Another year, another week. Here we go again. Extremely busy week and announcements of companies acquiring other companies all over the place. Bloggers joining vendors or just changing jobroles. Crazy week, and same goes for the quality of the articles this week.
- Steve Kaplan – Microsoft’s attempt to commoditize virtualization
Despite these many unique attributes, VMware's most compelling differentiator may be its astounding reliability. Unlike Hyper-V, it offers data center stability, performance and security that is independent from the bloat, reliability and patching issues of a general-purpose operating system. Even Redmond Magazine, "The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community" gave its 2008 Editors Choice award for the most reliable IT technology to VMware ESX (the IBM mainframe came in #2). - Duncan Epping – esxtop values/thresholds!
I am a huge fan of esxtop! I read a couple of pages of the esxtop bible every day before I go to bed. Something I however am always struggling
with is the “thresholds” of specific metrics. I fully understand that it is not black/white, performance is the perception of a user. There must be a certain threshold however. For instance it must be safe to say that when %RDY constantly exceeds the value of 20 it is very likely that the VM responds sluggish. I want to use this article
to “define” these thresholds, but I need your help. There are many people reading these articles, together we must know at least a dozen metrics lets collect and document them with possible causes if known. - Martin MacLeod – Follow the moon, data center virtualization – a short essay
We introduced the world to server virtualization where instead of
having a server per application, we could buy a server with a bit more
memory, a bit more storage and have that ‘cut up’ and shared amongst
the business units. It worked on the whole very well, but IT was still
a bit confused and still is in many ways about how we charge for it and
how we ‘make a profit’ for their cost center, you see we can only
absorb so much before someone has to pay for the underlying
infrastructure the 400TB of storage, the 32GB of RAM in each server,
and compare that with the 1u special that might be good enough for a
given application, keeping the per unit virtual machine cost
competitive could be a challenge if we didn’t look at the way we billed
for capacity, for delivering IT service. - Gabrie van Zanten – Putting your storage to the test – Part 2 NFS on Iomega IX4-200D
I was surprised to see so much difference in performance, I had
expected some difference, but no difference as big as this. Looking at
the data of the first “Super ATTO Clone pattern” test I ran, I can see
the biggest difference between NFS and iSCSI being the short peak in
read speed where iSCSI remained stable after reaching its peak
performance at 41 MB/sec. NFS peaked to 110 MB/sec testing block sizes
from 32K to 512K and dropped in speed to 57 MB/sec on blocks of 1M and
larger. - Steve Chambers – Four economic variables and approaches to make your VDI solution successful
Put yourself in the shoes of a business manager: “Why should I pay
Internal IT $250/qtr for a hosted desktop when I can buy physical for
less/similar, or use a cloud offering?” The common response by
Internal IT to this question is: “You HAVE to buy from us!” (footnote:
even if we cost more and are worse). That kind of mandate might seem
smart, but it’s a key indicator that Internal IT is losing the battle
and has lost the war. If this is an Outsourcer saying this, then the
writing is on the wall for them and I can 100% guarantee they are going
to have to go through a tender at the end of their contract (expensive
for outsourcer).
