Virtualization Round Up 20090914

It’s amazing how quickly the vacation effect can wear off you.  It’s been a few week since the last roundup and even thought I was on vacation for one of those weeks, there are a number of items that I had collected and wanted to share.  The usual mix of something for everyone…

VMware Specific Links

• VMworld 2009 is almost upon us.  I hope you have registered and booked your hotels by now!  If you haven’t registered, remember that you can use VMware Consulting and Training Credits to purchase your show access.  Hotels you’re on your own as the VMworld reserved blocks have now expired.If you’re attending VMworld and are a reader, let me know! I’ll be there most days and would love to meetup at Moscone.
• A joint white paper was released recently about running View on UCS with V-Max.  Internal tests showed 160 desktops running on a single half-width UCS blade (that’s 20 desktops per core!).  And these tests were for heavy use knowledge worker desktops!
• A while back, EMC’s Chuck Hollis had a great post on Why Oracle Doesn’t Like VMware.  Regardless of Oracle’s feelings, VMware customers are running Oracle in VMs on VMware (I have clients doing it today).  Even the most stubborn vendor will listen to what their customers want…even if it is only behind closed doors and with lawyers waving NDAs.)
• Chris Wolf’s article about SpringSource: VMware’s well-timed Acquisition is a great summary of the longer term strategy behind this acquisition.  (make sure to follow those links in this article)
• VMware – The Next Great Platform Company? is an interesting view of VMware from someone who experienced Paul Maritz and Todd Nielson working together in the past.
• Duncan Epping had a great post about one of the nuisances of HA where VM could be down and HA not restarting them. Since every client of mine turns on HA by default, every VMW admin should read and understand this.
  • Speaking of HA, have you seen this KB Article regarding ESX host settings for environments with up to 80 virtual machines per host in a VMware HA cluster?
• In a similar thread, Fault Tolerance is still raising questions form my clients, especially the hardware requirements.  There is a great KB article that talks about processors and guest operating systems that support VMware Fault Tolerance.
  • And here is a great white paper talking about VMware vSphere 4 Fault Tolerance: Architecture and Performance
• Techhead has started a list of VMware Tools that will be handy to keep in your vToolbox.
• vSphere Quick Start Guide, the book you’ll want on your gift list this VMworld! (not available yet, but stay tuned)

General Virtualization Links

• If you need an alternative way to jack the CPU load in your test environment, check out Bouke Groenescheij’s CPUBusier and CPUBusiest (multi-threaded) tools.
• Having lived in the SOA world for a while, I appreciated this article about Private cloud formations rising, but remember SOA lessons.
• The cloud, brought to you by flash storage brings up great points on how we’ll be seeing new storage models appearing thanks to the cloud.
• The economics of 100% data center virtualization does a great job breaking down the numbers of thinking completely virtual.  As my recent poll somewhat confirmed, I think Garnet’s estimates are considerably low.