VMWare
There are 12 entries for the tag VMWare
We at F5 – like most collectives of geeks - are constantly discussing the wide array of IT boondoggles that are out there, looking at which ones hold water and which are just passing fads. Often we’re debating which are passing fads. Today I received an email to a small group asking if any of us had tried out the augmented reality stuff out there. I haven’t, but that gives you an idea of the edge that is sometimes taken. And it is that time of year where every pundit and their uncle is making predictions about...
Every spring I get excited. I live in Wisconsin, which my travels have shown me you may not understand. I have actually been told “that is not your house, there is snow on the ground. All of America is sun and beaches”. Well, in Wisconsin, it gets cold. Moscow style cold. There are a couple of weeks each winter where going out is something you do only after bundling up like a toddler… Mittens, hats, coat, another coat, boots… But then spring comes, and once the temperature gets to the point where the snow starts to melt, the sun...
I am barely old enough to remember when US “Service Stations” really were – when someone else pumped your gas, and while it was pumping they washed your windshield and checked your oil. Not old enough to have actually used one mind you, but old enough to remember them. Whenever my Mother had to get her own gas – which was not very often – we’d only stop at full service stations, which of course changed over the years, and now that she’s widowed and much older, she’s pumping her own gas because there are precious few service stations...
That’s a mouthful, but this is just a quick blog to point you at the actual blog I guest wrote for our F5 Fridays series. In short, we’ve been toying with F5 BIG-IP WOM in the labs as a performance and distance enhancement tool for VMWare vMotion moves over the WAN when NetApp Flexcache is deployed. Pretty cool stuff, and while I wasn’t involved in all of the testing that went on, as the Technical Marketing Manager for WOM I did get to see the results as they rolled out of the lab. Take a read if...
If you’ve never heard of my Load Balancing For Developers series, it’s a good idea to start here. There are quite a few installments behind us, and I’m not going to look back in this post any more than I must to make it readable without going back… Meaning there’s much more detail back there than I’ll relate here. Again after a lengthy sojourn covering other points of interest, I return to Load Balancing For Developers with a more holistic view – application performance. Lori has talked a bit about this topic, and I’ve talked about it in the...
I owned a book once – long since wandered off in the hands of a friend or one of my children so I can’t give proper reference – where they discuss replication teleportation. Where your pattern is transmitted, but your physical self is not. Back in the 90s, some smart folks at IBM were working on just this theory. In the book, the new copy of you wakes up and they say “congratulations, you’ve made it to Mars safely”, while the old copy of you wakes up and gets the same speech, right before the old copy is killed. The...
My father was an antique dealer that specialized in furniture refinishing. All of us children spent some amount of time down at the shop getting instruction in how to handle antiques from dishes to weapons to furniture. But each of us got special instruction in how to treat a piece of furniture. The man looked at a piece of broken down furniture with a critical eye, and then caressed it like it was special, he could recover some of the most horrifically damaged furniture with nothing but experience and trial-and-error. The one lesson all of us received over and...
In the data center of the future, you are going to need to be able to bring up new instances of an application, have them fully functional without any user intervention, and when they’re no longer needed they should clean up after themselves and quietly go away. Five years ago this was fantasy talk, two years ago it was coming to the fore, and today we can see clearly that such adaptable infrastructure is going to be mandatory for any installation/application that has a highly variable rate of throughput. The drivers for this need for adaptability are varied, but...
One thing that some companies seem to have grabbed onto and run with while others don’t seem to have made the correct connections to fully utilize is testing in a highly virtualized or cloud environment. Of all the things these environments can do well, testing is one of the best possible use cases to deploy them. For some of you, this isn’t news. I know some testing people who have this down to a science, and no doubt their wisdom is palely reflected in this post. VIRTUAL OR CLOUD? In this case, cloud...
There is a trend in the high-tech industry to jump from one hot technology to another, without waiting for customers to catch up. We’re certainly seeing it with Cloud, there are people out there pushing the “everyone else is doing it and gaining agility!” button every day. But you’re not there yet. Part of the reason you’re not there yet is that virtualization is still growing up. Between VM sprawl, resource over-utilization, virtual versus physical infrastructure, and the inherent task of IT to continue to support the business as it sits today, there isn’t a ton of time left for...
I’ve had a couple of blog posts talking about how there is a disconnect between “the market” and “the majority of customers” where things like cloud (and less so storage) are concerned. So I thought I’d try this out as a follow on. If I were running your average medium to large IT shop (not talking extremely huge, just medium to large), what would I be focused on right now. By way of introduction, for those who don’t know, I’m relatively conservative in my use of IT, I’ve been around the block, been burned a few times (OS/2 Beta...
LOVE AND… NOT LOVE There are two interesting and complimentary rules in IT When a technology takes off, vendors will keep trying to find “the next big thing” to earn more of your business. Until something takes off, most IT staff doesn’t have time to worry about it. Virtualization is one of those things that has kept IT shops humming over the last few… several… Many years. When it first came out I was in an R&D group at a mid-sized company, and from that...
