Data Center

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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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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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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VMware vSphere 5.5 & Dell 12G Servers: Reliable Memory Technology

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A few days ago Dell released BIOS updates for their 12th generation servers. Among all the notes about preparations for the Intel E5-2600 v2 refresh there’s one line that’s of interest to those of us thinking about running vSphere 5.5 on our version 1 12G hardware: New Memory Operating Mode setup option ‘Dell Fault Resilient Mode’ This is a patented new technology from Dell, wherein the hypervisor and system hardware can work together to place the hypervisor in a more redundant section of memory. Dell servers have shipped with a variety of tricks to protect against memory faults, things like Memory Page Retire, which will dynamically remove a page from usable memory space if it encounters an error. However, to …

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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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