Its just another layerhow deep does the abstraction go?

Virtual Iron dead in the water?

OpenSolaris and Server Virtualization | Jul 8, 2009

Is this true? If so what's Oracle's game plan? They just buy Virtual Iron for a virtualization management. Appear to have a clue since they are buying Sun with a huge virtualization skill set and product line. Then this info comes along?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/19/oracle_kills_virtual_iron/

In a letter to Virtual Iron's sales partners, Oracle says it "will suspend development of existing Virtual Iron products and will suspend delivery of orders to new customers." And in a second letter to a partner speaking with The Reg, the company says it will not allow partners to sell new licenses to anyone - including existing customers - after the end of this month.

So is Oracle's plan just to cannibalize Sun & Virtual Iron's code and forsake all the customers they bought?

Makes me pretty sad since I'm a big Sun fan with OpenSolaris and I have the fear that they will do the same thing there.

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Cluster size of 8 is the only size to do

Server Virtualization and VMware | Jun 2, 2009

For a large organization that has more than 8 VMware Hosts (nodes) one should only make 8 node clusters for the time being according to the vSphere 4 Config Max doc.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_config_max.pdf

If you look on page 7 it says "Configurations exceeding 40 VMs per host are limited to cluster size no greater than 8 nodes".

What that means is to be supported you have the following chart:

8 Nodes x 100 VMs / Node == 800 VMs per cluster max

9 Nodes x 40 VMs / Node == 360 VMs per cluster max

20 Nodes x 40 VMs/ Node == 800 VMs per cluster max

32 Nodes x 40 VMs / Node == 1,280 VMs per clustre max

Now I might not be too smart here some days though I think the math is pretty obvious. Either I do 4 clusters of 8 nodes to give me 3,200 VMs on 32 boxes or I stick them all into one nice big cluster and get 1,280 VMs out of those 32 boxes. Easy math to me.

The question I have out of this is, why do you document it this way? That sure is confusing and I could have easily missed that.

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vSphere 4 is GA and I can't download it

VMware | May 22, 2009

vSphere 4 is now GA and available for download if you are evaluating it. However if you have Support & Service contract for in-line free upgrade of your licenses, your out of luck (or at least this morning when I tried 3 different ways).

If I went in and said I wanted to evaluate it, then I could download everything just fine.

If I get an email saying vSphere 4 is ready for download I should be able to download it. Am I asking too much?

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LoadTesting takes a turn with Server Virtualization

Server Virtualization | May 19, 2009

Just recently I had an interesting conversation with one of my clients. In this internal consult with her, she comes to me and says of our VMware Solutions that there is a

"potential issue with 4 vCPUs and scheduling"

I looked at her and was a bit confused. I told her

"No.. there isn't a scheduling issue for 4 vCPUs in our environment."

The response was

"Well in our last consult effort, the solution was changing the system down to 2 vCPUs instead of using 4 vCPUs."

Ah ha. I understand now. The light bulb suddenly came on.

One of the big benefits in Server Virtualization is the idea that we can make some rather "drastic" (by legacy mentality) changes to a Machine/OS instance that you couldn't or didn't want to do in a physical system.

  1. Ask yourself, When was the last time I went and pulled out Processors from a physical system in load testing? I'll bet you a beer at VMworld that you haven't done that in years if ever.
  2. Now when's the last time you changed a Virtual Machine from a 4 vCPU to a 2 vCPU system to try to improve performance of a given OS instance. I'll bet a beer again that you have done this in the last 60 days.


It is so easy for us to make those changes we don't think of the appearance of how it looks to our end clients. As in my recent discussion, they assumed that this was due to VMware ESX not being able to schedule multiple CPUs well. This may have been due to poor wording on my part or a leap of logic by my internal clients. In reality it is more likely, after I've gone back and started digging into some of the metrics collected at that time, that the application itself doesn't work as efficiently with 4 vCPUs as it does with 2 vCPUs.

Also it is very easy and a lazy / simple approach for us as IT folks to just assume that since I've got two sockets quad core in a physical that the load testing that we've done is going to be the fastest application performance we can get. The reality of the situation is that unless we do some tests covering changing the hardware around we really have no idea that if I got a single core, single socket my application may run (WAY) faster. We just don't know.

If your serious about IT and doing things Right and Correct for your company and yourself, you have to be honest with what your looking at (metrics and performance) and what it really means to yourself (flexibility) and to your clients (appearance). I know I've had a fantastic ephinany and that will help me be a better IT person now.

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