Changes in the Cloud World

August 29th, 2011 Posted in Virtualization
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Along with the already existing Cloud service providers (SP) that are labelled as the vCloud Datacenter by VMworld. Dell has also been added to the race and will be going up against the likes of companies Verizon, SlingTel, BlueLock etc. Now they maybe going against one another for the business but they will really be working in conjunction with one another in order to provide you a true cloud experience. Yes you heard it right. Global connect is the business arrangement that will make this happen for you. So let’s say you have are a SlingTel customer and want to deploy a VM in Hong Kong, if SlingTel does not have a datacenter in the location of your choice, it will reach out to the other vCloud Datacenters and fullfill your needs. Of course you will only interface with SlingTel and choke them if something doesn’t go as you like. With Dell joining the alliance and Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark, you as a customer will have more choices.

Another cool thing that has happened is the consolidation of the cloud SPs in one location by VMware. Go to vcloud.vmware.com . If the link does not work when you try, please try later. This announcement has just been made and VMware might still be in the process of bringing it up. So here you get to pick your location and test drive the SP of your choice. I think this consolidation isn’t only great for customers but also for SPs who can now reach out to more customers.

Lastly, Verizon bought Cloudswitch last week as we all know. Cloudswitch produces a very innovative tool that helps you play taxi between your private and public cloud. Will this tool be further enhanced to play taxi between all the SPs and fit within VMware’s vision of the cloud where you app can be anywhere you want? At this point Cloudswitch‘s future road-map isn’t very clear, but we know Verizon’s acquisition of Cloudswitch, Terremark and their own cloud offering makes Verizon an extremely strong candidate for all your cloud needs.

These are interesting times to be in the world of clouds. If you are not in it, hurry up. You are falling behind. Remember when you needed a CR to vMotion a server? Times have changed and soon no CR will be needed for moving your server to a different continent (only time will tell). Thanks to the cloud!

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PSOD (Esxi 4.1) Dell R710

November 24th, 2010 Posted in Virtualization
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The PSOD that has been talked about for years now finally made an entry to our datacenter this morning. The R710 that was spinning for a couple of days and still not part of anything special except for the plain ESXi installed on it stopped responding to my ping requests. Oblivious to what had happened, I called our network gurus to see if anything on their end was changed. Once it was confirmed that the network wasn’t tweaked, I decided to log on to the slow KVM to get to the console of this server. It got really silent and right before me was the PSOD on ESXi 4.1. I have been working with VMware for sometime now and I knew how big this really was. So I took a snapshot as a souvenir and hoped this would get me to the elite class of VMware engineers that I have so far only envied for.

From the PSOD it only made sense to look at the hardware side first. Upon running diagnostics, errors with PCIE came up. I figured it would be best to call dell and not reinvent the wheel. Sure enough once I was on the phone with dell, and upon sending the system logs from the DRAC, it was revealed that PCIE card on slot 2 (quad port NIC) was the culprit. We placed the card on slot 3 and now slot 3 started reporting issues. Luckily for us we had a few spare NIC cards that we ended up placing in this box. It has been up for hours now. No error logs reported yet, no orange LCD on the server and no purple screen of death.

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