Blogs are a great way learning more about virtualization, getting the best technical tips, and keeping up with the news. (See my last post on Virtualization Alltop.) One of the nice developments of this year is that we’re seeing more VMware employees blogging.
One of our newest blogs is from Dave Lawrence, a VMware senior systems engineer. He asked for advice as he was starting his blog, and both Mike and I both told him that people come back if you provide value — writing about what you know, so it’s interesting, and posting every day, so there’s something to come back for.
Well, Dave evidently took our advice to heart, because the result is his new blog The VMguy, "Virtualization for the little guy." Dave’s focus is SMB, and I hope he keeps going in that direction, because there’s a dearth of virtualization resources for small business out there, but really the topics so far will be of interest to everybody. Some recent posts:
Which storage protocol is best?
This question is definitely one of the most common that I receive.
"We’re thinking of building a new infrastructure for our virtual
machines, which storage protocol should we use?" There are two things
to remember for this decision. Performance and functionality.
HCL Update Recap for the week (btw, new feeds will be coming in that area)
Notable KB Articles from the week
What does 80-cores mean to you?
When you’re running 32-cores in a server how many apps will utilize that
hardware? Virtualization is the only one. AMD and Intel’s "arms race"
of processors has left the average software application in the dust.
Most applications in customer’s environments don’t even remotely push
the CPU capacity in the datacenter. One of the few remaining ways to
utilize these types of processors is virtualization. If you have not
virtualized as much as you can, keep working towards it. Remember that
the 4 or 6 core CPU you purchased this year will be end-of-life in 3-5
years. Perhaps the replacement machine might just have one of the
80-core powerhouses in it. Then you will be able to migrate all of
your virtual machines to it, without having to modify a thing inside
them.
VMware Converter 4.0 now in beta
White Paper: RVI Performance
Redmondmag.com Reader’s Choice Awards announced
What is Enhanced vMotion Compatibility anyway?
One important factor to note. In order to enable EVC for a cluster,
you cannot have any virtual machines running on that cluster. All of
the virtual machines must be powered down (or a clean cluster with no
VMs.) This protects the stability of the existing VMs. If you had a
VM running on a host and it changed it’s CPUID while a VM was running,
it would appear to the OS and app that the CPU changed while the VM was
running, thus adding instability just like our original problem above.
Once EVC is enabled for a cluster, there are no more VM outages
required to add additional hosts to that cluster. …Another thing to be aware of: the FlexMigration (Intel) and Extended
Migration (AMD) features do not block the actual instructions
themselves. They only mask what the CPUID instruction reports. Back
in the 486 days, application programmers would figure out what CPU they
were on by trying different instructions. Intel formally added the
CPUID instruction in the first Pentium processors in the early 1990’s.
They also recommended that developers use this standard method going
forward to determine CPU functionality. This is a much better method
as it is much more consistent and reliable. The point is that it is
possible that there could be code in use today, from the early 1990’s,
that has not been upgraded and does not use the standard CPU checking
with CPUID and tries to determine CPU capability by "trying functions."
Should I buy blades or standalones for my virtualization platform?
VirtualCenter, run it on physical or virtual?
Dave already has it down — a mix of news, tech tips, commentary, and discussion, all inspired by his day job interacting with hundreds of small businesses — and his blog is very worth keeping up with. Please welcome Dave to the virtualization blogosphere.
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