VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘gestaltit.com’

I recently participated in an interesting roundtable discussion with the gang over at GestaltIT.com about the popular trend in the market today of vendors either providing or partnering to provide all in one hardware platform solutions. Stephen Foskett recorded the conversation and has published it as Episode 6 of his Tech Field Day Podcast series. Podcast 6: Stack Wars Roundtable 1 features an all-star roster of virtualization, storage, and networking bloggers and engineers. Interestingly enough, everyone offers different opinions and points of view on the what, where, when, why, and how of “the Stack Wars.” In the end the podcast actually helps clarify some strategy and positioning of a hardware stack in the market.

With me on the podcast is:

Read the rest of this entry »

GestaltIT LLC Acquires Infosmack and Virtumania Podcasts

This evening during a press conference at the Holiday Inn Select Cleveland-Cty Ctr in Cleveland, OH,  Stephen Foskett of GestaltIT.com made some exciting announcements I’d like to pass along.

Foskett first introduced that starting in 2011 the first ever GestaltIT Tech Spring Break Conference will be held in Panama City, FL at the world famous Holiday Inn Resort. Although Specific Conference dates are not yet available, Foskett suggested watching both GestaltIT.com and the Holiday Inn Resort’s web page for future notices about conference sponsors, vendors and attendee registration information.

Foskett also announced the acquisition of the Infosmack Productions family of podcasts by GestaltIT LLC. Infosmack and Virtumania are independent podcasts addressing the news and technologies of IT decision makers and administrators on the topics of storage, networking, and server and desktop virtualization. Foskett explained that both the Infosmack and Virtumania podcast will be features of future GestaltIT Tech Day Events as well as the Tech Spring Break Conference.

GestaltIT LLC will now partner with Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley, and me to deliver Tech Field Day and Tech Spring Break audio and video content along with other GestaltIT.com storage and virtualization-related site content. Marc and I will both maintain our current blogs. Farley’s blog is storagerap.com and, of course my blog is vmetc.com.

“We are excited to add these Infosmack guys permanently to the GestaltIT event lineup.  They crack us up each week with their antics, and their podcast content ain’t too bad either” said Foskett.  When asked about Infosmack being acquired Marc Farley commented “Hey Now”. Virtumania regular Rick Vanover added during the press conference “I can’t wait for the Tech Spring Break Conference Party at Club La Vela.” Sean Clark wondered “why not have the Conference in Iowa?”

What are my thoughts about permanently joining the GestaltIT event family as a podcaster and blogger? “Here Goes Nothing!”

GestaltIT has a started a new web page for the Tech Spring Break Conference. Check here for more info both now and in the future.

One of the most interesting new vSphere storage features in my opinion is the new virtual disk paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) controller. It has been reported that improved I/O with as much as 18% reduction in ESX 4 host CPU usage can be achieved by switching to PVSCSI. The benefits of PVSCSI performance are twofold:

• Reduced data center power and cooling costs to when you consider the impact of tens of hosts not having to work as hard
• A potential higher VM to host consolidation ratio when more CPU cycles are available

For reference, EMC virtualization guru Chad Sakac provided a post that explains the PVSCSI performance benefits:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/05/update-on-the-io-vsphere-performance-test.html

However, to take advantage of PVSCSI a VM virtual disk configuration might need to change. Because VMware does not support PVSCSI on the operating system boot partition, VMs will need to be configured with separate virtual disks(.vmdk) for the boot drive and the data drive(s). Note that all the posts and articles referenced mention that PVSCSI works on a .vmdk containing the boot partition. It’s just that VMware officially does not support it.

So, the challenge for using PVSCSI then is to migrate services and applications that exist on VMs that contain both the boot partition and the data on a single .vmdk. Although separate boot and data partitions are the defacto standard for physical servers, the convenience of VMs has lead to a single .vmdk configuration in a lot of IT shops.

Incentive to use PVSCSI therefore actually overlaps with a shift in VM deployment strategy and ultimately supports and provides performance reasons to adopt smaller, dedicated .vmdks for boot partitions. This multi .vmdk design change also has other benefits including optimization of deduplication and DR site replication technologies.

Here are some quick thoughts on deploying and migrating VMs to a multiple .vmdk configuration. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weekends ago an email discussion started among the authors at GestaltIT.com about cloud computing. As I remember it (yes, I am too lazy to check for the actual first email) we started on Friday and replied back and forth until Sunday night. The results of those replies are slowly forming as posts about real world, enterprise infrastructure concerns and opinions about implementing and migrating to Infrastructure As A Service (Iaas). Governance And Peaks In The Cloud written by Joerg, Martin, and Stephen is the first post to be published from this dialogue.

“As large organizations begin to look towards cloud computing, many find themselves questioning the suitability of the infrastructure for their business needs. As consumer-focused services like Carbonite lose data and startup-focused systems like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure suffer outages, the image of the cloud has darkened. How are providers protecting the data? What RTO and RPO is offered? Are these sufficient for the types of applications being considered for the cloud?”

Read the entire post, and check out GestaltIT for much more about Cloud Computing infrastructure – both in posts already published and in the posts yet to come!

I collaborated with Joerg, Stephen, and Martin while writing Planning for Virtual Infrastructure: Avoid the Pitfalls at GestaltIT.com. The post offers many virtual infrastructure planning considerations in the areas of migration, performance, storage, administration, backup / restore, and disaster recovery.

Please go check it out!

I’m excited to announce that I am one of nine bloggers contributing content to a new independent online magazine. GestaltIT.com, a concept created by Microsoft MVP Stephen Foskett, is self described on it’s home page as “a “web magazine” focusing on the best in IT infrastructure content, syndicated from expert bloggers”. Look for both new, unique content from me there along with syndication of some of my posts from VM /ETC.

In case you were wondering, gestalt is generally defined (in my own words) as a group of concepts so unified that it is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

Here’s some more information from the GestaltIT FAQ page: Read the rest of this entry »