Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with an HP video series on the best practices for developing a common roadmap for DCT.

1. HP, VMware Partner to Provide Holistic Approach to Support
for Virtualized IT Environments
Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with an HP video series on the best
practices for developing a common roadmap for DCT.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: HP.
Redefine the potential of your technology investment.
Watch the Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.
Dana Gardner: Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect presentation, a sponsored podcast created
from a recent HP Expert Chat discussion on best practices for VMware environment support.
Advanced and pervasive virtualization and cloud computing trends are
driving the need for a better holistic approach to IT support remediation.
That’s why HP has made the service and support of global virtualization
market leader VMware a top priority.
And while the technology to support and fix these virtualized environments is
essential, it’s the people, skills, and knowledge to manage these systems that
provide the most decisive determinants of ongoing performance success. [Disclosure: HP and
VMware are both sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. To learn more, I recently
moderated a discussion with Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex
Problem Resolution and Quality for VMware Products at HP. Cindy has 27-plus years of
experience with HP and 8-plus years supporting VMware specifically.
In our discussion, you’ll hear the latest recommendations for how IT support should be done. As
part of our chat, we’ll also be joined by two other HP experts: Pat Lampert, Critical Service
Senior Technical Account Manager and Team Leader, as well as Sumithra Reddy, HP
Virtualization Engineer. Our discussion begins with an overview from me of the virtualization
market and user adoption trends.
We're going to be talking about how to make things better and appreciate the fact that
virtualization isn’t just server-by-server, but really impacts the entire data center. You need to
think about it more holistically, particularly in regards with 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 90 percent virtualization.

2. When they think about virtualization, they’ve gone beyond just server virtualization. It’s really
now looking at storage, application, networks and even the end-user device experience, desktop
as a service, the virtualization infrastructure for desktops.
These are all reasons why it’s no longer just about servers, but has to be
something that includes how you're looking at IT in general. It’s a cultural
issue. It’s about managing complexity when you get to that 20 percent or 30
percent and not letting the value and benefits for virtualization be eroded by a
management requesting an issue or complexity around management.
So we want to help you understand that you can take advantage of the best things about
virtualization and put in place the means by which your team have access to other teams around
the world, 24×7, with HP and VMware to help you keep those systems up and running and allow
you to progress, to learn as you go, and be able to take advantage of more virtualization benefits
over time.
Another thing to consider is that the way your organizations is perceived, not only your IT
organization, but your total company, is so dependent now on how your systems perform. It’s
really impossible to separate a business from its IT, and in many cases, your applications are the
business. How you present performance is in fact how you present your sense of competency,
capability, and your overall brand as a sense of whether you want to do business with this
organization.
We encourage people, as they pursue more virtualization, to recognize that their web
applications, their mobile applications or e-commerce activities all are running on a combination
of virtual and a physical infrastructure, but these need to be tuned and performance needs to be
considered and the fall back positions when things go wrong. They also need to be put in place
ahead of time and a learning curve needs to be created.
Expert panel
So how do you go about these suites of benefits, how do you keep the positive side of
virtualization on track, how do you put in place an insurance policy really without service and
support? That’s what our experts here today are going to help us understand.
At this point, I’d like to introduce one of our chief experts. Cindy Manderson is a consultant for
complex problem resolution at HP with 27 years of experience. She’s been now supporting
VMware products and the ecosystem of VMware for eight years. So that’s really about the
beginning, when VMware came on the scene in a big way.
I’d like to hear more from Cindy herself about what she's doing in, day in and day out. She's then
going to provide for us through a discussion with me more insights into how support works in
virtualization, how HP and VMware are working together, and what their products, the synergy
between their products, really amount to. So with that, I’d like to hand this over to Cindy. Tell us
about how you are doing, and welcome.

3. Cindy Manderson: Thanks, Dana. I've been in the multi-vendor space for many, many years,
from applications operating systems and all of this has been with HP. We
have thousands of trained and certified Microsoft engineers and Linux
professionals.
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.
But we have the largest number of VMware-certified professionals. We're
also the largest global VMware off-site training center. So HP also does education. We also
educate in the other technologies as well. We’ve trained over 20,000 students in the VMware
space.
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 to support
VM cases too.
We also 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. It runs the gamut from the
vSphere operating system that will install on the x86 server through the enterprise management
to the center where we work with a proxy virtual desktop infrastructure product, 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 the HP
hardware that we support. This includes servers and storage, our networking chain, and we
quickly are able to collaborate with them and pull together a virtual team in order to focus on the
customer's whole environment to provide a one-stop shop for our customers.
Expertise across technologies
Additionally, you saw that we’ve been in this multi-vendor support business for so many years.
We’ve got many experts across the other technologies in 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 a solution end-to-end.
Gardner: Let’s think about what happens in this whole process, when there are different levels
of support or what the process at a high level is like when there is a problem, when the

4. performance issue, security issue. Where does this lead to in terms of how you handle things
typically?
Manderson: We're in a reactive support business in this model. 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 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 this person that they're already
collaborating with will end up taking that 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.
Once it reaches Level 2 support, as far as we can continue to collaborate, we can reach our
teammates and the hardware teams, 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’ve got a great relationship with the folks that we work alongside and would escalate calls to.
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.
Gardner: And let’s look at this also from the perspective of globalization. So many
organizations now just don’t stop in the afternoon and go home. The ongoing problems can’t just
be left till the next day. How does it work on a continuity basis, time zone to time zone, region to
region?
Manderson: Another part of our infrastructure as a support organization is that we have a single
customer database. I can give an example here. 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 world 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 desktop in real time. They happened to have EVA

5. 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 French for the customer in order to get them 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.
Gardner: You’ve got a lot of examples at your disposal, I can tell. You've been through a lot
with different customers. What sticks out in your mind as a particularly complex engagement
that ended up turning out pretty well that might illustrate a bit more about what this takes and
what’s involved?
Manderson: A lot of examples I've given have all been involved with the Level 2 support
organizations, the HP server storage hardware, and also engaging VMware. There was another
case.
We have another process in HP that can actually go with top organizations outside of the center,
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 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 to put it on, 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 that the customer was on the technological edge and the pipe to have that
performance just did not exist.
Many of the examples that I've given so far are pretty much based on individual incidents. You
call in and you get connected to the next available resource.
We have another level, mission-critical support, and we have several offerings in this phase.
Essentially, it’s more personalized. We know who you are. We already know your environment.
You’re going to find a technical account manager.

6. Site visits
For example, Pat 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: Okay, I suppose another important part of not just mission-critical and some things we
alluded to earlier is the fact that none of these organizations are the same. They have difference
legacy, different installation, different rates of versions and physical virtualization. How do you
manage that sort of complex combination of mission-critical and in this case, the need for
customization too?
Redefine the potential of your technology investment.
Watch the Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.
Manderson: Actually, we have a team, our customer service. Anything that's been not already in
our pre-packaged service offerings, we can add. For example, a customer may need their own
800 number for when they log cases. And they may need just an email sent out.
Pat Lampert is one of our our custom technical account managers. He does have additional
requirements and possibilities for some of the customers that he is assigned. This way, we can
personalize the businesses even more and focus on choosing that business model
Gardner: For folks who get into some of the details on these services, how did they package the
way in which these are organized? Tell me about the mission critical and then the whole
portfolio.
Manderson: We have several different packages. Our highest level is the mission-critical actual
partners. In this particular process, you're assigned a team of folks 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.

7. That is coupled with keeping you running, and we also can work with you on a type that would
be best suited for your environment, in addition to keep your environment up and running.
Our critical and independent support also includes onsite resources from HP that also include a
lot of proactive. 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.
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, do they really look at what they get, what the
payoff is, and how important in terms of a value are these service?
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 talked about IDC, and they will show you their methodology for
doing that. So looking at things proactively and processes can certainly help you reduce that
downtime.
Gardner: This support extends across a variety of different areas. We looked at the mission
critical, we looked at those complex issues, the need for customization, and we can just give a
quick overview of some of the additional support services of it.
Manderson: Well, we have the hardware and software support. One of the cool things we have
with our hardware support is our support automation, our Insight, our remote support for that.
That can notify HP that you're having a disk drive failure. We will call you and say that we know
that disk drive is failing or something on a buffer server and storage is.
You can even take that a step further to look 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.

8. 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 environment up and running.
Gardner: We've talked about the need for ecosystem-level view on virtualization. We looked at
how HP and VMware have been working together very closely for a number of years, talked
about some of the services available, why the experts’ personal experience and knowledge is
essential, and the ability then for them to react towards something that’s unique that they haven’t
seen before, bring in the expertise when they need it, act as a adjunct to the teams at the sites of
these organizations.
And we have heard a little bit about some of the payback, 400 percent ROI, according to IDC in
a number of instances. Now let's take this back to the experts themselves. We've heard from
Cindy, but there are others involved. Hi, Sumithra.
Sumithra Reddy: Dana, 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.
Gardner: Pat, tell us about some of the other questions and your answers please.
Pat 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.

9. 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: Back to you Sumithra. Do you have any thoughts on some of the questions that really
caught your attention that you think are representative of what our audience is thinking and
feeling today?
Reddy: One little 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 proc 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

10. will assist us usually in troubleshooting and isolating what caused the hang, whether it be
hardware or a problem with the ESX host software.
Gardner: Pat, we have time for one more.
Lampert: 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. You should be able to get a
sample, if you're interested.
Gardner: WWell, that about wraps up our hour. I really want to thank our audience for joining
us. I hope you found it valuable.
This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a special
BriefingsDirect presentation. A sponsored podcast created from a recent HP expert chat
discussion on best practices for VMware environment support.
I would like to thank our guests. Cindy Manderson, Technical Solutions Consultant for Complex
Problem Resolution & Quality for VMware Products at HP, Pat Lampert, Critical Service Senior
Technical Account Manager and Team Leader at HP, as well as Sumithra Reddy, HP
Virtualization Engineer. And to our audience, thanks to you all for listening and come back next
time.
Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with an HP video series on the best
practices for developing a common roadmap for DCT. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2012. All rights reserved.

11. Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: HP.
Redefine the potential of your technology investment.
Watch the Expert Chat presentation on VMware support best practices.
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