Support in the 21st Century. What Works? What Doesn’t? In my last post, I laid out what I, in my humble opinion, would be the basic expectations or baseline expectations of just about most companies support model and structure would be like. In the past twenty years or so, these have been my observations and expectations any time that I started any new assignment in a new company. There was a certain level of comfort, which comes from experience, when starting a new position in a new company to at least have a basic understanding of what to expect. There is always a technical “learning curve” that comes with anything new, but makes the transition easier having a basic understanding of how thing will be supported. That concept has served me well over the years, but just like how virtualization and cloud computing has changed the datacenter landscape, I think the change in the support structure is just now really well on its way and now would be a good time to have a look at what works and what doesn’t.
Stephen Beaver is the co-author of VMware ESX Essentials in the Virtual Data Center and Scripting VMware Power Tools: Automating Virtual Infrastructure Administration as well as being contributing author of Mastering VMware vSphere 4 and How to Cheat at Configuring VMware ESX Server. Stephen is an IT Veteran with over 15 years experience in the industry. Stephen is a moderator on the VMware Communities Forum and was elected vExpert for 2009 and 2010. Stephen can also be seen regularly presenting on different topics at national and international virtualization conferences.
Support in the 21st Century Data Center
Support in the 21st Century Datacenter. There is no doubt that virtualization technology has been one of the leading factors in the dramatic changes we have seen inside the 21st century datacenters. For all practical purposes the landscape in the datacenters today look a lot different than they did before the turn of the century. During this evolution that fundamentally changed the technology environment, how much has the support structure really changed to keep up with virtualization and cloud technologies? This is the topic that I would like to focus on in this multi-part post that will explore the different support structures and concepts that have been the standards. Let’s start a discussion of what just might be a better way of doing things moving forward. First, I want to establish the base line and then move on to the different thought processes and philosophies for the future.
Dell Acquires EMC
Dell acquires EMC. It has been no secret that EMC has been under some pressure from Elliott Management Corp., one of EMC’s investors, to do something to raise share prices and rumors and speculation about what might be coming has been a topic of many different post and articles over the last year or so but now it has been confirmed that the deal is done. This deal will close in 2016 and EMC’s Chief Executive Officer, Joe Tucci will finally get his opportunity to retire. For all practical purposes, this has been is the making for quite a while and there was some speculation that some kind of announcement needed to happen by the earnings report.
Strategy for Cloud Automation
Strategy for Cloud Automation. There is a lot of post about the Cloud and Cloud Computing but have not seen to many post or articles that discusses different strategy to consider when it comes to the automation in your environment. I did comes across a nice post called Legacy Job Schedulers: 3 Effective Exit Strategies to Consider by Jim Manias from Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. that had some interesting points and thought it would be a great topic for discussion. In this post, Jim Manias, starts old school with a reminder that the early stages of automation were managed via schedulers from the host system to kick off the scripts when triggered either manually or from an event. Actually in all practical purposes if you use PowerShell for any of your automation needs, chances are you have used the Windows Scheduler in one form or another.
Tech Field Day Briefing with Primary Data
Tech Field Day briefing with Primary Data. During the VMworld 2015 Conference in San Francisco there was another event, Tech Field Day Extra, which was going on at the same time during the conference. I was one of the panelist for Tech Field Day Extra and had the opportunity to be a part of the briefing from a company called Primary Data to showcase DataSphere. DataSphere is a dynamic, objectives-driven data mobility virtualization platform across different storage types and tiers.
Ansible Automation Technology
It was quite the week attending the VMworld 2015 conference in San Francisco, but all good things must come to an end at some point, and this event is no exception. During my time there, I have had several briefings from a variety of different companies on their technologies. Given my love and passion for …