Blog Posts

Ok, now that I have your attention (and no, I’m definitely not John Galt), but since this is my first post, I think it appropriate to give you a little background about myself. After all, why read and/or care about anything I have to say?

I was introduced to VMware like so many others, through Workstation back in 2002. At the time I worked for a 2.8 billion dollar company and had just completed a major Microsoft SMS 2.0 implementation. I was working with a consultant that had it installed on his laptop PC and used it to demo the product developed by his employer.

So then it goes something like this:
That’s a cool product, let me show the boss!
Boss likes it and says, “Why don’t you do some more research on this VMware company and find out more?”
I do the research and discover VMware’s GSX and ESX product lines.
The rest is history. (Don’t you love that line?)

I procured a copy of GSX, set it up and created three virtual machines for one of our internal development teams.
Oh, and I never told anyone what I had done. (Bad boy!)

I used a whitepaper from VMware that describe how to use the same base image for multiple VMs using redo logs. Worked great except when one needed to be rebooted = NTFS no likey.

The dev team never caught on and six months later I finally let them in on the secret. Virtual machine? What’s that? Etc, etc… (I hate giving end-users or customers reason, right or wrong, to blame all of their ills on me!)

Bottom line = pilot successful. From there I got ESX 1.52 approved (now end of 2003 or so), first one host, then two, then four - all with local disk.

Then VirtualCenter 1.0 and ESX 2.0 are released. Please Mr. IT Director, will you approve this requisition for a SAN? No. But please?
No.
Okay then how about you get fired and my team now reports to another director?
Will you, new Mr. IT Director, approve this SAN purchase?
Yes!

Hosts grow to 16 (mixture of IBM 440s, 445s, 3650s, BladeCenter blades); VMs to 500 (powered on) 600+ requisitioned; VMotions = 1000s, SAN (IBM DS4500) = 16TB; every VMworld = attended; VCP2 = achieved. Life if good.

It’s now 2006 and my employer gets acquired by another company. Oh yeah, and the new management doesn’t like any new technology much less virtualization.

Time to move on. So here I am, embarking on a new implementation using ECM Celerra IP storage (iSCSI), HP ProLiant DL380s, VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 and ESX 3i.

I thought I would use this blog to document the good, the bad and the ugly of this next gen VI platform and maybe share some tips along the way. The VMTN forums have been good to me over the years so maybe I can add to the discussion.

That’s it for now. I already have a list of technical stuff to publish. Stay tuned!