Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

CloudPhysics Storage Analytics and new round of funding

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When I just woke up I saw the news was out… A new round of funding for CloudPhysics! CloudPhysics raised $15 million in a series C investment round, bringing the company’s total funding to $27.5 million! Congratulations folks, I can’t wait to see what this new injection will result in to. One of the things that CloudPhysics heavily invested in to the past 12 months has been the storage side of the house. In their SaaS based solution one of the major pillars today is Storage Analytics, along side General Health Checks and Simulations.

The Storage Analytics section is available as of today to everyone out there! It will allow you to monitor things like “datastore contention”, “unused VMs” and everything there is to know about capacity savings ranging from inside the guest to datastore level details. If you ever wondered how “big data” could be of use to you, I am sure you will understand when you start using CloudPhysics. Not just their monitoring and simulation cards are brilliant, the Card Builder is definitely one of their hidden gems. If you need to convince your management, than all you should do is show the above screenshot: savings opportunity!

Of course there is a lot more to it than I will be able to write about in this short post. In my opinion if you truly want to understand what they bring to the table, just try it out for free for 30 days here!

PS: How about this brilliant Infographic… from the people who taught you how to fight the noisy neighbour, they now show you how to defeat that bully!

**disclaimer: I am an advisor to CloudPhysics **

Quick pointer to new Virtual SAN Ready Node configs

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Just a quick pointer to the new document that holds all Virtual SAN Ready Node configurations: Virtual SAN Ready Node.pdf. In this document various new configurations are described and a couple of old ready node configurations appear to have been removed. I expect these new configurations to be added in the upcoming weeks.

Another very useful document recently released on the topic of Virtual SAN hardware is the following: Virtual SAN Hardware Quick Reference Guide. It describes for both Server and VDI workloads different profiles and give examples around how you should configure your hardware to meet certain requirements.

FW: Dear Clouderati Enterprise IT is different…

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I hardly ever do this, posting people to a blog post… I was going through my backlog of articles to read when I spotted this article by my colleague Chuck Hollis. I had an article in my draft folder on the subject of web scale myself. Funny enough it so close to Chuck’s that there is no point in publishing it… rather I would like to point you to Chuck’s article instead.

To me personally, the below quote captures the essence of the article really well.

If you’re a web-scale company, IT doesn’t just support the business, IT is the business.

It is a discussion I have had on twitter a couple of times. I think Web Scale is a great concept, and I understand the value for companies like Google, Facebook or any other large organization in the need of highly scalable application landscape. But the emphasize here is on the application and its requirements, and it makes a big difference if you are providing support for hundreds if not thousands of applications which are not build in-house. If anyone tells you that because it is good for Google/Facebook/Twitter it must be good for you, ask yourself what the requirements are of your application. What does your application landscape look like today? What will it look like tomorrow? And what will be your IT needs for the upcoming years? Read more in this excellent post by Chuck, and make sure to leave a comment! Dear Clouderati Enterprise IT is different…

 

Pre-order Essential Virtual SAN through Pearson…

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Pre-order Essential Virtual SAN through Pearson today, printed version that is: http://bit.ly/1uxLo7x

“You’ll learn what VSAN is, exactly what it offers you, how to implement it, and how to maximize the value it delivers. Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping show how VSAN implements object-based storage and a platform for VM storage policies that simplifies VM storage placement decisions. They explain how VSAN integrates with vSphere features such as HA, DRS and vMotion, providing greater resiliency, more scale-out storage functionality, and greater control over QoS.”

vCenter 5.5 Update 1b with OpenSSL and SPBM fix!

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For those not monitoring the VMware website like a hawk… VMware just released vCenter 5.5 Update 1b. This update contains a couple of fixes which are critical in my opinion. So make sure to upgrade vCenter as quickly as possible:

  • Update to OpenSSL library addresses security issues
    OpenSSL libraries have been updated to versions openssl-0.9.8za, openssl-1.0.0m, and openssl-1.0.1h to address CVE-2014-0224.
  • Under certain conditions, Virtual SAN storage providers might not be created automatically after you enable Virtual SAN on a cluster
    When you enable Virtual SAN on a cluster, Virtual SAN might fail to automatically configure and register storage providers for the hosts in the cluster, even after you perform a resynchronization operation. This issue is resolved in this release. You can view the Virtual SAN storage providers after resynchronization. To resynchronize, click the synchronize icon in the Storage Providers tab.

You can download the bits here.