The World Cup tournament just entered the knockout stage. Today England plays against Germany and I guess it is needless to say that I will be supporting England, or should I say "Engerland"? (Hey, no one loves their neighbours.) All of this has of course nothing to do with the reason I am writing this article. This article is about the top 5 Planet V12n articles of week 25. This week we've got a "newcomer", I guess this is my way of saying welcome William. Here we go:
- Kendrick Coleman – Why vSphere Needs NFSv4
If you are familiar with my blog, you'll know that I'm a huge advocate of the NFS protocol with VMware. I firmly believe that over the next few years, ethernet storage will be the front-runner of VMware deployments. Most of the people that I talk to that have a Fiber-Channel (FC) based environment are in large enterprises that made the switch to VMware but used their existing FC environment. Which is great, but now is the time everyone is starting to virtualize their whole environment and money talks when it comes to scalability. I won't go into Ethernet vs FC because there is boat loads of information already out there, but let's talk about NFS. NFS is that guy sitting in the corner that doesn't get much attention, but NFS is making headway into the marketplace. - Vaughn Stewart – Data Compression, Deduplication, & Single Instance Storage
Storage savings technologies are all the rage of the storage and backup industries. While every vendor has their own set of capabilities, it is in the best interest for any architect, administrator, or manager of data center operations to have a clear understanding of which technology will provide benefits to which data sets before enabling these technologies. Saving storage while impeding the performance of a production environment is a sure-fire means to updating one's resume. - Daniel Eason – VMware DPM usage – My view
DPM technology is excellent and to be honest plain common sense, it has moved from being experimental into full blown production supportable within the later versions of ESX and now as a de facto proven product within vSphere. Core Main benefit of DPM is simple, it will dynamically turn off virtual hosts that are not needed at non peak times which is great, it avoids the cost that would have been occurred by running even vSphere hosts in an under utilised state. So I’ll get to the point do I think DPM is capability that can be used it to obtain the saving to anyone? well not really to be honest, I am in the non enthusiastic camp when it comes to DPM and the reasons I think this are as follows… - William Lam – ESXi syslog caveat
Append the above entries between the … tags. Once you have updated the vpxa.cfg file, you will want to run the follow command on the Busybox console to ensure the changes are saved and backed up to the local bootbank for ESXi. There is an automated cron job that runs every hour which calls /sbin/auto-backup.sh - Scott Drummonds – Private Clouds, People Consolidation, and Chargeback
The beauty of virtualization is that not only can the physical resources be shared, as any VMware demonstration will prove, but the people that support the infrastructure can be shared, too. This concept is already understood by VMware’s more mature customers, who have been telling VMware for years that virtualization can save more money in operational expenses than capital expenses. These savings are coming after thinning the ranks of dedicated infrastructure specialists and refocusing them on higher value opportunities.
