Archive for May, 2009
VMware vSphere takes me by storm
May 26th
Official download was available on May 21st, 2009, and I was waiting anxiously for my license keys for the new vCenter (management console) and host license keys (that which is the hypervisor)…
I got them on that day, and then proceeded to spend way too much time with it. For some people, addiction is a bad thing. For me…no need to guess.
I find playing and working with VMware (and the suite of tools available) to be on par with playing World of Warcraft. I can lose myself for hours and hours. With WoW, I complete quests, work with groups of people (9 or 24 others) accomplishing a goal. With VMware, I make clusters, I play virtual networking games, I make one computer act like many.
Since Thursday, I have upgraded my not-for-resale copies of vCenter and installed an Enterprise level host (well, upgraded from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4 Enterprise). I want to get used to things. It hasn’t taken very long to get comfortable. Sure, some things have changed, but the core methods have not.
Hopefully over the next 2-4 weeks I can upgrade our VMware cluster(s) to vSphere 4 from ESX 3.5. The added performance benefits (according to VMware), the prettier and better organized client software (still no native Mac client, BOO!), and the eventual vNetwork Distributed Switch implementation.
My testing so far (ha, hard to believe what you can do in 4 days), upgrading the infrastructure shouldn’t be hard at all, and should be pretty seamless in our data center, though before the clusters get some love, I’ll be doing a few more test installs and test upgrades.
Until next time… VMware addict out!
VMware vSphere – 1 more day of waiting!
May 20th
Tomorrow, May 21st, 2009, normal people around the world will get a chance to download VMware’s newest edition of their infrastructure ’cloud operating system’ products named vSphere.
I am very excited to see what this all entails. I have read the documents, reviewed the upgrade steps and procedures, have read many a blog entry from those special enough to have early access.
What will it do for our infrastructure here at ipHouse? That I don’t know. The new Cisco Nexus 1000V stuff looks great, but initial reports of pricing push it out of our market space pretty quickly as what I have read so far show it to be over $10,000 per physical host. I do hope I am wrong, but until I can get someone on the phone (or even email) from Cisco dealing with this software, I am marking it as unobtainium.
Until tomorrow…when maybe I won’t be so lame with my lack of content…
Linux Sucks! – a presentation
May 9th
Over at Bryan Lunduke’s blog is a presentation on why Linux sucks. No no, no operating system or distribution bashing, he isn’t from Microsoft, and he isn’t arrogant, snarky, or rude throughout. He is able to bring up a topic that causes a lot of fervor – Linux distributions have issues. It sucks.
His thoughts revolve around the desktop and lack of software for the mainstream user, problems with this driver not working with that kernel, and other things that are brushed over when persons talk about the ease of a Linux based system.
My view is much more from the server side of things, that’s where I live day to day, but some of the issues brought up during the presentation reinforce my idea that Linux doesn’t belong in my server network.
But a subscript issue is talked about without ever being brought to the forefront – lack of cohesive anything between different distributions. He touches on some of it dealing with package management – Debian packages vs RPM vs package-manager-of-the-week, but misses the rest of the picture with the complete lack of standardization across the distributions (there is mention of discussions about creating this – isn’t that so 10 years ago? 15? Still broken…).
