VMTN Blog

Blogging seems to be a trend in our virtualization community. It is becoming really hard to keep up with the flow of incoming information and that is when people start filtering. I try to keep as up to date as humanly possible on what is happening in the world of virtualization bloggers, but I must admit I also filter. One of the blogs that I have not filtered out is Ken's Virtual Reality, which is maintained by Ken Cline. Those of you who are active on the VMTN Community forums will recognize this name as Ken is a VMTN moderator and a heavy contributor for years. To quote Mike Laverick "Ken Cline is the grand-master-flash-melly-mel of VMware and was already an experienced VMware person before I even opened an account on the VMware Forums."

Ken recently started a blog and has been primarily focused on virtual networking so far. Traditionally virtual switches and port groups have always been a hot item on the VMTN Community forums. The first topic Ken addressed is Service Console redundancy. The article contains the four most used scenarios. Each scenario contains an extensive explanation, diagram and scorecard. I concur with Ken's conclusion, keep it simple.

I’ve noticed something about engineers. They’re never happy with the way something is configured out of the box - there’s always a better way! Well, I have a different philosophy: “If you don’t have a very good reason to change a default value, don’t change it!”

The discussions on this article led Ken to a new series of posts on vSwitches, The Great vSwitch Debate. This series is constructed of three parts which address every single aspect of vSwitches including a basic explanation, VLANs, security and load balancing. One might say that these topics have been adressed by many bloggers already but Ken takes it to the next level. For instance Part 3 deep-dives in to the actual algorithms being used for load balancing and what the advantages and disadvantages are.

These articles are by no means a beginners guide to virtual networking, but there is something to be learned for each level of expertise. This is why these articles will be in my personal top 10 virtualization blog articles for 2009.

• The Great vSwitch Debate - Part 1
• The Great vSwitch Debate - Part 2
• The Great vSwitch Debate - Part 3