I once was a huge fan of HP’s Virtual Connect Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Modules but with the new enhancements to VMware vSphere 5, I don’t think I would recommend for virtual environments anymore. The ability to divide the two onboard network cards up to 8 NICS was a great feature and still is, if you have to do [...]
With all that is made of the competition between blade server manufacturers and the growth of the blade server market in general, is there room for another type of condensed computing in the data center? Have we been going about things all wrong with regard to architecture design? Nutanix thinks so. Nutanix is a [...]
I always find it interesting to hear how customers are using blade server technology “in the real world.” Brickworks, a $1.7 billion Australian brick company with over 60 locations and 1,000 employees, recently provided The Australian with details about how Citrix XenApp Enterprise combined with VMware vSphere and Dell rack and blade servers helped develop a more efficient workplace for its [...]
Since my last post, I heard lots of rumors that VMware would make some changes in their new licensing model. Well, this week VMware made an official announcement of changes and posted here. VMware made very clear that all the changes were motivated by the feedbacks they have received:
As you no doubt heard by now, VMware has announced a new version of vSphere along with some new or improved features however, this post will not highlight these features. In this post, I want to talk about what did not improve – the licensing.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been researching what are the “ideal” configurations for a home VMware vSphere lab. Ideally, it would be small enough to run a few virtual machines and demonstrate high availability features like vMotion, DRS, HA or even FT. The problem that I’ve run into is that I haven’t found [...]
As VMworld 2010 is right around the corner, I wanted to take a few minutes to make a plea to all attendees. This year, IF you receive a bag or backpack that you just don’t want, please don’t throw it away, but instead take it home, go to the dollar store and fill the backpack [...]
(Updated 7/27/2010 – 11 am EST – added info on power and tower options) When you think about blade servers, you probably think, “they are too expensive.” When you think about doing a VMware project, you probably think, “my servers are too old” or “I can’t afford new servers.” For $8 per GB, you can have [...]
(Updated to include links to results) I’ve had a few questions lately about “the best” blade server to use for virtualization – specifically VMware virtualization. While the obvious answer is “it depends”, I thought it would be an interesting approach to identify the blade servers that ranked in the top 5 in VMware’s VMmark benchmark. [...]
Cisco is getting some (more) recognition with their UCS blade server product, as they recently achieved the top position for “8 Core Server” on VMware’s VMmark benchmark tool. VMmark is the industry’s first (and only credible) virtualization benchmark for x86-based computers. According to the VMmark website, the Cisco UCS B200 blade server reached a score of 25.06 @ [...]
