Virtual Machines
The Value and Cost of Persistent Data
Jan 27th
I’ve been cleaning out my house recently. There’s a lot of crud that’s just been lying around, collected through years. My wife describes me as a level 2 hoarder; she says that I would be a shoe-in for that A&E show. Going through many, many boxes that I’ve collected in the basement, I pick through each cord and think “I might need that.” I won’t need it though, so with a small mental push, I put it in the trash bag. Persistent data is a lot like that. A lot of companies have, either through policy or inertia, tons of useless information sitting on disks, or tapes, or CDs, that may be useful one day, but probably will not ever be.
Clone-tastic!
Jan 20th
There are many things about virtualization is the ability to clone virtual machines. It’s really cool! Unfortunately, after you work with virtualization for a while you start to take it for granted. I can’t tell you how many times I roll out a new physical machine and sigh because I can’t simply clone it. Well, I can but that’s a discussion for another day.
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What does a VDC get you out of?
Jan 20th
A vmForge virtual data center gets you into a private pool of computing resources which you can custom configure to your needs. It gets you into a lean, efficient, reliable, and elastic platform for your business, which can easily grow as you do. But it’s also worth looking at what it gets you out of.
Idle Thoughts: Things to do with your VDC
Jan 17th
By now, you might have a virtual datacenter, and whether by design or happenstance, you might have some extra capacity in reserve. Rather than letting it sit idle, why not utilize it for some small, temporary projects? Since creating and starting a virtual machine takes minutes instead of hours, and the resources invested can be recovered just as quickly, its relatively easy to explore options which you might not have had time for before. Maybe you can solve a problem you’ve been struggling with, or discover new capabilities for your business. Here’s a few ideas.
Monitoring, a journey
Jan 9th
Or “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love SaaS”
I touched on monitoring in an earlier post but I thought that I would expand on my thoughts.
Let me just get this out there: LogicMonitor (company site) is awesome. It’s not perfect (what is?), but it’s amazing, simple, straightforward, and it works. It combines effective monitoring with graphing (metrics); it’s easy to understand and customize and it works.
Repeat: It works.
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