Blog Posts

As a self-acknowledged servergeek, I enjoy learning about the details of Microsoft Exchange 2007, SQL Server Mirroring, Oracle RAC, and VMware HA. I spend a lot of my time analyzing the configuration of systems with tons of processing cores and RAM of 32, 64, and 128 GB. I even have my own open source project (along with Dave) that is a test OLTP database for SQL, Oracle, and MySQL that includes driver programs, build files, and load scripts.

So why should I get involved with desktops? Because a lot of people are now considering using those big servers to host desktops-as Virtual Machines-inside the data center. The advantages of this approach can include better security of data, easier management of clients, and potential cost savings. In some ways it's an extension of many of the advantages of server virtualization, but for desktops. So pay attention: the desktop may be coming into your data center.

Todd

Jose Maria, a Dell virtualization guru and member of delltechcenter, has his own virtualizaiton blog that he writes en espanol. Even after taking 2 years in high school and 2 more years in college I still need lots of hand waving and gesturing to get by when attempting to speak Spanish. Jose Maria is a native speaker who does very well with English as well, but has started his blog to reach the large audience of technical minded Spanish speakers. He has many excellent posts and updates it several times a week with entries that disucss the latest developments in the virtualization industry. This is a great opportunity for those of you that would prefer to get some technical content en espanol and for me to brush up on my Spanish.

I've put a link to his blog right on the delltechcenter home page, giving it some international feel.

Todd

Our upcoming chat today on benefits of iSCSI and Virtualization led me to some quick research to see what I could find. The first hit was for a Dell Whitepaper on why iSCSI is the best storage for virtualization. Turns out this is a whitepaper that I reviewed internally before it was published about a year ago.

I was a long time fibre channel user and thought that some of the points in the paper were a bit harsh. The funny thing is that reading it now I agree with it much more. The paper didn't change, but my experience in the last year with iSCSI has changed me. I really do think that iSCSI is easier and the performance concerns that I had, for the most part, don't concern me anymore. Although I must admit that I still like my CX3-80 fibre channel storage.

Todd

I leave for vacation for a few days and all kinds of cool stuff is announced (although I did make it into the office a couple of times while on the beach). What I think is a really great server for virtualization is now on the website where you can configure and order it. The new PowerEdge r805 is not just a new version of the 2950 or 2970. It was designed with virtualization in mind and has the features to back it up. It has 16 memory DIMM slots, 4 embedded NICs, plus four more PCI slots, and is still only 2U.

I put together a couple of configurations on the website and the price for an r805 system with two top bin quad-core processors and 64 GB of RAM seems like a great deal to me. I guess that I'm still thinking about some of the old PowerEdge 8450 8-way servers that I tested with back in the day with a list price of over 50K, which was a good deal at the time.

Todd