VMWare? EMC? Veeam?

[Dolby]

I'm not a technical person but always dealt with networking products - tangible wireless, switching etc

However an understanding of some of these terms will help me understand a little more of what my colleagues do and position my product better, as it fits slots in nicely with them.

Where do these all fit in?

My understanding is a company buys a massive PC with tons of RAM, multiple cores and terabytes of drive space all in a single chassis. They then have software (VMware?) that carves out portions into small machines (similar to me portioning a drive - but with RAM\CPU too?) and you can run separate OS on each? So VMware is the underlying software needed?

Is that similar to a virtual environment?
How does EMC in?

 

[Arthur]

VMware - the company making a hypervisor (called ESX(i))that allows you to run separate "computer inside a computer", called a virtual machine or VM. You can run multiple VMs inside a single physical box. Other common hypervisors are Hyper-V, RHEV, Citrix/XenSoft, Parallels, Oracle VM.

Veeam - backup software for virtual machines. Many prefer Acronis vmProtect / Acronis Backup for VMware.

EMC - company offering high-end enterprise-class storage, storage management, virtualization, analytics, and related software.

What does your product do? What's it called?

 

[Dolby]

Thanks for the reply.

So pretty much just like myself partitioning on own HDD and running a dual boot?
And VMWare is the software that does that?
So EMC is hardware - like huge HDDs?

Sorry for the questions, Arthur - I know they're quite simply but it's a very different space to what I usually play in .

The product is Riverbed which was started as WAN optimization and - although people still associate Riverbed with WAN optimization - they now sell sell other products. The one which fits with all of this is SteelFusion.

In a quick brief my understanding is that a Core box is placed at datacentre with Edge boxes placed in all branches - hub and spoke style. The core box connects to the 'huge' HDD' and projects data to each Edge box. Those Edge boxes can also run VMs.

So in the above sceneria just trying to work out what fits where

Sorry for the amateur questions - just not traditionally where I've been interested or worked in

 

[Park@82]

With VMware, Virtual Machines sits on top of the Hypervisor, they share the hardware, you can allocate resources to individual VMs as per requirements. Found a simple pic that might help: http://binarymist.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/bare-metal_hypervisor.png

Unlike partitioning, these machines can all run simultaneously.

 

[Park@82]

Dolby, it might be a good idea to reg & attend the VMware vForum next week, it should help to pick up some of the lingo and a few contacts.

 

[Dolby]

Dolby, it might be a good idea to reg & attend the VMware vForum next week, it should help to pick up some of the lingo and a few contacts.

Thanks guys.

The PMs here for the various technologies said they'll assist - just didn't want to go in totally cold and at least have a vague understanding.

Btw - I've got EMC is storage - is it like banks of standard Seagate/WD drives daisy chained?
Is that the idea?

 

[Slaught3r]

EMC offer different solutions, but mainly SAN (Storage Area Network). You typically connect your chassis (Server or actual tin) to the SAN by Fibre Channel via an HBA card. On the SAN you can then have multiple LUN's (basically partitions) that you allocate to different servers or databases.

 

[PsyWulf]

Thanks guys.

The PMs here for the various technologies said they'll assist - just didn't want to go in totally cold and at least have a vague understanding.

Btw - I've got EMC is storage - is it like banks of standard Seagate/WD drives daisy chained?
Is that the idea?

You're trying to apply small business and consumer level storage concepts on a massively bigger scale storage solution. While some of the basics might be understandable when simplified those units are not really daisy chained standard harddrives

They MIGHT be Enterprise class drives ( Nearline SATA,SAS ) drives Raided in a particular combination,they might even posess extra memory,builtin UPS,their own processor and SSD based caching and expose storage using Fibre/HBA or be IP based

Generally consumers and some big companies ( Google,Facebook ) build their own storage clusters using open source software and consumer/cheaper enterprise hardware but generally they have the expertise to service and maintain this themselves. EMC/IBM and the like prebuild and package solutions and support them

 

[SauRoNZA]

I'm not a technical person but always dealt with networking products - tangible wireless, switching etc

However an understanding of some of these terms will help me understand a little more of what my colleagues do and position my product better, as it fits slots in nicely with them.

Where do these all fit in?

My understanding is a company buys a massive PC with tons of RAM, multiple cores and terabytes of drive space all in a single chassis. They then have software (VMware?) that carves out portions into small machines (similar to me portioning a drive - but with RAM\CPU too?) and you can run separate OS on each? So VMware is the underlying software needed?

Is that similar to a virtual environment?
How does EMC in?

It IS a virtual environment, not similar to it.

And it's a lot more involved that simply partitioning a hard drive and dual booting.

You are basically running an Operating System that then splits itself into an infinite number of operating systems running on top of it in various flavours and doesn't just provide partitions to them but complete computers that include HDD, Networking, CPU.

To be honest I don't know how you are selling products in this market without even a basic understanding of these terms. Did you just start in this field or what?

If you had to pitch your product to me I would have been laughing in your face by now because all the terms above would have come up in the first five minutes of our conversation.

****

In fact if you had to pitch me anything you would need to know about the non-VMWare products to impress.

I really hope you aren't the same guy from Riverbed who tried to pitch me a year or two ago...because I almost kicked him out never mind politely declined.

 

[PsyWulf]

Closest analogy I can get to how a hypervisor (Virtualization host like VMWare) works is somebody buying a property,then subdividing it and renting it out. Might have a few singles,some couples,big families and small families sharing the same property but each having their own unit with its own plumbing and services. They just don't know any of their neighbours since they only stay in their own units

 

[SauRoNZA]

Closest analogy I can get to how a hypervisor (Virtualization host like VMWare) works is somebody buying a property,then subdividing it and renting it out. Might have a few singles,some couples,big families and small families sharing the same property but each having their own unit with its own plumbing and services. They just don't know any of their neighbours since they only stay in their own units

That's actually a very good description that I'll try to remember in future.

In a way you can say that they are aware of each other and can communicate via the phone line or in the passage.

 

[PsyWulf]

That's actually a very good description that I'll try to remember in future.

In a way you can say that they are aware of each other and can communicate via the phone line or in the passage.

Yeah we could delve into VLANning being intercoms for all the units and having telephones which would be agnostic to it being a local call to the neighbour or anybody in another property but that might be heading for lesson 2

 

[Dolby]

Thanks guys - appreciate it!

@Sauron - I dealt with Riverbed in 2009/2010 when the product was WAn optimisation only. I was part of a team with presales etc - but dealt with in from an internal sales side.

At a new company now and we only started our relationship with Riverbed 7 weeks back. We've yet to hire technical and we're using the first few months as a foundation, training etc. In fact we haven't even had the launch as yet.

I will ultimately present - but an overview on the commercial side and only those deals that need my assistance that an account manager cannot handle. Presales and the vendor technical resource are there for technical side if needed. That said, I'd still very much like to understand basics

 

[PsyWulf]

Thanks guys - appreciate it!

@Sauron - I dealt with Riverbed in 2009/2010 when the product was WAn optimisation only. I was part of a team with presales etc - but dealt with in from an internal sales side.

At a new company now and we only started our relationship with Riverbed 7 weeks back. We've yet to hire technical and we're using the first few months as a foundation. In fact we haven't even had the launch as yet.

I will ultimately present - but an overview on the commercial side. Presales and the vendor technical resource are there for technical. That said, I'd still very much like to understand basics

Feel free to post more questions since it wasnt a bad question to ask. It can be very hard to grasp the concepts leaping from consumer to enterprise grade

 

[Slaught3r]

Feel free to post more questions since it wasnt a bad question to ask. It can be very hard to grasp the concepts leaping from consumer to enterprise grade

^ This.

There is no such thing as a stupid question. I think Sauron might have had a bad experience which might have prompted the response.

 

[Dolby]

You can be sure I will

Thanks guys!

 

[Arthur]

A hypervisor like VMware ESX(i) or Microsoft Hyper-V (to name the most widely used) is sophisticated control software that allows you to simultaneously run multiple operating systems like Microsoft Server or Linux inside a single physical machine.

It essentially creates a separate space for each virtual machine (or VM for short) inside the memory (RAM) of the physical machine so that each separate operating system can run programs as if it were its own separate computer ... except in this case it's not a real physical computer but a software-only computer running inside the physical machine.

The beauty of this approach is that you can run multiple VMs at the same time and so make better use of the expensive hardware.

The hypervisor is the master controller that shares out the physical resources (such as CPU, RAM, storage, networking, et cetera) between all the software-only computers (VMs).

Hypervisors have many powerful user-settable features to ensure that each VM gets its fair share of the physical machine's CPU, memory, storage and networking.

Almost all regular modern PCs can run VMs, provided they have the right CPU and enough memory and disk space. I often run several different operating systems at the same time in my desktop computer and even in my tablet computer.

 

[SauRoNZA]

Thanks guys - appreciate it!

@Sauron - I dealt with Riverbed in 2009/2010 when the product was WAn optimisation only. I was part of a team with presales etc - but dealt with in from an internal sales side.

At a new company now and we only started our relationship with Riverbed 7 weeks back. We've yet to hire technical and we're using the first few months as a foundation, training etc. In fact we haven't even had the launch as yet.

I will ultimately present - but an overview on the commercial side and only those deals that need my assistance that an account manager cannot handle. Presales and the vendor technical resource are there for technical side if needed. That said, I'd still very much like to understand basics

Cool beans.

Yeah it's never a bad idea to have as much an understanding as possible especially when selling technology.

There's nothing that kills a deal faster for me than someone trying to sell me something but not having a clue what they are talking about when it comes to integration of the product.

 

[Dolby]

There's nothing that kills a deal faster for me than someone trying to sell me something but not having a clue what they are talking about when it comes to integration of the product.

Nah - at this stage I don't go out alone and ultimatley when I do, we'll go in a team

I do have another question for you guys - surely haven't a single chassis with multiple VMs is a single point of a failure? lightening, surge, PSU issues or even corrupt software knocks out all VMs?

 

[PsyWulf]

I do have another question for you guys - surely haven't a single chassis with multiple VMs is a single point of a failure? lightening, surge, PSU issues or even corrupt software knocks out all VMs?

That it is,and thats why you would ideally have a replication system running,or at least a backup. And since it's a virtualized environment (hardware agnostic) even if you don't have a live replica you should be able to either spin up a backup VM or migrate the VM in the case of a predictable failure

Also these enterprise components are partly as pricey because they are rated for much longer and more intense workloads so are less prone to failure than consumer grade
In the case of Google/Facebook however they use some consumer hardware because they have much redundancy and can just swop out any failures. Enterprise hardware also has longer and better warranties