My name is Steve Chambers and I am passionate about connecting things and provoking IT from good to great.
When I’m not wasting everyone’s time on here or twitter, I while away the hours being Canopy Cloud’s CTO. As much as I like to think I speak for everyone, this blog is purely my own: any opinions or statements expressed on this blog are not those of my employer. All the mistakes are mine.
14 Comments
I am impressed with your blog- It offers good technical information about how to use the Cisco UCS.
Has Cisco UCS been sold in the 320 server configuratin yet? I feel with all the features it has, the best value will be in deploying an entire rack with 320 blade servers.
Email me if you want to hear more.
UCS has only just been shipping so the 320 blade setup is not at any customer I’m familiar with, though we use it in large configurations at Cisco (not sure exactly how much, but we’ve been using it for a long time).
You’re dead right, though: UCS is about scale. 320 blades running between 50-100 VMs each is a mighty configuration that requires dynamic and agile operations – GAME ON!
Hey brother – wondered what happened to ya. Good to see you’re still “in the family”. Nice site!
Ok…
So just to bring this “thread” up to speed.
There were 512 Blades or 16 Racks (4 Chassis per rack) in the VMworld Datacenter.
(Thought you would like to know…)
And just case you havent seen it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOnNpBkRam0
Regards,
Dan
(Steve: Happy New Year my old friend!)
@Dan Anderson
Great to hear from you Dan!
Steve how are you tackling the performance management aspects for end to end application visibility and how do you ensure consumer credibility is maintained. I work for Integrien and I am often challenged with the question, looking for some other insight from your point of view
OpTier and other products?
RE: Twitter followup question regarding UCS and boot from SAN. Reason I am asking about boot from SAN is because while we have had no problems with vSphere, SRM and RecoverPoint we have had problems with the few remaining boot from SAN physical servers. We managed to overcome those issues by using combination of HP Hardware and SuSE linux. Deal is that we are investigating migration to UCS or using it for independent projects and would like to know if there are any pitfalls to watch out for when dealing with configuring a blade for boot from SAN with SuSE 11. Thanks for your feedback.
Paul
Hello Steve -
I am passing along a couple “IT” bits of news that your ViewYonder readers might find of interest:
1. Today VKernel is partaking in the Gestalt IT Field Day where 15 IT thought leaders have an open exchange with IT industry vendors. The delegates are live blogging and tweeting as we speak.
2. VKernel has also released Capacity Analyzer 4.3, which allows SysAdmins to manage both VMware and Hyper-V environments from a single console. We’ve also integrated with Systems Center and VMM, so now you can even get VMware alerts sent directly to Operations Manager.
The download is here: http://bit.ly/aP97ws
In general, Capacity Analyzer helps the Sys Admin eliminate capacity based performance problems, across servers and storage at every level of your VMware and Hyper-V virtualized infrastructure as it:
Profiles current and past performance and capacity data for each application VM
Identifies current and predicts future performance problems caused by CPU, memory and I/O latency constraints
Tells you exactly how to fix performance problems
Tells you where to place new VMs to avoid future performance problems
This release is yet another step toward VKernel’s goal of being completely hypervisor-agnostic!
Have a great day,
- Tina
Hi Steve ~
I just wanted to alert you of the latest release of VKernel’s Optimization Pack. This latest version (1.4) was developed while keeping in mind the needs of VKernel’s large and growing base of enterprise customers who require scalable solutions from both performance and reporting points of view.
Optimization Pack 1.4 can now scale to 2,000+ VMs in a single VKernel virtual appliance to meet the demands of the largest enterprises. In addition, Optimization Pack’s reporting capabilities have been enhanced to automatically setup and deliver key utilization reports throughout the enterprise to facilitate better IT decision-making.
There are six PDF reports that can be delivered via email:
1. Rightsizer Summary
2. Wastefinder: Abandoned VMs
3. Wastefinder: Powered off VMs
4. Wastefinder: Unused Templates
5. Wastefinder: Unused Snapshots
6. Wastefinder: Zombie VMs
The download for the free 30-day trial is here: http://www.vkernel.com/products/optimization-pack
Optimization Pack will ensure that the System Administrator is not over- OR under-allocating resources in the virtual environment.
No wasted storage, CPU, or memory = no wasted money
I hope your ‘View Yonder’ readers can benefit from this news,
- Tina
P.S. VKernel is so confident in Optimization Pack’s ability to give companies ROI, we have a special challenge for our users with 4 more more hosts: http://www.vkernel.com/beef
Hello Again Steve ~
I know you did not have a chance to get a “Pre-Briefing” from us directly last week, but VKernel released “StorageVIEW” today. So you may finally get to play around with this free tool in your virtual environment. At only 6MB, it rounds out the family of lightweight products (including CapacityVIEW and AppVIEW) that sit on the desktop.
StorageVIEW delivers quick analysis of VM infrastructure path latency. It provides:
• Top five host/datastore paths with the highest latency
• Listing of the associated VMs for these high latency paths
• Throughput information for each VM in the high latency path
• Aggregated results for the remaining datastore/host pairs
• Support for NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel
The download may be accessed here: http://bit.ly/b9vF69
Hope you and your readers find StorageVIEW an eye-opening tool,
- Tina
P.S. Another blogger actually found it quite revealing already. See his results here: http://jfvi.co.uk/2010/06/23/storageview-beyond-the-press-release/
I wish I would have read your stuff when it first came out. ESPECIALLY about ITIL. I think the “idea” is good but the practice lacks…well “practice” and like so many other “specialized/speficied” certs it just tends to create unnecessary clutter in the world of IT. Mainly because computing is constantly evolving. Look at what Apple has done. No matter what we say we’ll be tied to switching and hardwired networking for sometime to come but, at least, Apple is headed in the right direction in terms of the consumer/collaborator end of things. The paradigm is shifting so much it’s not funny. I hope you’ll read this soon because I’d love to see how you’re doing at VCE (even though I don’t what it is) I just so happen to think you’re a genius that’s all! :)
I Really enjoyed the article on ITIL. I am involved in an organization that has decided to make the move to ITIL. The proposed strategy for moving forward with ITIL in this particular organization is to train (…not certify) a few choice individuals and then they will pass their “new found” knowledge onto the rest of the group. THEN, the “knowledgable” (aka: rest of the group) individuals will then pass the information onto the 2nd shift personnel so that they can then educate the 3rd shift personnel. After researching the positives and negatives of ITIL, the proposed strategy appears to be a recipe for disaster. Thanks for your insights.
That sounds like the catholic church to me. IT is like anything else in life: it’s mostly about common sense, it suffers from the usual human problems (politics, relationships, war), and there is no higher being or design that need to be interpreted by soothsayers. It doesn’t hurt to read #ITIL and strive for better #ITSM, but it creates emperors with no clothes: I hope that’s never you! :) Best of luck, share your journey (that’s the BEST education, much better than ITIL: we have an open, not closed, community that shares).