ESXi vs. VMware Server

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Wil van Antwerpen of PlanetVM posted yesterday about the future of VMware Server, specifically its rumored demise. That isn’t surprising at all, at least to me. I know a lot of people will miss VMware Server when it’s gone, but in my experience that’s mainly because they were using it as a free copy of Workstation. They aren’t using the web interfaces. They aren’t scripting anything. They aren’t buying support. What I’ve seen people do is buy a $4000 workstation-class PC, install VMware Server on Microsoft Windows, and use Remote Desktop to manage it. Lame? Yeah, I know. The thing is, for what they’re doing with it they’d be better served with a copy of VMware Workstation, or a copy …

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links for 2010-05-22

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Maniacal Rage A ton of funny Photoshop CS4 crash reports. Fork bomb – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Those that are not familiar, become so. Also a great way to test your limits.conf setup. AT&T to Raise Early Termination Fee for iPhone and Other Smartphones from $175 to $325 – Mac Rumors AT&T sucks. This is just buoying themselves against the Verizon iPhone threat.

links for 2010-05-21

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Smoking-Fast Laptops: Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD Disk Drive Confirmed! – Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat These look very promising. Now, if they'd just stick a SAS interface on them it'd be nice.

What are P-states and how do I use them in vSphere?

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VMware vSphere 4 added the ability to take advantage of Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! CPU power management features. These features are commonly known as “Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling” or DVFS, and let an OS cooperate with the CPU to reduce power consumption by reducing the frequency of the CPU and the voltage at which it is operating. It reduces these things in preset tiers, and these tiers are known as P-states. On Intel CPUs they are trademarked as “SpeedStep” and on AMD they are either “Cool’n’Quiet” or “PowerNow!” The Wikipedia article on Intel SpeedStep points out that “power consumed by a CPU with a capacitance of C, running at voltage V, and frequency f is approximately P = …

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If You Don't Like Change…

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“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki, former United States Army Chief of Staff.

Thanks AMD!

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Holy crap, server pricing has come down a lot in the last month! Four weeks ago a Dell R810 with 256 GB of RAM, dual Intel 6550 8-core CPUs, and the standard complement of drives, warranties, etc. was almost $28,000. A couple weeks ago the AMD-based Dell R815 was released, featuring the AMD 8- and 12-core CPUs. A similar configuration to the R810 above comes to almost $17,000, and that’s with more cores in the host than the Intel. Now the Dell R810, same configuration, is a little over $18,000. I’ve not been a big fan of AMD’s technology in the past, because of caching bugs, OS incompatibilities, general BS, etc.  However, for what they just saved me by keeping …

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links for 2010-05-17

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You’re Welcome, You Bastards Michael Arrington vs. the idiots at Fortune who apparently don't understand social media or how the web works. Steve Jobs to Valleywag at 2:20 AM: “Why are you so bitter?” | VentureBeat "By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?" +1 for Jobs.

links for 2010-05-16

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Collection : Gallery: Water tower fire on Southwest Side A water tower in Madison, WI caught fire as they were repairing it, taking out all the telco gear. Needless to say, my already terrible AT&T service has become completely non-functional. Cool to see the firefighters getting to use their ladder truck, though!

Vote On VMworld 2010 Content

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Public voting is open now for VMworld 2010 sessions. I’ve already gone and voted for my own session, “Tuning Linux for Virtual Machines – TA8102,” in the Technology & Architecture track, as well as a number of other heavyweight presentations by Duncan Epping, Scott Drummonds, Mike Laverick, David Davis, Steve Chambers, Chad Sakac, Edward Haletky… I’m missing a lot of people in my list here, but the point is that there are tons of presentations by people who really know what they heck they’re talking about. If you are thinking about going to VMworld this year you should go and pick the content YOU would like to see in the conference. It’s pretty rare that attendees get to help set …

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