Posted in IT Architecture on October 27th, 2006 1 Comment »
Most of the lab work I’ve been doing on the x4100 and x4600 has been relatively straightforward. Looking ahead, most of the things that require thought and consideration are the same issues that plague data centers now.
VMWare doesn’t by itself give you a lot of information about individual vm’s misbehaving except through reports and alarms. […]
Posted in IT Architecture on October 25th, 2006 No Comments »
The x4600 is an 8 processor, 16 core AMD Opteron machine. If you’ve ever wondered what 70 vm’s on a single box would look like, wonder no more.
You’ll probably want to download it to get a closer look. Vince Hill and I have been doing some lab work with the x4600 and ESX 3.01. One of […]
Posted in IT Architecture on October 25th, 2006 15 Comments »
I’ve put together a lab with an x4100, VMware ESX, a SunRay and an OSX laptop. This provides the infrastructure in my home office, and a super platform for experimenting with various software and architectural components.
Key components are:
Sun x4100 w/ 4 cores and 8Gb Memory VMWare ESX 3.01 Solaris 10 x86 virtual machine (vm) running SunRay server SunRay […]
Posted in Photography on October 23rd, 2006 No Comments »
Flickr is a wonderful technology. It’s a wonderful example of how technology can enable social interactions that wouldn’t otherwise occur. It also seems to spur, or at least allow us to see, personal talents that would not otherwise be seen or exercised. One thing that’s at once delightful and disconcerting as you browse the photos is […]
Posted in Photography on October 19th, 2006 No Comments »
First Snow
It’s snowed here in Denver. A foot fell in the mountains. I guess it’s time to plan for skiing! This time of year is always too short, no matter where you live I think. The next time it snows the color will be gone and the trees will be bare. It will feel colder even […]
Posted in IT Architecture on October 17th, 2006 No Comments »
It’s inevitable. The current processes for designing, building and maintaining compute infrastructure are simply unsustainable. Perhaps this or something like this is this decade’s PC David that will take out this decade’s monolithic glass-house Goliath? A more interesting question is, what is the killer-app for the datacenter-in-a-box?
blackbox, datacenter
Posted in IT Architecture on October 11th, 2006 No Comments »
In The Death of Yesterday’s Datacenter, Jonathan Schwartz discusses the future datacenter, or lack thereof as we build them now. I’m reminded of one customer’s metric for a well designed and run datacenter. It’s the count of how many times you go into it. Zero is a good answer. I’m also reminded of a humorous video we […]
Posted in IT Architecture on October 10th, 2006 No Comments »
I recently purchased an X4100 from my employer, Sun. I have a certification from VMware and wanted to hone my skills in the area. I’ve had quite a bit of success and (dare I say it) fun hacking away on the installation, creating virtual machines with various operating systems and so forth. The fun ended today […]