Just wanted to give my $.02 on today’s news about Dell acquiring Wyse.  Again my disclaimer – I work for Dell and this entire article is based solely on my opinion.  However, I’ve been a Dell (and general consumer of enterprise IT products) customer for way longer then I’ve worked for Dell.

In my opinion this is one of Dell’s best acquisitions right up their with Equallogic.  Several of my co-workers were amped when we bought Compellent, others Force10, some even SonicWall.  This is the first Dell acquisition I’m really excited about because it makes the most sense to me.  I’ve been told by a number of people that Dell is the largest reseller of Wyse thin clients.  I have no data to back that up, but I’ve heard it from a number of people both inside of Dell and Wyse, so that’s a good start.  I’ve always used Wyse thin clients in my former life because I like WTOS.  It’s easy to configure, easy to deploy and update and has a very large community following.  Wyse was also very easy to procure – that was totally directed at you IGEL.

Brian Madden already beat me to it when he said “So on one hand, you have major computer maker (HP) which also makes thin clients, you have the other major company maker (Dell) who doesn’t make their own thin clients, and you have the biggest thin client maker (Wyse) which doesn’t make computers. It was really just a matter of time.”  However there is more to it then that.

First, I work strictly in Large Enterprise focusing on the data center.  I don’t even deal with end user computing or clients for that matter, but since virtualization is large part of my job and my general career interest, VDI/SBC falls into that category.  In my opinion, Cisco has become our biggest competitor in the data center and not because of the network but because of UCS.  Cisco has had a tight partnership with Wyse in their VDI offering and this acquisition disrupts that to some extent.  I’m certain Cisco will partner up with another vendor (DevonIT anyone?) but its disruptive for the time being non-the-less.  It also makes some of our partners pay a little more attention to us (I’m talking to you Citrix!)

Second, while Dell has offering around VDI with our DVS Kaviza based appliance as well as many other service offering with XenDesktop and View, this gives us opportunities where we were otherwise left out of the discussions.  Sure there are other thin-client vendors but Wyse is the largest and everyone knows who they are.

Third, Dell has acquired quite a bit of intellectual property over the last couple years and some people I’ve talked to feel as if Dell is growing purely by acquisition with no future vision in sight.  I couldn’t disagree more with those people.  While some of these “futures’” might be a year or two out, the vision is actually there (sorry I can’t divulge…do be honest, I don’t even know the whole roadmap)  If you’ve paid attention to the acquisitions, they all have an underlying tenant and that’s open.  Dell acquired Force10, not because they’re just a really good switching company, but because their FTOS operating system is an open, extensible language that can be easily integrated into IT automation platforms.  Dell acquired Scalent and turned it into Dell’s Advanced Infrastructure Manager which allows for easy server and datacenter workload management that is hardware agnostic.  Dell acquired Compellent and everyone thought “Dell has Equallogic, why buy Compellent, it must be a consolation prize for losing out on 3Par”- WRONG!  Bidding for 3Par was so we could compete with Symmetrix and VMax, but our markets weren’t high end storage so in the end we broke our EMC relationship, made HP totally overpay for 3Par, and have full control of our storage roadmaps and storage future – something we could never do being an EMC reseller.  Oh yeah and we got some really sweet dynamic data tiering and data life-cycle management IP along with it.  We acquired RNA networks, not for what they do with memory, but for what we can do with their IP from servers, to memory to storage.  So if you factor in the entire end to end solutions, Dell has a pretty impressive portfolio.  Imagine if you will, back-end network, server, and storage automation with Force10, PowerEdge and Compellent/Equallogic, intelligent OS streaming, whether it be full fat client, tablet/smartphone or thin/zero client built into the fabric switches, and all fully manageable from a single interface, regardless of hardware vendor…I dunno, but that sounds like a pretty cool vision to me.  A little ways out?….probably.

Of course I’ve seen a few of the negative comments and sure, people should have their concerns.  Just to address a few of them:

- thin clients and PC’s are dead, we’re in the post-PC era.  I give you one challenge, take the best tablet or smartphone and do 1 simple task….PRINT SOMETHING!  Yes, tablets and smartphones are awesome, I have them, use them daily and love them.  Its been well documented and discussed – They consume content not create it.  I’d also be curious to see what Dell does with Wyse PocketCloud for tablets and smartphones…

- I hope Dell doesn’t ruin Wyse.  Dell hasn’t ruined Equallogic, Compellent, Force10 or Scalent.  People much higher on the pay scale then me do a great job integrating these companies and we take the best tools and features of our acquisitions and fold them into Dell Inc.  Great example would be Compellents Co-Pilot support which we’re looking to fold into our other support models thru-out Dell.

I am a little down that this will most likely end the OEM deal we had with DevonIT.  I always liked DevonIT as an alternative to Wyse.  I like their VDI Blaster tool to repurpose PC’s as thin clients and I really liked their VMA management appliance.  It was super simple to use and worked well.

I look forward to seeing the future of Dell and Wyse, it’s exciting news and hope to comment more about it as Wyse gets folded into the Dell family.

I switched hosting companies and migrating between hosts hasn’t gone so smoothly.  Well….that’s actually a lie.  Migrating hosting companies was easy….Migrating my 2.x version of WordPress to 3.x has been a challenge.  All my posts and their respective comments came over but the layout looks a little different.  I’m working on building a much more exciting tonydimaggio.com site in 2012!

Happy New Year!!!

Tony

I received my new Amazon Kindle Fire about 5 hours ago and someone suggested I post a review.  Not having spent enough time with the device I figured I’d just give a first impressions analysis.

If you don’t know what the Kindle Fire is, you can read more about it here so I won’t be getting into specs, etc.  The first comment I got from one of my co-workers is “You have an iPad2, why would you get a Kindle Fire?”  To that I have a couple of answers.  First, my iPad2 has pretty much been taken over by the rest of my family.  Kids play games and stream Netflix on it, wife surfs the web on it, etc.  Second, while obviously the iPad2 isn’t overly large or heavy, there is something about the 7″ form factor I liked (hell, I even like the Dell Streak 7 *shocker* ).  Lastly, me being the geek I am, at $199 I couldn’t resist.

Size
I love the 7″ screen.  It’s a little thicker then the iPad2 and without weighing it, it does actually feel a little heavier then the iPad2.   However, one thing I noticed with the 7″ screen is that with the “News Stand” magazine reading app, pages don’t format correctly, so if you’re looking at a magazine full page the text is very small and there is a lot of pinching and zooming to make it usable.  Compared to a standard Kindle the screen does have glare in direct sunlight, it’s a color touch-screen display and I was expecting that.

Interface
I’m not sure what the “skin” of the Kindle Fire is called but its responsive and works well.  Across the top of the device you have shortcuts to Books, Movies, Music, Apps, Web and Docs (more on that later) Then a “carousel” in the middle which lets you flip thru your most recent apps and content.  The bottom has a dock for your favorites.  Takes a little getting used to coming from an iPad but I like it.  Across the very top of the device are your normal status items, WiFi, clock, battery and notifications. The Kindle Fire can display in both Portrait and Landscape and its rather responsive when you flip it around.  Standard Android touchscreen keyboard.  Overall I feel the device is easier to use in Landscape, which is exactly how I feel about the iPad as well.  Besides the power button on the bottom, there are no other buttons on the device, it’s all driven thru the touchscreen.  I would have preferred volume buttons but it’s not a deal breaker for me.  Whenever you touch the screen, the controls appear on the bottom of the screen.  There is a home button, back button, menu button and a search buttom – very Android-ish.

Camera
There isn’t one…With that being said, the camera on the iPad2 sucks anyway and I never use.  I have a Canon DSLR I take real pictures with, anything else I can get away with my phones camera.

App Store
Again, only having the device a few hours, I didn’t have trouble finding the apps I was looking for in the Amazon App Store.  While not as big of a library at the iTunes AppStore, it’s good enough and I’m sure it will get better over time.  Beats the hell out of the Blackberry App World which is downright terrible.  The only app I couldn’t find so far is the Citrix Receiver but I saw on a blog post somewhere its coming.  At the end of the day, it’s an Android device so I’m sure its just a matter of porting over a few lines of additional code.

Email
The Kindle Fire comes with an email app that for the most part works like any other mobile device mail client.  Can’t really say I have any complaints.  When you first launch it there is a wizard that will setup all the mainstream web based email providers like GMail, Yahoo and MS Live, etc and I had email running in under a minute.

Docs
This is by far my favorite feature so far.  The Kindle Fire has this “send to Kindle” feature.  It looks like Amazon flips your regular Amazon username and appends a @kindle.com address to it.  From your email, you can attach a doc and send it to that address and it shows up in the docs app.  This is like a Dropbox-esq feature I like.  I’ve already emailed a couple of spec sheets and presentations I’m always using to that address and in under a minute they showed up on my Kindle.  Great idea, I really like that feature.  You can also control from Amazon’s website which addresses can accept documents.

Content
Me personally….I’ve sold my soul to Google and Amazon.  Once a co-worker turned me on to the Amazon MP3 store and the Cloud Player, I dropped iTunes like like a lead balloon.  All your music is already ready to be downloaded to your Kindle Fire from the Cloud Player or you can stream it if you’re online.  As an Amazon Prime member you can stream a number of movies and TV shows for free.  You can also rent and buy movies and download them to the device locally.  The knock I’ve read online about the Kindle Fire is that it only has 8GB of memory but if you’re an Amazon junky like myself it doesn’t really matter because you can save most of your media on their cloud and download what you need.  When I took the Kindle Fire out of the box and powered it on (and after a system update) all my purchased Kindle books were already there as well along with a nice letter from Jeff Bezos appreciating my business…you’re welcome Jeff

Browser
The Kindle Fire includes Amazon’s new “Silk” browser.  There are some other reviews that compare the iPad vs. Silk vs. Android browser and from a speed perspective, I don’t find it to be slow.  However there is a certain “fluidity” of the Safari browser on the iPad that is better then Silk.  The Silk browser can be a bit choppy at time while scrolling and zooming.  It’s not terrible, but its something you definitely notice coming from an iPad.  Flash seems to work fine though and browsing sites like YouTube is not an issue.  Overall I think the browser suites the device just fine.

Final Thoughts
Again, only a couple hours into owning the Kindle Fire – I like it.  Is it an iPad killer? No….not yet.  I think the 7″ screen is a great size for a tablet and using Amazon’s ITaaS,PaaS,SaaS and any other *aaS , delivering content I’m most interested in on a daily basis is a breeze.  I’m sure all the Apple fanboys will rip it to shreds because it wasn’t innovated by Jesus Jobs.  As someone who’s used a lot smartphones, tablets and laptops, I think there is definitely a market for the Kindle Fire and will be a hot seller this holiday season.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Dell

In January 2011, Dell released a new Management Plugin for vCenter that allows administrators to monitor and maintain Dell 11G servers directly from the vCenter.  While the plugin is not free, it does provide value.  I had a chance to play around with the plugin and thought I’d share some information on the installation and configuration.

To begin I can’t stress enough…RTFM!  Before starting the installation, please read the README.TXT file and the User Guide included with the software.  There is some important pre-requisites about firmware versions of Dell’s iDRAC and LifeCycle Controller that must be met for the plugin to work correctly.  I did my installation and testing on ESXi 4.1.  The plugin works with ESX 4.0 and ESX/ESXi 4.1.  I chose ESXi as VMware has already stated that 4.1 will be the last version that is available with the “classic” install, i.e. a Service Console.  As ESXi doesn’t have a service console, the installation is a tad different then with ESX Classic.

Some things you’ll need to get up and running:

• Dell Management vCenter Plugin (a self extracting EXE)
• Either the VMware vMA appliance or the Remote CLI
• The latest Dell OMSA VIB for your server
• Obviously, a Dell 11G server running ESX/i and VMware VirtualCenter (Some basic monitoring features are available for 10G servers, again – read the docs)

Let’s get started…The first thing I had to do was upgrade my R810′s iDRAC to 1.54 and LifeCycle Controller to 1.4.  This was easy to do using Dell’s Repository Manager tool.  After running the self-extracting EXE for the Management vCenter Plugin, you end up with a folder with a couple files (disregard the downloads folder):

One of the requirements for the vCenter Plugin is to have the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator agent (OMSA) install on the host.  With ESX, its a matter of SFTP’ing the binary to the host and running the install shell script.  However, ESXi is a little different.  There is no service console to run the agent, nor can you SSH into the host and run commands.  This is where you need VMware’s Remote CLI, or run the VMware vMA appliance to manage ESXi host scripts and agents, in this case the Dell OMSA vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB).  The OMSA VIB can be downloaded from http://support.dell.com.  Using the following command from the Remote CLI installs the VIB:

C:Program Files (x86)VMwareVMware vSphere CLIbin>vihostupdate.pl -server <server IP address> -i -b OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-6.4.0-1266.VIB-ESX41i_A00.7.zip

You’ll be prompted for the hosts username and password, after a few minutes the installation will complete.  YOU MUST REBOOT THE HOST!  In my experience restarting the management network is not enough.

The next step is using the vSphere Client to import the OVF file of the Management Console plugin appliance.  In VirtualCenter, click on File, Deploy OVF Template.  Locate the extracted OVF file from the Dell Management vCenter plugin folder and begin the import process.  Once the appliance is imported, power it on.

When you first start the CentOS based appliance it will reboot one time, then prompt you to set the admin password.  Once the password is set, you’ll see a http link and options for configuring network settings, time zones, and other appliance management tasks.

The next step is to open a browser and connect to the appliance.  Log in with the password you set in the previous step.  Click on VCENTER REGISTRATION on the left side and enter the VirtualCenter IP address and credentials of the VirtualCenter server that has the 11G Dell hosts you wish to manage.  This will register the plugin with VirtualCenter

With the OMSA VIB installed, the appliance configured and the vCenter plugin registered we’re ready to start using the plugin right?…..WRONG!!!  This step hung me up for a while.  In troubleshooting why I couldn’t get any inventory, I found an article about configuring OMSA on ESX/i 4.1 hosts.  You need to change a value in the Advanced Settings section of the configuration tab for the host.  Under UserVars, set CIMoemProviderEnabled from 0 to 1.  I was stuck here for a while because after this setting is changed, you MUST reboot the host again as just restarting the management agent doesn’t work.

Once the host is rebooted, you can now access the plugin from the VirtualCenter Home page (disregard any certificate warning – to be fixed in next version):

The first time you launch the Management Plugin, a wizard will guide you thru creating a Connection Profile.  Enter the credentials for the iDRAC of the server and the ESXi host.  For a classic ESX server you can also enter the OpenManage Server Administration URL.  You can test the connection of the profile on the same screen.

You will also be asked when to run Inventory and Warranty Status jobs.  I decided to run the Inventory everyday at 3am and the Warranty Status once a week at 3am.  You can force the jobs to Run Now under Job Queue from the left side menu.

If you’ve had any issues with your Connection Profiles, your inventory and warranty history jobs will fail.  This is either due to a failed OMSA VIB installed, or the CIMoemEnableProvider setting assuming you’ve eliminated any other basic networking issues.  If you have successfully collected data, click on the host in VirtualCenter.  You’ll now notice a “Dell” tab.

That’s it!  As you can see, I only have one power supply on this R810 connected which is why you see the Critical alert on the page.  There are several option to view on the left side.  You can also access the remote console of the iDRAC.  If this was a classic ESX host, you could also access the OpenManage Server Administrator web site.  However on ESXi the web service is not there (remember, no service console)…To access OMSA on ESXi….that’s a different post!  Also, you can right-click hosts in VirtualCenter and get a “Dell” context menu with some same tasks.

I hope to do some more follow-up posts on the some more of the features of the Dell Management Plugin for vCenter .

I took a position as a Systems Consultant at Dell covering the NYC/Northern NJ region.  I’m not sure what the policy around blogging is so I won’t be posting anything technical until I find out.

DISCLAIMER:

The views and opinions expressed here are mine.  Although I work for Dell, this is NOT a Dell blog, but a personal site.  The content on this site does not represent the views or opinions of my employer, or their partners.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, really because I haven’t had much to say and the rest of the blogsphere has already said it.  However recently, I’ve had some interesting discussions which prompted me to write something.

Some background – For the last 5 weeks I’ve been in meetings and discussions with many vendors around data retention and eDiscovery based on a project our legal department is sponsoring.  I’ve met with at least half a dozen eDiscovery vendors from StorIQ, Digital Reef, Commvault, Symantec, etc. but the last couple days we’ve been talking with other IT people in my industry (chemical manufacturing) around their processes and procedures on the topic.  Some of the companies we spoke to said something that really struck a chord with me regarding home directories.

For starters, eDiscovery and data retention is a BORING subject…data crawling, indexing, dedup, searching…not the typical subjects that spark my interests.  However we’re beginning to look at Exchange 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 along with Windows 7 and Office 2010.  What jumped out at me is how much effort Microsoft has put into these products around data retention.  If you talk to Microsoft, its no surprise they’re making SharePoint the platform for web development.  We’re a big SharePoint shop and we’ve been telling users “Put it on a team site” for years, but where it gets interesting is with SharePoint’s “MySite”  A MySite is a SharePoint site that belongs to an individual user.  They can post blogs, add webparts, post pictures, and collaborate with their colleagues.  It can also store document libraries.  What’s even more interesting….you can also do Folder Redirection with Windows 7 to a users MySite, as well as offline access to MySite document libraries.  This leads me to my question….are home directories dying?

When I first heard from another chemical company –  ”we’re killing off legacy home directories for SharePoint MySite’s” I did a double-take….Why?  Well not to toot my own horn but I had this idea 3 years ago when we first got into SharePoint and learned about MySites.  I thought to myself….Self…if I could redirect users My Documents to a MySite, then I could get cranking on a some type of browser based, thin-client workspace with Citrix’s SharePoint webpart to access applications, then layer on the functions of other webparts for things like email thru OWA and IM thru the Office Communicator webparts.  However at the time, you really couldn’t do it very easily thru group policy and I lost interest.  But now with Windows 7 and Office 2010, Microsoft did a pretty nice job at integrating everything that makes saving docs to a Sharepoint site very easy.  If you’re not a SharePoint user…on XP with Office 2003/2007 you had to save your document locally or on the network, then browse thru Sharepoint and upload your docs…it was a pain in the arse for lack of a better term.

Now my first thought was “great…lets take unstructured crap data and move it into a structured database of crap” but as I saw some of the new data retention features of SharePoint 2010 it started making sense.  Here’s a quick list of advantages to having user data in a MySite as opposed to a standard home directory:

• Document version – No more “mydata.xls, mydata1.xls, mydata1old.xls, mydata2.xls”  SharePoint can manage versions…up to 5 versions (I think) of a single doc.
• Data retention – legal policies can be incorporated into document libraries and sites in SharePoint.  For example, a doc that hasn’t been viewed in 2 years can be deleted or moved to lower tier storage
• Rights Management – SharePoint libraries can integrate with Windows Rights Management Server so data can’t be printed or forwarded outside the company, etc
• eDiscovery – All SharePoint data is indexed and searchable for litigation.  Holds can be put on docs so they’re moved out of retention policies or set to read-only

The only real disadvantage I can see is:

• Restores - recovering a single doc from SharePoint isn’t all that easy.  Yeah there are document level backup agents, etc for SharePoint, but its still way easier on a file server or even better a NetApp NAS share with snapshots.
• Expensive storage –  SharePoint needs SQL and SQL database servers and 15k FC disk is still expensive compared to low I/O RAID5 file servers.
• WAN - Most of our remote sites have a local file server, but we have a centralized SharePoint site.  Now you’d be saving files over the WAN and your data could be inaccessible during a WAN outage.
• SharePoint - Yeah obviously you need to be running SharePoint which is no simple task in itself.

Let’s face it…Home directories as we know them have been around since the dawn of time (oh how I miss NetWare 3.1) and maybe they’re on their way out…I’d love it if it took PXE with it.  So I pose the questions…Are Home Directories Dead?

Just got a new Droid Incredible. I have to say its rather incredible. Posting this from WordPress Android app!

I honestly haven’t had anything interesting to write about so here’s a quick and dirty Powershell script for XenApp Commands (Powershell for XenApp) which you can download from My Citrix.

I’ve always found it annoying that there was no real quick way to get a list of all your apps and which users or groups have access.

get-xaapplications | get-xaapplicationreport | select browsername, account

With that being said…I suck with Powershell but I’m trying to learn as much as I can about it. I’ve never been a savvy scripting, programmatic kinda guy…something I’d like to change!

I was messing around with some different themes and I broke my original theme with the Lake George header. The current theme is just temporary for now. Although I do like it, we’ll see!!!