Archive for March, 2009

I had to smile at Chris Wolf blog post about performance – it pokes a little fun at us instructors – who when asked a question – respond “It depends…”

http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=303

In fairness. It quite often does “depend” – on many variables that are almost to completely nail down. In fact I say “It depends…” so often that I’ve sometime toyed with having it printed on one of my VMware polo shirts – not that a brand polo shirt, baseball cap, cup – and other merchendising wearing instructor. Its a choice between “It depends” and “Don’t forget August the 12th…”

Chris’ post centres around some claim and counter-claim about performance in the old chestnut of MS Vs VMware Vs Xen debate -  that will be rumbling on into the next decade if current traffic persists. Personally, as soon as performance claims or TCO/ROI claims are made by any vendor their website – I start to sniff there air. Have you ever been on a vendors website that say “Our product has exceptionally poor performance which falls well below any of our competitors – and will inceases your TCO and decrease your ROI”?

Again on from Chad’s blog is the news that EMC have developed a failback plug-in for vCenter & VMware Site Recovery Manager. If you don’t there currently isn’t an automated process for failback after a failover for SRM. Well, those clever folks at EMC have writen a plug-in which precisely does that! I think this is the shape of things to come – with more and more vendors plug-in them into vCenter just like EMC have. Incidentally, I think NetApp has done something similiar – but not for SRM – just general storage stuff. The documentation behind this from EMC is on their PowerLink system – you need a PowerLink account to download it…

http://powerlink.emc.com/km/live1/en_US/Offering_Technical/Software_Download/EMC_Celerra_VMware_vCenter_Site_Recovery_Manager_Failback_Plug-in_v1.0.zip

I’m catching up on some overdue blogging. The truth is I’ve been so wrapped up in my vSphere4 book, to blog about day-to-day events. Anyway, I’m sat on the sofa with last nights “Heroes” in the background – and thought I would do some blogging whilst my step-daughter watches the repeat on the Sky+ box.

When I was a VMware Europe in Feb (yes, I told you this was long overdue). I bumped into Chad from EMC who runs his virtualgeek.typepad.com blog. Anyway, Chad collared me to try and persuade me to come along. (Sorry, Chad I sucked into SnuggieGate by mistake). Anyway, there was on thing that peeked my interest – his ideas on using solid-state disks in array. Late last year I poo-poo’d the idea of local SSD in some just-another-virtualization-blades that HP were touting. I’d never really considered them in shared storage. But Chad built an argument was around less spindles, equals less power as cost saving. Must admit a was a little sceptical but as he went on this began to make sense. Aparently, these SSD based arrays are flying off the selves – so it looks like EMC must have a compelling argument. Anyway, I will leave it to Chad to make the usage case he’s the storage guy, not me…

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/02/solid-state-disks-enterprisevmware-ready-or-not.html

Wednesday, March 25, 2009 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT

Join us on Wednesday, March 25 for an exclusive webinar that will showcase how Mobile Admin 4.2 extends your IT reach like never before. 

Mobile Admin 4.2 delivers new functionality and product enhancements that make it easier than ever to manage your IT infrastructure from anywhere, at any time. 

    * Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 
    * Microsoft Systems Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 SP1 
    * VMware Virtual Infrastructure 
    * BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5 
    * Audit Logging 
    * Credential management 
    * Windows Mobile SSH/Telnet and VNC integration 
     
In addition, Mobile Admin 4.2 includes enhanced data routing, usability improvements and online help accessible from all supported clients.

www.roveit.com/webinars

On Friday I did site visits (something I rather foolish didn’t do with my current provider!) on two hosting/colocation providers in my local area (the East Midlands area). I’ve become increasing disatisified with my current provider – and want to check out what was on offer. Incidentally, my current provider doesn’t host this blog – but rather the 42U racks worth of kit that allows me to develop new courses, and write books. I’ve visited two locations near to me – iomart.com in central Nottingham, and node4.co.uk in Derby’s Pride Park. 

I was very impressed by both location – in fact before even rang the doorbell (so to speak) I could tell that both locations were the next level up in terms of hosting equipment – with the proper security, power infrastructure, cooling and so on. I would have to admit where I currently am is not a location I would recommend, but I could easily recommend these two locations to my customers if I was asked for advice. 

What really got me buzzing is both locations have fibre links to nearer sites. Node4 has fibre between Derby and Wakefield – and iomart.com has connectivity between Nottingham and Leicester. Now, that got me thinking. Rather than one rack in one location with 3 SANs – there’d be nothing stopping me having two half-height racks in two locations with a pipe between them – that would allow me to do Site Recovery Manager for real!

For the moment I’m locked into a contract for the next few months – and really loathing the whole hassle of re-racking my kit. But I think its likely I will buying new servers in the next few months to make sure I have the vLockstep attribute required for VMware FT… 

To celebrate the arrival of yet another advertiser on RTFM – it’s my pleasure to release chapter 2 & 3 of my popular VMware Site Recovery Manager book. The chapter on Lefthand Networks VSA is somewhat dated – one of my projects is to update my chapter on iSCSI in my vSphere4 book to match the functionality of the new VSA… and also at the same time update the chapter on LHN so it matches with SAN IQ8.

Remember you can still buy the book in EMEA at much reduced cost via the VMworld EMEA store (whilst stocks last) – alternatively, if you prefer to buy the SRM book in the US it is still available on LULU.com. 

Work is coming along well with vSphere4 book. My hope is that by the end of the month – I should have working copy I can distribute to my VMTN reviewers and internally to VMware. The plan is to still have an “authors” edition out on LULU on the day of the GA – with a hope of having the final “cut” so to speak ready for VMworld in San Francisco.

Download Chapter 2

Download Chapter 3

I’d like to introduce you to new advertiser on the RTFM website – roveit.com and there “Mobile Admin 4.2″ product. Increasing people want to manage their virtual infrastructure on the go – with Mobile Admin you can do just that. It’s been developed for Blackberry, Windows Mobile – and they also support the iPhone via its Safari web-browser. Screen grabs below and ad up at the top for free 14-day evaluation.

http://www.roveit.com/mobileadmin/overview/

It seems like MS had a bit of an outage… Time to reboot the cloud?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/16/azure_cloud_crash

Well, I hit the buffers – which is to be expect – you can’t create an VM inside ESX running inside VM. Let’s be honest it would be great if you could but a bit nutty. My question is – how does VMware “know” I’m doing this… After all when it’s added into VC, the virtual ESX4 server just looks like an other ESX host. Admittedly, the virtual ESX VM is running in the same VC, as the physical ESX host that (erm) hosts it… 

I’m gonna try to find some way of isolating further. The interesting thing is this – if VMware can tell I’m doing this, and stop it from happening. Then VMware could programatically allow it. I dunno, perhaps VMware is trying to protect its product and me – from disappearing up its own ***hole….