Anthony Metcalf (vantmet) has been in IT for over 10 years, working with UK firms in industries from Engineering to Law, along with service providers. Anthony works in all areas of the data centre, from networking to automation, and has recently been blogging the VCP-NV experience at PlanetVM.net.
A few weeks ago, Tom Howarth asked me one of those simple questions that leads to a very long answer. Like all good questions, it made me think. He asked, “In an ideal world, what would you monitor?” Of course, the analyst in me immediately turned that around. Context is key, and such a broad …
Continue reading “Monitoring: How Much Can You Do with What You Know?”
In June 2014, VMware’s Project Marvin was sighted. From that point until the release of the tech preview at VMworld at the end of August, there was very little to know about it. What was previewed? EVO:RACK and EVO:RAIL, VMware’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offering. This was a big step for VMware. Its first hardware release was …
With the recent layoffs at VMware, one of the biggest surprises was the loss of almost the whole Workstation/Fusion team. For many, this is the end of an era. Not only was Workstation one of VMware’s first products, but it was the one that gave numerous people the opportunity to play with new tech and …
A few weeks ago, Hany Michael released a blog post on his NSX lab network. Embedded within is one of the most brilliantly clear diagrams of a very complex situation I’ve ever seen. It takes a level of skill to achieve the clarity of this diagram. What hit me, though, is the sheer level of …
In networking, as in life, we often use the same terms to mean many different things. One of the biggest culprits of this in networking is “edge.” An edge device is usually considered to be a device that connects into a network in only one place. Traffic can flow from an edge device, or it …
It’s the end of the year, and a good time for thinking back. I’m thinking back to a dark past long ago, when physical servers ran server operating systems, and ran applications—when those servers plugged into a switch, and each endpoint was a single server. The network team could see every device, endpoint, or switch, …
Continue reading “Docker: Where Does It Leave the Network Admin?”
