I’m subscriber to Scott Lowe’s blog – he’s very strong on the relationships between VMware and NetApp. Here’s a cluster of his blogposts.
Important Note Regarding VMware over NFS
VMware ESX NetApp storage deduplication enhancements
Recently Red Hat & AMD shows how they could do a “Live Migrate” of VM running an Intel server to an AMD server.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=EuhU6jJjpAQ
Mike DiPetrillo has a very good summary about this might not be a very good idea. After all American English and British English are similiar languages, but there are differences…
I notice Mike has moved his blog, but his look has changed… to the old Kubrick theme my blog used to have on WordPress!
Well, you know EVERY goddamn week this comes up as an informal topic discussed over the water-cooler on my training courses. You know if I had a dollar for everytime this got debated since I’ve been involved with VMware since 2003 – I would be very rich man.
Massimo on his IT2.0 blog has what I think is the most saniest neutral debate on this which I have heard in sometime. To be honest I find the clarvoyant (lets predict the future) stuff a bit tiresome. That’s no disrespect to IT2.0 by the way – just it comes up at the water-cooler so much. I just take a deep breathe and sigh – and say, well not neccessarily – its a little bit complicated than that:
In very tongue-in-cheek blog post, Eric Gray on his VCritical blog has a satirical take on Microsoft SCVMM and how it handles ISO files. Don’t know about you – but every time I see SCVMM, it looks like SCUM…#
http://www.vcritical.com/2008/10/storage-vendors-unanimously-applaud-scvmm-innovation/
Glenn on virtualizationinformation.com here has an interesting post about experiences of rolling out VDI in a large scale environment. There are some useful points for everyone here thinking of getting VDI. By the way, that’s not sexually transmitted infection!
I’ve not got much to say about this – but to point my readers to a couple of blog posts – to say that is ENTIRELY resonable to virtualization Microsoft Exchange on the ESX platform. Check this out:
University virtualizes massive Exchange environment with VMware
Is Microsoft Exchange 2007 Supported on VMware
VMworld Europe 2008 – AP03 – Virtualization of Microsoft Exchange Server
David Marshall on his vmblog.com has an interesting report on virtualization adoption.
I find this survery/study interesting. Because there does seem to be mistaken assumption that virtualization isn’t for small/medium size business – coupled with a mistaken notion that somehow virtualization and VMware Products especially represents some premium-race-horse-class system that’s only for the top100/0/00 fortune companies. That’s far from the truth.
Here’s an idea. Download for FREE VMware’s ESX3i product and install to server on the HCL with plenty of RAM and CPU. Next install Microsoft SBS product to the VM. A week/month/quarter the small biz, say hey we need a small Terminal Services/VDI deployment – OK, no need to buy more physical, just create more virtual. Next week/month/quarter the same small biz says, hey we want Blackberry and need a Blackberry RIM server – no problem say – another VM is on its way… After while they begin to see how much they have invested in this one physical box. No worries, lets get some cheap NAS solution in and another ESX box – and think about VMware HA. Sounds like a big leap up – not if you look at the Foundation Accelation Pack….
I’m catching up with other blogs in the virtualization space. My fellow bloggers Chris Wolf and Mike D both have blogposts on the topic of DPM (Distributed Power Management)
http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=203
http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/11/vmware-distribu.html
In case you don’t know the concept is this. Couple with some performance monitoring tools such as VMware DRS and some kind of live migrate feature like VMware VMotion. The system detects that you could actually move VMs around to then allow the power off of physical hosts in to ACPI Standby mode. As the load peaks or returns, these physical hosts are then booted by using the “Magic Packet” associated with the Wake-On-LAN support on most NICs (a feature thats been around since the advent of PXE). The selling point is you consumme less power when the VMs are not in use.
Currently this feature (like many in Vi3.5, grrr) is “experimental” i.e not fully supported but should work. So from the get-go your unlikely to get this approved for production use in corporate datacenter where “full support” only is the rule. So, the bigger question is what’s the point and is it worth while.
I would probably be conservative right now and agree with Chris Wolf’s take on this. BUT… there are cases where it could be quite compelling. Firstly, how about only powering on physical hosts in DR location when its needed, and based on how much you power on based on different recovery scenarios. Greate idea huh? Well, yes – but for the moment such DR tools like VMware’s very own Site Recovery Manager are not supported in this configuration. Secondly, in non-mission critical environments such as test & dev it would be extremely wise to only power on what physical ESX hosts you need, when you need them. Thirdly, and this would be a bit more contentious is in VDI. Only powering on ESX hosts as when users demand additional resources – or concurrency demands it.
As for production server based VMs providing network services to hundreds of users, it would brave man who would rely on a magic packet to power on an ESX host. For me in the world corporate datacenters – the only thing that powers on or off a physical host is human being authorised by change-management request….
VMware has announced a whole series of product renames – to make it clear to everyone what their products are about. [Pause for laughing]. Of course VMware got the whole darn idea from RTFM. I’ve been saying vCenter for sometime. Once I even had my hand slapped by someone in VMware for calling VirtualCenter vCenter instead. I was taken to nearest bathroom, and mouth was washed out with soap and water – just like my granny did when I used to swear at her. I was an angelic child you see.
So anyway. Forget about VirtualCenter that’s so 2003, its vCenter now – that’s 2009.
I guess VMware are not alone in this product-name-goal-post-moving-exercise-because-some-marketing-PR-person-said-it-would-be-good-idea stuff. Here’s all the names that Citrix have had for using a ICA client to thinly deliver a desktop or application.
WinFrame Server, MetaFrame 1.8 Server, MetaFrame XP Server, Presentation Server, XenApp…
Well, a couple of months ago VMware and many other US software vendor annouced a 10% price increase. Hey, that really helps to defeat the mistaken impression that products are “premium”, just for “enterprize business” and are “expensive”. Anyway, no soon had VMware and Citrix and others jacked up their prices, then prices went down again.
The rationale for the first increase was all down to currencies. You see up until recently the greenback was weak against the euro and british pound [Watch out, the British are coming!!!] The argument was our strong currencies were kicking the butt of the US Dollar and we getting products priced in US dollars way cheaper than we should have. Tut-Tut. Clearly, nobody was looking at the price of barrel oil when they made this statement. The problem with this argument was the weakness of the dollar against other currency was not some wierd event that just started in 2008. It actually began back in 2001. I aint saying nothing about what the significant event was in 2001 for fear of being flamed alive! 
.
But do you remember what President Bush said “It’s voodoo economics”. Then Reagan made Bush Snr his VP after Bush had run against Reagan in the Primaries!
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-voodoo-economics.htm
Anyway, like it or lump it – whether you think there is any rationale to the currency argument – the prices got cut again. Back down by 10%. Why? Well, market conditions had change – more excrement hitting the fan apparently… Anyway, my favourite photo of recent times – was sign placed on a lampost opposite Wall Street. All it said “Hey, bankers – why aren’t you jumping?” [or words to that affect] Looking back on that photo – i thought it was probably in very bad taste considering that other event that happened in 2001….
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