Tag: Technology (Page 5 of 7)

Don’t call it a comeback

September 18, 2010 / Mark Vaughn / 0 Comments

Since moving to INX, I have been drinking from a fire hydrant. Working in a large enterprise organization, we focused on a few primary vendors and operating in many silos. Now, I represent a wide range of vendors and have a pretty big toolbox I can work with. I have been in vendor training, working on certifications and trying to learn the INX ropes. I am finally beginning to feel like I am catching up and contributing at a decent level. In the meantime, the only posts I have made are in reference to my TechTarget articles for SearchServerVirtualization. That will be changing, and I will be putting up more blog posts.

Much has been going on, and I have some posts in the cue that I hope to publish in the next few days. One, in particular, has me very excited. Don’t give up on me, and please check back for more posts this coming week.

Did I mention that I am loving it at INX? Great people, great partners and great customers. I am waking up every day excited about going to work!

Bringing down the silos

September 9, 2010 / Mark Vaughn / 0 Comments

This is a tricky topic, and one that many organizations are getting hung up on. This can be a major contributor to virtualization stall. Virtualization stall is when an organization finds their efforts to virtualize their environments stalling out and forward progress becoming more and more difficult to achieve. This can often occur when the “low hanging fruit” that the organization started with is done, and the tasks involved in maintaining the virtual environment combine with the difficulty of addressing the remaining “difficult child” physical servers that need to be virtualized.

The easy work is done, and now you begin to realize that moving forward may require a different game plan. Everyone may be in the same boat, but they are each rowing in a slightly different direction. The boat is either going nowhere or in circles, but little to no progress is being made. The solution is not to force people to go in one direction, but to educate them on each others roles and help them understand the impact of their actions on everyone else. In doing this, they begin to go in the right direction as a common group with a common goal. In IT, this means breaking out silos and building new groups where every member of the team carries the same goal and will be measured against the same expectations. This change is not nearly as easy as it sounds, and will surely meet a great deal of resistance.

For more on this topic, please read my article “Overcoming virtualization turf wars” at SearchServerVirtualization, then come back here and leave comments.

Wire once and walk away

August 19, 2010 / Mark Vaughn / 0 Comments

This is a phrase I am hear more and more of lately, and I love the concept behind it. Virtualization has consolidated servers, and blade servers have consolidated the footprints of those virtualization hosts. Now, blade solutions are beginning to employ even greater efficiencies with creative and flexible wiring strategies. As FCoE and converged networking matures, blade technologies are deploying these to collapse cables and leverage a single cable to provide multiple services (network and both block level and file level storage solutions).

Physical servers are also leveraging this, though blade solutions will often be more efficient in this arena. I also think that Cisco’s UCS has really taken this and run with it, others are catching on and making progress in this arena (i.e. HP’s Blade Matrix technologies). Regardless of your blade solution, this is a concept that you need to get familiar with and evaluate in relation to your future technology goals. In reducing infrastructure, you lower costs, ease administration and provide greater agility. Who doesn’t want that?

For more on this topic, please read my article “‘Wire once and walk away’ boosts data center efficiency” at SearchServerVirtualization, then come back here to leave any comments.

It’s 10pm, where is your capacity?

July 16, 2010 / Mark Vaughn / 0 Comments

You can no longer simply set an alarm on capacity measurements and trust that to keep you clear of capacity problems, especially if you are looking at virtualization and/or cloud computing. Shared resources are a tremendous gain for efficiency, but can be a double-edged sword when it come to managing that shared capacity. It is well worth the extra effort, but you need to know how critical that extra effort is.

You can no longer just know where your capacity is, you have to know how it got there, where it is going, why it is going there, WHEN it is going there, what factors may speed up or slow down that growth rate…I think you get the point. The role of resource/capacity management has just stepped into the spotlight, and you need to adjust your policies and practices to recognize that.

Read more on this topic in the SearchServerVirtualization article “It’s 10p.m. Do you know where your capacity is?“, then come back here to leave your comments. These are big topics, I would love to hear what you think or how you may be adjusting to these changes.

Turning the Page

July 15, 2010 / Mark Vaughn / 0 Comments

It is very odd to be writing this, I don’t think the reality will set in for a few days. After almost 12 years at The First American Corporation/CoreLogic, I will be moving on. When I came here, I was just a few years out of college and recently married to my junior high crush. While here, we have had two children, I finished my MBA and few IT certs, markets have gone up and down, towers have fallen and the world has changed. This has been a great home, where I found a lot of talented people to work with and some great mentors to help me along the way. While I am confident in my move, it wasn’t easy to walk away from the family I have built here.

The IT world is changing and I want to play a bigger role in what that new landscape will look like. I wanted to be somewhere that would enable me to make a difference, in a role that would allow me to be an evangelist for emerging technologies and to assist people in leveraging those technologies to improve their business. However, it was going to have to be the right opportunity to justify a move.

A few months ago, a friend of mine from the vExpert program was visiting town and we met for dinner. This topic came up, and things began to click. More discussions were had and an opportunity came up that was aligned perfectly with what I was looking for. I guess that I now owe Steve Kaplan (@roidude) a dinner.

I just left The First American Corporation/CoreLogic as a visitor for the first time since 1998, when I came here to interview. Tomorrow, I start as a Consulting Principal for INX. I am sure there will be some initial culture shock as I move from customer to Partner/VAR, but it is a ride that I am looking forward to. INX has been awarded Partner of the Year by both VMware and Cisco for two years in a row, and those are just a few of the many awards that INX has won. I am joining a great team, with a strong track record, and I cannot wait to see where the future is leading.

To my family at First American/CoreLogic, thank you for allowing me to be a part of the team, best wishes for the futures of both The First American Corporation and the newly formed CoreLogic. To my new colleagues at INX, let’s roll!

vSphere 4.1

July 13, 2010 / Mark Vaughn / 0 Comments

Just a year after introducing vSphere 4.0, which ushered in dramatic performance gains and increases in configuration maximums, vSphere 4.1 is now available. Once again, the performance gains and increased configuration maximums are big. These are the kind of gains rarely seen in a major release, let alone a minor rev update.

Another notable piece of information about vSphere 4.1…it will be the last release to feature the ESX product. ESXi has long been hailed as the successor to the vSphere throne, and now they have set a date. Well, not a date, but a marker. The next release of vSphere, likely in 2011, will only include the ESXi product. For all of those vendors still relying on the CLI of ESX, wake up and smell the vMA coffee.

A few highlights in the many vSphere 4.1 improvements are:

3x increase in VMs per host
2x to 4x increase in concurrent vMotions (no longer VMotion as of 4.1)
Improvements in the scalability of Linked Mode (I LOVE this feature in vSphere)
Added Memory Compression to provide further gains in efficient memory utilization
DRS VM Host affinity rules (more on this below)
Active Directory integration on the ESX/ESXi Host
Multiple vCPU per virtual socket (think of vCPUs as cores in a virtual multi-core proc)
Host Profiles can now roll out password changes (host profiles are right up there with Linked Mode for me, great new feature in vSphere)
Fault Tolerance (FT) was made a little more forgiving in handling patch level mismatches
Network I/O control to group and manage NIC bandwidth by traffic types (VM, vMotion, FT, etc)
Load-Based Teaming for vNetwork Distributed Switches, to keep the load balanced across all physical adapters (vDS is probably my favorite new vSphere feature)
Hardware Acceleration with vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI – more on this below).
ESXi can be deployed via a new scripted install feature (as a long time Unix/Linux admin, I really like this…but I did not have the time to test it in the beta)

DRS VM host affinity rules are something I was very excited to see in the beta. As I have been implementing vSphere and designing a private cloud environment, a lot of effort has gone into the right methods for determining cluster groupings. Licensing is always a pain point in these discussions. I lose efficiency in creating a two small licensing-driven clusters for applications A and B, while maintaining N+1 within both clusters. If I could create one larger cluster, forcing the appropriate VMs to remain on their licensed group of hosts, I gain efficiency in the N+1 capacity if nothing else. There is also ease of management and a number of other advantages to this.

Now, throw into the mix that application A never allows the instances to run on unlicensed hardware, but application B will allow the instances to temporarily run on unlicensed servers in the event of a hardware failure. The new affinity rules will allow you to state that group A can never run anywhere else, while stating that group B can run somewhere else in an HA event. Now this feature becomes even more valuable.

Another new feature worth dedicating a few lines to is the VAAI. This will allow vSphere 4.1 to offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware. Why make vSphere use the less efficient “this copy command will work anywhere” approach for Storage vMotion when NetApp or EMC already have specialized commands on their arrays for these functions and know the most efficient way to carry out the task. This is a true win-win partnership with the storage vendors and one that can yield significant performance gains in your environment. Look for the major storage vendors to all be announcing their support for this within days, not weeks.

Finally, I will part with a list of KB articles passed on to me from our friendly neighborhood Technical Account Manager at VMware. Carl Olafson has always been quick to share information with me at my work, and this particular list is all public info. That being the case, I will pass it on to you:

KB Article: 1022842 – Changes to DRS in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1022290 – USB support for ESX/ESXi 4.1
KB Article: 1022263 – Deploying ESXi 4.1 using the Scripted Install feature
KB Article: 1021953 – I/O Statistics in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1022851 – Changes to vMotion in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1022104 – Upgrading to ESX 4.1 and vCenter Server 4.1 best practices
KB Article: 1023118 – Changes to VMware Support Options in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1021970 – Overview of Active Directory integration in ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1
KB Article: 1021769 – Configuring IPv6 with ESX and ESXi 4.1
KB Article: 1022844 – Changes to Fault Tolerance in vSphere 4.1
KB Article: 1023990 – VMware ESX and ESXi 4.1 Comparison
KB Article: 1022289 – Changing the number of virtual CPUs per virtual socket in ESX/ESXi 4.1

Shiney new IT toys

July 13, 2010 / Mark Vaughn / 0 Comments

All that glitters is not gold…sometimes it is simply a distraction. Sometimes, and I have been guilty of this, we let the desire to implement technology get in the way of meeting business needs. It can be very tempting, after evaluating an amazing new technology, to then begin looking for ~~excuses~~ opportunities to use it. Sometimes you find that true win-win scenario where that technology is the exact fit, and sometime you end up making it fit in the hopes that it will show increased value in the future.

Fred Nix hit this point very well with his post on 1/4 inch drill bits. Sometimes we simply need to step back and evaluate why we are looking at a new technology. If you are impressed with a presentation or excited after evaluating a new technology, then make note of that and add it to your toolbox of solutions. Then, when the right opportunity presents itself, reach into your toolbox and pull out the right solution for the problem in front of you.

Read more about this in my article “New IT Trends: Are they right for you?“, then come back here to leave any comments. As always, your thoughts and feedback are encouraged.

Opportunity Cost

June 21, 2010 / Mark Vaughn / 0 Comments

When you are presented with two or more mutually exclusive options, you are going to have to pass up an opportunity. The key to making the right decision not only lies in knowing the value of both options, but in looking for a possible third option and assessing the value of that option as well. The value of the opportunities not taken are the “opportunity cost” of your decision.

A simple way to explain opportunity cost is to consider selling an item at cost. If I buy a widget for $10, and I sell it to you for $10, I have recovered my cost and lost no money…right? That is true in simple financial terms. However, consider that I could have easily sold the widget for $15, that decision had an opportunity cost of $5. I passed up an opportunity to make $5 by selling it to you at cost.

That concept changed the way I approach IT decisions, teaching me to always consider the business value and cost. No matter how good my design, the business may have other opportunities available that would yield a better return. My designs not only have to be good, they have to be valuable.

Another impact of learning this lesson…I no longer ask my friends who own businesses to sell me items at cost 😉

Please read my article on this topic at the SearchServerVirtualization site, then come back here to leave comments.
http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid94_gci1514524,00.html

vExpert 2010

June 7, 2010 / Mark Vaughn / 0 Comments

First, I am humbled and honored to have been a vExpert in 2009. As the year went on, and I got to know more of my fellow vExperts, I was in awe of the people that I was sharing this title with. In fact, it inspired me to work even harder and to put more effort into be an active member of the virtualization community.

That being said, I am amazed to once again receive the vExpert award for 2010. I look forward to learning from my fellow vExperts, as they are a truly talented group of people. I have yet to meet a vExpert that was not both highly talented and eager to assist. In fact, that is why they are vExperts.

Some of you may be asking, what is a vExpert? VMware describes it like this:

The VMware vExpert Award is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year.

The criteria for vExpert selection are value to the community, technical merit, effectiveness, professionalism, reach and effort. The group is full of authors, bloggers, technology leaders and a wide range of highly skilled individuals. Again, I am humbled to have been grouped with these people.

Being a vExpert led me to become more involved in sharing my opinions and contributing to discussions via twitter. I also launched this blog site and began writing for Tech Target. In these pursuits I received a lot of input and advice from fellow vExperts like Steve Kaplan, David Davis and Scott Lowe. Those names stand out, but so many others have contributed to helping me grow. John Troyer, the driving force within VMware that launched the vExperts and a number of other programs, worked very hard to add value to this program last year. John is promising even more from the coming year and I cannot wait to see what that will look like.

To all of my fellow 2009 vExperts, thank you so much for your encouragement and assistance, it was an honor to share that title with you. To my fellow 2010 vExperts, congratulations! I am honored to be in your company and I look forward to getting to know you better as the year goes on.