Virtualization – Page 19

Talking about Convergence of Private Clouds

July 27, 2009 1 Comment

A bit last minute, but for those in the Bay Area, I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow (Tuesday, 7/28) at SDForum’s Cloud Services SIG on the Convergence of Private Clouds. If you’re in the area and available, join the event…

I’ll try to post the presentation here after the event.

Virtualization Link Roundup 20090726

July 27, 2009 Leave a Comment

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!

How Virtualized Are You?

July 24, 2009 1 Comment

There was an interesting discussion today amongst some colleagues of mine. What is the industry average for the percent of corporate computing workloads that are virtualized? According to Gartner back in February, the estimated global virtualization penetration is expected to hit 20% in 2009 (it was 12% in 2008).

Of course the devil is always in the details. First, you have to correctly calculate your percentage virtualized. Second, are you counting all servers across your entire company or just those in your department? (i.e., Production IT, a Dev/Test group)

When I look at my client base, there are certain departments that are well above 20% virtualized. But, some of them are less than 20% virtualized company wide (assuming they even know how many servers they have across the entire company, those crafty buggers get good at hiding under desks…).

I thought it would be fun to run a highly un-scientific poll across my readers. How virtualized is your computing environment? To make it interesting, I’m going to break this down into two questions:

First:

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(Consider “Your Department” to be the group that you work for and have the most knowledge about)

Second:

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Please vote in both polls and spread the word about this post, the more who vote, the more interesting the results will be…