Entries from Eric Sloof

A few days ago I’ve hooked-up my newly bought Intel SSD drive to one of my ESX server but didn’t realize it was the one with an ICH9 SATA controller. After some first tests I was a bit disappointed with the outcome, only 150 MB/Sec. After exchanging some email with Simon Seagrave over at techhead.co.uk who also has bought an SSD drive, I realized I was using the wrong ESX server. The SSD drive is now hooked-up to a server with an ICH10 SATA controller. I quickly fired-up the servers to see how fast the SSD drive is running now and it really matters. The difference is significant.

Next week my new Cisco Catalyst 2960G-8TC-L switch will arrive so I went to the store to buy some additional Intel PRO/1000 adapters to get fully prepped. While I was waiting in queue at Informatique an article written by Chad Sakac popped into my mind, in his article he predicted that 2010 will be the year of Solid State Storage. I noticed a real nice offer from Intel; the X25-M Postville SSD 80GB for only 200€ and tough what te heck, let’s buy one.

Model Name Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drive
Capacity 80GB
NAND Flash Components Intel® Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND Flash Memory
Bandwidth  Up to 250MB/s Read Speeds - Up to 70MB/s Write Speeds
Read Latency 85 microseconds
Interface SATA 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s

All the NICS and the SSD drive are build into my two white boxes so I fired up HD Tune Pro in a virtual machine with a 8 GB test disk hosted on the newly created SSD-VMFS. The HD Tune Pro has a real nice feature which enables you to export screenshots of the measurements.

So, here is a quick benchmark comparison between SATA (10 GB) and SSD (8 GB) storage.

                          

During the Tech Data / Azlan partner event I’ve shot some video footage. The interesting part is at the end where Fiona Hering is presenting the new top products accompanied by some models on the catwalk. Fiona is a fashion & lifestyle-pro and one of the hosts at RTL Boulevard, aired at the biggest Dutch Broadcasting company. We agreed to do a little interview but I couldn’t find her after the show.

@FionaHering I’m sorry we couldn't catch up for the interview at the Tech Data event, you did great on presenting the new features. :-)

On January 21th, 2010 the 16th edition of the Tech Data and Azlan partner event took place at the Home Boxx Exhibition Center Nieuwegein.  This Partner Event has become an annual event, with over 60 leading ICT suppliers and over 2000 resellers and is the only ICT exhibition with a unique design, full of information and entertainment. I’ve presented two sessions at this event about how to Accelerate Deployment of the Private Cloud with Vblock Infrastructure Packages. Here’s my slide deck, kudos to Chad Sakac for helping me out with my presentation.

IT is undergoing a transformation. The current ‘accidental architecture’ of IT today increases procurement, management costs, and complexity while making it difficult to meet customer service level agreements.  This makes IT less responsive to the business and creates the perception of IT being a cost center.   IT is now moving towards a ‘private cloud’ model, which is a new model for delivering IT as a service, whether that service is provided internally (IT today), externally (service provider), or in combination.  This new model requires a new way of thinking about both the underlying technology and the way IT is delivered for customer success.

While the need for a new IT model has never been more clear, navigating the path to that model has never been more complicated. The benefits of private clouds are capturing the collective imagination of IT architects and IT consumers in organizations of all sizes around the world. The realities of outdated technologies, rampant incremental approaches, and the absence of a compelling end-state architecture are impeding adoption by customers.

This new ‘private cloud’ model, which is a new model for delivering IT as a service, whether that service is provided internally (IT today), externally (service provider), or in combination.  This new model requires a new way of thinking about both the underlying technology and the way IT is delivered for customer success.
By harnessing the power of virtualization, private clouds place considerable business benefits within reach. 

Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, are putting you on a new road to greater efficiency, control and choice. A faster road to unprecedented IT agility and unbounded business opportunities. With the Virtual Compute Environment’s Vblock experience.

VMware education services will release the Skills for Operators training course around mid February.  This hands-on training course explores configuration and management of VMware vSphere virtual machines. Upon completion of this course, you should have the skills necessary to work effectively with VMware virtual machines. The course is based on VMware ESX 4.0 and VMware vCenter Server 4.0.

Objectives

•  Create, deploy, and manage virtual machines
•  Use vCenter Server to monitor virtual machine resource usage
•  Use VMware vCenter Update Manager to apply patches to virtual machines
•  Use VMware vMotion™ and Storage vMotion to migrate virtual machines
•  Troubleshoot problems with virtual machine configuration

http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www&a=one&id_subject=18670

I've had a little interview with Gabrie van Zanten (Gabes Virtual World) about two new upcoming Storage Replication Adapters. Site recovery Manager communicates with storage arrays trough storage replication adapters (or SRAs). Storage replication adapters translate generic commands generated by SRM for tasks such as discovering arrays in the datacenter determining which LUNs are replicated by the arrays. SRAs also assist in initiating recovery plan tests and failovers.

Eric Siebert over at vSphere-Land has published the first results of the best VMware/Virtualization blog election. The winner is Duncan Epping over at Yellow-Bricks.com, followed by Chad Sakac from Virtual Geek at second and Scott Lowe at the third place. I’m maintaining my position at the fourth place. I want to thank all the voters and Eric Siebert in special for all his hard work. I’ll do my utmost to get higher into the list so keep watching my blog.

One last mention, congrats go out to Gabrie van Zanten over at Gabe’s Virtual World, the third Dutch guy in the top ten, maintaining his position at the eight place. But don’t forget two other Dutch blogs at the 14th place you’ll find Frank Denneman and at number 18 vmguru.nl.

With the announcement of the launch of VMware GO, VMware has finally entered the Hosted (Cloud/Web) Application market - Providing services to small and medium businesses to more easily manage their ESXi implementations.

This move may be an attempt by VMware to begin experimenting with ways of creating Hybrid Cloud environments in a future iteration of VMware GO. How would this work and how does GO work today? Dave McCrory, founder and CTO at Hyper9 is an Expert on Cloud Computing and Virtualization and has recorded the following video.

Continue reading "VMware GO overview by Hyper9" »

esxplot is a GUI application that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program takes a single command line argument which is the esxtop batch mode output file. You can also simply start esxplot without any arguments, and enter a dataset file via the File attribute of the menu bar. Esxplot loads the data in this file and presents the metrics as a hierarchical tree where the values are selectable in the left panel. In the right panel, a graph is plotted (value over time) of the selected metric, in this way, you can "browse" the contents of these somewhat unwieldy files.

http://vpivot.com/2010/01/13/esxplot-1-0-released/

Audits all changes and enforces controlled change management processes across your VMware environment. Provides daily reports for every change made to your ESX servers, folders, clusters, resource pools, virtual machines, and their hardware, including previous and current ("before" and "after") configuration values. Use this link to download a 20 day evaluation.