I really like to include graphs in my whitepapers and blog posts whenever possible. I find that lots of people read the first few pages or paragraphs, then skip to the graphs. And if they are really interested they will go back and read the sections that interest them.

In my recent blog post on VROOM! I spent a bit more time that usual on the graph. It seemed that everybody who reviewed the blog post had a couple of comments - About the graph. It started out with what was probably too much data and ended up a much better and simplified graph due to all the comments. Thanks for all the help to those who commented.

Just for fun I have decided to post the original version of the graph below. You can compare it with the final version that was published on VROOM! Comments are welcome

The big difference with this earlier version is that there are more data points included for both FT enabled and disabled. I had also used a different color for the previous generation processor tests to make it easier to spot them. Once I decided that all these data points weren't needed the different colors weren't needed either.

Even though I agree that the final version is easier to read and understand, part of me still likes this earlier version with more data that takes a few minutes to figure out what is going on.

Todd

The whitepaper that I finished recently was new for me on many levels. It was my first whitepaper here at VMware which meant that I learned the review and publishing process. ESX 4.0 was also still under development when I started, so I got to learn about how to get new builds and report bugs. Which was all pretty cool.

I also used a NetApp FAS6030 storage array for the testing. Prior to this work I didn't have much exposure to NetApp and I didn't know what to expect. There are a few things that I wanted to note here that were surprising to me in working with the NetApp array for the first time.

1. The snapshots work really well. I was impressed with how the aggregate level snaps worked and how well they performed.

2. NFS on the NetApp array is better than I expected. I didn't think that it would be as close as it ended up being to the FC results.

3. It is really easy to use NFS with ESX. I didn't realize how easy it use NFS as a data store for ESX until I had done the setup.

4. The NetApp people that I worked with were good and it has been cool to interact via twitterand blogs with them as well. OK - so this shouldn't be categorized as surprising.

These were just a few things that didn't really fit in the whitepaper and the type of general stuff I think makes for good blog posts (If you are into this kind of tech stuff).

Todd