Why, oh why, oh why, has every man and his dog started calling everything Cloud? Cloud Hosting, Cloud Apps, Cloud Services? Is it me, or was it only 6 months ago that these were called Virtual Hosting, Web Apps, Web Services? What’s changed?
One of the major new components in Virtual Machine Hardware 7 is the new Para Virtualised SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter. When it first came out there were a number of posts regarding the much improved I/O Performance and latency reduction this new adapter delivered, such as Chad Sakac’s I/O vSphere performance test post.
There is one thing that keeps coming up lately in our office. We install a lot of systems virtually, and have over 8000 virtual servers installed.
Now, as anyone who has installed SAP will probably tell you, our software can do a lot of things, but one of the things it swallows up is RAM. [...]
I was doing some work out of hours the other night on my employers Virtual Infrastructure when bang on time the little red triangles started popping up against certain ESX hosts in vCenter. Why you ask? well it’s AV scanning time on our VM’s of course, or the Sophos summit as we affectionately call it due to its uncanny resemblance to a mountain range when you look at the CPU performance stats in vCenter.
VMware, Cisco, and EMC made their official announcement of the VCE Coalition and the joint venture Acadia this morning. Acadia is interesting, but it really isn’t the meat of the announcement, in my opinion. The real substance of the matter is the nature of the coalition.
Enhancements to EMC Symmetrix V-Max systems is possibly around the corner (FY09 Q4). FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) is due this quarter and will be one of the most awaited software release in the enterprise storage space by EMC. Bundled together with FAST, possibly a new microcode version the enables FAST (its associated features) and other expected enhancements.
This weekend I finally had the chance to catchup on some of the new storage features released as part of vSphere 4.0, there are quite a few changes to cover, some of them quite exciting.
What is VMware VMDirectPath I/O?
VMDirectPath allows guest operating systems to directly access an I/O device, bypassing the virtualization layer. This direct path, or passthrough can improve performance for VMware ESX systems that utilize high-speed I/O devices, such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet. A single VM can connect to up to two passthrough devices.
VMDirectPath I/O is experimentally [...]
I’ve recently been evaluating some of the new features in VMware vSphere to see what use they would be to my current employer. One of the areas that I touched upon in my “what’s new in vSphere Storage” blog post was thin provisioning. I wanted to come back and cover this particular topic in more detail as it’s a key feature and it’s available throughout all versions of vSphere so I’m sure everyone will be interested in it.
Part of upgrading your VMware Infrastructure 3.x environment to VMware vSphere 4 also involves upgrading your virtual machines. This process upgrades the VMware Tools, virtual machine hardware, and installs the latest paravirtualized drivers for maximum performance.