Disqus - Latest Comments for vseanclark

Re: VMworld 2012 – Something for Everyone

vseanclark — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:18:05 -0000

Xangati and VMworld go together like bacon with fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes on a BLT. Stoked to have Xangati sponsoring VMunderground once again. From Brian, Theron and I, Thank You!!

Re: vSphere 5 To Include vStorage API for Token Ring Integration

vseanclark — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 09:46:54 -0000

I would love to meet that vShawn Cleric guy. Not only does he recognize the power of FCoTR and advanced integration with VMware, but he knows how to dress from the sound of it.

Re: VMware vSphere design - the book | Technodrone

vseanclark — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:49:05 -0000

I agree with Rod. Lately there has been a VMware design book gap since the ATDG books of ESX 2 and VI 3. I will be pre-ordering this book to go next to a little orange book on my bookshelf. Thanks for putting this together. Can't wait to crack it open.

Re: VMware vCloud Director Communication Overview

vseanclark — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 22:38:25 -0000

Good overview.

Although it is kind of scary that resource pools are needed to prevent resource theft or leakage. If someone plans to use resource pools to do this with today's vSphere, to do it right becomes exceedingly complex. Yes, it helps if you can put hard limits on resource pools, but resulting resource pools need to be closely monitored and capacity planned. In a very dynamic environment, it may require resource pool settings and shares to be dynamically changed to ensure resource pools still perform as originally intended.

I think the further integration of AppSpeed, Application Discovery Manager, CapacityIQ and Integrion w/ vCloud Director will be necessary to confidently chop up large clusters into smaller resource pools, and manage the ongoing performance requirements for the VMs (vApps) contained within.

Re: VMware CPU ready, virtual machine rightsizing…and donuts?

vseanclark — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:42:36 -0000

John,
Mileage will definitely vary, that is an eternal truth when it comes to performance and capacity planning.

Just so readers aren't confused (since it can be a confusing subject for folks not chest-deep in VMware), but there is a good treatment of Ready Time here: http://communities.vmware.c... - Something that gets confused is interpreting the %RDY stat for multi-proc VMs. In the case of a multi-proc VM there is actually a %RDY calc for each "world" or vCPU (+overhead) of the VM and each of these is tallied to create the default %RDY stat you see when you first open esxtop. If folks don't know this is an aggregate stat, they might unecessarily jump to the conclusion that the VM is performing badly, when in reality each vCPUs %RDY time might be within limits layed out in the link above. To see this granularity of %RDY per world, you can type "e" within esxtop's CPU screen to expand a VM to show all its worlds.

John, I'm probably preaching to the choir here. But I just want to make sure that your readers have some good additional tools/resources on their journey to understanding %RDY and how to manage performance of their larger VMs.

-Sean Clark
@vSeanClark

Re: VMware CPU ready, virtual machine rightsizing…and donuts?

vseanclark — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:48:04 -0000

Josh,
I'm pro-#DonutZen, but I need to correct you on how ESX handles scheduling of multi-proc VMs. What you are describing is "strict" co-scheduling. ESX has not done that since ESX 2.5. In ESX 3, they introduced relaxed co-scheduling to allow a portion of the vCPUs of a multi-vCPU VM to run a the same time. ESX 4, relaxed this even further with better skew detection and handling. The following VMware documentation explains the ESX scheduler very well within 20 pages or so. http://www.vmware.com/files...

I agree though in principle that large VMs need to be justified and not doled out like candy.

Thanks for bringing prominence to donuts.

Sean Clark
#DonutZenMaster

Re: VMware with a Modular Desktop View

vseanclark — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:31:35 -0000

Awesome post, Scott! Please consider turning this post into a static page that is easily linked to for folks just beginning their journey into VDI. I agree with a ton of this. Creating the right VDI center of excellence or team is spot on. Assessing your environment with tools like Liquidware Labs Stratusphere and defining good requirements for the VDI project is also huge. Good work!

But, I have to add my $.02 so I hope you don't mind. :) You project team is missing a key area. If the company has a a Terminal Server team in-house, you'll want to make sure you involve them because they've been bleeding on similar issues for years and their experiences map pretty well to the VDI space.

And if I wanted to get nit-picky, if the company is big enough to have a dedicated storage team, you need to involve those guys so they can start to begin thinking out of the box (if they aren't already) on the unique storage demands that need to be addressed for rounds 2 and 3 of VDI deployements.

And remember, with VDI we don't make mistakes, we just make happy little accidents.....in the POC. :)

Re: Stop Using VMware Server! (For Your Workstation Workloads)

vseanclark — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:18:57 -0000

Dumb question here, but can you run more than one VM on VM Player at the same time? If so, am I crazy or was that the limitation when it was first release?

Re: VIRTUMANIA Episode 12: EMC World 2010 Post Game Analysis

vseanclark — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:28:59 -0000

I did comment on episode 12, but the URL is showing episode-11-coast-to-coast. But I'm reading you stuff about sideline babes and the heading is correct (VIRTUMANIA Episode 12: EMC World 2010 Post Game Analysis). You'll have to check it out. It's a little weird. It might explain why I thought your podbean wasn't updating last week when in reality it is.

Re: VIRTUMANIA Episode 12: EMC World 2010 Post Game Analysis

vseanclark — Wed, 19 May 2010 01:10:21 -0000

Great show this week, Rich. Even if you didn't get full participation from the sideline babes. :)

It's been a week since the announcements of vPlex and long(er) distance VMotion and I'm still geeking out on the possibilities of this technology, BUT the shine is starting to wear off a bit. Until VMotion can be supportable at asynchronous distances, I can't see this technology being implemented. I think if anything, this announcement will help EMC and VMware sell more VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) solutions as customers reluctant to move datacenters to synchronous replication distances, will opt to improve DR capability and lay foundation for future long distance VMotion capabilities.

Re: Citrix Is First To Release Bare Metal Client Hypervisor

vseanclark — Thu, 13 May 2010 12:35:21 -0000

Very cool. Although I think Virtual Computer guys might have actually been first: http://www.virtualcomputer..... But Citrix did beat the vGorilla (VMware) to the punch, so they're first in that sense.

Re: New VMware Visio Stencils - v3 | Technodrone

vseanclark — Mon, 10 May 2010 09:41:40 -0000

Do we know if VMware ever put these back for public download? Corporate firewall is blocking the download from the links you provided. :(

Re: New beginning

vseanclark — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 01:14:05 -0000

Thanks, Jason. Beware though. Now that I'm 100% virtualization and cloud, I'll be reading good VCDXer blogs (like http://www.boche.net/blog/ ) with extreme voracity.

Re: New beginning

vseanclark — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 01:10:38 -0000

Thanks, Jason. Look out, though. I'll be reading virtualization blogs (like http://www.boche.net/blog/ ) with extreme voracity. VCDXers like yourself might get tired of me! ;)

Re: New beginning

vseanclark — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:02:00 -0000

@maish and @professionalvmware - Thanks guys!

Re: New beginning

vseanclark — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:01:14 -0000

Thanks, Chad! EMC-financed beer is the best. It's been a while since I've tasted. ;)

Re: VIRTUMANIA Episode 7: VDI Plumber Crack

vseanclark — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:32:21 -0000

"Disclaimer: All references to plumbers, plumbing, hot dogs, fanny packs, and Budweiser are virtual."

LOL!

Re: New beginning

vseanclark — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:13:30 -0000

Thanks, Scott. And thanks for you help along the way. It is MUCH appreciated.

Re: Here Goes Somethin

vseanclark — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 07:24:40 -0000

Awesome move, Rich! There is no sexier company in V12N land at the moment. Good things are ahead for both you and Veeam.

Re: GestaltIT.com Announces Aquisition of Infosmack Productions and New Annual Conference

vseanclark — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:31:13 -0000

Rich,
I take my last comment back. Everything, except the moonshine comment.

Keep up the good work. ;)

Re: GestaltIT.com Announces Aquisition of Infosmack Productions and New Annual Conference

vseanclark — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:28:47 -0000

I will likely stop listening to Virtumania now that GestaltIT owns it. That, and they don't say "nipple" anymore. Going down hill if you ask me.

I still for the life of me don't know why you wouldn't want to locate a Spring Break conference in Iowa. I mean, come on! We can usually go sledding on some of our bigger hills during spring break, and/or go help fill sand bags by our local river banks. And did I mention, that you can fly SouthWest to Omaha, Nebraska and then drive 3 hours to Des Moines? There are conveniences and attractions galore.

Iowa - Where we could probably make silicon out of corn, it weren't addicted to moonshine.....er.....I mean ethanol.

Re: Compellent Storage Center 5: Best SAN for VMware VMFS

vseanclark — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:54:14 -0000

No. I think it just means performance for your randomly accessed blocks will continue to kick arse, but your sequential I/O to same VMFS volume would continue to be slowed down because of the interruption of random I/O at the VMware level.

A Compellent storage architect would be more qualified to answer, but the slowdown that Scott is talking about is at VMware level and independent of the type of storage.

Re: Compellent Storage Center 5 – Introduced

vseanclark — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:35:45 -0000

Devang,
I've tweated this earlier, but portable volume replication is nothing but a good thing for folks that need it. Those business that can't afford big pipe absolutely need another way to sync up data for initial replication passes for volumes. So folks in flyover-country can now afford SAN replication without going broke on the bandwidth costs. Who is claiming this is CDP by-the-way?

Good post. Just wanted to make sure nowhere, fly-over country and Iowa are represented properly. ;)

Sean

Re: Announcing the 2009 Q3 VM /ETC UGG & UGH Winners

vseanclark — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:24:54 -0000

Congrats, UGG and UGHs!!

Re: Cisco UCS for Dummies – UCS Overview

vseanclark — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:02:41 -0000

I'm loving the idea of stateless UCS blades. Why would anyone choose to insert SAS drives in these blades and leave all that stateless goodness on the table? Would be interested in your classes view on that or anyone logging in here.

This will be a very popular series of posts, Rich. Thanks!