The Virtualization Practice was recently offline for two days, we thank you for coming back to us after this failure. The reason, a simple fibre cut that would have taken the proper people no more than 15 minutes to fix, but we were way down on the list due to the nature of the storm that hit New England and took 3M people off the grid. Even our backup mechanisms were out of power. While our datacenter had power, the rest of the area in our immediate vicinity did not. So not only were we isolated from reaching any clouds, but we were isolated from being reached from outside our own datacenter. The solution to such isolation is usually remote sites and location of services in other regions of a county, this gets relatively expensive for small and medium business, can the Hybrid Cloud help here?
TVP Category Archives
A Look At VMstore from Tintri
One of the biggest things I took away from the VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas was the all advancements within the storage part of virtualization. For me, this was the year for storage. One product that really got my attention was the new NAS appliance, VMstore from Tintri. This 3U appliance, well 5U if you count the UPC, is a single datastore with 8.5TB of usable storage. This appliance was a collaboration of some very smart individuals from different companies like VMware, Datadomain, NetApp and Sun. They put their minds together and built this NFS appliance from the ground up with specially engineered file system to work with virtualization. What makes this VM-aware appliance different from other typical storage designs is VMstore uses VM’s and virtual disks as the abstractions instead of the conventional storage abstractions, volumes, LUN’s and files that we have all been accustomed to. Each I/O request will map directly to a virtual disk all while VMstore monitors, controls the I/O and presents disk performance statistics per VM or per VMDK.
Application Performance Management – Our New Relic Details
Given the complexity of modern web sites, tools such as New Relic RPM are incredible assets and a valuable tool to determine what is happening within your environment. While your data does go into their SaaS offering, all SQL and other statements are scrubbed. The results of using this tool are incredible.
VMware's Rapid Desktop Program: Pivot3 vSTAC VDI appliance delivers early
In an effort to relieve the discomfort for customers and partners VMware have introduced a Rapid Desktop Program. This program looks to validate View Proof of Concept appliances to ensure that they meet criteria for performance and reliability. By removing the complexity of the “I”, an organisation can focus better on the assessment of virtual desktops and in turn deliver faster .
Nimbula 1.5 delivers federated IaaS
Nimbula is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) software stack analogous in its target market and its business model to commercial software like vCloud. It sits alongside a number of open source software products like Eucalyptus, Cloud.com (Citrix) and OpenStac k(Rackspace et al.) as well as the Amazon Web Service, and other hosted services.
VMware Capacity Planner – A Special Use Case
I have had the opportunity to perform a few VMware Capacity Planner assessments over the years and I have been, more the most part, pretty happy with the process and the results of the reports. The assessment is really pretty straight forward. We had physical servers to the project, making sure we have proper permissions to perform all the tasks and then let the process run over an extended period of time. For the most part, this way of sampling over an extended time frame will give you a very good idea what can be virtualized and the number of hosts that will be needed.