VMware
|
Apr 22, 2009
It's official. There's about a zillion blog postings and news articles coming out about the next generation of ESX.
In watching the press conference yesterday the one thing that really hit me is that this is the next game changer. Cloud computing has been stuck for years in lock-in approaches. Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure are development environments that you really need to develop to for your apps to work. The designs and setup have to be extremely customized to function. This is the main reason cloud computing hasn't taken off full scale. No cross vendor solutions. No ability to take my application out of the box deploy to the cloud system and it just works. No way for me to honestly develop in house and then move it easily to the cloud.
vSphere 4 (or Cloud Infrastructure) is the first Cloud Computing solution that I have seen that doesn't lock you into a specific vendor. I can run Microsoft Azure on top of vSphere 4 (woah!). It can run on my infrastructure of commodity parts (yeah.. that white box I have can be a cloud computing solution). I can set it up, test it, run it in my basement, then deploy it up to a cloud provider with more bang and power than I have. I can develop on linux, suse, freebsd, windows, or solaris and have the whole thing packaged up as a deliverable tool. No middleman. This is a powerful concept. This is the game changer.
The reason Microsoft OSes took off in the early '90s is they were simply the easiest and most accessible development environment out there. Today Linux/Java/Web is taking most of that development energy by storm. It costs me nothing to develop solutions on those products. If I can setup a development environment of my own without having to pay some thousands of dollars just to get started with the tools, I can make the next facebook/twitter/ebay. I don't have to be a corporation to develop a solution.
VMware gets that and Paul Maritz was a key component of that understanding at Microsoft. Welcome to the next great thing.
Continue reading »
VMware
|
Apr 3, 2009
Good friend of mine calls me and hollers on 1 Apr that his websites aren't working. I look and find out that the DNS servers at register.com aren't responding. After a call to Register.com they say "not our issue and is something happening to the net".
Guess it is their issue.
My friend can't wait for this to end to move his stuff to a different Registrar.
Continue reading »
Uncategorized
|
Apr 3, 2009
Sun to be bought by IBM for $7 billion. SGI bought by Rackable for $25 million.
The SGI purchase I can understand as Rackable wants to be a one stop shop for their customers. SGI has been on a downward spiral for years. Who needs to buy a super expensive custom OS/Hardware to do graphics processing or HPC when I can get commodity hardware and do just as well if not better?
The Sun purchase doesn't make much sense to me. IBM has no need/want for a new OS and it sure can't be for the sales force/contacts that Sun has. I can think two things that it "might" want. One is to expand their server hardware line to AMD though why? IBM is well known for their "better than Intel" line of Intel x86 chips and Sun is of the same quality generation in AMD terms. The other thing I can think of is that IBM wants to take full control of the Java Stack. They have a heavy investment in WebSphere and is one of their more profitable product lines so why not take control all the way down if you can?
Continue reading »
VMware
|
Mar 21, 2009
My good friend has found another VI Toolkit call that is amazingly slow compared to pulling useful data from it. I've done performance testing before of Get-VM against Get-View to get to the useful data needed day to day. In that test using Get-View was 18x faster than using Get-VM.
This past week he was able to dig through the API/mob to find disk data for individual VMs for an internal tracking and reporting system we have. This time he found a way to get the majority of useful data from Get-Harddisk a different way. Rather significant change in speed with another couple hours of work.
This report he generates goes through about 1/2 of our VMs to pull VMDK information.
Get-HardDisk => 35 hours
New method => 2 mins 15 seconds
Yes. That's right. 976 times faster. Do the math yourself.
Continue reading »
Server Virtualization
|
Mar 18, 2009
Microsoft has renamed the Parent Partition in Hyper-V. It is now called the Management Operating System.
Nice that Microsoft folks are starting to admit in passing that their is a heavy dependency on this MOS. Giving it a real name is a starting point.
Continue reading »
