Demitasse

In April I got to visit two new countries in one week, teaching Nutanix courses in Seoul and Tokyo back to back. My week was 20,000KM flying, six airports, two hotels and a lot of different cars. I met a lot of Nutanix staff and even more Nutanix partners. One of the things I really like about my work is going different places and meeting different people. This week definitely delivered both people and places.

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CloudPhysics is an interesting company name to go with an interesting company. I have a University degree in Physics and spent many hours looking out windows at clouds whilst gaining that degree. Of course CloudPhysics does little physics and while it is in the Cloud it isn’t in the sky. They apply big data analytics to information about a large number of vSphere environments. The results of the analysis are presented back to customers in a web portal. The analysis provides configuration information and actionable recommendations. The data about the vSphere environments is provided by every CloudPhysics customer. Each customer deploys an observer VM which reports back to the CloudPhysics data warehouse. Customers can then connect to CloudPhysics web site and get insights into their environment.

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Some flash array vendors want to make the fastest flash array they can. Pure’s array isn’t the fastest, that is by design. Pure Storage want to bring the benefits of flash storage by being price competitive with hard disk based arrays. Pure is targeting being a mainstream storage array that uses flash. Pure want to replace the spinning disk in your datacentre. When I say Pure isn’t the fastest flash array I mean a single array won’t do a million IOPS, only a few hundred thousand. To put this in perspective an all hard disk array without cache would need eight racks of disks to hit 200,000 IOPS. Not the fastest all flash array is still a very fast array. The purchase price for usable capacity may be similar to hard disks. The price per unit of performance is much lower than hard disk.

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It’s funny what motivates you. Last week I was at Virtualization Field Day 3 in San Jose. These events are where I hang out with my tribe and talk virtualization. Over beer one evening we were talking about AutoLab and I was vigorously encouraged to ship the vSphere 5.5 build of AutoLab even though the documentation wasn’t updated. Now that I’m home I’ve spent my evenings getting the documentation fixed, after an awesome week last week it didn’t take me long to get the docs together.

AutoLab v1.5 is available for download on the AutoLab home page. It supports vSphere 5.5 as well as the current versions of View. In order to let you play with vSAN there are now three ESXi VMs and they have a disk tagged as SSD as well as another disk. Setting up VSAN on AutoLab is easy (provided you put the license key in). Keep in mind that you’re really only looking at the interface to VSAN, you’d need to do some funny things to make it perform like a real VSAN.

If you are new to AutoLab then make sure to read the deployment guide. If you have used AutoLab before it works the same, just be aware that the ESXi VMs now have 4GB RAM configured, so that ESXi 5.5 will install. To fit on an 8GB physical you will need to reduce each ESXi to 2GB after install.

My normal day job is teaching about virtualization for enterprise IT. I don’t often get to install large environments. As a result much of what Spirent does is way beyond my knowledge. My normal day job is teaching about virtualization for enterprise IT, so I don’t often get to implement large environments. As a result much of what Spirent does is way beyond my knowledge.

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It is always an honour when people you like and respect approach you to work together. I was delighted when Scott Lowe (the “Other” one, not the one talking about NSX all the time) and David Davis asked whether I’d like to write some articles for their web sites, VirtualizationSoftware.com and the newly launched EnterpriseStorageGuide.com. The sites are both filled with articles by independent community members and with interviews and videos that Scott and David have produced with vendors. There are quite a few articles there that I want to have a read over when I get a moment. The two articles of mine that have been published are Why RAID Cannot Cope With Large Disks: Rebuild Times and An Introduction to Scale-Up vs. Scale-Out Storage there are a few more that should appear on the site over time.

For a full listing of the pieces I have written please take a look at my Other Publications page. It’s getting quite long since three articles a month for two years adds up. If you are looking for writing services do get in touch via my About page.

I’m in silicon valley for VFD3, this is my first time in the valley so I’m having the experience of seeing tech company signs on way more buildings than I’m used to in New Zealand.

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This is my big news for February, I approached Infinio to become sponsors of AutoLab and they said yes! Starting this month Infinio is the sole sponsor of the AutoLab and their help will allow me to spend more time on AutoLab and thanks those other community members that have contributed.

The first immediate change is that AutoLab now has a logo which you can see proudly displayed on the AutoLab web site over time you may see the logo on shirts and buttons too.

Infinio has an awesome storage accelerator application for vSphere, if you are planning on adding trays of disk to an old NFS array just to get better performance then Infinio is probably a better solution.

AutoLab 1.5 is close to shipping, I now need to update the deployment guide and make it much more understandable.

2014 has been an amazing year so far & it keeps getting better. I hope your year is the same, or becomes the same.

On Monday I head to Silicon Valley to spend a few days at Virtualization Field Day 3, run by the incomparable Stephen Foskett and his merry band. This will be my first visit to the valley, previous SF trips have been two VMworlds, so all about the Moscone centre. I was going to arrive early and relax a bit to get used to the time zone, my relaxing time is now filled with going to the VMware and Nutanix HQs.

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I cannot believe that it’s nearly two months since HP Discover in Barcelona, a very busy and chaotic couple of weeks. I started this post on the plane back from Barcelona but didn’t get it finished until today.

Disclaimer: I attended HP Discover in Barcelona at the invitation of HP, who paid for travel and accommodation, thanks HP. HP has not asked me to write about anything nor seen anything I write before it is published.

Data centre based desktops come in a few flavours: Virtual machines, terminal servers and dedicated physical desktops. HP are bringing an option for the dedicated physical desktop by putting an AMD APU in a Moonshot cartridge which provides 1800 physical desktops in one server rack. There are two new things here, the APU and the Moonshot chassis.

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