The above title is a horrible attempt at a Forest Gump reference.
Either way - Novell announces support for VMWare's Virtual Machine Interface - which allows Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2's kernel to have "increased performance and better interoperability".
Think of it this way - there will be preferred OS's to virtualize - Novell says you can virtualize Suse since its just x86 virtualization but if you do SLES 10SP2 - you can get VMI support.
In the paravirtualization space - this will mean increased density, better running VM's, better running ESX hosts, etc.
In other words - "the guest operating system is modified to work more closely with the underlying hardware and not just with the virtualized environment."
And its a brand differentiator as well - the OS and the VM platform both have to be tuned or tunable - and with VMI - VMWare is saying they are prepared to virtualize an OS like SUSE better than its competitors.
Showing posts with label ESX Capacity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ESX Capacity. Show all posts
Monday, June 16, 2008
Friday, June 6, 2008
Water Cooled Doors / Datacenters
On the third day of cloudy skies and rain, I figured it appropriate to talk about water and how its returning to provide cooling in datacenters.
With virtualization usage increasing, server capacity increasing, and VM densities on the rise (100:1 anyone?).
The amount of power in a rack is going to change from 7-8 kW to 30+ kW or more.
That's 300-400% increases in power densities inside a single rack. This explains the increase in discussion/slides on water cooling data centers - IBM has a Rear Door Heat eXchanger and I saw Vette Corp talking about their Rear Door Heat Exchanger.
I also think more folks start looking at Deep Lake Water Cooling (DLWC), which they are doing up at Cornell and Ontario.
Metro Hall, a 27 story office building in Toronto, went online with Enwave's Deep Lake Water Cooling system in June 2006. Energy consumption at Metro Hall will be reduced by 3 million kilowatt-hours per year and reduce CO2 emissions by 732 tons annually - equivalent to taking 160 cars off the road.
I am heading to Kitchener, Ontario (near Toronto) for a VMUG and I am going to try and get over to Toronto and check it out - Enwave distributes steam and chilled water to over 140 buildings via a 40km underground pipe network that covers most of the city's downtown core.
What's great is that they don't take water out of the lake, they use the "coldness" of the deep lake water to chill water in a pipe loop - this is done with a drastically lower carbon footprint that using electricity from coal-fed power plants.
With virtualization usage increasing, server capacity increasing, and VM densities on the rise (100:1 anyone?).
The amount of power in a rack is going to change from 7-8 kW to 30+ kW or more.
That's 300-400% increases in power densities inside a single rack. This explains the increase in discussion/slides on water cooling data centers - IBM has a Rear Door Heat eXchanger and I saw Vette Corp talking about their Rear Door Heat Exchanger.
I also think more folks start looking at Deep Lake Water Cooling (DLWC), which they are doing up at Cornell and Ontario.
Metro Hall, a 27 story office building in Toronto, went online with Enwave's Deep Lake Water Cooling system in June 2006. Energy consumption at Metro Hall will be reduced by 3 million kilowatt-hours per year and reduce CO2 emissions by 732 tons annually - equivalent to taking 160 cars off the road.
I am heading to Kitchener, Ontario (near Toronto) for a VMUG and I am going to try and get over to Toronto and check it out - Enwave distributes steam and chilled water to over 140 buildings via a 40km underground pipe network that covers most of the city's downtown core.
What's great is that they don't take water out of the lake, they use the "coldness" of the deep lake water to chill water in a pipe loop - this is done with a drastically lower carbon footprint that using electricity from coal-fed power plants.
Monday, June 2, 2008
One Quad or Two?
One of the best resources on the Internet for VMWare implementation is the VMTN community forums - its top notch.
This week there was a discussion about budgets and performance (where finance always mixes it up with IT (that and Chargeback)).
The post asks about the value of two medium-speed (1.6 - 2 Ghz) QuadCore CPU's ($$) vs. one high speed (3.33 Ghz) QuadCore CPU ($$$$).
I liked William Bishop from Huntsville Hospital response - "You'll get better density on the dual socket". He prefers the "dual proc, quad core setup" and has been "adminning vmware from some of the first dual cores to the newest quad cores."
I wonder if he has done anything with 4 socket x QuadCores?
Density is important - it's going to help you drive down your per VM costs and generate better ROI on the dollars invested in a virtualization product.
This week there was a discussion about budgets and performance (where finance always mixes it up with IT (that and Chargeback)).
The post asks about the value of two medium-speed (1.6 - 2 Ghz) QuadCore CPU's ($$) vs. one high speed (3.33 Ghz) QuadCore CPU ($$$$).
I liked William Bishop from Huntsville Hospital response - "You'll get better density on the dual socket". He prefers the "dual proc, quad core setup" and has been "adminning vmware from some of the first dual cores to the newest quad cores."
I wonder if he has done anything with 4 socket x QuadCores?
Density is important - it's going to help you drive down your per VM costs and generate better ROI on the dollars invested in a virtualization product.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
I want my Availability
I wanted to do a knock off the Dire Strait's tune - Money for Nothing and then change the "I want my MTV" into "I want my Availability" - VKernel will then hire a Dire Straits cover band to perform it somewhere.
Availability vs. Capacity - is one better than the other?
Are there types of Availability?
Virtual John writes about High Availability (HA) vs. Continuous Availability (CA)
"In plain English this means, if one of your hosts in a cluster of VMWare Servers goes away the VMs will reboot elsewhere. Reboot = downtime, so is this high availability? Or just higher availability than no fault tolerance?"
It could be a important misnomer - the VM's with HA will be expected to not have any interruption of business service (enter VMotion) and voila - "I want my Availability".
Availability vs. Capacity - is one better than the other?
Are there types of Availability?
Virtual John writes about High Availability (HA) vs. Continuous Availability (CA)
"In plain English this means, if one of your hosts in a cluster of VMWare Servers goes away the VMs will reboot elsewhere. Reboot = downtime, so is this high availability? Or just higher availability than no fault tolerance?"
It could be a important misnomer - the VM's with HA will be expected to not have any interruption of business service (enter VMotion) and voila - "I want my Availability".
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