Alumni Lounge

Tuesday, August 30, 2011 Category : , 0

Hanging at the Alumni lounge at VMworld. After five years you would think that my status would be sorted but each year I always seam to have to queue to get the status applied. Not to worry, the registration people are very nice.

Cant see any food in here, just some water. I think last year there were some snacks. Their is quiet, power outlets and comfy chairs. A good place to hang to do some blogging before the solutions exchange opens later this afternoon.

Rodos

IE9 and VMware vCloud Director

Tuesday, August 16, 2011 Category : , 4

A quick note as people are starting to use IE9.

Currently vCloud Director (remote console plug-in) does not support IE9, the vCloud Director website should work with the appropriate Flash plugin, but the VMRC (console) is not expected to work. Support for IE9 is a feature request VMware are looking at for a future release of vCloud Director. Personally I am keen for Safari support too.

You can find the list of supported browser versions on various OS versions starting on page 18 of the install guide. Note that the Users Guide for VCD is less helpful as the phrase "At least Internet Explorer 7" which might lead you to think that IE9 works.

Rodos

Is VMware the new Tall Poppy?

Wednesday, August 10, 2011 Category : 6

Here in Australia we have this phrase called "The Tall Poppy Syndrome". It is the "social phenomenon in which people of genuine merit are resented, attacked, cut down, or criticised because their talents or achievements elevate them above or distinguish them from their peers."

Seeing a bit of the fallout of the VMware licensing for v5 I wondered if VMware were the new Microsoft and we felt that they just needed to be brought down a peg or two.

My view is that part of this is due to a cultural change in how Virtualization is used within organizations today. Back in the day VMware was used to remove other costs within a project, it helped drive the ROI. Due to consolidation, which was it's big use case, every dollar you spent on VMware licenses was saving you many other dollars on physical hardware. We would drive every cent out of that physical hardware but the VMware portion looked like good value for money.

In today's world we have moved onto new models. We have seen "virtual first" become standard (certainly in my region) and VMware be a standard base cost for doing IT. At the same time we have seen the base hypervisor become a commodity item. Therefore the hypervisor has become like all the other elements of a solution, people need to squeeze every spare cent out of it, just like their storage, networking and compute hardware. VMware has entered main stream and is being treated accordingly by consumers.

Yet to stay leader of the pack and continue to deliver the eco system of products and tools around the base hypervisor VMware need to recoup their costs and they are going to price accordingly.

My take on the pricing backlash is this is more about VMware being treated just like all the other products and vendors in the stack. The glory days of consolidation savings are over, it's now the new norm. Time to refresh the value prop and get used to the backlash no matter what they do, just like Microsoft.

Rodos

P.S. First post from my new iPad. Maybe this might get me posting more.

There is some way to go

Friday, June 03, 2011 Category : 2

A quick little rant on an article I read this morning, "Interview: Wadeson opens up on Government IT". The lead of the article describes who Wadeson is

The Australian Government's longest-serving, most influential CIO reveals all on his retirement.

John Wadeson, one of the longest-serving CIOs in the Australian Government, will retire on September 9 after 40 years of public service.

The day he started, Bill McMahon was Australia’s Prime Minister. He’ll finish up just after his 61st birthday, and midway through one of the largest IT challenges an Australian Government agency has ever faced.
Given that Wadeson is no light weight so I was really interested to his comments on Cloud. They were brief;
Wadeson has followed with interest discussions on cloud computing in government, but feels it offers little to advance Centrelink – and now Department of Human Services.

“No one is ready to put customer data offshore,” he noted. “Not yet. It won’t happen in my time.

“The trouble is that you split our architecture and then nothing connects,” he said.

“Our staff want it all to work in a whole system that integrates. So there’s not a lot in it, for us.”
Really. They are certainly brief statements and he may have said a lot more and often people can be quoted out of context ... but even so.

Do we still need to live with the perception that utilising Cloud means to "put customer data offshore"? Sure, Australia does not yet have the diversity and scale of Cloud services that exist in other countries but there are services and more are being delivered every month.

Why does Cloud adoption mean you "split ... architecture and then nothing connects"? With the growing capability of hybrid models, storage tiering and other architectures there is no split or loss of connection. How Cloud utilisation results in not having "whole" or "integrated" systems is a wonder. Is the perception that Enterprise Architecture and Cloud are incompatible?

The only way I can may any sense of this is that the definition of Cloud being referred to is a narrow alignment with specific and standalone SaaS offerings, for example the adoption of Google Mail to replace or augment a departments existing mail systems. But Cloud is so much more than that!

Is this really the depth of innovative thinking that exists within IT leadership in this country? Maybe its a good thing that Mr Wadeson is retiring in September. If Cloud is not going to happen "in my time" at least that time is short!

This speaks to show just how much work there is to do in education, discussion and working through the models and use cases for the ever increasing expanse of what Cloud means and what Cloud can deliver.

Rodos

P.S. The views expressed as usual are my own and my own madness and not related to anything or anyone else.

UPDATE : Here is a video from ZDNet with John that's interesting to watch.



Where it all began, 1994

Monday, May 23, 2011 4

Just had to share the crazy stuff I just found.


Here is the text of a web page I created in 1994 when I was first starting to use this thing called the Internet. Its a scream!

Remember when you cared if your serial card had a 16550 uart for less interrupts? The computers at work had 2G disk drives, luxury. Remember having a PPP account to connect to the net? What about when windows did not come with a TCP/IP stack and you had to go and pay for one! What about recommending that people look into this thing called Linux.

For those from Australia, that DEC Alpha machine which was connected to the net only via email was set up by none other than Simon Hackett, founder of Internode.

Looking back at the site I had all these tips, technical notes and FAQs on the technology that I worked on. Obviously the seed to a future blogging career.

How technology has changed (but my spelling has not improved).

Enjoy this blast from the past. I hope it brings back some memories of your own!

My stuff!

  • Hardware
  • Internet software
  • Creating my pages
  • Providers of PPP connections in Sydney, Australia
  • Test your browser

There is a lot of software and hardware that I have come accross, especialy when it comes to surfing the net, so here is bit of a description of what I have and how I use it.

Hardware

At home I am running a 486DX2-66 with 8mb of RAM, an Adaptec SCSI with a 512Mb SCSI drive and a NEC 3Xi SCSI CD-ROM drive. For communications I use a QuickComm Spirit II modem that does 14.4K. A while ago I used a serial board with 16550 uarts for extra speed and less interupts but it seams to have died so I am back to the 8250. Still haning around is my old 386SX-16 with 4mb of RAM and a 80mb drive. Its so slow it drives you nuts, especially in windows, however I did run Linux (click to hear Linus Torvalds prounance it) on it for a few months and was able to get ghostview, a postscript viewer to run under x-windows on it, not bad for such a dud machine, of course I had a 16mb swap partition. If you are interested in unix at home you should give Linux a try.

In the office I use a variety of machines. There is a DEC VAX 4000/60 running OpenVMS with 24mb of RAM and about 2.1Gb of disk, the DEC Alpha running OpenVMS with 80mb of RAM and about 2Gb of disk and a HP running HP-UX with 64Mb RAM and 1Gb disk space. They all have huge workstation screens which I love to work on and are all networked (TCP/IP). The Alpha is connected to the Internet by mail only.

Internet software

These days I am really into the Word Wide Web (the WEB or W3) and have lots of utilities and software etc to do this. My connection to the net comes from Magnadata who provide PPP and shell accounts. Its around AUS$40 a month for PPP access. The good thing about their charging is its not time baed but transmission size. Therefore I can stay connected and not worry about how long it takes me to read something or if I am FTPing something from the US I don't care how slow the link is. The monthly charge incluses 20mb and each extra mb isa dollar or something.

On my PC I run PC/TCP from FTP Software Inc. and use their PPP connection. It loads as a VBX for Windows but I am not sure I have it installed right and think there still might be a TSR floating around somewhere. Its very good and its dialer program which you use to make the serial connection is simple.

On top of all TCP/IP I then run lots of client programs, the most important of which is my W3 browser, Virtual Library/CyberWeb of WWW Development. I create my images by capturing them from other pages or pieces of software with Paint Shop Pro.

Creating my pages

Like a lot of people as soon as I started using the W3 I had an urge to create my own documents; after all who can resist the idea of having your ideas accessable by anyone in the world, what a medium! My first page was a simple home page that I placed on my providers server in Hong Kong (where I was living at the time). This linked to another page which had information on my son Samuel with his picture. Once these were created I started to place my URL into the signature of my home page and have done so ever since.

Today I am a little more experienced but few things have changed. All of my pages are created locally on my PC and I use the file: URL to load them, therefore they all load very fast, hense the number of images in my pages. To write them I simply use a text editor SuperPAD that comes as an example with MS Visual C++, it's basically notepad but has an MDI interface. I have tried HoTMetal bySoftQuad Inc. and HTML Assistant by Howard Harawiz but find that they really don't make the creation of a page any easier. I just write in the editor and then frequently load it into Following is the dialog for my conversion program.

Rodos

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