Nov 10
I was checking on some of the blog stats today and found that I had hit a nice metric – 2,000 subscribers. I’m not sure if that’s good or not since I’m still pretty new to blogging on a regular basis. I’ve been getting about 5,500 page views a day which has been good as well. I’ve even been picked up in the NY Times. All of this means I must be writing something that you all like so thank you! If you happen to have any topics that you’d like me to drill into just comment here and I’ll make sure to bring that topic up soon.
November 10th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Thanks for everything you are doing! I would REALLY like to see an honest non-biased comparison of VMFS/SAN vs. NFS/NetAPP.
November 11th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Hi Mike,
i’m one of your loyal and regular readers here, and i would like from you to have a look and comment on this interesting Hypervisor’s comparison, i think there are some stuff that are not quite clear, including for example what it’s saying about ESX not supporting 64bit physical hardware ?!! and that it’s can’t support more that 80 active VMs ?!!!
http://www.virtualization.info/buyersguide/vmms.asp
this just doesn’t make much sense to me .. and i’d like to see your comments (or corrections if applicable) about those features …
thanks a lot.
November 11th, 2008 at 7:16 am
Hany,
Thanks for reading. I’m actually going through the buyer’s guide at virtualization.info as we speak and compiling a list of corrections. I know Alessandro pretty well so it should be easy to get corrected. Not sure why the stuff that was there appeared the way it did. The 64-bit thing is usually FUD from Citrix so that’s likely where it came from. Never-the-less I’ll have the list of items over to Alessandro later today so it should be corrected soon.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Thank you so much Mike .. i look forward to reviewing this tweaked list of feature comparison…
November 13th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
No problem, thank the power of the blog.
Your linked to my blog, welcome to add me.
Roger
http://rogerlunditblog.blogspot.com/
November 14th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Mike, I really enjoy reading your blog and learn quite a bit from it. Do you have any thoughts on whether and how it makes sense to cluster in a virtual infrastructure? When I talk to consultants I get a good bit of variation as to what they will recommend. Some will say it is worth it to cluster even within the same ESX host (in the SMB you may only have one), others (most) say it doesn’t.
What do you think? What do you see in the field?
November 18th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Brian,
Personally I do think it makes sense to cluster in a VM depending on what your application and SLAs warrant. With VMware HA you’ll get a restart for an application in just a couple of minutes. For most of your applications this will meet the SLA you’re looking for. It should be noted that HA is like recovering from a hard server crash since it only kicks in after the VM has crashed. Most applications will deal with this ok. This is also nice since most applications aren’t cluster aware.
For those applications that require a faster restart time or crash consistent failover you can do clustering inside of the VM. Obviously this requires a cluster aware application. If you have such a beast and you like the torture of setting up and managing a cluster then you can still do this in a VM.
Personally, I think the days of setting up and managing traditional OS based clusters is coming to an end. Nearly every virtualization solution out there offers simple HA today. VMware is even introducing VMware FT for software based lock-step failover with zero downtime for application failover. There are hardware based solutions out there as well that do this today such as Stratus servers which allow for VMware to run on top of them.
Hopefully this is the info you were looking for.