Planet vSphere-land

Welcome to Technology Short Take #29! This is another installation in my irregularly-published series of links, thoughts, rants, and raves across various data center-related fields of technology. As always, I hope you find something useful here. Networking Who out there has played around with Mininet yet? Looks like this is another tool I need to add to my toolbox as I continue to explore netwo...

Cisco made a massive strategic blunder in the last decade, aggressively moving into consumer devices rather than focusing on their core enterprise and service provider markets. It seems that Cisco is now in the process of rectifying this mistake, but charting a path to growth is an entirely different matter! A Cisco Cius at Cisco Live 2011, with iPhones in the background Cisco’s Consumer B...

Oooh, a new version of VMmark is out. From Bruce Herndon on the VROOM! blog: I am pleased to announce the release of VMmark 2.5, the latest edition of VMware’s multi-host consolidation benchmark. The most notable change in VMmark 2.5 is the addition of optional power measurements for servers and servers plus storage. This capability will assist IT architects who wish to consider trade-offs in ...

Last Thursday Cisco released version 1.0 of their new multi-UCS-domain management tool, UCS Central and now it is generally available. UCS Central is a product that enables IT administrators to manage multiple UCS domains that are managed through individual UCS Managers from a single location through a single interface. UCS Central works closely with UCS [...]

Days after announcing its converged infrastructure platform, the Active System 800, Dell is already dropping hints about its future development path; confirming its intention to use the tech it acquired with RNA Networks to deliver new storage options.Dell Planning New Storage Tech for 2013|The Virtualization Practice

Dell was in San Francisco last week to host its Enterprise Strategy Update, staking its claim to the x86 top spot with the announcement of its big converged infrastructure platform, the Active System 800.Dell Delivers UCS Beater (Dude, It’s a Converged Infrastructure!)|The Virtualization Practice

    Today I visited the Cisco booth here at VMworld 2012 in Barcelona and got a inside view of the UCS Central. UCS Central is a tool Cisco is working on to manage multiple Cisco UCS systems/domains. At the moment it is still in beta but they expect to release it Nov/Dec 2012. UCS Central is [...]

Two years ago the HP Vice President for Enterprise Servers Storage and Networking, Randy Seidl, said the following: “A year from now the difference will be (Cisco) UCS (Unified Compute System) is dead and we have had phenomenal market share growth in the networking space.“ Man, he must feel pretty stupid right now. In Q2 of [...] by Erik Scholten

As one of the largest Cisco Partners in the Netherlands we do a lot of Cisco UCS implementations and as the first company in the Netherlands with the Cisco Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization, where the place in the Netherlands for Cisco UCS troubleshooting. Last week a colleague was called to a troubleshoot a customer [...] by Erik Scholten

I have spent a great deal of time lately working with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). This computing platform is really quite impressive with its power and flexibility, but my expectations about the platform have really changed since I completed the UCS training. During the training classes that I attended, both the design and install courses emphasized that the Cisco UCS platform woul...

Welcome to Technology Short Take #18! I hope you find something useful in this collection of networking, OS, storage, and virtualization links. Enjoy! Networking The number of articles in my “Networking” bucket continues to overflow; I have so many articles on so many topics (soft switching, OpenFlow, Open vSwitch, MPLS) that it’s hard to get my head wrapped around all of it. H...

This is BRKCOM-3002, Network Redundancy and Load Balancing Designs for UCS Blade Servers, presented by none other than M. Sean McGee (available as @mseanmcgee on Twitter; I highly recommend you follow him on Twitter if you are interested in UCS). I was really looking forward to this presentation, as I’ve spoken with Sean before and I know that he is a super-sharp UCS guru. Sean also blogs ...

Now that I’ve published the Storage Edition of Technology Short Take #12, it’s time for the Networking Edition. Enjoy, and I hope you find something useful! Ron Fuller’s ongoing deep dive series on OTV (Overlay Transport Virtualization) has been great for me. I knew about the basics of OTV, but Ron’s articles really gave me a better understanding of the technology. Check...

A little over a month ago, I was installing VMware ESXi on a Cisco UCS blade and noticed something odd during the installation. I posted a tweet about the incident. Here’s the text of the tweet in case the link above stops working: Interesting…this #UCS blade has local disks but all disks are showing as remote during #ESXi install. Odd… Several people responded, indicating they...

How’s that for acronyms? In all seriousness, though, as I was installing VMware ESXi this evening onto some remote Cisco UCS blades, I ran into some interesting keymapping issues and I thought it might be handy to document what worked for me in the event others run into this issue as well. So here’s the scenario: I’m running Mac OS X 10.6.7 on my MacBook Pro, and using VMware V...

Cisco has been around for years and years on the networking and security side but since a year or so they are a real upcoming player on the server market. Personally I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing Cisco’s Unified Computing Systems first hand and WOW I’m impressed. On March 23, 2011 (1:00 PM – 2:00 [...] by Erik Scholten

That’s right folks, it’s time for another installation of Technology Short Takes. This is Technology Short Take #11, and I hope that you find the collection of items I have for you this time around both useful and informative. But enough of the introduction—let’s get to the good stuff! Networking David Davis (of Train Signal) has a good write-up on the Petri IT Knowledge...

Welcome to Technology Short Take #9, the last Technology Short Take for 2010. In this Short Take, I have a collection of links and articles about networking, servers, storage, and virtualization. Of note this time around: some great DCI links, multi-hop FCoE finally arrives (sort of), a few XenServer/XenDesktop/XenApp links, and NTFS defragmentation in the virtualized data center. Here you go...

Welcome to Technology Short Take #8, my latest collection of item from around the Internet pertaining to data center technologies such as virtualization, networking, storage, and servers. I hope you find something useful here! Networking A couple weeks ago I wrote about how to connect a Nexus 2148T to a Nexus 5010. What I haven’t actually done yet is connect the Nexus 2148T to dual Nexus ...

A lot of interesting material is written about configuring Quality of Service (QoS) on 10GB (converged) networks in Virtual Infrastructures. With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware introduced a network QoS mechanism called Network I/O Control (NetIOC). The two most popular Blade systems; HP with Flex10 technology and Cisco UCS both offer traffic shaping mechanisms at hardware level. Both NetIOC ...