eInterview with Mike Laverick - Veteran Virtualisation vExpert

Information

Title: 

eInterview with Mike Laverick - Veteran Virtualisation vExpert

Author(s): 

Xtravirt (Paul Davey)

Target Audience: 

All

First Published: 

15 March 2010

Products: 

N/A

UID: 

XD10232

We catch up with Mike and chat about his current outlook on all things virtualisation

We catch up with Mike and chat about his current outlook on all things virtualisation

Mike Laverick is a VMware Forum moderator and member of the London VMware User Group steering committee. He is the sole author of the virtualization website/blog RTFM Education.

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We received a copy of your new vSphere 4 Implementation book in the post this week. It looks like you have done a great job again! Can we expect to see other publications from you in future?

Yes. My current project is a complete re-write of my SRM 1.0 book based on Vi3.5 – to be SRM 4.0 book based on vSphere4. I’m very close to finishing the work, and it should be released sometime this month. The book will be 400+ pages long (to be honest I’m not precisely sure how much I’ve written!) and will be a free PDF or as at-cost print copy. I’m not sure what my next big project will be I’m toying with the idea of a back-to-front VDI book where I would cover VMware View 4.5, and then if you flipped the book round it would be XenDesktop 4 book.

Back in January you announced that you had signed a deal with SearchVMware.Com. Can you tell us more about this?

Last year I started reviewing my future – it coincided with me turning 40 this year, and following 10 years of running RTFM Education Ltd. There were a couple of opportunities on the table at last year’s VMworld event and I decided to investigate an opportunity with TechTarget. The deal was sealed on 1st Feb this year, and involves a contract to write for TechTarget over the next 2 years whilst allowing me to continue on with my RTFM website. I’ve enjoyed working with the TechTarget team so far, so I see no reason why I won’t be renewing in two years’ time. For me it means that I can spend more time at home (I have gotten used to over 120 days away in a hotel per year) and also have more free time to create content. I’m moving into videos and podcasts big time this year.

What does a typical week in the life of Mike Laverick look like?

Much depends on my project. I haven’t completely given up on training yet! At the moment I’m finishing up the SRM book, whilst each week fulfilling my quota of articles for TechTarget. At the end of the month I’m attending a Fast-Track course on Microsoft Virtualization, and hope to do the same for Citrix Xen/Desktop. Each week I do my “chinwag”, so alongside the usual mountain of email to babysit, I’m usually discussing what they might like to chat about whilst arranging timings. I’m UK based so it’s not unusual for me be to be up at 10pm chatting, especially if the guy in question is located on the West Coast of the US.

What do you think the biggest shift has been in Virtualisation over the past year?

I hear more and more customers who are disgruntled with VMware. Perhaps the glory days are over in the sense it’s no longer a solution you can bring in with no questions asked. You never had to hard sell VMware; the difficulty was in selling virtualization as a viable solution to companies. Now that Citrix and Microsoft have entered the market space, it’s much harder to justify the significant value-add that VMware has. I guess that’s competition for you – and I welcome the competition. Vendors should be forced to raise their game and offer value for money to their customers. From where I’m sitting, I’m seeing my customers seriously look at HyperV but mainly from a branch office, test and development perspective. They don’t seem to trust it as platform for production yet – whereas they trust VMware Infrastructure. For Microsoft this is precisely the kind of foot-in-the-door approach they have taken with other vendors (Novell, Oracle and so on). Personally, I think the virtualization market is big enough to equally support three quality vendors with quality products. It doesn’t have to be an either/or end-game. As for Citrix XenServer, I don’t see its market share on a quantum level. I do see its use with my customers who had or have Citrix XenApp. They are now seriously looking at XenDesktop. It might be that Citrix maintain their dominant position on client delivery, and VMware maintain their dominance from a platform perspective.

What do you think will be the main focus area for virtualisation adopters in 2010?

Each year it’s the year of VDI. It’s a gravy train everyone is waiting to arrive. This year there seems to be more talk about VDI than ever before. Perhaps people think they have squeezed as much value out of server consolidation, and looking for the next big cost saving. I still feel VDI as some mileage to cover before it reaches the same maturity as server-based computing - but saying that is a bit of truism. As for DR I think this current release of SRM 4.0 is not such a big deal. But having taken a sneaky peak at View 4.5 and the next generation of SRM, I can tell you there are major changes coming through. For View these major changes will happen this year, but I have feeling the big changes for SRM won’t come until next year. By then we may be talking about SRM 5.0!

We have seen a number of clients starting to seriously look at deploying Virtual Desktops. Any tips for people looking at doing this?

Phew! Where do I begin! Disk foot print and disk I/O is the big one I think. The reason is I admittedly took the view that once we had linked clones or de-duplication that the disk penalties as a barrier would melt away. To some degree they have, but what’s surfaced is the I/O that virtual desktops generate. I don’t think many people saw that coming. Like me, they probably thought that a desktop virtual machine would do diddley squat in terms of I/O. But boot and logon storms remain a concern, as does in-guest I/O generated by disk defragmentation tools or more significantly, anti-virus software. In many respects I feel like the early problems of server-based computing have just been ported to different platform which introduces new problems – what a wonderful world IT is!

What do you feel is the most overlooked or misunderstood component of a Virtual Infrastructure?

Snapshots, Snapshots, Snapshots! People always confuse them with storage vendor snapshots. Honestly, the term snapshot is probably the most abused in IT. Every vendor has their own snapshot technology and they all work slightly differently. The next student who says that they will revert their snapshot as part of DR or as a backup solution – I will scream.

For people new to virtualisation, what’s a good way for them to network with their peers?

VMUGs are a good place to go. I’m active in the London, North UK and Scottish UGs. The Irish UG has a been a little bit quiet so I intend to re-engage with the steering committee there and see if I can personally jumpstart things. For me twitter is huge. My twitter list is about 109 of the top people working in virtualization – its quick, and the 140 characters is a kind of brevity that is sadly missing in some blog posts. But it’s great way for me and my peers to shout stuff to each other. It reminds me of the early days of the VMware Communities forums.

What are your favourite ways to chill out after a hard day at the office?

I love to eat rubbish food (crisps, chips, beer) and catch up with the latest editions of Mad Men. This year I’ve started going to the gym every day. I do around a 4-5KM run each day. My theory is at the age of 40, so long as I keep on running I can carry on eating rubbish food – I don’t think my personal trainer knows this yet. I’ve got about 6 guitars around the house and I recently got a mandolin and banjo for Xmas and my 40^th. You could probably catch me plonking away on them whilst a recovery plan runs in SRM.