VMTN Blog

It was an exciting week this week. For some the VCE announcement was not a real surprise for many it seemed to be. Like always some were skeptical and others were enthusiastic about this new initiative. The first post on this Top 5 covers every single aspect, keep in mind that Chad is an EMC employee. I can also recommend the articles by Chuck Hollis on this topic but as he is not part of PlanetV12n he did not make the top 5:

• Chad Sakac - VCE Coverage: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3, Post 4, Post 5, Post 6
  Let’s focus on the “Vblock” management layer. To restate the challenge – the goal is to have a thing that makes utility-like management of a Vblock (or more importantly a series of them), including server + LAN/SAN network (UCS manager does this well for one UCS system) + storage itself. As with all things in the VMware, Cisco, EMC consortium, we know customers need choice – and any one element is replaceable. The value proposition is that the things we build are so tightly focused, so tightly integrated, that if you are looking at something like this – the integration value is so high it’s nearly irresistible.
• Alan Renouf - Virtu-Al VESI & PowerGUI PowerPack & vCheck v3
  I have been teasing people on twitter for a week or so now and have just uploaded my PowerPack to the PowerGUI site, you can download it here. This is a first attempt at providing most of my scripts in one PowerPack and adding to the already great management that VESI and PowerGUI give you.
• Andre Leibovic - Your Organization’s Desktop Virtualization Project – Part 1 & Part 2
  I would anticipate that when your CAPEX is calculated for the next 5 years after the adoption of desktop virtualization your CIO and CEO will not be very impressed only with the numbers, especially if you have incorporated acquisition of Thin Clients to your CAPEX. If you are looking for a justification to adopt desktop virtualization you should focus on your OPEX and cost savings coming from Lower Operating Cost/TCO, Power and Cooling Energy Savings and increased seat utilization, when applicable.
• Mike Laverick - Virtual Compute Environment - VMware, Cisco and EMC Coalition
  So here’s my attempt. It seems the case that whether you like or not - we are creeping steadily away from a best-of-breeds approach to building out datacenters. Everyone yaks endless about the commoditization of IT - and it’s happening right before our eyes. Each of the major OEMs - HP, IBM, Dell have been for sometime junking their valued partner relationships in effort to seal their customers into a one-stop solution. Of course, IBM are probably the company that’s most famous/notorious for this approach. In recent years, HP have been steadily improving their HP ProCurve stuff to the degree that they no longer feel the need to promote/resell Cisco switching gear. To me the VCE announcement amounts to 4th OEM provider coming along to this party. So in short while you will be able to CHOOSE which OEM to shackle yourself too. This choice will be limited to the “Gang of Four”.
• Duncan Epping - How to avoid HA slot sizing issues with reservations
  When you select a specific percentage that percentage of the total amount of resources will stay unused for HA purposes. First of all VMware HA will add up all available resources to see how much it has available. Then VMware HA will calculate how much resources are currently consumed by adding up all reservations of both memory and cpu for powered on virtual machines. For those machine that do not have a reservation a default of 256Mhz will be used for CPU and a default of 0MB+memory overhead will be used for Memory.