Converged Infrastructure

No VMware NSX Hardware Gateway Support for Cisco

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I find it interesting, as I’m taking my first real steps into the world of VMware NSX, that there is no Cisco equipment supported as a VMware NSX hardware gateway (VTEP). According to the HCL on March 13th, 2018 there is a complete lack of “Cisco” in the “Partner” category: I wonder how that works out for Cisco UCS customers. As I continue to remind vendors, virtualization environments cannot virtualize everything. There are still dependencies on things like DNS, DHCP, NTP, and AD that need a few physical servers. There will also always be a few hosts that can’t be virtualized because of vendor requirements, politics, and/or fear. Any solution for a virtual environment needs to help take care of those …

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Intel’s Memory Drive Implementation for Optane Guarantees its Doom

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A few weeks ago Intel started releasing their Optane product, a commercialization of the 3D Xpoint (Crosspoint) technology they’ve been talking about for a few years. Predictably, there has been a lot of commentary in all directions. Did you know it’s game changing, or that it’s a solution looking for a problem? It’s storage. It isn’t storage. It’s RAM. It isn’t RAM. It’s too slow to be RAM. It’s too small for storage. It’s useful now. Nobody will use it for years. Yup. Confusion. It’s because Optane is a bunch of different things. It’s consumer and enterprise, and it’s both storage and memory. There are plenty of articles out there on the technology itself. There’s a small M.2 version for desktops …

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Three Thoughts on the Nutanix & StorageReview Situation

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I’ve watched the recent dustup between VMware and Nutanix carefully. It’s very instructive to watch how companies war with each other in public, and as a potential customer in the hyperconverged market it’s nice to see companies go through a public opinion shakedown. Certainly both VMware and Nutanix tell stories that seem too good to be true about their technology. On the VMware side VSAN is new-ish, and VMware doesn’t have the greatest track record for stability in new tech, though vSphere 6 seems to be a major improvement. On the Nutanix side I have always had a guarded opinion of technologies that introduce complexity and dependency loops, especially where storage systems are competing with workloads for resources. I’ve argued …

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Why Use SD Cards For VMware ESXi?

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I’ve had four interactions now regarding my post on replacing a failed SD card in one of my servers. They’ve ranged from inquisitive: @plankers why would you use an SD card in a server. I’m not a sys admin, but just curious. — Allan Çelik (@Allan_Celik) January 22, 2015 to downright rude: “SD cards are NOT reliable and you are putting youre [sic^2] infrastructure at risk. Id [sic] think a person like you would know to use autodeploy.” Aside from that fellow’s malfunctioning apostrophe, he has a good, if blunt, point. SD cards aren’t all that reliable, and there are other technologies to get a hypervisor like ESXi on a host. So why use SD cards? 1. Cost. Looking at …

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Keeping My Blade Options Open

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One of the types of advice I really appreciate is that which helps me to keep my options open. I have a team from Dell in the office this week, configuring a giant pile of equipment we bought. The equipment includes a bunch of blade servers. We’ve relied on rack-mount equipment for decades, but with a push towards a private cloud we opted to jump into the early 21st century with blades. I’ve had relatively little experience with blades so it’s nice to have more experienced people around. When I’m designing a system I always try to figure out what it’ll need to look like four years from now. Seeing the future is the hardest part of designing a system. …

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SDN Industry Analysis

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Tip of the hat to Ivan Pepelnjak over at ipSpace.net — a welcome three minute distraction this afternoon. Enjoy.

Coho Data

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Over the last year or so I’ve been fortunate to work with a bunch of great folks over at Coho Data, who are coming out of stealth mode with the debut of their storage product, the DataStream[0]. I’ve got a write-up over at The Virtualization Practice on the device, but I’ve also got a prerelease unit running in my lab, and I’ve been liking it a lot. Neither Coho nor EMC nor Nutanix will like this comment, but if an Isilon got frisky with a Nutanix cluster the DataStream might well be the love child. Scale-out architecture and great software smarts on value commodity hardware. For both personal and technical reasons I’ve always liked the Isilon products, and they’ve done …

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Shameless Self Promotion – Active System & OpenStack Edition

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I’m continuing to write over at The Virtualization Practice, and it’s been fun so far. Those of you following what I’ve been doing have probably seen me take a real turn towards converged infrastructures in the last six months, both for TVP and for TechTarget. Not that I don’t think the public cloud is attractive to many, but hardware vendors are doing some real interesting things that are keeping on-site IT fairly attractive. Plus the local telco lobbies and myopic/dirty legislators seem to be keeping inexpensive bandwidth, the Achilles heel of the cloud, to a minimum in most non-urban places. Anyhow, we’ve got: A Look at the Dell Active System 800 wherein I’m trying to figure out if Dell’s converged anything …

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Shameless Self Promotion – VCE, TVP, and 787 Edition

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My first-ever post as a member of The Virtualization Practice is up. I’m a little slow, I know: Digesting The Latest VCE News: Vblock 100 and Vblock 200 wherein I criticize Vblocks for not having very much RAM, and attract the attention of Kendrick Coleman in the comments (which is cool, Kenny is great). I’m very much looking forward to writing more stuff with Edward & Bernd & Steve & crew. I’ve also been writing for TechTarget’s “Modern Infrastructure” magazine as a regular columnist, which has been pretty darn different & fun. April’s work is: The Benefits of Insourcing Data Center Operations wherein I wonder if moving to the cloud is like the offshoring & outsourcing manufacturing companies in the …

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