This is the last Top 5 for this year, well almost. Of course I will try to capture 2009 in a Top 5 or a Top 10 blog posts article. Not sure though as it will take some time to re-read and "grade" all articles. This week was a bit chaotic for me personally. I had the week off which means that I have to do "real" work. Play with the kids, clean up around the house and we left to Disneyland Paris the day before Christmas. We, especially the kids, had a great time and enjoyed ourselves with Mickey, Mini, Donald, Buzz, Goofy and the rest. I guess those are my Top 5 for this week but that is not why you are reading this article:
- Steve Kaplan – Cisco UCS vs. HP Matrix: strategic vs. tactical approach to virtualization
The initial HP Matrix press release appears to be the first public mention of the product; it is hard to imagine that it resulted from a long-term data center strategy. The HP-sponsored April, 2009 IDC white paper, HP BladeSystem Matrix: Enabling Adaptive Infrastructure, says "HP is not introducing any brand-new technologies". Matrix not only lacks innovation, it feels like a work in progress. Even the "adaptive infrastructure" messaging used to introduce Matrix last April appears to have been replaced by "dynamic infrastructure". - Duncan Epping – IOps
So how do we factor this penalty in? Well it’s simple for instance for
RAID-5 for every single write there are 4 IO’s needed. That’s the
penalty which is introduced when selecting a specific RAID type. This
also means that although you think you have enough spindles in a single
RAID Set you might not due to the introduced penalty and the amount of
writes versus reads. - Steve Chambers – Does your Desktop Service Strategy look a bit like this?
If using VDI technology to deploy Desktop Services is a great idea (according to the alleged market size, and vendor/consumer bustle in that market place, it seems to be so) then how do you do it? Well, according to ITIL, you start with a Service Strategy. I’m no ITIL kung fu master, and this is by choice because I consider ITIL a minor tool that, at best, needs to be used in conjunction with other tools to do the job and it’s not the be-all or end-all. ITIL’s better than nothing, but it’s not everything. - Chethan Kumar – Using solid-state drives to improve performance of SQL databases on vSphere hosts when memory is overcommitted
Performance of certain applications such as databases running in a
vSphere based virtual infrastructure can be affected when demand for
memory increases beyond what is available on the host. vSphere uses
complex memory reclamation techniques to acquire and reallocate memory
to VMs that need it. Swapping memory pages of a virtual machine to a
swap file located on physical storage media is one such technique.
Swapping is known to have a negative effect on the performance of the
application in the VM. The degree to which the performance is affected
depends on the I/O performance of the storage media used to host the
swap file. Recently, I ran a few experiments to study the possibility
of using a solid state device (SSD) as swap storage in virtualized SQL
environments. - Tom Howarth – How To: configure sudo on ESX
Now if the invoking user is root or if the target user is the same as
the invoking user then no password is required. Otherwise, sudo
requires that users authenticate themselves with a password by default.
Once a user has been authenticated, a timestamp is updated and the user
may then use sudo without a password for a short period of time (15
minutes unless overridden in sudoers).
