As we near the end of VMworld, I thought I would take some time to highlight a couple of announcements that could impact the way people use blade servers with VMware vSphere.
Category Archives: VMware
HP Flex 10 vs VMware vSphere Network I/O Control for VDI
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 physical deployments of servers. I do realize that there is the HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric 10Gb/24-port Module but I live in the land of iSCSI and NFS so that is off the table for me.
With vSphere 5.0, VMware improved on its Continue reading
Nutanix Cluster: Disruptive to Blade Server Market?
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 start-up company geared towards delivering a simplified virtualization infrastructure with a strong focus towards eliminating the need for a SAN. Their clustered solution brings storage and compute together which theoretically reduces expense, reduces complexity, and improves performance. On its own it doesn’t really seem that innovative but the secret sauce is how they make the cluster scale and tier/span data across all nodes without sacrificing performance. Each node has the usual compute resources plus a mix of local SSD and SATA hard disks. There are 4 nodes per 2u enclosure called a “block”. Add more blocks and you have a Nutanix cluster. The software stack scales and balances everything between the nodes and blocks. The technology originated from the architecture that companies like Google and Facebook employ in their data centers. Assuming that can be taken at face value, the scalability potential is phenomenal.
So what’s the big deal?
Well my thinking is that if you can eliminate the need for a SAN (for virtualization) then you can definitely eliminate the need for an enclosure of blade servers. No interconnects. No Enclosure. Simplified network architecture. No SAN. What’s not to love?
Customer Success Story with Dell, Citrix and VMware
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 employees. Continue reading
Will the New VMware vSphere 5 Licensing Affect Blade Vendors? (PART 2)
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: Continue reading
Will the New VMware vSphere 5 Licensing Affect Blade Vendors?
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. Continue reading
What Is Your Ideal VMware Lab Environment?
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 a really good site that has a detailed list of parts and pieces to buy. Continue reading
A Plea to VMWorld Attendees
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 with pencils, crayons, paper and erasers and donate it to your local school system. You would be AMAZED to find out the numbers of children who don’t get backpacks and whose familes can not afford the costly school supplies that are required each year. You will be making some family happy and you’ll get the name “VMware” marketed throughout the schools, getting the next generation of techno geeks ready to learn all about virtualization.
Thanks for the consideration!
(UPDATED) 4TB SAN, 3 ESX Hosts for only $32,000? YES, It’s Real!
(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 blade servers preloaded with VMware ESXi 4.1 AND 4TB of storage! Want to know how? Keep reading. Continue reading
(UPDATED) Best Blade Server for VMware Is…
(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. Before I begin, let me explain what the VMmark testing is about. Continue reading