Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: Virtual Grid
Virtualization – the key to delivering "cloud based architecture" NOW.
Posted by on June 23, 2008
There is a lot of talk about delivering cloud or elastic computing platforms, a lot of CxO’s are taking this all in and nodding enthusiastically, they can see the benefits.. so make it happen!….yesterday. Moving your services to the cloud, isn’t always about giving your apps and data to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. You [...]
Free SAN for your Home/Work ESX Lab
Posted by on May 25, 2008
VM/Etc have posted an excellent article about a free iSCSI SAN VM appliance that you can download from Xtravirt it uses replication between 2 ESX hosts to allow you to configure DRS/HA etc. Excellent, I’m going to procure another cheap ESX host in the next couple of weeks so will post back on my [...]
A Closer look at Green IT and Microsoft’s new Container Data Centre in Chicago
Posted by on May 24, 2008
Link here – good visualisation about 10mins in of how their new Chicago data centre is laid out internally. With virtualisation breaking the traditional hardware/OS ties; this is becoming an increasingly appealing way of managing commodity compute grid resources for large organisations. Mike makes some good points about the de-comissioning of servers on a [...]
Solid Sate SAN, Storage vMotion and VMWare – HSM for your VMs
Posted by on May 13, 2008
You’ve been able to buy solid state SAN technology like the Tera-RAMSAN from TMS which gives you up to 1Tb of storage, presented over 4Gb/s fibre channel or Infiniband @10Gb/s… with the cost of flash storage dropping its going to soon fall in to the realms of affordability (from memory a year ago 1Tb [...]
New Microsoft Data Centre is Container Based
Posted by on April 2, 2008
Article here, it’s coming people! Some interesting discussions on how you can measure the productivity of a container and come up with some common metrics to compare and contrast and handle charge-back.
Cisco ASR is Virtual to the Core, all 40 of them!
Posted by on March 14, 2008
Interesting article here on how Cisco have made heavy use of virtualization within their new ASR series router platform, Linux underneath and 40 core CPUs! This type of approach does make me wonder if we will get to the stage of running traditional “network” and “storage” services as VM’s under a shared hypervisor with [...]
Performance Expectations on a Shared Virtual Platform
Posted by on March 12, 2008
Some interesting discussion linked-to within this article on Storagezilla. people using Amazon’s EC2 platform are complaining because they feel they are getting less performance than they should. Always an interesting point to bear in mind and useful in expectation setting for developers. You may want a dedicated CPU/core – but do you really need [...]
Support for Virtualized OS/Applications – an Open Debate..
Posted by on February 21, 2008
Martin’s post here prompted me to blog something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Virtualization projects and services are cool; we all understand the advantages in power/cooling and the flexibility it can bring to our infrastructures. But what about support, if you are a service provider (internal or outsourcing) you normally need [...]
P2V Backup & Disaster Recovery
Posted by on February 20, 2008
There is a new site here (disclaimer: it does seem to be promoting a commercial service, but has some useful information that has been put into the public domain); describing some methods to roll your own P2V backup approach; I’ve not read in detail yet; but looks like Frane Borozan has solved some of [...]
Mmmm, Big, Really Big Cisco Switches
Posted by on February 11, 2008
Over here and here like the idea of combining FC and Ethernet in one chassis; They’re not cheap though, more info and viewpoint here and spec here looks to be the next step up from 6500 series catalyst. Cool
