The Virtualization Practice

sbeaver | July 29, 2010

With the release of vSphere 4.1 there have been some great enhancements that have been added with this release.  In one of my earlier post I took a look at the vSphere 4.1 release of ESXi.  This post I am going to take a look at vSphere 4.1 availability options and enhancements. So what has changed with this release?  A maximum of 320 virtual machines per cluster has been firmly set.  In vSphere 4.0 there were different VM/Host limitations for DRS as well as different rules for VMware HA. VMware has also raised the number of virtual machines that can be run in a single cluster from 1280 in 4.0 to 3000 in the vSphere 4.1 release. How do these improvements affect your upgrade planning? (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  SMB Virtualization | No Comments »
Tags: availability, DRS, Dynamic Resource Load Balancing, Dynamic Resource Scheduling, Fault Tolerance, FT, HA, High Availability, vSphere 4.1

Bernd Harzog | July 26, 2010

In The ROI for Server Virtualization with Business Critical Applications, we showed an example of how the savings from server (specifically core) consolidation might not be as large when one is virtualizing business critical applications (where the physical servers were appropriately sized in the first place) is it is with tactical applications (where the one server per application resulted in massive over-provisioning). At the end of that analysis we also pointed out that the business critical case did not include the other “extra” products that would need to be a part of a business critical application virtualization project. This post proposes a reference architecture for the entire suite of solutions that will be required to virtualize business critical applications. We are going to build this example around VMware vSphere as VMware has the broadest level of third party support in terms of vendors who provide the solutions required to fulfill the requirements of the reference architecture. (more…)

Topic:  Application Virtualization,  Data Center Virtualization,  Performance Management,  SMB Virtualization,  Virtualization Backup,  Virtualization Management,  Virtualization Security | No Comments »
Tags: Virtualization Backup, Virtualization Management, Virtualization Performance Management, Virtualization Security, VMware vSphere

sbeaver | July 22, 2010

When you hear the term “host” when talking about virtual environment, what is the first thing you think of? For me, the answer is simple, a host is an appliance.  For years now I have been standing on my soap box and preaching the power and fundamentals of automation in building and configuring your virtual environment.  I came across a thread on the VMware VMTN Community Forum where a concerned individual was in a position that he was going to have to rebuild his host from scratch.  What he did to get himself into this position was to run a hardening script on the host and then the host became broken and unusable. This person was concerned that he did not have a backup of the host and was looking for a way to rollback. (more…)

Topic:  Data Center Virtualization,  SMB Virtualization,  Virtualization Management | No Comments »
Tags: Automation, Backup, ESX, Host, Restore

Bernd Harzog | July 21, 2010

A Wall Street Journal article, Spending Soars on Internet Plumbing on 7/20/2010 chronicles the growth in the investment in the servers that form the compute backbone of the Internet. The following examples were citied: (more…)

Topic:  Cloud Computing,  Data Center Virtualization | No Comments »
Tags: Cloud Computing

Texiwill | July 20, 2010

When you read books on virtualization, cloud computing, security, or software product sheets a common word that shows up is Policy. Tools often claim to implement Policy, while books urge you to read or write your Policy. But what does Policy imply?

Webster (webster.com) defines policy as:

1 a : prudence or wisdom in the management of affairs b : management or procedure based primarily on material interest
2 a : a definite course or method of action selected from among alternatives and in light of given conditions to guide and determine present and future decisions b : a high-level overall plan embracing the general goals and acceptable procedures especially of a governmental body

When you read policy in product literature and books we are looking at definition number 2 and often a over b. But what does this mean to those who administer and run virtual environments or make use of cloud services?

(more…)

Topic:  Cloud Computing,  Data Center Virtualization,  SMB Virtualization,  Virtualization Backup,  Virtualization Management,  Virtualization Security | 3 Comments »
Tags: Capacity, Cloud Portals, Hyper9, Policy, Security, The Book, Vkernel