Technology Ramblings – Page 2

Real World Snapshot of OS Distributions

September 22, 2014 Leave a Comment

There is a profusion of sources of data about the deployment of Operating Systems available today, just see the references for the usage share of operating systems for a sample. I’ve always wondered about the accuracy and real world applicability of that data. Thus, I created a small data point in time snapshot of OS distributions thanks to a few anonymous contacts in my network. The following graph shows both Production IT managed and Development Team (DevOps) managed environments that span both physical and virtual environments:

This is a data point as the total aggregate OS instances involved is below 250,000. While the numbers in the graph represent both physical and virtual environments, the Production side was over 85% virtualized and the Development side was over 75% virtualized.

How does this compare to your own internal OS Distributions?

Some of the interesting points that jumped out at me:

Maybe I’m dating myself here, but I remember when those Windows and Linux proportions used to be flipped…
Solaris and HPUX are still breathing…thought I think it’s safe to say they are on hospice care
There was a larger percentage of development running ESX Nested than running HPUX (even when nested ESX is not officially supported by VMware)
Windows deployments are lower in Development; the sources of these data points were not using Azure as far as I know, I wonder how Azure might impact a graph like this moving forward
Unsure how to read the significant delta between Solaris deployments on the Production side versus the Development side

Post a comment if you want to compare your environment to the above. Since this is a data point snapshot I haven’t calculated any statistical margin of error…for entertaining discussion only. 🙂

Energy Efficient Lighting OpEx Experiment

February 19, 2012 Leave a Comment

Over the past few months I’ve been changing over the most frequently used lights in my house with new energy efficient LED light bulbs. Many of the new bulbs have highly accurate color temperatures (important for consistent lighting over time…especially when illuminating photographs!) and have dramatically come down in price over the past few months.

Before I started this conversion process, I ran some lighting OpEx calculations to see how long it would take me to recover the higher cost of the LED lights. To my surprise, and thanks to my higher California cost of electricity, these new bulbs don’t take very long to pay for themselves. I recently shared the Excel spreadsheet I create to calculate the OpEx savings with a photographer who is opening up a gallery and invested in LED lights. I figured if he found it valuable others might as well, so I’m sharing it publicly here.

To use the calculator:

Download the Lighting Opex Calc document
Change the Average cost per Kilowatt Hour (yellow field) to your cost for electricity (industry calculations typically use $.11/KWH, I suspect most people’s are slightly higher like mine)
Update the rows for each similar wattage light on each room’s switch (add more rows and fill down the OpEx Costs fields as needed)
See how many Months/Years it will take to break even on the cost of the new light bulbs.

If you find this calculator valuable, drop me a line and let me know.

Some leasons learned to date:

Try LED bulbs purchased locally from stores with good return policies; when paying $30-$60 per bulb, you want to make sure it is exactly what you need now and for the next 10+ years, if it’s not perfect, take it back. These bulbs cost too much for them not to be exactly what you want. LED bulb manufacturers should also learn to package their bulbs in resealable packages for this specific reason…
I’ve had good luck with bulbs from Home Depot and Lowes…
If you have dimmer switches, your LED bulbs will be brighter than you expect at the lowest setting, something you have to get used to. And I’ve heard rumors of dimmer switches with more than 4-5 bulbs sometimes having problems where the bulbs flicker.
If you have digital dimmers designed for halogen lights (to not produce a hum), they won’t work with LED bulbs.

Running Legacy Workloads on vSphere

March 16, 2011 Leave a Comment

Here is an interesting video from Andy where he took the time to show the history of upgrading through each version of MS Windows by actually doing that inside a VMware VM!

Sure this video is interesting from the “wow, I remember that OS…how far we’ve come” aspect. But I find it more interesting from the “a current version of VMware could still run that old OS” aspect. I have a colleague who’s client “upgraded” their control system for their assembly line not by paying the $100,000’s upgrade price to install new hardware and move to the latest OS and controller software version, but by paying a few $10,000’s to P2V the existing controller systems to VMs and then run them all on two modern mid-range servers. These systems didn’t demand a lot of performance, they just needed to work. The old version of the OS and controller software weren’t broken, just the model in which it all operated (physical servers versus VMs).

One of my clients even has a “convalescence ESX cluster” where they move old apps to so they can die a slow hardware oversubscription death. These are apps that either can’t be tracked back to the owner but see an occasional blip of activity or are apps that the owners are steadfastly refusing to EOL. So rather than keep them running on old servers taking up rack space and excess power in the data center, they built a special ESX cluster just to run them all on. They are available and work when needed and it was the path of least resistance for the IT staff.

So, what Legacy workloads do you have running in a VMware VM in your datacenter? Leave a comment and let’s see what is the most obscure OS / Software Version we can find. Don’t worry…you can leave it anonymously to protect the guilty…

(Thanks goes out to @herrod for the pointer to the video.)