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.
