Tech Industry – Page 8

Virtualization Round Up 20090918

September 18, 2009 2 Comments

Round Up II

Well, it’s been two weeks since the end of VMworld, and how the time has flown. Everyone should have seen plenty of write ups on VMworld by now (so I won’t bother) and the labs and sessions are now available at the VMworld site. Based upon comments I saw twittering about online, it appears that some people didn’t realize that the data center built at VMworld was actually in use for all the hands on labs. VM /Etc did a great interview with the Operations Team manager for the VMworld Data Center, to provide more of the back story on that.

And so, back to the regular roundup from the past few weeks, the usual collection of things that caught my attention recently for this reason or that. Thanks goes out to all my colleagues and my twitter network for leading me to many of these gems!

VMware Specific Links

New Releases
- VMware View Manager 3.1.2 was release don Sept/04 (Release Notes)
- VMware Data Recovery 1.0.2 was released on Sept/08 (Release Notes)
- VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager 1.0.2 was release on Sept/10 (Release Notes)
This is not new information, but I finally had a chance to watch the Burton Group’s Debating Hypervisor Performance session from their recent Catalyst Conference. I thought it was great to actually see VMware and Citrix stand side by side and have the performance debate in person (versus the usual venue of blog posts). 40min video makes for a perfect lunchtime edutainment.
Looking for a VMWare View Open Client for OSX? Ron Peters has worked to port the linux open client to run on the Mac.
As most VMware users should now be aware, the service console-less ESXi is the stated architecture for the future. But in the meantime a document details Changes to the ESX Service Console for ESX 4.0 has been posted tot he Communities site. Find out what’s new, different, and incompatible between ESX 3.5 and 4.0 service console.
Looking to reduce data center power/cooling costs? Have you looked at DPM? There is a new whitepaper out entitled VMware Distributed Power Management: Concepts and Usage. One of my clients just started evaluating DPM to power off servers during low demand times with huge potential for cost savings for them.

General Virtualization Links

EMC’s Chuck Hollis recently wrote about Chargeback vs Pricing where he discussed how Pricing can be an effective tool to force consumers to change their consumption behaviors. I had this general discussion this week with two clients on the path to private clouds; they are interested in VMware Chargeback so they could start exposing consumption to their virtualization users even if there is no price associated with it…just to get the IT users to start realizing what they are consuming. IT organization who are still trying to just drive users off of physicals onto VMs can use Chuck’s advice to drive this change of behavior through pricing.
Cloudy days ahead: 2 In 3 IT Managers Have Cloud Funding, according to a recent survey. This jives with my experience as 66% of my clients are actively moving forward with private clouds and the expectation of a federate cloud.
Citrix announced plans to evolve Xen into the Xen Cloud Platform.
In what appears to be a move into the Cloud space, Tibco Acquires DataSynapse. While I’m sure some of the folks I know at DataSynapse are happy about this, I haven’t had a chance to get their take on this acquisition yet.
Floyd Strimling has an interesting view of the the newest battle between IT Giants, Why Cisco should fear HP.

Virtualization Round Up 20090824

August 24, 2009 Leave a Comment

On the final march to VMworld 2009, this will be the last roundup until after Labor Day.

VMware Specific Links

First, some VMWorld 2009 Stuff
- VMworld 2009 Unofficial Party List
- Thanks to Chad Sakac, here’s an AWESOME peek behind the scenes of getting hardware ready for VMworld 2009
After more conversations last week with clients about their private cloud plans (including bursting out to external cloud providers), I wanted to share the list of VMware Ready vCloud Service Providers. I expect this list to grow post VMworld…
A recent patch was released for vCenter Server 4.0 which fixes an issue where HA Cluster failover might not work if the servers were configured with certain IPs. Full details are available in the Knowledge Base Article.
Some more SpringSource centric posts
- SpringSource announced Cloud Foundry, their Enterprise Java Cloud. The VMware price tag for SpringSource is looking a bit more reasonable all of a sudden.
- VMware’s SpringSource Acquisition: More Than Meets the Eye?
- With SpringSource Buy, VMware Constructs Cloud Platform
When a client asked me about running Documentum eRoom solution in a VM recently I found this great article about how EMC is doing that and Saved $1.5 Million in the process.
The Vroom blog has a great posting about VMware Fault Tolerance Performance including a link to a FT architecture and performance whitepaper.
Scott Drummonds recent community post Four Things You Should Know About ESX 4’s Scheduler helps to answer the common question of how man vCPUs to give a VM (as well as a few other questions…).

General Virtualization Links

With 1 In 3 Developers Working On Private Cloud Apps, almost 50% of developers expect to be working on cloud applications within a year and think that Java is the best language for developing in the cloud.
When talking about cloud applications, the business model of these applications can come into discussion (with the Free usually being mentioned at some point). That’s why I found this simple formula to gauge a freemium model’s success so interesting.
Security Showdown: Cloud Computing vs. On-Premise IT is an interesting podcast discussion actually discusses the private cloud between the lines.
EMC’s Chuck Hollis talks about how he’s seeing more enterprises wanting to get going now on private clouds by building A Starter Private Cloud For IT.
After seeing a few pallets of UCS systems being delivered to a client of mine last week, I found Steve Chamber’s post about The stars are aligning: VMware, Cisco and ESG rather timely and right on target with regards to the higher level value UCS delivers to the CIO’s office. “Make IT simple stupid” is a mantra that we should all live by.

Virtualization Round Up 20090914

August 14, 2009 Leave a Comment

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.

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