Mike D’s Blog

When I used to run datacenters every outage or blip or error was blamed on the firewall(s). Some DBA would call up and say their Oracle database is running slow and ask if we had made any changes to the firewall. Uh, no and you’re not even going through the firewall to get to the database. The firewall was that mysterious black box that everyone could blame because no one knew where it was or what went through it or what kind of control it had.

Enter virtualization – the new firewall. Coffee maker broken? It must be that virtualization we’re using. NIC doesn’t connect to the network? Gotta be that darn virtualization again. It’s always the virtualization layer’s fault. Maybe we need to do some better education with people about what the virtualization layer does and exactly how transparent it is. There are so many myths I see floating around the Internet blaming virtualization on this or that.

Well, if you’re ever in a bind one way to check if virtualization is the problem or not is to try things without virtualization in the middle. Carlo over at VMware Info posted a blog recently about how he quickly diagnosed a network problem just by booting the host with a LiveCD. No there’s some thinking! Finally someone gets it.

So if you’re ever in need of a quick sanity check a LiveCD may be just the thing you need. Now if we could just virtualize that and stick it into people’s heads then maybe they’ll stop blaming everything on the new firewall.