cpu

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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The Five Stages of VMware Licensing Grief

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Update 8/3/2011: VMware announced updated licensing terms (link is to my post on the matter). As part of the vSphere 5 & Cloud Infrastructure Suite announcements today VMware announced a new licensing model. And, as expected, people are having a fit. A few of us were briefed on this new model last week, and I’ve got a four-day head start on the denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance that seems to follow this change. Let me work through it with numbers from my environment, as an IT professional, in a professional way. Hopefully this will let some people pass from the anger stage to bargaining (perhaps with their VMware sales representatives) and on to acceptance. Before I start, I do …

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VMware Fault Tolerance, Determinism, and SMP

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We’re all at least roughly familiar with Fault Tolerance, a feature VMware added to vSphere 4 to establish a mirrored VM on a secondary host. It’s kind of like RAID 1 for VMs. To do this, Fault Tolerance records the inputs to a primary VM, and then replays it on the secondary VM to achieve the same results. There are two important and somewhat subtle points here that help us understand why Fault Tolerance is limited to one CPU. First, the process records the inputs, not the state of the PC after the inputs happen. If you moved the mouse on the primary it moves the mouse on the secondary VM in exactly the same fashion. If you ping the …

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