A couple of weeks ago I asked this question on twitter about what the average disk size of a virtual machine is these days. Within a couple of minutes Ben Thomas replied and said we might be able to create a survey script and he copied William Lam in. Now for those who never worked with William, if you ask him a question like that you can expect him to knock something out… William and Ben decided not to just knock out a survey script, but rather an open community project called vOpenData.
This open community project consists of a script that collects the data (and they collect a significant amount, you can see what they collect here.) and is aiming to provide various trending statistics and data for virtualized environments. The data is fed back in to the vOpenData database. The vOpenData website has a great dashboard which provides you all these cool stats. For instance, at the moment there are 77 infrastructures that provided data to their collection. The question I asked, what is the average disk size, currently says “61.51GB”. That average is based on those 77 infrastructures with over 27.000 VMs in total combined. Nice right!?!
I have already emailed William a bunch of suggestions, and as I will be in Palo Alto this week I am sure some more will bubble up during conversations. I am hoping that everyone sees the power of a solution like this and can help feeding data in to the vOpenData platform.
Go here to download the bits and feed up!
** I have had some people asking me how vOpenData compares to CloudPhysics. I have also seen some people comparing vOpenData to CloudPhysics… To be honest you can’t really compare them. Where vOpenData is about averages and statistics, CloudPhysics is more about analytics and simulation models. **