Archive for October, 2008

Mike Dipetrillo of the VMware Competitive Analysis team has an interesting take on the myth – that HyperV allows you to leverage your Microsoft skills to get up and running with HyperV quickly. This kinda keys into my last couple of posts about MS marketing strategy at VMWorld, and the VMTN site which shows harder/more steps are required to get started with HyperV than ESX3i…

http://mikedatl.typepad.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/09/hyper-v—the-w.html  

You might haven’t heard about this – but at VMworld 2008 Microsoft stand they were handing $1 poker chips apparently. Also on the card was a url to the affect that vmware costs to much .com…

http://www.vmwarecostswaytoomuch.com/

There were some unsubstantiated rumours that they were asked to leave. But there is no evidence to back up that. Still rather juvenille behaviour at best. Plus the association of poker chips with a major software vendor in this day-and-age seems a little cack-handed. Would you gamble your virtualization with HyperV?

You can read more about this viral-hype-marketing on the Microsoft Blog…

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2008/09/27/VMworld-is-over_2C00_-but-the-facts-remain.aspx

The guys at the Burton Group have another take on this altogether…

http://dcsblog.burtongroup.com/data_center_strategies/2008/09/microsofts-mist.html

Of course no matter how diligent you are – it’s impossible see every breakout session – sure in a few weeks time the whole darn thing with probably viewable from VMWorld.com – but its still nice to see other peoples take on the thing.

this crop come from Scott Lowe

PO1644: VMware Update Manager Performance and Best Practices
PO2061: VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 Database Best Practices
TA2644: Networking I/O Virtualization
VMware Keynote – Automating DR with VMware SRM

Just picked this up from Scott Lowe’s blog. It appears that LHN has been acquired by HP for $360 million in cash. So despite the credit crunch is seems like some companies still have money to splash about! I was surprised to here this, but then again perhaps not… Seems like the little guy always gets snapped up by the big guy. I quite liked the plucky independency of the iSCSI vendors – but I guess if they want to go global and get enterprize recognition being bought by a bigger player is the way to go. If its good enough for VMware….

Here’s the press release:

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/081001a.html  

I’m a bit embarassed to say this – but I came across a new VMotion warning the other day. I wasn’t aware that if a VM is configured for more than 4GB of memory – then when you try the VMotion a warning will appear (not error which is show stopper). So this will be going on my list of things to watch out for in future courses – as currently the courses I teach do not cover every single possible VMotion error or warning.

Interestingly, warning which you can see in the screen grab below is not in the usual user-friendly format (sic) but looks more like internal debugging message. Mind you this was taken on Vi3.5 U1 system, it might have changed in U2. The message states “Migration from esx2.rtfm-ed.co.uk to esx2.rtfm-ed.co.uk;

fault.MemoryNotRecommended.summary”

There’s beem a mixed response to VMware’s VDC-OS. Of course its all about the buzz/hyper/PR-Bonanza that is this cloud thing. I think the Register on this – comparing it to the various other attempts in the past.

Clearly, the last couple of years have questioned what we mean by the term “Operating System”. It is a kernel that handles memory, cpu, storage and network or is envolving into merely a “space” within which developers can write useful bits of code called programs.

I like to occasionally think like an end-user (although I try not act like one!). What do they want from us? What do they care about? As an end-user I want my applications (word, excel, outlook, msn, yahoo, skype, itunes) that I use on a daily basis. More over I want to be able to get to these applications either on my PDA, Online, Offline on my laptop. I think we sometime away from being able to write one application that will work in all of these environments.

The funniest thing I’ve read about clouds, is urban myth (urban truth?) that said the first cloud concept was created by guy who over resourced a datacenter, and had to think some way of bailing out the organization by reselling all the compute resources he had…

If you want to read what the register has to say – read on

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/26/virtual_dc_os/

Microsoft and others have been banging on about how “easy” it is to get up and running with HyperV. In response the people over on VMware’s VMTN website have put together a blog post to show how this just isn’t the case, especially when you compare it to ESX3i

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/09/vmware-vmware-v.html  

Sorry to people who come to RTFM on a regular basis. The site has been offline for a number of days due to it “exceeding bandwidth”. At first I thought I had an unusual peak of people downloading one of my PDF files or even a malicious DDOS style attack. After speaking with my hosting provider it became clear that this was not case. Instead it appears to series on semi-related events that cause the site to be pulled. Firstly, VMworld always peaks the traffic to the site and coming in the middle of the month this usually means I’ve already used some of the bandwidth allocated. Secondly, the fast majority of the hits was to RSS. It looks like people decide to bookmark the site using their RSS Feeders. In my experience most RSS Feeders download the last 100-150 posts unless you configure them otherwise – my theory is that was a surge of such subscribers post VMworld. Lastly, there appears to be an error in the WordPress blog – when RSS Feeders pull down the post – they appear to pulling down the entire post, not just the first couple of lines. If the posts contains images and those images are large – this can quickly saturated the bandwidth allocated to the site.

Anyway, sorry that the site has been affected. Normal service is resummed. I am working on a short-term and long term fix for this issue.