During a week in which the Democratic party worked to convince U.S. voters to give Barack Obama four more years as president, EMC decided to extend Tucci’s contract by nearly as long.

According to a statement EMC filed with the Security and Exchange Commission Thursday, it extended Tucci’s contract through February of 2015. That gives Tucci another two-and-a-half years on the job. Last year he said 2012 would be his last year as EMC CEO, but in January he said he would stay on through the end of 2013 at the request of the board.

After he gives up the CEO job, Tucci plans to remain chairman of EMC and VMware. In July, Tucci said he expected his replacement to come from inside EMC. Two of the main candidates to succeed Tucci were recently promoted. Pat Gelsinger moved from COO of EMC to CEO of its majority-owned VMware, and Dave Goulden added EMC president and COO to his CFO title. Tucci’s extension gives them more time to gain experience in roles that could be seen as try-outs for the EMC CEO job.

VMworld has become a major storage event because of the impact server virtualization can have on operational environments. Storage can be the limiting factor for server virtualization projects, both on the server and desktop. To remedy the bottlenecks created with storage when multiple virtual machines are running on a physical server, storage systems need to be optimized for virtualized environments.

In the case of VMware, storage systems that effectively implement VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) can provide significant performance gains. Storage systems can improve performance for the virtualized environment through technologies such as tiering, solid state technology, wide striping, and space-efficient snapshots. The net effect of increasing performance is to increase the number of virtual machines per physical server.

This provides a huge opportunity for storage vendors to solve customer problems in server virtualization projects. Increasing virtual machine density, which is the number of VMs per physical server, has a major impact the economic value of server virtualization projects. New storage solutions that enable this increase provide immediate value and a quick return on investment.

So it’s clear why you see so many new storage products and updates around VMworld. Vendors want to get their message out and VMworld is a great opportunity to feature their products and show how they improve virtualization. The products announced not only address virtualization needs, but vendors also use the attention being paid to highlight other capabilities. With the product announcements, the vendors are also competing to show who best addresses the virtualization problems.

So, you can expect the deluge of storage products that address virtualization to continue at least for another week.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

We’ve seen traditional storage vendors try to wash their legacy products as private, public and hybrid cloud technologies as they seek ways to continue selling those technologies under the cloud banner. Keeping storage clouds loosely defined is in their vested interest, at least until customers figure out exactly how – or if – they want to use the cloud.

EMC is a perfect example of a vendor looking to define cloud storage around its image. EMC originally hailed its Atmos object-based platform as its cloud product. But at its recent Forum, EMC showcased Isilon scale-out NAS and its VNX midrange unified storage platform as private and hybrid cloud products. Atmos was hardly mentioned.

EMC is also among the vendors who talk of server virtualization as a fundamental cloud technology. That’s no surprise, because EMC is majority owner of server virtualization market leader VMware and many of its customers have already gone down the virtualization path or are planning to do so. When asked to define the cloud, Gelsinger mentioned virtualization, having a shared pool of computing networking and storage, and an automated managed environment. “What we call IT as a service,” he said.

There seems to be as many definitions of storage clouds as there are people in the storage industry.

Let us know what you think.

• Demonstration booths – the design, construction, transportation of the booths have the same characteristics of preparing a NASCAR team for race day.

• Staffing – getting the correct people that can speak to products, support the systems, meet with the press, analysts, and customers coordinated is almost an exercise in queuing theory.

• Equipment – the latest systems to be shown (in pristine condition) need to be ready and sent to the event. Also they will need to be set up. If demonstration labs are required, support systems and infrastructure must be there. Seemingly simple things such as sufficient power and the right types of power connectors can cause major problems without proper preparation.

• Briefing staff and executives – preparing for meetings with press, analysts, and customers requires that the scripted messages be prepared and ensuring everyone is briefed and ready.

• Arranging meetings – analysts especially have a high demand on their time and coordinating meetings is like putting an odd-sized puzzle together. Lead time is crucial to ensuring the right executives are speaking with analysts.

From our perspective as an analyst firm, VMWorld represents a valuable opportunity to meet with vendors’ executives to understand their strategies and translate the vendor information into useful analysis for our IT customers. The importance of VMWorld can be measured by the number of requests for meetings that we receive – more than can be scheduled and certainly more than be absorbed.

Like vendors, there are a limited number of events that we will invest our time into attending and preparing for. VMWorld has become one of these events, underlining the important role played by storage in server virtualization, as I discussed in a previous blog.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).

“Storage plays a central part in what we’re doing [with vSphere 5],” VMware senior product marketing manager Mike Adams said. “A lot of it has to do with advancing the cloud, but we’re also trying to help people become more efficient with storage.”

vSphere Storage Appliance is for SMBs, and lets them turn internal disks into shared storage that is required to reap the benefits of vSphere. Customers load the software onto a server and can point it at one or two additional ESXi targets to create a storage pool – similar to products such as Hewlett-Packard’s Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). The appliance will cost $5,995 as a standalone product and $7,995 as part of a bundle with vSphere 5.

The first version is limited to three servers. “This is for SMB customers who can’t afford or don’t have the know-how to set up a SAN,” Adams said. “They can use vMotion for live migration and VMware HA for failover of virtual machines. They both require shared storage.”

Other new storage features from the vSphere rollout included:

Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). This extends the DRS feature from the compute side to storage, helping customers quickly provision virtual machines to storage pools. DRS takes advantage of new vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) to place data and load balance based on I/O and available capacity.

Profile-Driven Storage. This lets users map VMs to storage levels based on service level, availability or performance needs. VMs running applications that need the highest performance can be mapped to tier one storage, with less critical apps mapped to lower tiers. Customers associate tiers with service levels for performance and available capacity.

vSphere Replication. Building replication into Site Recover Manager (SRM) 5 removes the need for array-based replication, allowing customers to replicate data between different types of storage systems. It also adds automated failback and planned migration between data center capabilities. And while VMware presenters didn’t talk much about it during the public launch, the vendor also rewrote the code for its VMware HA DR product.

VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) support for thin provisioning, NAS hardware acceleration. vSphere will inform arrays when files are deleted or moved by Storage vMotion so the space can be reclaimed. It also monitors capacity on thin provisioned LUNS and warns users when they are running out of physical space to avoid oversubscription with thin provisioning. The new hardware acceleration for NAS includes a full file clone that enables the NAS device to clone virtual disks, similar to the VMware’s full copy feature for block arrays. It also has a thick virtual disk feature that lets administrators reserve space for an entire virtual disk. Previous versions of vSphere always created a virtual disk as a thin provisioned disk.

vSphere 5 also adds NFS support for its Storage I/O Control feature that prioritizes I/O of virtual machines in shared storage to reduce latency.

The post gets into nitty-gritty details and even includes what look like scanned-in napkin drawings to illustrate some of the complexities of performance management using ESX 3.x server with iSCSI. There are multiple links to futher resources on everything from the fundamentals of link aggregation to the full iSCSI spec.

But the bottom line for storage users is that “the ESX 3.x software initiator only supports a single iSCSI session with a single TCP connection for each iSCSI target…So, no matter what MPIO setup you have in ESX, it doesn’t matter how many paths show up in the storage multipathing GUI for multipathing to a single iSCSI Target, because there’s only one iSCSI initiator port.”

There are ways around it–in short, the post states, “Use the ESX iSCSI software initiator. Use multiple iSCSI targets. Use MPIO at the ESX layer. Add Ethernet links and iSCSI targets to increase overall throughput. Ser your expectation for no more than ~160MBps for a single iSCSI target.”

There’s also a workaround for single LUNs needing more than 160 MBps, using an iSCSI initiator in the guest along with MPIO, though the post acknowledges, “It has a big downside…you need to manually configure the storage inside each guest, which doesn’t scale particularly well from a configuration standpoint – so for most customers [say] they stick with the ‘keep it simple’ method.”

The best news out of this post for VMware and iSCSI users, though, is probably the pre-announcement that this behavior will be changing in future ESX releases.

I was poking around on the Internet a few weeks back and came across a deal I couldn’t possibly refuse: a refurbished dual Opteron server with 4 GB of RAM and four hard drive bays (one with a 400 GB drive) with caddies and a decent warranty for $229. No, that’s not a typo!

The downside is that the server is all SATA, and ESX won’t install on some generic SATA controllers attached to motherboards, or even some add-in SATA cards, without some serious cajoling and at least hunting around on VMware’s support forum. These hacks are not officially (or even unofficially) supported. In fact, VMFS is explicitly NOT supported on local SATA disk(scroll to the bottom of page 22). There are exceptions to this and there is work on a SATA FAQ where you can get more info.

When my server arrived, I installed an Areca SATA RAID card in it, downloaded the beta Areca driver for ESX 3.5 update 1 and went about the install. Areca is my favorite SATA/SAS add-in card manufacturer. Their cards are stable and have proven to be the fastest cards in their class for the money.

Why not use LSI, you may ask, especially considering that their driver is in the ESX kernel? Well, I like speed, and I usually don’t make compromises when it comes to the performance of a storage subsystem unless it is absolutely, positively required due to some other dependency. (As a side note, I have LSI  installed in my Vista x64 desktop due to a lack of x64 driver availability for my Areca card at the time of install. See my Windows on SAS blog post for more info.)

The Areca driver install went smoothly, and I currently have Exchange 2007, a Linux email server, a Windows 2003 domain controller, a Windows 2008 domain controller, a Windows XP desktop, and an OpenSolaris installation on the 1.2 TB of local SATA storage. So far, things look strong and stable with the driver in place. Normally, I try to stay away from needing a driver disk at install time to get to storage, as it makes recovery a nightmare if you are forced to use a live CD to repair your system. But this process was so stable that I may need to add exceptions to my prejudices. . . .

I’ve had acceptable performance (according to my subjective non-scientific benchmarking) with the relatively small number of VMs I have deployed on this server, so all in all, the storage subsystem is performing admirably.

This leads me to the question: Is SATA in ESX’s future? I wonder, seeing that Xen has native support for a myriad of storage subsystems, and Windows Hyper-V will install on SATA. I can’t see VMware being able to hold the line of local VMFS on SCSI/SAS only for much longer.

Couple this with storage Vmotion and it leads to more questions about the storage subsystems used for VMware and how it affects VMware’s already strained relationship with storage vendors. On the other side of that coin, why isn’t Microsoft or Citrix taking any heat for allowing the use of onboard SATA attached to cheap integrated controllers? Have the generic onboard storage controllers (Marvell and Silicon Image come to mind) reached the point where they are deemed capable of handling heavy server I/O loads? I’m sure they’ve advanced but I’m not convinced they can handle the storage I/O loads that a server with 20 VMs would generate.

But I have a bigger dilemma than all of this. How would I free the terabytes of storage I’d have trapped in these servers if I used eight 1 TB SATA drives? ESX isn’t exactly the platform of choice for a roll-your-own NAS. While it is technically possible for one to install an NFS server daemon on an ESX host, doing so may not be such a good idea. I’ve seen posts on how to compile and install the NFS module on an ESX host, but I haven’t seen any hard documentation as to the overall performance of the system when serving up VMFS via NFS and host/guest VMs simultaneously. You could also create a guest and turn that guest into an iSCSI or NFS target and point your ESX server to it, but that is also a bit kludgy.

In other words, just because I can run ESX on SATA disks local to the host doesn’t mean I should. I haven’t found a compelling business reason to have local VMFS on SATA in these times of inexpensive NAS. However, the pleasant side effect of this dilemma is that until I come up with a business case for using SATA as primary storage for an ESX server, I have a super cheap host that I can test various tweaks and changes to ESX before I roll them up into a QA or production environment.  Maybe that’s reason enough to have one or two ESX deployments on SATA.

MessageLabs is partnered with Fortiva to offer email archiving SaaS, so I wondered if the acquisition might mean that Symantec will get into that kind of offering as well.  SearchSecurity.com reported that MessageLabs CEO Adrian Chamberlain will be heading up a new SaaS group at Symantec, though Symantec officials also told SearchSecurity they won’t be SaaS-enabling all products. This remains an open question for now, as a Symantec spokesperson told me that product roadmaps will be decided after the acquisition closes, which might not happen until year end.

Symantec also launched VCS One, with the goal of allowing organizations to keep active farms of virtual servers running at a disaster recovery site, as well as recover tiered applications with dependencies intact.  ”Right now, this process is dependent on a lot of tribal knowledge in the heads of individuals who know the right order and design scripts to run this kind of recovery,”  said Mark Lohmeyer, vice president and general manager of the VCS product group at Symantec.

If any of that sounds familiar, it might be beacause this past May, VMware and its storage partners launched VMware Site Recovery Manager,  allowing VMware’s VirtualCenter to execute commands against storage arrays at primary and secondary sites during recoveries and enable VirtualCenter-generated metadata about virtual machines to be replicated, along with system and application data. In part, SRM is designed to help server virtualization customers automate their disaster recovery checklists, which many of them keep on paper and check off manually.

Meanwhile, Symantec has been among the most outspoken of storage vendors about friction with the server virtualization giant, and at Vision this year took VMware rival Citrix XenServer under its wing and into its product line, claiming the resultant Veritas Virtual Infrastructure product will be a better approach than VMware’s Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)  for server virtualization in large environments.

However, Symantec positions VCS One as complementary to SRM, rather than competitive with it. A Symantec spokesperson emailed me the following statement when I asked about it late last week:

VCS One is a complementary solution for VMware environments that can help improve overall availability of the environment in production, for mission-critical apps, by taking an application-centric approach to HA/DR.  And, we work closely with VMware to integrate with, and leverage VMware technologies such as Vmotion (for reducing planned downtime) and DRS today, and we’re looking at how we can also integrate with SRM in the future.  Finally, our solution is ideal for heterogeneous physical and virtual environments, that includes VMware as well as other platforms (which is the case in virtually every data center).

It’s important to note, though, that VCS One only supports VMware virtual machines at present, which might make the kind of competitive statements made earlier this year a bit awkward at this stage. Lohmeyer says VCS One was under development before Xen came on the scene. “[Support for Xen] will be in our very next release,” he said. Once that happens, I wonder if Symantec’s messaging might change somewhat.

I wrote to one of the researchers involved and got a response through IBM’s PR spokesperson that:

• The IBM-developed algorithm is based on VMware API available in Virtual Infrastructure version 3, not the VMWare LinkedClone API. Specifically, the algorithm uses VMware Infrastructure SDK 2.5.0 as documented at https://secure.techtarget.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/ and file system level access on ESX servers.
• We developed the algorithm based on the API that was publicly available and supported at the time that we began development efforts
• VMware can provide detail on the differences between the APIs in Virtual Infrastructure version 3 and VMware LinkedClone API

So far no response from VMware.

Regardless of what API was or was not used, what I am trying to get at is the functional difference between these two products, if any. If there is one, it’s important for users to know about. If there isn’t one, it speaks to the growing convergence between VMware’s virtual infrastructure and storage vendors’ value-add software.

the bottom line right now seems to be that IBM’s product is for existing IBM customers, since it requires professional services through IGS. There are some shops that need the IBM label before they buy, and so VSO could at least be a fit for them.

Appreciate weigh-ins from IBM, VDI, and / or VMware experts.

The next day, at a keynote, VMware officials demonstrated a new concept they’re rolling out in the next version of VMware Infrastructure called LinkedClones. LinkedClones create a “golden image” of virtual desktop files, as well as incremental changes;. The golden images, VMware demonstrated, can be updated with patches that automatically proliferate to all virtual machines based on the image to simplify rollouts and updates.  

From the briefing I’d had with IBM the day before and this keynote demonstration, these products seemed similar. Since the VMware demo last Wednesday, I’ve been trying to assess what might be different about them. VMware officials I spoke with Wednesday and Thursday said they didn’t know enough about IBM’s product to comment on its differentiation and IBM spokespeople were unavailable.  IBM’s press release about VSO had stated that it was “based on an algorithm developed by IBM Research,” but VMware said LinkedClones  wasn’t based on anything from IBM.

Today I spoke with VMware director of enterprise desktop Jerry Chen, who told IBM’s VSO is based on the LinkedClones API. I asked about the algorithm developed by IBM. “There are things our partners can do to further optimize LinkedClone,” Chen said. “For example, there are different settings for the number of LinkedClones each master virtual machine can copy.”

Chen said he wasn’t familiar enough with the IBM product to say what VSO adds on top of LinkedClones.  Meanwhile, IBM has been coy on this one. Since last week, I’ve put in numerous requests for comment by phone and email, including a fresh round of requests today after speaking with Chen. So far, no comments have been forthcoming.