Provoking IT from Good to Great
..because a little provocative difference is good in the world
The controversial mixture of truth, error and humour in this blog are mine and not those of my employer. This is not a Cisco blog. My content is not approved by Cisco. If you want someone to castigate, or send money to, leave my employer alone and try your luck at getting past my spam filter at stevie underscore chambers at viewyonder dot com.
about 1 year ago
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.
about 1 year ago
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!
about 9 months ago
Hey brother – wondered what happened to ya. Good to see you’re still “in the family”. Nice site!
about 8 months ago
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!)
about 8 months ago
@Dan Anderson
Great to hear from you Dan!
about 6 months ago
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
about 6 months ago
OpTier and other products?
about 5 months ago
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
about 5 months ago
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
about 3 months ago
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
about 2 months ago
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/