Virtual Enthusiasm

Real-Time Infrastructure

nospam@example.com (Clint Eschberger) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:50:43 -0500

I was reading an article today from Gartner and one term really jumped out at me, "Real-Time Infrastructure". There are many ways to interpret that term or change it around to "Just-In-Time Infrastructure". For so long the data center was a very static system that due to its lack of agility created un-necessary complexity and cost. With virtualization both in the form of hypervisors (ESX, Xen, Hyper-V) and I/O virtualalization (Dell/Egenera, Cisco, HP) we are seeing the shift from rigid to agile hardware.
Continue reading "Real-Time Infrastructure"

Egenera Ships 6th-Generation Blades

nospam@example.com (Clint Eschberger) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:24:12 -0500

Egenera Ships 6th-Generation Blades based on Quad-Core Intel Processor 5500 Series

Egenera announces general availability of its new family of 2-socket Egenera® Processing Blade™ offerings based on Intel® 5500 series processors, previously codenamed “Nehalem.”

Continue reading "Egenera Ships 6th-Generation Blades"

Challenge "Mission Critical" Complexity

nospam@example.com (Clint Eschberger) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:25:23 -0500

I was reading my fellow blogger's, Fountnhead, post titled "Why (and How) Low-Cost Servers Will Dominate" and I could not help but notice that the opportunity to challenge the long standing idea that your "Mission Critical" infrastructure has to be complex.

Traditionally the more critical your application/system is to your business, the more complex the infrastructure is. The reasons are obvious as you have to have a high level SLA to make sure those systems are always available and/or recoverable in a very short amount of time.

Continue reading "Challenge "Mission Critical" Complexity"

Max amount of VMs per VMFS volume

nospam@example.com (Clint Eschberger) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:06:08 -0500

Great post over on Yellow Bricks about figuring out how many VMs per VMFS volume. This has always been one of the toughest parts of planning your virtual infrastructure's storage setup.

Here is a quote...

So in other words, the max amount of virtual machines per volume
multiplied by the average size of a virtual machine plus 20% for snaps
and .vswp rounded up. (As pointed out in the comments if you have VMs
with high amounts of memory you will need to adjust the % accordingly.)
This should be your default VMFS size. Now a question that was asked in
one of the comments, which I already expected, was “how do I determine
what the maximum amount of VMs per volume is?”. There’s an excellent white paper
on this topic. Of course there’s more than meets the eye but based on
this white paper and especially the following table I decided to give
it a shot

View the full post HERE..

Disaster Recovery an Afterthought?

nospam@example.com (Clint Eschberger) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:13:00 -0500

In my role I get to listen to they way a lot of CIO and IT leaders think. To be honest I know how they feel as IT has generally been looked down upon by the rest of the business. You always have "critical" projects, hardware refreshes, new software, support, and a whole lot of infrastructure planning, not to mention cost. When you ask most of these guys what is their Disaster Recovery plan, you get the 1000 yard stare, yes I stole that. DR, while at the time of crisis is the single most important part of keeping a business running, is generally an afterthought up until that occurs.

The sad thing is, with solutions like hypervisors (VMware, XEN, Hyper-V, etc.) on the virtual side and the new wave of fabric based computing (Cisco UCS, HP Matrix, and Dell/Egenera PAN System), DR has really became a whole lot easier and cost efficient to do.

Continue reading "Disaster Recovery an Afterthought?"

R.I.P. Virtual Iron

nospam@example.com (Clint Eschberger) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:04:29 -0500

Looks like Oracle does not feel the need to have three separate hypervisors based on XEN.

Quote from The Register..

Little more than a month after acquiring Virtual Iron for an undisclosed fee, Oracle is effectively killing the company's virtualization product.

In a letter to Virtual Iron's sales partners, Oracle says it "will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers." And in a second letter to a partner speaking with The Reg, the company says it will not allow partners to sell new licenses to anyone - including existing customers - after the end of this month (i.e. in 11 days). Before then, partners can only sell licenses to existing customers under certain conditions.

Full Story