Gardner: Virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to think about it more holistically, particularly in regard to things like security,    performance and how your brands and businesses are perceived across   the  globe. Many of the companies that I deal with day in and day out   are up  at 80 percent and even 90 percent virtualized.

When they think about virtualization, they go beyond just server virtualization. It’s really now looking at storage, applications, networks and even the end-user desktop experience, or desktop as a service (VDI).

Successful  virtualization is no longer just about servers, it’s about managing  complexity when you get beyond the 20   percent or 30 percent level and  expand into converged infrastructure virtualization without failures.

So  how to take advantage of the best things  about virtualization? Part of  that means allowing your IT team to have  access to other experienced  support teams, from HP and VMware,  around  the world, 24×7, to help  keep systems up and running. Such support also  allows your IT team to  progress, to learn as they go,  and to be able to  take advantage of  more virtualization benefits over time.

Expert panel

So    how do you go about attaining such benefits? How do you keep the    positive side of virtualization on track? And how do you put in place an    insurance policy around service and support?

Manderson: We have several different packages. Our highest level is the mission-critical.   In this particular process, you're assigned a team that are across the   technology that you have in your environment. But you also get a set  of  folks who would actually look at not just the  reactive support and  even  some of the proactive, but how actually your  entire business is  running according to the ITIL standard.

That    is coupled with keeping you up and running, and we also can work with   you on a  type that would be best suited for your environment.

Our   critical and  independent support includes onsite resources from HP   that also include a  lot of proactive support. In addition, they're more   focused on specific  management, but that would be more of an ITSM technology. We can look at that for you.

... We  also have the hardware and software support. One of the cool things we have  with our hardware support is support automation, our Insight for remote support.   That can notify HP that you're having a disk  drive failure. Or we  will  call you and say that we know that disk drive is  failing, or  something  on a buffer server and storage is about to.

You can   even take  that a step further to look inside at the Windows operating  system.   We're hardware agnostic on that operating system. We don't  care about   the vendor -- and I believe we are looking at expanding  that automation  to  other operating systems. We have installation and  startup services  that  we can actually go out and set up and configure  the hardware and   software at a site.

So    we definitely integrate across all the multi-vendor services. We run    the gamut between all the x86 operating systems, as well as our  proprietary operating systems, our servers and storage. Again, we're no  stranger to multi-vendor support and keeping the entire environment up and  running.

... One of our most creative services would be Proactive Select,    a core product series of credits. You can use these credits for maybe    planning on migration and upgrade. You can say you need some  consulting   time. You can use these credits and work with upgrade and  migration.  You  may need some performance or you may need some type of   environmental  assessment, and these credits can be used for that.

Gardner: When people do employ these services,  how do they measure what the payoff is, the value of these services?

IDC study

Manderson: In 2010, IDC did a study. They went out and looked at the methodology, and this is  out on our website.   They saw that the customers who have the  mission-critical services,   reduce their downtime by over 70 percent, and  increase their return on investment (ROI) quite high, over 400 percent. The main benefit was in problem    management as well as help desk calls, because these were alleviated due    to the proactive nature, a lot of looking at the entire environment,    and looking at the business processes.

So take a look at the  study.   It shows IDC's methodology. So looking at things proactively and these   support processes can  certainly help you reduce that downtime.

... I've been in the multi-vendor space  for many, many years -- from applications to operating systems -- all  with HP.

In   2002, when VMware came on the scene, HP actually  became alliance   partners with them. In 2003, we became a reseller, and  thus began our   support partnership with them. It would only extend  recent in 2005, we   also became an OEM.  We have thousands of trained and certified Microsoft engineers and Linux professionals, too.

But    we have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're    also have the largest global VMware off-site training center. So HP  also  does  education on these technologies as well. We’ve  trained over   20,000 students in the VMware space alone.

And we have had   this  very strong collaboration with VMware for many years and have   support  teams around the globe. In addition, we also offer the same   level of  training that VMware support engineers do. We actually go to   their  facilities and train right alongside them, too.

We further  do  this training virtually. The training is then recorded and made    available on demand for reference, for folks who are not able to attend    a scheduled course. There's definitely a very strong partnership, and    as you see from our history with the other vendors as well as VMware,  we   are no strangers to multi-vendor support.

With all of the VMware products that HP sells, we do provide support across them all. It runs the gamut from the vSphere operating system that will install on the x86 server, through the enterprise management to the vCenter, and virtual desktop infrastructure products like VMware ThinApp. We also support the converter product getting into vCloud Director.

In    addition to that, we have the ability to access our peers on the  other   teams across HP hardware support. This includes servers and   storage,  and our networking chain. We are quickly able to collaborate   with them  and pull together a virtual team in to focus on the   customer's whole  environment, to provide a one-stop shop.

Expertise across technologies

Additionally,   you saw that we’ve been in this multi-vendor support business for so   many years, with many experts across the other technologies, such as   Microsoft and Linux. Of course, the virtual machines (VMs) are running these operating systems. So if the contract is also with    them, we can easily pull them in to help us work an end-to-end  solution  and support it.

Gardner: Let’s think about what happens when there are  different levels of support at work. How does that shake-out?

Manderson: We're in a reactive support business. If the customer has a  problem,   they can either call in at their local region telephone number  --   whether they are in America, Europe, or Asia Pacific. There are    different phone numbers for them to call.

They can also log in    via the web, and they'll get to our next developer Level 1 engineer.    They're a great organization and have solved over 85 percent of their    cases.

If they have issues where they have to escalate, first    they will be collaborating with us. We also have an online chat tool,    where we are all in a virtual room, the Level 1 engineers, Level 2    engineers, etc. So we’ll be consulting and collaborating with them   before they  even get to a point of escalation.

If    the case does end up needing escalation, chances are they're already   collaborating with the first person, and will then end up taking the   case. That  saves a lot of information transfer, as far as what type of   server you  have, what’s the firmware, what build level, and what’s the   problem  there, etc.

Once it reaches Level 2 support, as far as   we can continue  to collaborate, we can reach our teammates and the   hardware teams, too, so  we can look at the server and make sure that   the environment is what we  need it to be. If we can't resolve it, we   can also go to Level 3 with  VMware at an offline service-partner level.

We   have a great  relationship with the folks that we work alongside with   and would escalate  calls to at VMware. We’re obviously not going into   Level 1 at VMware because we’ve  already done all that work, and we are  a  service partner. They'll go  right up to our peers over at VMware  and  then we work together, while  always owning the solution that we  provide  back to the customer.

Another  part of our infrastructure-as-a-support-organization is that  we  have a  single customer database. I can give an example. A call  came  into our  Level 1 French engineer. When this call came in, for the   European  folks, it was already the end of their day, and the French   engineer  could not speak English. It was a critical down, their VMs were    offline.

HP Virtual Room

So    we worked in a virtual room and they talked to us, and brought the    case to us here in America’s time zone. We worked with this case and    another tool called HP Virtual Room, where we could actually all look at the customers' desktops in real time. They happened to have EVA storage, and we quickly got an EVA engineer engaged. Of course, we  had   to find a resource in the Americas because the European folks had    already left. So we're all looking in real-time at the customer’s    environment and found out that they had locked the storage.

The    EVA engineer helped to get back online, while we all watched and the    French engineer was translating in French for the customer in order to   get it all resolved. We got it back online, and the customers were ready   to  home.

We gave instructions on getting log files and we   placed a  call for follow-up for the daytime hours in Europe the next   day. So our  counterparts in European support teams picked that up and   worked with  the customers to resolution, to analyze exactly what   happened and  prevent it in the future.

We have another  process in HP that can   actually go with top organizations, our  escalation  manager process. I  was lead source for a particular case  where we had a  field team  assisting a customer deploying a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) design. They had a third-party VDI vendor. They had HP hardware,    servers, and virtual connects. They had our storage, and we didn’t quite    know where the bottleneck was. They were having performance issues   by  trying to have this VDI at two different locations with the hardware  at   one site.

The escalation manager was able to get the local   office  to borrow equipment, and then try to get performance and    network traces. They had the Engineering Problem Management Resource    (EPMR) lab in Houston trying to duplicate the problems.

Our    escalation manager was able to drive the issue to completion across not    only the solution standards, but the local office, to owning the  actual   escalation with all the action items to keep this all on track.  We  knew  where we were going to go. That was about a six-month case,  but we  did  finally find was that the customer was on the technological  edge,  and the  "pipe" to have that performance just did not exist.

Site visits

Pat  Lampert is a technical account manager and does site  visits. The   technical account managers do go out on site. So we’re  aware of the   environment. We have the information of your environment  documented  into  the database. When you call, we’re not saying, "Now  what kind of  server  is this? What’s the firmware?"    We know this because we already have it documented. We could be   calling  them to say, "Server 3 is running a little off." We already   which know  VMware version this is on, because we have that information.

And    because we have that, we can also offer proactive advice. We can know    that there's a new firmware update, or VMware just came out with a  new   build, and we have a place where you can go find the latest that's    specific to your environment. So this helps to reduce further  incidents,   because we can be more proactive to help you maintain your  business.

Gardner: What are some of the the most frequent questions you receive from the field?

Reddy: I'll address two questions that are frequently showing up. One is, what is the difference between the VMware ESXi image and an HP ESXi image?

Basically,    HP takes the same ESXi image that VMware provides to the customers.  It   then adds HP thin components for hardware management, and it also  adds   any latest fibre channel and network drivers. Once it's tested and  certified, it's available for download both from HP and VMware websites.

Major differences

And   one of the major difference between the two images is that VMware  image  is disk installable only, whereas HP image can be installed on a  disk, USB key, or a SD card.

The other question we're getting nowadays is how to upgrade from VCA4 to VCA5.    As with any major upgrades, planning helps. The first thing I would  do   is understand the difference between ESX 4 and ESX 5, because  starting   with ESX 5, we have no service console. So we need to  understand what   the architectural differences are.

Also learn about the new licensing policies. Then, use the System Analyzer that VMware provides to evaluate the current environments, and    download, check, and complete the checklist. Once this is done,    hopefully the upgrade will go smoothly.

Lampert: Another question that has come up from customers has to do with the   added value  of getting support directly from HP. It was partly   addressed during the  presentation we just gave. First of all, VMware   does have a fine  support organization. I have a couple of friends who work in VMware  Support, and they do a good job of supporting their product.

HP,    in addition to a similar level of expertise in the product, also   offers  our expertise in HP hardware, especially if you have systems   based on HP Blades.    The infrastructure behind that often is tied very closely to the    performance and availability of your ESX host. So when you call us, you    will have not only someone who is very familiar with the VMware   product,  but also is familiar with the HP hardware and able to pull in   the  proper resourced results, problems you might encounter with  running   vSphere on HP hardware especially.

In addition to that,  we have  a  partnership agreement with VMware, and when you call in for  support   through HP, you're getting that same level of service when we  have to  go  to VMware to get answers to questions or fixes.

One  other   question that has come up is about our lab ability to reproduce    problems. We have two global labs, one in India and one in the United    States. We have several static vSphere cluster configurations with a    number of different types of servers already in those configurations,    and the ability, when needed, to add specific models, if there is a    problem that’s specific to a particular Blade or rack-mounted server    model, or a particular card or something like that. So we're quite able    to reproduce most problems that come in. We even have some Dell and IBM equipment in our lab also.

Gardner: What other issues are users grappling with?

Reddy: One question I can answer is how to troubleshoot server crashes. When something goes wrong in ESX, we call it the "Purple Screen of Death."    Often, these are results of hardware failure, but we still need to   rule  out the software. So we collect all the logs, and look at it to   see if  it's a software issue. If it's not a software issue, then we   engage the  hardware team to see how we can get to the root cause and   fix the issue.

Lampert: To dovetail  with Sumithra’s  comment there, one of the questions I get  frequently  is what to do if  you don’t have a dump. Say the host hangs,  and that  seems to be almost  more common than the Purple Screen of Death.  Some  customers are't aware  that through HP’s Integrated Lights-Out  Management, there is the ability to generate a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) just by pressing a button, and by saving a certain environment variable ahead of time in your ESX host.

KB article

There is a KB article on this, by the way, if you just search on NMI and core dumping in    VMware. But with that setup, you can force a dump while a system is in a    hung state, and that will assist us usually in troubleshooting and    isolating what caused the hang, whether it be hardware or a problem with    the ESX host software.

One question that came up ahead  of time is what HP suggests as far as   getting a handle on our  inventory of VMs? I happened to be involved in   field testing some new  tools from HP that will be available in January   and February regarding  vSphere.

One of them is a Holistic Blade   and Firmware Analysis  that takes into account the VMware environment on   our Blade systems  which we are working on having ready soon. We have   just completed  field tests.

And the second is a really nifty   Inventory Report  HP has just put together. We're just completing field   tests on that  now. It will be available soon. Basically, we install a   small Perl script in the customer environment on any machine that has access to the vCenter host and has a vSphere CLI installed.

This Perl Script crawls through the VMware environment and builds an XML file, which we then feed into a report generator here at HP. This can    be used for us to gather information on customers, so we have ahead  of   time a clear picture of the environment. But also it will be sold  as a   service to customers.

The   report is really quite nice,  with all sorts of charts and showing   availability of machines and  availability of memory and also disk space.   It's a very nice report.

• Continuous Improvement and Flexibility Are Keys to Successful Data Center Transformation, Say HP Experts
• HP's Liz Roche on Why Enterprise Technology Strategy Must Move Beyond the 'Professional' and 'Consumer' Split
• Well-Planned Data Center Transformation Effort Delivers IT Efficiency Paybacks, Green IT Boost for Valero Energy
• Hastening Trends Around Cloud, Mobile Push Application Transformation as Priority, Says Research
• Data Center Transformation Includes More Than New Systems, There's Also Secure Data Removal, Recycling, Server Disposal

The stakes have never been  higher for keeping applications and business up and running.

• Continuous Improvement and Flexibility Are Keys to Successful Data Center Transformation, Say HP Experts
• HP's Liz Roche on Why Enterprise Technology Strategy Must Move Beyond the 'Professional' and 'Consumer' Split
• Well-Planned Data Center Transformation Effort Delivers IT Efficiency Paybacks, Green IT Boost for Valero Energy
• Hastening Trends Around Cloud, Mobile Push Application Transforation as Priority, Says Research
• Data Center Transformation Includes More Than New Systems, There's Also Secure Data Removal, Recycling, Server Disposal