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Jul
10thOrganic Cloud : Modeling After The Natural World
I am very prone to drifting off into thoughts about patterns in real life and how they correlate to things I deal with in my work life. I am fascinated by the thought of the constantly blurring line between ourselves and technology. It is really amazing to think about how social and mobile technologies have changed they way we work, communicate, and relax. I am just as guilty as the next guy of constantly tweeting during my vacation, contacting someone through Facebook only, or the fact that I have not written an actual letter in over ten years. It is out of this day-dreaming that I often start thinking about current cloud designs and how I would change them. In my mind both public and private cloud have several core demands that have been around for a while and are an essential part of expectations in any computing utility. A simple list of these would be things like being cost effective, performant, reliable, secure, and scalable. I could spend a large amount of time defining the rules about what makes a good “cloud”. But instead I will move forward with the assumption that a cloud service provides the same or better relative utility while being cost effective to the consumer. You can find a great many blogs and personalities out there that do a much better job of defining a robust cloud service offering. My thoughts our more focus on how that actually happens.
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Jan
22ndThe VCE Model : Yes, it is different
This post comes out of a slide deck I authored last week for a partner event. I decided I was going to try and illustrate why the VCE model really is such a different approach to other datacenter and private cloud models. Normally my blog is light on vendor specific commentary. I see myself more as a virtualization geek who just happens to work for an awesome company (EMC) than a hardcore analysis/blogger. But I have seen so much messaging lately that distorts the VCE message, I really felt the need to offer my own perspective.
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May
19thBesser UBER : Celerra VSA UBER v2**** Go here for new version of UBER VSA **** What is better than UBER? UBER version 2. It has only been 19 days since the original release of the Celerra VSA UBER edition for the masses. The response has been overwhelming and encouraging. And out of that appreciation I am excited to present the Celerra VSA UBER V2 (version 2). It has a host of new features and now features the combined input of the vSpecialist team to put the shine on it. If you are not familiar with the original feature list with the first UBER version, then go here first. Here are the new features and enhancements in UBER Version 2: Even shorter initial setup Better network configuration. Removal of old style Control Center config from original VSA (Thanks to Eric Hollis & Kevin Z for help) Completely automated addition of storage. You heard that right… If you want to add more storage simply shutoff the VSA. Add as many hard drives as needed and turn back on. The VSA now detects the new VMDK’s, partitions, formats, mounts, performs Clariion configuration, and adds to storage pools. Gone are the days of manually having to configure. See video below for demo. (This by far was the biggest request) The VSA now includes a Rapid Configuration script for setting up CIFS, NFS, and Replication between 2 VSA’s. This script will accelerate the creation of a baseline working set of VSA’s. We highly recommend you use this after becoming familiar [...]
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May
1stCelerra VSA – UBER : Smaller, Faster, Easier, Geekier
**** Go here for new version of UBER VSA **** Have you tried the EMC Celerra VSA before? If so, then forget everything you experienced. If not, then welcome and let me introduce you to easiest way to test enterprise-level features with NAS and virtualization. I won’t go through the history or the advantages of the Celerra VSA because Chad Sakac does a much better job here, and here. I am a greenhorn at the EMC vSpecialist team. I have just barely three notches on my belt (if notches represent months). So everything is new to me. I am constantly bothering my direct manager with questions like: “Why do we do that?” or “How did this come about?”. This is because I am looking at everything and trying to understand the why behind it all. And this is part of the reason I ended up diving under the hood of the Celerra VSA; to find out what made it tick and why it wouldn’t tick faster. But first a quick background story: over the last month or so I have been doing my first tour of duty. I did my first customer presentation to a huge company (very near the top of the Fortune 500 list). I got involved in a proof of concept at another major client near Washington D.C. And I even got involved in helping design labs for VMware Tech Summit and major demos for EMCWorld (more on that after the big day). I have never been surrounded [...]
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Feb
15thvSphere Mini Monitor : Now With More Cowbell!
The purpose of the vSphere Mini Monitor is to provide a simple extension of the vSphere Web SDK to allow for real-time alerting of important user-based events on your vCenter server. It is not meant to replace a holistic monitoring platform. I wrote it to be secure, multithreaded, and lightweight. It is simply a cool geeky tool.
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Jan
26thLook I’m A Tool! : vSphere Session Monitor 1.0So that is a few hours of my life dedicated to seeing how easy it is to utilize the VMware vSphere Web SDK. And from a datacenter guy I can definitely say that the documentation, community (thanks @sjin2008), and SDK made this a pretty easy task. I highly recommend everyone take your cool tool ideas and try something out too.
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