Opinion
Oh sandbox, you need to grow
Nov 21st
The buildup of our new sandbox for internal learning has run for a week and already we are running out of resources.
Five old Dell PE1430 with 2 4-core processors but they max out at 8 GiB of RAM. That’s 40 GiB total for 7-8 people. This is a little tight.
Digging through dead server storage(tm) I have found a few old PE1950 boxes with old school Xeon processors. Gonna see what I can harvest from other old servers in DSS(tm) and give these servers as much RAM as possible. And I’ll need to find ethernet ports as the sandbox requires 3 to fully operate.
Fun times! I am very excited to see my staff learning how VMware works, how vCloud Director does its thing, how all of this magic really is not all that difficult to digest. Hats off to you ipHouse employees!
Monitoring and measurement software, the search
Oct 11th
While at VMworld 2011, I spent a lot of time at the expo (where companies were peddling their wares) looking for 2 items.
- Storage vendors who do things via NFS.
- Monitoring and measurement companies to help me consolidate the multiple pieces of software we run today.
This post is about #2.
I looked at a ton of software while at VMworld and more once I got back and I had fallen in love with LogicMonitor, found via a google search.
I also looked at a bunch of things once I got back, but LogicMonitor still keeps on winning on everything technical for us.
Understands things like VMware (vCenter and ESXi via SDK), SNMP devices (including device specific items like F5 extensions, Fortigate), measurement of data from Apache, MySQL (and I assume other databases), etc.
I’ll write more later, need to finish up my slightly extended beta test and work on the alerting function.
Check them out, so far so good.
VMworld 2011 – what a busy week
Sep 5th
I was in Las Vegas for VMworld 2011 this past week and what a busy week it was!
20,000+ people in attendance!
I met many amazing people, saw quite a few new products, I enjoyed it 100%.
Slimy marketing tactics are insulting
Aug 3rd
Isilon – makers of what look to be a very cool scale-out NAS solution just sent me an email.
Now, I was expecting their email, so this isn’t an issue of spam at all (in fact, when they scanned my badge at VMware Forum I commented that I would be watching for their email, and to be honest, I said it to every booth person doing scanning). I was excited to see the message because I want to talk to Isilon about their product.
My received email looks like this:
non-existent person used in email contact
I responded to the message stating that I would like to talk to her about budgetary pricing and how Isilon may work in my network.
My phone rang about 5-6 minutes after I sent my message out and a nice gentleman was on the phone from Isilon.
When I stated that I had sent an email to a Deborah and asked why I was getting a call back from him, he, honestly it seems, told me that there is no such person by the name of Deborah Levin in the company and that this is done to give some personality to the message.
He could have lied to me; told me that Deborah was busy and passed him the lead and I would have taken that at face value. Instead he (seemingly) told the truth, that Isilon (and EMC as their owners) do this through a third party email service provider (all headers in the email are Isilon headers).
But he didn’t lie, and for that I look forward to his email for later contact with him, if I can get the bad taste out of my mouth.
Pertinent headers:
Received: from mail01.info.isilon.com (unknown [204.92.21.14]) by smtpgrey-2.iphouse.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2064F3D7667 for <my-email>; Wed, 3 Aug 2011 11:56:26 -0500 (CDT)
Message-Id: <1b53bd039cbe4772a93c38749f6a68d4@1135>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”–boundary_10086078_b76909b6-4a0e-4dae-9655-32f63a61adcf”
Return-Path: sales@info.isilon.com
Received-Spf: None (mail.corp.iphouse.net: deborah.levin@isilon.com does not designate permitted sender hosts)
So there we have it…slimy marketing tricks.
