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1 year ago
in Storage Virtualization: What Is It Good For? on Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat
I will fully admit my newbie status with storage virtualization. Are there any primer articles to get somebody up to speed? I run a group of CX3 (soon to be CX4) systems and just use real LUNs. What is the benefit from using virtual LUNs?
1 year ago
in Switch! or How the Mac (Finally) Won Me Over on Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat
No more premium than Dell's XPS series or the Alienware series or the Acer high end equipment.
I will admit it looks nice but I have always been fond of the ToughBook line of notebooks that can stop a bullet so my tastes may diverge a bit from the mainstream.
Before the new Apple commercials I was always ambivalent about them but they are just fueling this misconception that Vista is terribly broken an OSX is flawless. Good post and have faith that I will keep checking in to see what warts lay beneath that brushed aluminum exterior.
I will admit it looks nice but I have always been fond of the ToughBook line of notebooks that can stop a bullet so my tastes may diverge a bit from the mainstream.
Before the new Apple commercials I was always ambivalent about them but they are just fueling this misconception that Vista is terribly broken an OSX is flawless. Good post and have faith that I will keep checking in to see what warts lay beneath that brushed aluminum exterior.
1 year ago
in Switch! or How the Mac (Finally) Won Me Over on Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat
Whenever I see these "switch" comments, especially from intelligent people, I cringe. At least you recognized the price premium you paid for the nice exterior but I cannot imagine paying the price premium for an Apple when it is built on commodity hardware.
Oh wait, I forgot the one special piece that always Steve Jobs to restrict OSX to running only on "Aptel" hardware.
Vista may not be perfect but I have always preferred the server iterations (2003 vs XP and now 2008 vs Vista).
But I will concede that no one beats them on packaging and frills. Good luck with the laptop and make sure to compare it to the XPS in the future to see how the two systems fair on similar tasks.
Oh wait, I forgot the one special piece that always Steve Jobs to restrict OSX to running only on "Aptel" hardware.
Vista may not be perfect but I have always preferred the server iterations (2003 vs XP and now 2008 vs Vista).
But I will concede that no one beats them on packaging and frills. Good luck with the laptop and make sure to compare it to the XPS in the future to see how the two systems fair on similar tasks.
1 year ago
in VMFS Storage Sizing for Maximum Performance on vm /etc
Now I have to respectfully disagree with some of the assumptions here.
I would be impressed if you were able to demonstrate an I/O level where a 15 spindle Raid5 array (even Raid6 I bet) can't handle the VM load from multiple LUNs spaced across the volume.
My environment is different as less than 10% of the systems are "production" and the rest are rapid build engineering and testing platforms but when we run scalability testing it does put some pretty significant load across the VMs AND my users are snapshot crazy.
My design looks more like this - two primary clusters with HA/DRS (5 Dell 4u's 32GB ram+ with ~400 machines per cluster) hooked up via 4GB FC.
I can't imagine a situation where Raid5 isn't a good option (go with Flash Drives if the I/O is that high) but the real question we should be addressing is the use of SAS drives vs SATA drives in modern arrays. On that question I don't have good answers yet. I am just starting to use SATA in our production environment and have good results so far.
I would be impressed if you were able to demonstrate an I/O level where a 15 spindle Raid5 array (even Raid6 I bet) can't handle the VM load from multiple LUNs spaced across the volume.
My environment is different as less than 10% of the systems are "production" and the rest are rapid build engineering and testing platforms but when we run scalability testing it does put some pretty significant load across the VMs AND my users are snapshot crazy.
My design looks more like this - two primary clusters with HA/DRS (5 Dell 4u's 32GB ram+ with ~400 machines per cluster) hooked up via 4GB FC.
I can't imagine a situation where Raid5 isn't a good option (go with Flash Drives if the I/O is that high) but the real question we should be addressing is the use of SAS drives vs SATA drives in modern arrays. On that question I don't have good answers yet. I am just starting to use SATA in our production environment and have good results so far.
