's funny though is a lot of people might look at HA and DRS and say, "It's just a checkbox, right? How can you come up with 200 some pages of that?" Well, there's no single feature that I know of in technology, specifically virtualization, that can either enable you or cripple you so fast than HA and DRS, so you better know it right. I think a lot of VMware people would agree with that. So you can stick with the defaults and probably be okay. But you can quickly put yourself in trouble in a lot of situations as well if you put things in the wrong place. I don't know, I don't want to say in trouble, but you can not really realize the full potential of a vSphere virtualized environment if you don't give it some thought and some planning. Everything is easy when it's little, but once you start getting big, then it gets complicated.

Frank: Exactly. So, usually we see that in DRS resource management, we see a lot of environments who are just, well, almost died because they just added one more virtual machine, and then the whole system collapsed. Basically, they had a wrong operational procedure. Again, like Duncan said, they didn't change their game. They didn't change the way they behave, they operated their environment. It all went well for a long time, because there were enough resources or just enough without knowing or noticing any problems. Then when you had the final one, it's too late.

Rick: Yeah. I've come into that. I think you see that a lot with especially memory and sometimes storage might be the first two to arrive at those categories. But if you guys haven't seen this book, I definitely recommend checking it out. I still hand out free copies of it during the Veeam featured webinars. Let's see, I'm up to . . . I don't know. I just had a webinar last week. It was a total clean sweep. All ten people picked your book, so that's awesome. But for me, you can check them out. I'll stick it in the podcast notes. But I definitely still hand out a lot of these books. But if anybody's been watching the tweets from these guys, you might think that something is up. So, what's up with you guys in terms of books? Are you guys working on a current book or a new topic or anything?

Frank: Yeah. So, people who bought the eBook, if they go to the last page, they will see the new cover of our new book. It's basically around HA, the new version of HA and the new version of vSphere and all the DRS features. I don't know if I can tell everything, but there are some features, like SDRS, SIOC, and the usual DPM and DRS featured in the book.

Rick: Gotcha. So it's just really following step with what may or may not be coming out in the future. I hear you guys, I see your tweets. There's a lot of good information coming from that. I'm really excited, both to get a copy of that book and also to make it available to people in my webinar. So that's awesome.

Frank: So, we are trying to update this book, so the 4.1 book. We are actively working with people who are giving us feedback on the current book. So I know some diagrams are too dark, so we changed it for the new book. So, if you have an eBook and if you are using Public Notes, please give us feedback. We will use it, and we will see if we can use your feedback and make the new book better.

Duncan: Another thing to expand on, for instance, some of the people said, DRS, for instance, heavily leverages vMotion. But vMotion is not explained in depth. Well actually, for the upcoming book, I took that comment seriously. I'm actually working on four or five pages about vMotion itself. What are the steps that vMotion takes on? We will create a workflow around that.

We're going to do the same thing for storage in vMotion. We're going to try to expand several sections, add some more bits and pieces around architecture, change some of the DRS stuff, because some of the feedback we got was that, for some people, it was too dry. So we're going to try to make it juicier, make it easier to understand for people as well. I think it's best to read the storage initiatives that are going to be included is what people will be looking for, and of course, the whole redesign of HA itself. That's, in my opinion, spectacular.

Rick: Wow, you call it juicy. I love it. I love it. One note, including vMotion, I personally think it's a really good idea, because there are a lot of people, that second wave, especially in a smaller environment, they are really enjoying Essentials Plus. So that includes vMotion and HA, but it doesn't have DRS. So, in a sense, this content can still be really relevant to those people as well. So I think that's a really good move.

Well, hey, I've got a gimmick in my podcast. Most podcasts have a gimmick. I found out not everyone does. But my gimmick is called "Three Views from You," and I'm going to ask both of you guys this question, since it is the first time for both of you on this podcast. I'll start with you, Duncan. Duncan, you as just a general person, as a technologist, in your history or some time in your past, what's the most interesting or cool thing that you can share with everybody about something you've done or worked with?

Duncan: Something I have done would have been the birth of my son, of course. There's no way I couldn't mention him. Actually, of both of my kids, of course. But I think from a work perspective, so from a career perspective, I think the coolest thing I did is actually a project that I did together with Frank. Frank's going to hate me for it, for mentioning it, because now he can't mention it anymore. But that's actually designing and implementing the first vCloud environment in Europe. So that's most definitely the coolest thing we did.

Although spending 12, 13, 14 weeks in London isn't great for your family life, implementing the cloud environment, which included a brand new VMAX, UCS blades, vSphere 4.1, vCloud Director. You name it, they had it. It was a greenfield deployment, so basically, we had workshops every day discussing new features, new architectural decisions, stuff like that. It was probably one of the coolest things that I've done in my life so far.

Rick: Cool. How about you, Frank? What's the coolest thing in your history or work experience or something that you've worked on that you can share with everybody?

Frank: Yeah. So besides the vCloud Director engagement, which was really awesome, like Duncan explained, well, I'm currently working on a VPLEX design, an EMC VPLEX design, and that's really breaking my head. It's really difficult to design a proper environment. So that's basically on the work level. Also, working on the book together with Duncan was just awesome. Having discussions about certain technologies, thinking about certain features, rediscovering certain techniques and the way things work, second guessing yourself, and then again, second guessing yourself again, it's awesome. It was one hell of a ride.

Duncan: Yeah, about the book by the way, what a lot of people actually don't realize is that we actually found out a lot of this stuff by reverse engineering. So that's the fun part of it. I agree with Frank that that was a great experience. We spent many late evenings phoning each other up. "I just figured something out. How cool is this?" Then we started discussing it, doing things like whiteboard sessions at customer sites or at hotels with pieces of paper. You get the weirdest stuff sitting in a hotel discussing DRS with pieces of paper, shifting things around and seeing how things figure out. That was a lot of fun indeed.

Rick: I definitely appreciate the passion. You guys aren't who you are without passion. So you definitely have that. That's awesome. So Duncan, Frank mentioned what he's working on right now that's got him most involved. What about you? What's going on right now with you that's most interesting that you can share?

Duncan: So, I just finished a white paper on operations around ESXi, basically explaining some of the changes when migrating from ESX to ESXi. I'm working on a lot of the new stuff that's coming up in the future. I don't think I'm actually allowed to mention what I'm working on, but basically what I do on a day-to-day basis is I work on white papers, video demos, click through demos, presentations, stuff like that. I have discussions with the engineers of the products, the product managers themselves. I give them feedback around the UI, the usability, stuff like that. So that's some of the cool stuff I'm doing.

Rick: How about in the future? This doesn't even have to be related to VMware, but what do you see in the future of technology, Duncan, that is most interesting to you in a general sense?

Duncan: I would probably say all the storage related stuff that's coming up. I'm having a lot of discussions right now with all the product managers about some of the ideas they have for two, three, four years from now, which is a lifetime in IT. If you see some of the changes that are coming up, some of the crazy concepts that the engineers are coming with, they are sharing with me. Just even being allowed to give them my opinion about what they are working on right now, it's crazy stuff that's coming up. I'm pretty sure that VMware is going to be around for a very, very long time, and that some of the stuff that is coming up, even really soon, it's going to blow away the competition, if we're even allowed to call it competition at that point.

Rick: Awesome, awesome. Hey Frank, how about you? What do you see in the future of technology in general that's most interesting to you?

Frank: Well, what I'm curious about is that if we can create an environment that just vMotions everything to different parts of the world, like follow the moon principles. Like, get your data center and migrate it to the next data center who's miles away just to save power and cooling costs and all that stuff. So you'll see long distance vMotion. Think of it as really long distance, and you will see a complete dynamic and fully . . .

Rick: Fully orchestrated fool's solution. You don't have to worry about it. Then on the follow the moon would be your DR site, right?

Frank: No, no, no. Just your active environment just migrating to a new data center, to another data center where it's cheaper to run. All that kind of stuff.

Rick: Gotcha. Then really, take that to the next level, then there's going to be a whole stock market for lowest compute power. You can set your buy and sell to move your workload to it. Wow.

Frank: Yeah. Stuff like that.

Rick: That's freaky. I love it. That's awesome. Well, hey guys, let's wrap it up here a little bit. First of all, guys, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm sure the listeners are going to love this stuff, just really getting to know you guys. Like I said, we read the blog and we read the book, but this hopefully tells everyone a little bit more about you guys.

So again, I'm Rick Vanover, and I am on Twitter @RickVanover. If you have any feedback on the podcast, you can send an email to podcast@veeam.com. So Duncan, Frank, hey guys, thanks for being on the show.

Frank: Thank you.

Duncan: Rick, thanks for having us, and again, thanks for giving away all the books. We really do appreciate all the support.

Rick: Awesome. Thanks guys. That's a wrap.