virtualization
There are 40 entries for the tag virtualization
There is a series of advertisements for Capital One aired in the US featuring Vikings talking about “more points” from their credit cards that asks “What’s in your wallet?” While they’re entertaining, I never understood what Vikings had to do with a credit card, other than perhaps both like to plunder unsuspecting innocents. Though in fairness, credit card issuers tend to just increase rates, while the Vikings enjoyed wholesale slaughter when they plundered, and took literally everything not nailed down. But the question is valid in the modern day. Most people have enough credit cards, and...
The complexities of life often escape a young child. The Little Man asked me the other day why I had to go work, which was both a compliment to wanting to spend time with me and an unintended backhand slap at Lori, who was going to hang out with him while I took care of business. The answer was the usual stuff, that working paid the bills, and work has its own rewards… It did not include “and I like my job”, though I do, simply because I didn’t want to imply “more than hanging out with you” to...
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...
When I was hired in to a utility to head an Automated Meter Reading project that was just getting organized – R&D was largely done, but implementation was not started – the team was set up in a rather odd manner. We had our own datacenter, we had our own networking, we had our own well, everything. And that was a conscious choice on the part of management. As it was presented to me, they didn’t want the early phases of the project mired in “we can’t set up load balancing for our app, you have to go talk...
Funny thing about the advancement of technology, in most of the modern world we enshrine it, spend massive amounts of money to find “the next big thing”, and act as if change is not only inevitable, but rapid. The truth is that change is inevitable, but not necessarily rapid, and sometimes, it’s about necessity. Sometimes it is about productivity. Sometimes, it just plain isn’t about either. Handcarts are still used for serious purposes in parts of the world, by people who are happy to have them, and think a motorized vehicle would be a waste of resources. Think...
The rate of change in a mathematical equation can vary immensely based upon the equation and the inputs to the equation. Certainly the rate of change for f(x) = x^2 is a far different picture than the rate of change for f(x)=2x, for example. The old adage “the only constant is change” is absolutely true in high tech. The definition of “high” in tech changes every time something becomes mainstream. You’re working with tools and systems that even ten years ago were hardly imaginable. You’re carrying a phone that Alexander Graham Bell would not recognize – or know...
Sun Tzu wrote that you cannot win if you do not know your enemy and yourself. In his sense, he was talking about knowing your army and its capabilities, but this rule seriously applies to nearly every endeavor, and certainly every competitive endeavor. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses - In our case the strengths and weaknesses of IT staff and architecture – is imperative if you are to meet the challenges that your IT department faces every day. It is not enough to know that you must do X, you must know how X fits (or doesn’t!) into...
One of the things that F5 has been trying to do since before I came to the company is reach out to developers. Some of the devices in your network could be effective AppDev tools if utilized to their full extent, and indeed, I’ve helped companies develop tools utilizing iControl that give application managers control over their entire environment – from VMs to ADCs. While it is a struggle for any network device company to communicate with developers, I think it is cool that F5 continues to do so. But increasingly, the Network is the place you need...
Gear shifting in a modern car is a highly virtualized application nowadays. Whether you’re driving a stick or an automatic, it is certainly not the same as your great grandaddy’s shifting (assuming he owned a car). The huge difference between a stick and an automatic is how much work the operator has to perform to get the job done. In the case of an automatic, the driver sets the car up correctly (putting it into drive as opposed to one of the other gears), and then forgets about it other than depressing and releasing the gas and brake pedals....
We’ve all had that chilling moment when the gate attendant at the airport comes over the loudspeaker, and doing her best Charlie Brown’s Teacher imitation, announces “Jursim Puzzling vlordid Netting, gollink dummole Neptune.” (This flight is in an oversold situation, we’re looking for volunteers…). While we could discuss the causes and solutions to this being an all-too-frequent event in the daily operation of airlines, for the purposes of this blog, let’s talk about the back end. The problem on the back end is, quite simply, that the plain cannot be expanded to handle the burden demanded of it. That...
This is the second part of this series talking about things you need to consider, and where cloud usage makes sense given the current state of cloud evolution. The first one, Cloud Storage, can be found here. The point of the series is to help you figure out what you can do now, and what you have to consider when moving to the cloud. This will hopefully help you to consider your options when pressure from the business or management to “do something” mounts. Once again, our definition of cloud is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - “VM containers”, not...
Lori and I’s youngest daughter graduated from High School this year, and her class chose one of the many good Vince Lombardi quotes for the theme of their graduation – “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.” Those who know me well know that I’m not a huge football fan (don’t tell my friends here in Green Bay that… The stadium can hold roughly half the city’s population, and they aren’t real friendly to those who don’t join in the frenzy), but Vince Lombardi certainly had a lot of great quotes over...
A few of us were talking on Facebook about high speed rail (HSR) and where/when it makes sense the other day, and I finally said that it almost never does. Trains lost out to automobiles precisely because they are rigid and inflexible, while population densities and travel requirements are highly flexible. That hasn’t changed since the early 1900s, and isn’t likely to in the future, so we should be looking at different technologies to answer the problems that HSR tries to address. And since everything in my universe is inspiration for either blogging or gaming, this lead me to...
A few years ago, a gentleman created a video showing how quickly an unpatched, unprotected Windows XP machine was infected once connected to the public Internet (the linked video is worth a watch, and is short). That video took the business community pretty much by storm, but was old news to security administrators and most systems administrators. Things have improved on the operating systems side of the house, but so have the systems, attackers, and environment for hackers, meaning things aren’t much better today. In the confines of your enterprise, that’s all cool. Whether you are deploying a...
On occasion I have talked about military force multipliers. These are things like terrain and minefields that can make your force able to do their job much more effectively if utilized correctly. In fact, a study of military history is every bit as much a study of battlefields as it is a study of armies. He who chooses the best terrain generally wins, and he who utilizes tools like minefields effectively often does too. Rommel in the desert often used Wadis to hide his dreaded 88mm guns – that at the time could rip through any tank the British...
One of the majors Lori and I’s oldest son is pursuing is in philosophy. I’ve never been a huge fan of philosophy, but as he and Lori talked, I decided to find out more, and picked up one of The Great Courses on The Philosophy of Science to try and understand where philosophy split off from hard sciences and became irrelevant or an impediment. I wasn’t disappointed, for at some point in the fifties, a philosopher posed the “If you’re a chicken, you assume when the farmer comes that he will bring food, so the day he comes with an...
Our basement, like most geek basements, has a pretty good collection of outdated computer gear. Some of it is running on the network, some of it is sitting there waiting for the end times. Or for a crook to break in and steal it so we don’t have to dispose of it. I’ve posted this picture before, but here is “the cable box” before the last time I went through and cleaned it up. Or at least a close-up of one part of it, it is a pretty large box. One of the things that we have been...
It is an interesting twist in the IT world that with the increased usage of purchased packages and the growth of on-demand IT, we increasingly find ourselves talking about “Applications”. This is a good reference point, it addresses all of the things running on our servers with one fell swoop, but much like when you talk about “vehicles”, the phrase has little meaning beyond discussing similarities. In the IT sense of the word, Application can be defined as a program running on hardware. In the datacenter sense of the word, it can be a program running on one of our...
The hype around cloud shows every indication of settling down, which, if you go with the Gartner Hype Cycle model means that the trough of disillusionment is yawning before you. But you don’t have to dip into the trough, if you didn’t ride up the hype hill. The thing is, that with this particular hype cycle, IT was the brakes on the hype cycle, wanting to quickly identify what Cloud could and could not do for your organization, while the business was riding the hype up. That’s good, it will serve to smooth out the trough. If you’re...
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...
There is one little thing you’re missing from your IT budget. While it impacts manpower most of all, you’ll be feeling it throughout your budget, and see signs of it in other departments as well. You should plan for it, because it is nearly a guarantee that it will continue to impact your budgeting for the next year or so. It’s not SOA. SOA had its day in the sun, and though Cloud will give it a little bit more, it is pretty much baked into the budgets of those organizations using it, and not even on the radar...
Someone said something interesting to me the other day, and they’re right “at 10 Gig WAN connections with compression turned on, you’re not likely to fill the pipe, the key is to make certain you’re not the bottleneck.” (the other day is relative – I’ve been sitting on this post for a while) I saw this happen when 1 Gig LANs came about, applications at the time were hard pressed to actually use up a Gigabit of bandwidth, so the focus became how slow the server and application were, if the backplane on the switch was big enough to...
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 eldest son has been having car troubles. To be more direct, he needed a new car. We agreed to help him out financially, let him go do his shopping and comparing, and when he chose a car I took him to pick it up. He chose a used PT Cruiser to replace his worn-out Olds Achieva, and on the way home, tried to familiarize himself with the features of the new car. Anything that the Achieva didn’t have and the PT Cruiser did, he found to be odd to him. And I pondered that as I drove him...
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...
I read an interesting blog the other day that is pretty spot-on about IT, customers, and what we’ve spent the last 30 years doing. We’re in a field whose purpose is to increase the capability of the enterprise while simultaneously making it easier to do whatever the organization in general and IT specifically does. IT’S WHAT WE DO It is a pretty rare enterprise that can do without IT these days, for systems are what the military refers to as “force multipliers” – they make the people available more effective. We blame a...
The last couple of years have been painful, to say the least. Some call them unprecedented, financially, but I do believe that is pushing the descriptor a bit far, since there have been plenty of instances where business pretty much en-masse questioned the amount that IT returns for their investment and cut budgets, so the feel of this recession is not much different than what we’ve felt before, it’s just by necessity. The funny bit of this is that everyone seems to agree that IT spending still went up in 2009, just by a massively reduced amount. Since the pinch...
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...
In Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (the first Star Wars movie for those more curmudgeonly than I), Luke is training with a light saber… Ben Kenobi: Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him. Luke Skywalker: You mean it controls your actions? Ben Kenobi: Partially, but it also obeys your commands. VIRTUALIZATION AND THE FORCE Virtualization is much like that – it limits your options, in effect controlling your actions, while also helping you to do your job more effectively....
Rubik’s Cube was first patented in 1974. The first book talking about a solution algorithm was published in 1981. In 2007, computers were used to deduce the smallest number of moves to solve a cube, and in 2008 that number was further reduced. That’s 34 years after it was invented. And it’s just a toy. NO! Turn it RIGHT! RIGHT! I’ve danced around this quite a bit, but time to hit it head on. The maturing of server virtualization, the growth of virtual desktops, the introduction of cloud, and deduplication of at-rest data...
Over the last several years, and for several more to come, virtualization and cloud are transforming the way that we implement IT. The purpose of the department is the same – to serve users in the best manner possible – but the agility with which that service can be offered has increased by a magnitude or more. Bringing up a brand-new server took weeks, now it is hours. The entire focus of Server Administrators shifted from hardware, so that it is a small part of what they do on a daily basis, the number of servers you can offer the...
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...
Looking for my blog today? It’s in hiding. I posted it over there –>> Lori’s blog. She is running a series called “F5 Friday”, and as I promised a few blogs ago, I have a write-up about Data Manager (DM), complete with screenshots in for today’s installment. A little weird that it’s on her blog? Not really… Nothing to do with our relationship or anything, she’ll do some of these and will host others by employees, partners, customers, who knows? Mine is just the first of many to be hosted on her blog… So read and enjoy, DM...
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...
In a recent blog by Randy George over at Network Computing, he gets a little excited over the prospects of running 100% virtual, and is somewhat dismissive of hardware appliances. Buried in toward the end of the post is a note that says he’ll be running tests of virtual Wan Optimization tools, which explains his excitement up front a bit. Lori and I used to write for Network Computing (NWC), before it went away, then returned as a web pub. We never worked with Mr. George, but we have worked with some of the people who are still...
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...
There is an excellent article over on SD Times about multi-core programming and virtualization that delves into the approaches that application developers can consider to take advantage of multiple core CPUs. For those that missed it, I wrote a bit about this not so long ago. I was looking at multi-core from the perspective of how application developers could take advantage of the increased processing power, and why it is that few if any enterprises will bother. But Mr. Handy is approaching the problem from the perspective of “should you bother” with Virtualization becoming so commonplace, and then talks...
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...
YOU GET THE CALL AT 2AM. “Web Server XYZ is out of disk space” says the voice on the other end of the line in a tone that, at 2am, could pass for Scotty screaming “Capt’n! I don’t know how much longer I can ‘old her together!” And that’s just the beginning of your nightmare, for this is exactly the scenario that you implemented thin provisioning to avoid, and if it has come to pass anyway, then you know that… “And now server ABC is crashed!” the voice shouts, reminiscent of...
Nine things you can do to weather the storm. We've known for quite a while that you would be asked to do more with less budget next year - the credit crunch if nothing else was going to make your organization cautious about large infrastructure investments when money in the bank is a good idea. But starting relatively recently - it gelled yesterday, but actually started several weeks ago - tech companies and IT departments started making staff cuts. That means not only will you be asked to do more with less, but you'll be asked to do more with...
