Virtual Labs vs. Physical Labs - VirtualizedGeek Tech Talks Episode 3
Transcript
hi this is Keith Townsen from virtualized geek.com coming from you again from another underscore location today is March the 5th uh we are going to talk about three separate uh things tonight I think our pretty good topics for you virtualization and Technology things that can't get enough of this uh you know it's it's actually a couple of dozen of you guys that actually watch these videos so I'm very grateful tonight we're going to talk about AWS versus VMware uh there was a AR technical article that
highlighted that Amazon uh is starting to encroach a bit on to vmware's uh Enterprise stomping grounds we're going to talk about best buying they're rolling away their telework program as well as virtual Labs we're going to talk about virtual a virtual Virtual Lab versus a physical Virtual Lab lab and when you should consider one over the other so for the first conversation we're going to talk about VMware versus AWS there was a ARS Technica article that highlighted the fact that AWS has reduced their workload instances
by as much as 28% which is a nice chunk especially when you're looking at an Enterprise budget and especially an Enterprise uh that's very cost conscious and how VMware should be concerned about this when it comes to uh encroaching on their uh Enterprise kind of uh bread and butter VMware as most of you read the blog and our in viralization know that uh they pretty much own the virtual workspace for most Enterprise workloads uh the article I think was very accurate in saying that VMware has
something to fear when it comes to AWS uh as you guys know I'm a big fan of cloudlike services in the Enterprise so having a virtualized back uh virtualized backend run it by some type of cloud management solution whether that's vcloud openstack eucalyptus AO take your pick of Management Solutions and then having developers and consumers of those service write their apis request new workloads and manage their workloads via that management interface AWS is completely there right now they uh most definitely focus on the enduser of
the infrastructure so when you look at workloads that would be uh desirable to startups uh or startup like companies like Zinga they would or even uh established company like Netflix that's really never had a data center they built their whole applications Based On A Cloud Model Enterprises so are not so much that way you know if you have an exchange server you're not going to all of a sudden go from running exchange to running some uh some instance of like zimra or some other uh cloud-based
solution if you run exchange you're going to like exchange when you virtualize exchange your drivers for virtualizing exchange are different than the drivers of a startup or Enterprise looking to write new applications looking at virtual workloads that you would have running the Amazon.com or AWS service the drivers are just different so I don't think price is as critical as a feature as the RS technical article made it out to be however I do agree that when it comes to public Cloud uh VMware has a has
a difficult image I mean VMware uh from a business practice perspective is a complic organization they don't mind competing with their Partners last week they made the comment at their partner exchange that they should uh all be really concerned about AWS and making sure Enterprises avoid going to AWS because a loss of a workload uh to AWS is a loss not only to VMware but to the whole VMware partner relationship so a lost to VMware and their Partners not just to VMware uh they need to
they needed to highlight this because VMware does compete against their Partners I've highlighted on the blog before that uh I'm not sure where VMware is going to go with their relationship in the vce uh Alliance Cisco seems a little bit hesitant in that all Alliance now that VMware has bought Nera EMC isn't obviously going anywhere because EMC owns VMware but vmware's desire is to control the data Center and when you your desire is to control the data center you will alienate a lot of your Hardware
Partners that's just not on the heartware side VMware competes directly with their Consulting Partners so their Professional Services uh division actually competes directly with uh Professional Services from the likes of HP uh enture and the like so uh VMware really needs to control that message understand how they're going to uh benefit both uh their stockholders and their partners and meet the goal of making sure that the vcloud V fabric uh vpar message is spread across the Enterprise and able to offer AWS uh not only a
compete with AWS when it comes to uh features but AWS when it comes to price so that's the AWS story the other story that I wanted to follow a little little bit has been Best Buy so Best Buy if you haven't heard has rolled back their teleworking program similar to Amazon I'm sorry similar to Yahoo not just similar to Yahoo but very much like Yahoo and the rationale the rationale is that if employees come into the miniapolis uh office they will be more productive and more
and more collaborative that if they kind of circle the wagon and have the team come in and solve their very challenging problems face to face that it will be much more effective than their current model Best Buy to date has been extremely uh advanced in their Tork program not only have they had a telework program but the whole nature of the program has been pretty much focused on efficiency so if you are efficient and get your work done it doesn't matter where you get your work
done uh from or what times you get your work done just produce the product they've most definitely changed that approach to a much more traditional approach that some of us that are really used to Tork and a very liberal collaboration uh policy probably raise a brow to I'm really you know kind of weary of uh the pro that Best Buy and Yahoo are taking if Best Buy and Yahoo are successful and turn around their business I'm wondering out loud what does that mean for the whole
Tork movement overall specifically when it comes to virtualization you know vdi guys are virtualization guys so virtual desktop infrastructure we like uh virtual desktop infrastructure even if it hasn't caught on in the entire Enterprise as much as we would like to and virtualization taking over the Des top the way that we've foreseen that it had would be over the past four or five years if that doesn't happen area that it most definitely has taken over has been for Tork so Solutions like Zen desktop V viw
have been uh and obviously zenap have been huge parts of most organizations Tork programs and if Tork goes away what happens to the vdi movement in general does it stall you know what I that's I think that's a very good question and then the last topic I think is a little bit fun for us more pure Geeks I'm not claiming to be a more pure geek but you know I think it is a fun topic it's the topic of labs you know practically speaking if you
want to learn virtualization virtualization is a similar skill set as uh networking you need to get your hands on it you need to play around with the different products whether it be KVM uh zen zen server uh VMware or hyperv it most definitely helps to get your hands on the actual product the question is what's the best approach to do that with we can go the traditional route buy a couple of servers with 16 to 24 gig of RAM a hardware based switch and a hardware
based storage solution like a Nas a cheap NAS array put it all together install our favorite Hy visor on it uh install the management suite and then practice until our little heart's desire however if you're a true virtualization geek why go with a fidget School Lab at all why not go virtual VMware is hosting a cloud-based lab service that's coming around I in the beta haven't really got around to plan around with it but even more closer to home than that why not just buy a
one server be a fairly beefy server I wrote a blog post on this with maybe 24 to 32 gig of RAM and virtualize your whole infrastructure you can install a bare metal hypervisor like es6 free you can install KVM you can install hyperv uh KVM and Hyper hyperv I'm not as familiar with when it comes to running nested VMS but I most definitely know with e6i Fe free or even vmw workstation or vmw player you can run nested VMS especially esxi so you can run esxi
uh maybe two or three versions of esxi uh your Nas your virtual switch and then uh install uh the management suite and then underneath the hypervisors that you've installed you can actually run a full app if you do a search on the blog for vmw workstation you'll come up you'll the results show a ton of laps that I've installed an entire vdi solution I've actually installed Zen desktop within VMware Workstation I've run vdi in a box within VMware Workstation I've obviously run the VMware Suite uh
vpar within VMware Workstation this is all one single solution without needing to actually go out and buy a uh physical set of Hardware so kind of practice what you preach great uh I think it's a great article and something that kind of gives you some food for thought I would encourage you to take a look that concludes episode three of uh virtualized geek Tech talks you can find links to the articles that we discussed within the show notes at virtualized geek.com thanks and I'll talk to
you next week
