Explaining Things Simply

Humans try to make everything really, really complicated. Sometimes we need the complexity but we often do it just because we can. We do it without thinking about it, perhaps a subliminal way of telling people to check out our species’ big brains. It’s also the way we write. We write long and complicated emails, memos, documents, blog posts, whatever. We use big words when we could very easily use smaller ones. Think about all the times you’ve used the word “utilize.” You don’t need that word, ever. Another word you never need is “bespoke.” People who use those kinds of words are writing so that nobody will read or understand them, which is a complete waste of time for …

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Cloud Isn't Really About Technology

If there was one concept about “the cloud” I wish more people understood it is that the cloud is not a technological revolution. Sure, a faster and more pervasive Internet helps, but we’ve had vendor-hosted applications for years. Virtualization has created better opportunities for server infrastructure, lowering barriers to entry and helping us squeeze blood out of things we once treated as rocks. But, despite being almost continuously conflated with “cloud,” it isn’t the cloud. Not by itself. The cloud is about people and about process. It’s about organizations deciding to talk to each other internally, to collaborate and solve problems together. Cloud is about opening the door to automation and security and scalability, asking computers to do what they …

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OpenStack Isn’t Our Savior from Lock-In or Support Costs

There is an attitude among some now that OpenStack is, or at least will be, our savior from vendor lock-in in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud space, as well as something that will help corporations save a lot of money in licensing fees from VMware. While I see the potential I think there’s more to the picture. To start with, OpenStack will lock you in just the same as a commercial offering, even though it’ll be “open.” If you want to move from OpenStack to another solution to another there will still be a bunch of hassle to move virtual machines and applications, just the same as if you wanted to move between VMware and Hyper-V, or to a public cloud offering. OpenStack …

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Four Things VMware Engineering Can Give Me For Christmas

I hope everybody out there in the virtualization world is having a great holiday season this year! My religion celebrates Christmas, and these are four things I’d love to see under my Christmas tree this year. 1. IPv6 support at all levels of the VMware stack. For a cloud vendor that fancies themselves as forward-looking, not to mention trying to be the “VMware of Networking,” the lack of IPv6 is pretty embarrassing. I know, I know, the tired argument is that nobody is really looking at IPv6. Well, it’s hard to look at when your vendor doesn’t support it much. 🙂 Chicken, meet egg. This would also help ameliorate the fact that VMware products need an awful lot of IPs …

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VMmark 2.5

Oooh, a new version of VMmark is out. From Bruce Herndon on the VROOM! blog: I am pleased to announce the release of VMmark 2.5, the latest edition of VMware’s multi-host consolidation benchmark. The most notable change in VMmark 2.5 is the addition of optional power measurements for servers and servers plus storage. This capability will assist IT architects who wish to consider trade-offs in performance and power consumption when designing datacenters or evaluating new and emerging technologies, such as flash-based storage. A long time ago I was pretty skeptical of yet-another-benchmark, but it’s been useful to help compare physical hosts with virtual workloads. Unlike most benchmarks, the results from previous versions are still relevant to the new version. I …

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Tags in VMware vSphere 5.1

Mike Preston has a short post & video about the tag features in VMware vSphere 5.1: Just think, say you have hundreds, or thousands of VMs.  You can now more align the way you categorize things inside of your business within vCenter, and sort/search on those custom tags. From the moment I saw the tag features I’ve been pretty optimistic about them. They’d be useful for tagging VMs with all sorts of information, like billing, locations, tiering, or even as a makeshift CMDB by tagging admins, applications, etc. It also wouldn’t surprise me if they were eventually used to drive features like various storage and network profiles, replication, etc. Just set the right tag and everything just takes care of …

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Statistics Rollups Are Evil

It’s pretty common for statistics-gathering software, like MRTG, Cacti, VMware vCenter, etc. to roll statistics up over time by averaging them. This helps save space, as well as cut down on the processing needed to look at & graph the data. The problem is that the process is lossy. These systems save disk, memory, and CPU by averaging the data over longer and longer time periods. Those averages remove spikes and make the data less and less representative of what actually happened on your system or network. It also makes it damn near useless for planning and troubleshooting. Let’s start with an example I drew up in Excel to simulate something like vCenter recording an application server’s CPU load every …

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VMworld US 2012: Day Two

Day two for me (Monday) was spent running around the Solutions Exchange, talking to vendors. The keynote was excellent, and it was nice to hear that my Enterprise Plus licenses are becoming vCloud Suite Standard licenses. vRAM is dead, too, which is nice. Didn’t make it to any sessions, but that’s okay. That’s what the other days are for! The vExpert meeting was excellent, and I appreciate the appreciation everybody has shown for my work. Thanks folks. The evening was spent checking out CloudPhysics and talking with some extremely awesome startups & VCs. Serious stuff but fun, and I owe Frank Denneman a big thank you for including me (thanks dude). I followed that with the #vFlipCup tournament. I was …

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VMworld US 2012: Day One

Day one was a weird day, roaming the city before the Solutions Exchange “Welcome Reception.” Was trying for breakfast at The Pork Store on Haight but ended up at Squat & Gobble, which was excellent. If you get time to go over there the Crab Cakes Florentine is tasty (that’s the plate photo below). Afterwards we walked down to the Ferry Terminal at the end of Market St. If you haven’t been in that building there are some great food vendors in there. There was also an America’s Cup boat heading down the bay. v0dgeball was successful, though I didn’t attend, instead getting an update from Mark Vaughn who was one of the referees. My understanding is that the Arista …

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VMworld US 2012: Day Zero

Flew in around 3 PM, took the BART over to the hotel, checked in and headed out to Fisherman’s Wharf for some In-n-Out Burger action. Ended up at Rogue Ales, and were so enamored with their beer that we missed the #vBeers. By the time we were ready to head over many of the international & East Coast folks were heading to bed, so we diverted to 21st Amendment. Tasty beer there, too. At Rogue I’d suggest the Hazelnut Honey Brown Ale, at 21st Amendment the HQT which is an ancient Egyptian recipe. We also took a swing through a cocktail bar called Rickhouse, which looked very cool but we were in a mood for beer. That burger is a …

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