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Virtualization Round Up 20090914

August 14, 2009 Leave a Comment

photo by alandberning
photo by alandberning

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.

Filed Under: Tech Industry, Virtualization, VMware, VMworld Tagged With: Link List, Virtualization

Virtualization Link Roundup 20090726

July 27, 2009 Leave a Comment

photo by alandberning
photo by alandberning

Another few weeks have gone by and my list of Virtualization links have hit critical mass, time to thin the herd.  Lots of product releases from VMware and Private Cloud articles (just in time for my upcoming talk on the Convergence of Private Clouds).  Forgive the one day late posting…was too busy last night enjoying sunset from 2000 foot high ridge near my house–and too tired afterward–to post this yesterday.

VMware Specific Links

  • The last two weeks saw a lot of product release come from VMware:
    • View 3.1.1 was released recently, check out the release notes for details.  This update is highly recommended for View users…
    • vCenter Server 2.5 U5 was release recently as well, check out the release notes for details.
    • vCenter Lab Manager 4.0 was released.  This version is compatible with vSphere 4.0, the release notes contain all the other goodness in the latest version.
    • vCenter Chargeback 1.0 was released to market.  (I have a number of clients looking at this just to provide viability to their end users on resource consumption, even if they don’t have the finance model in place to actually charge back for that use.  Social engineering goes a long way…)
    • vCenter AppSpeed 1.0 was also released to market.  Check out this great 1st Look Video from HyperViZor
  • Using a Private Cloud to Improve Exchange Performance – great article from testing Dell did around running a private Exchange cloud in their lab.
  • vSphere in a Box: A “Virtual Private Cloud” Blueprint – while not officially supported by VMware, running nested VMs is a great way to build out your lab…and here’s your blueprint thanks to HyperViZor.
  • Exchange Performs Well Using Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS on vSphere – interesting storage performance numbers highlighted here from recent whitepaper (linked to in article).
  • Memory Performance Chart Metrics in the vSphere Client – overview of Memory performance stats now available in VIC…err, I mean vSC (doesn’t quite roll of the tongue as well…)
  • VMware’s Two Two Important Cloud Beta’s – review of vCloud beta releases.

General Virtualization Links

  • Business Imperative for Virtual Private Cloud Services – from the Cisco Service Provider blog.
  • Cloud Standards Coordination Wiki Site – great portal attempting to document all the work around defining standards for the cloud.
  • Microsoft opened Linux-driver code after ‘violating’ GPL – interesting back story on Microsoft’s submission of their Linux drivers to the Linux community.
  • Is A Private Cloud Worthwhile? – I agree that we can stop trying to define the cloud and get working on preparing for or building them.  The future industry leaders are using the recession to innovate in this area.  Are you?
  • HOWTO: Download, Install and License EMC PowerPath/VE – A great video how-to from Chad Sakac.  Did you know that EMC’s PowerPath can also work with non-EMC storage?  I learned this recently from one of my clients…while there is a limited list of 3rd party storage that works this is still very cool stuff!

Filed Under: Tech Industry, Virtualization, VMware Tagged With: Link List, Virtualization

Virtualization Link Roundup 20090705

July 5, 2009 Leave a Comment

I hope everyone in the United States had a fun and safe 4th of July weekend!  In honor of this American holiday, wanted to share some photos I took of my local fireworks this weekend (click through to view them all).  Now on to the roundup of links that I’ve collected over the past few weeks based upon customer interactions, online discussions, and stuff that caught my eye:

VMware Specific Links

  • Meet the Engineer – Feature Videos on VMware Communities
  • VMware I/O queues, “micro-bursting”, and multipathing (deep storage discussion from Chad Sakac)
  • VMware Furthers Collaboration with HP through OEM Agreement and Co-Development Plans to Deliver New Solutions for Datacenter and Application Management
  • vShield Zones Overview (from a vExpert)
  • And the winners of the VMware top blog are… (from vSphere-Land reader survey)
  • VMotion between Data Centers—a VMware and Cisco Proof of Concept
  • HP has integrated VMware ThinApp with the HP Client Automation policy-based management platform
  • vSphere Virtual Machine Upgrade Process (from Scott Lowe)
  • Scalable Storage Performance with VMware ESX Server 3.5 (oldie, but still valuable and relevant based upon conversations I’ve had last week…)
  • Using HP RGS with VMware View 3.1 (while not officially supported by VMware, I know a few people who will try this anyway…)
  • ESXi Builder 1.4 and other utility scripts (Configure ESXi from Factory Settings) – Seen an increase interest in ESXi lately (rightfully so since this is the future direction of the ESX installation form factor).  This utility script helps to implement ESXi configuration following power on of a server with an ESXi USB key installed.

General Virtualization Links

  • Incomplete Thought – Cloudanatomy: Infrastructure, Metastructure & Infostructure
  • The Cloud’s Growing SLA Ecosystem (from E-Commerce Times)


Filed Under: Tech Industry, Virtualization, VMware Tagged With: Link List, Virtualization

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About latoga labs

With over 25 years of partnering leadership and direct GTM experience, Greg A. Lato provides consulting services to companies in all stages of their partnering journey to Ecosystem Led Growth.