VirtualVCP IT Virtualization

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On July 12, 2011 at about 16:00GMT, VMware announced vSphere 5 and a bunch of changes surrounding the product suite. During the event, Twitter was ablaze with updates with regards to what was being revealed by VMware. However, one of the changes seemed to have caused some concern amongst the trusted virtualisation community. The change to the vSphere licensing model is what seems to have been discussed quite a bit on Twitter.

I’m not going to expand by giving details on the licensing changes, for more information on the new licensing model, see the link below:

http://wcc.on24.com/event/33/43/99/rt/1/documents/slidepdf/cloud_infrastructure_licensing_v2.pdf

At first I wasn’t going to write up on this as the blogging community already came out and published pre written posts as soon as the VMware NDA time expired at 16h00 GMT. Also, I’m pressed for time at the moment, so I’m rushing this one and the research done on this post in.

After doing some number crunching, I came to a disturbing conclusion. Unless my calculations are way off, and unless VMware is drastically going to reduce the “per license” price tag, the new licensing model will offer a raw deal to VMware’s customers.

As far as I am aware, VMware has not yet published the price list for vSphere 5. As I really wanted to see what implications the new licensing strategy was going to have in terms of today’s prices, I did some calculations using today’s vSphere 4 license costs. As I said, unless VMware reduces the price per license, it would be almost impossible to sell the product to some of my current customers who already think that VMware vSphere is too expensive in comparison to rivals such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Well, unless I’m very wrong, it’s about to get worse!

Now, bear in mind that I did these calculations in a rather short period of time. I’ve not done a whole bunch of research on the new licensing model yet, but went by what the PDF stipulates. I could have made a fundamental mistake somewhere, and I really hope that I am wrong on this.

Please, if anyone can find a major error somewhere in my figures, please let me know.

I based my calculations on the following template as most of my customers typically run a similar setup;

• 2 CPU sockets
•  12 Cores per CPU
•  128GB per Host

I compared what the new vSphere 5 model would cost in comparison to the vSphere 4 licensing model. The results are truly staggering!

Also, to give vSphere 4 a level playing field in terms of memory assignment, I assumed that we would want to be able to use up to 100% of the physical memory in the cluster, as this would not carry any penalty in terms of vRAM TAX in vSphere 4. Now I know that the license on vRAM is on allocated and not on total physical memory, but for an apples and apples comparison on possible memory consumpsion, this was the most straight forward way of calculating the numbers.

Below are my results. Now if I have made some mistakes here, please let me know. I’m looking for constructive comments here! An argument is not going to help anyone

I am delighted to be able to finally announce that I am in the process co-authoring a book. At first the prospect of being involved in such a project seemed a bit daunting, but I very quickly realised that opportunities such as this are few and far between, and it is something that I have to take on board and make time for.

I am however not in a position to disclose any details around the project just yet, but I can say that it will be on virtualization and surprisingly enough, it will be on a subject that is not covered by any books that I know of at the moment.

If any of the many much experienced authors out there are interested in sharing some tips with me, please drop me an email or a DM tweet!! I would appreciate any advice or suggestions, as this is my first time authoring a book.

I’ve been getting quite a lot of emails asking what equipment I’m running in my home lab. Rather than having to reply to each and every email with the full inventory, I thought it would be a better idea to just post it on here.

Now, my home lab is nothing special. In comparison to the toys that some people have the pleasure of playing with in their labs, and I’m not mentioning any names (hmmm, Mike Laverick), my little environment is very cheap and simple, but it does the job well enough for me, so I can’t really justify any upgrades. Not at the moment anyhow.

Let’s start with the stuff you’re probably most interested in, the servers:

For VMware vSphere, I run two of the following specification machines in a two node cluster:

• HP Proliant ML110 G5
• Intel Xeon 3065 @ 2.3GHz (FT is unfortunately not supported)
• 8GB RAM
• 1x Onboard Broadcom NC105i Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
• 1X Intel PRO/1000 GT Dual Port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
• No Internal Hard Disk Drive
• Boot ESXi 4.1 from a USB Stick installed internally on the motherboard.

For shared storage, I run iSCSI using OpenFiler on a machine with the following specification:

• HP ProLiant ML115 GB
• Dual-Core AMD Opteron Processor 1214
• 2GB RAM
• 1x Onboard Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5722 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
• 4x 750GB Seagate SATA II drives in RAID10 configuration.
• Boot OpenFiler from a USB Stick installed internally on the motherboard.

Network Equipment:

The hosts are all connected via a NETGEAR ProSafe GS724Tv3 Switch with 24 ports.

Now I would advise that this is a non-production, test environment only. There’s not much resilience in there. I simply do not have any more space for any more server and network equipment. Besides, I costs a fortune to power these things 24x7 anyway.

So that covers the servers. My “desktop” PC on the other hand is entirely another matter. Seeing as I really only buy a new PC every 5 or 6 years, and seeing that I’ll be using this machine predominantly in my spare time to run graphics intensive applications such as Flight Simulators, I really went all out on this one in terms of performance, power and stability:

• Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 Full Tower Case
• Antec TPQ-1200OC TruePower Quattro OC 1200W Modular Power Supply (PSU)
• ASUS Rampage III Extreme X58 Motherboard
• Intel i7 950 CPU (surprisingly the slowest component in the box)
• 12GB RAM: 6X Corsair Memory Dominator GT 2GB DDR3 1866 Triple Channel Modules
• 2X 64GB OCZ Vertex 2 SATA II 2.5" SSDs (One for the Windows 7 Install and one for the Flight Simulator installs)
• 1TB Seagate SATA II drive for applications and data storage
• 1x Onboard Gigabit Ethernet Port
• M-Audio Revolution 5.1 Sound Card (PCI)
• XFX ATI Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition 2GB Graphics Card

Just a quick note on the case: I cannot stress enough just how large this case is. IT IS HUGE! I caught myself starring in amazement at the thing for about 20 minutes when it arrived. If you ever think about getting one of these cases or a similar one of that matter, make sure you have enough space to park this thing NEXT to your desk, because it’s not going anywhere else!

Just a quick note on the graphics card: The graphics card is the main reason for my decision to purchase the CM Stacker Case. I needed to get a case that would provide sufficient space for the card to actually fit into. The graphics card is a massive13 inches long and believe me when I say that it just about fits the case with maybe an inch or so to spare at most.

For stability reasons, this card also demands a certified power supply that is capable of a bare minimum 600W. As I have plans to install a second card and maybe even a third card in a cross-fire configuration later on, I thought it would be best if I make sure that I buy one power supply now that will provide sufficient stable power for future upgrades.

So I’ve had my HTC Desire HD mobile phone since it was released in October 2010. As I’m not one to follow trends, line an arrogant company’s pockets and make a fashion statement by opting to buy an iPhone 4, the HTC Desire HD really was the obvious choice for my next phone. Overall, I have to say it’s a brilliant piece of kit. Android is really easy to use and it does everything, well almost everything you ask of it very well. Then HTC put their spin on Android , they produced a device that really gives the iPhone 4 a solid competitor.

However, as I said before, I’m not one to follow trends, but I’m also not one who likes arrogant companies like Apple, and now Google. How can I say Apple is arrogant? Well easy! They charge an arm and a leg for a device that will only be good for 6 months to a year (if you’re one that follow fashion trends) before they replace it with “Version 2”. To make it worse, they don’t even give you an option to change simple things like the battery. However, this post is not to slam Apple, as I use a MAC myself with Final Cut Studio, a software package that is very powerful, easy to use, and compared to similar products from other vendors, rather cheap (and we all know the cheap word and Apple don’t go together all too often). No, this post is to slam Google for not listening to its customers when all we want to do is keep your text messages once we have received them.

Yes that’s right! All I want is for my text messages to live happily ever after on my Android device after I have received them! Is that too much to ask from a mobile device? For a 10 year old Nokia device that’s been dropped, kicked and lived life to its fullest? No problem. For a brand new Android device? Well, that could be a problem.

Many people, including non technical people will be asking why someone would be complaining about a new, state-of-the-art device’s functionality surrounding the rather ancient technology known as Text Messages and also known as SMS messages. But I have to say, it is rather annoying if your shiny new, all-bells-and-whistles mobile phone (or for you guys in the America, Cell Phone) randomly decides to delete all of your text messages. What’s more annoying than that is when it happens for a second time two months later. What’s even more annoying than losing more than a thousand text messages over a period of 3 months is the fact that the great search engine giant responsible for the Android operating system, Google doesn’t seem to be bothered about the issue. At first, I thought it’s an issue that only affects the HTC Desire HD handset, but a quick search on Google revealed that the issue affects most, if not all Android devices.

My mobile phone have now on two occasions randomly decided to delete all of my text messages! How? Well easy! I decide to send a text message, and when I open Text Messages on my phone, all my messages are gone!

When this happened to me again last night, I decided that I’ll jump on Google.com and have a look if anyone else is having the problem. Sure enough. It turns out that the issue has been around for a very long time. Many people have complained about losing thousands of text messages and in some cases photos and contact information and this has been going on since 2009.

The issue, known on Google Code forums as issue 5660, has been around for more than a year. Since 26 December 2009, a whopping 959 posts of complaints have been made regarding this problem on this forum thread: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5669

Yes, that’s right. People have been losing data on their handsets for more than a year and Google still hasn’t replied, or to my knowledge even acknowledged that there is an issue.

When Apple launched their iPhone 4, the entire world kicked up a fuss surrounding a small issue where the phone had signal problem in certain cases. That, in my book isn’t an issue compared to data loss. However, the peeps at Apple were forced to respond with advice on how to fix the issue as it was a media frenzy. Now my question is.... WHERE IS THE MEDIA FRENZY on this one? Why is Google allowed to get away with not listening to their customers.

You know what. Everyone out there, if you are unsure on what the next mobile phone you would like to buy, BUY AN iPhone. Don’t buy an Android device. Google doesn’t deserve your support as clearly we, the consumers and users of their operating systems isn’t important enough for them to care. It’s a sad day, as I love my HTC Desire HD, but in reality, until they fix the issue surrounding data loss, I cannot trust it with ANY of my data at this point in time.