Archive
#Gartner report – How to Choose Between #Hyper-V and #vSphere – #IaaS
The constant battle between the hypervisor and orchestration of IaaS etc. is of course continuing! But it is really fun I must say that Microsoft is getting more and more mature with it’s offerings in this space, great job!
One of the things that I tend to think most of is the cost, scalability and flexibility of the infrastructure that we build and how we build it, I often see that we tend to do what we’ve done for so many years now. We buy our SAN/NAS storage, we buy our servers but lean towards Blade servers though we think that’s the latest and coolest, and then we try to squeeze that into some sort of POD/FlexPods/UCS or whatever we like to call it to find our optimal “volume of Compute, Network and Storage” that we can scale. But is this scalable like the bigger cloud players like Google, Amazon etc.? Is this 2013 state of the art? I think that we’re just fooling ourselves a bit and build whatever we’ve done for all these years and don’t really provide the business with anything new… but that’s my view… I know what I’d look at and most of you that have read my earlier blog posts know that I love the way of scaling out and doing more like the big players using something like Nutanix and ensure that you choose the right IaaS components as a part of that stack, as well as the orchestration layer (OpenStack, System Center, CloudStack, Cloud Platform or whatever you prefer after you’ve done your homework).
Back to the topic a bit, I’d say that the hypervisor is of no importance anymore, that’s why everyone if giving it away for free or to the open source community! Vendors are after the more IaaS/PaaS orchestration layer and get into that because if they get that business then they have nested their way into your business processes, that’s where ultimately that will deliver the value as IT services in an automated way once you’ve got your business services and processes in place, and then it’s harder to make a change and they will live fat and happy on you for some years to come! 😉
Solving the Compute and Storage scalability dilemma – #Nutanix, via @josh_odgers
The topic of Compute, Network and STORAGE is a hot topic as I’ve written in blog posts before this one (How to pick virtualization (HW, NW, Storage) solution for your #VDI environment? – #Nutanix, @StevenPoitras) … and still a lot of colleagues and customers are struggling with finding better solutions and architecture.
How can we ensure that we get the same or better performance of our new architecture? How can we scale in a more simple and linear manner? How can we ensure that we don’t have a single point of failure for all of our VM’s etc..? How are others scaling and doing this in a better way?
I’m not a storage expert, but I do know and read that many companies out there are working on finding the optimal solution for Compute and Storage, and how they can get the cost down and be left with a more simple architecture to manage…
This is a topic that most need to address as well now when more and more organisations are starting to build their private clouds, because how are you going to scale it and how can you get closer to the delivery that the big players provide? Gartner even had Software-Defined-Storage (SDS) as the number 2 trend going forward: #Gartner Outlines 10 IT Trends To Watch – via @MichealRoth, #Nutanix, #VMWare
Right now I see Nutanix as the leader here! They rock! Just have a look at this linear scalability:
If you want to learn more how Nutanix can bring great value please contact us at EnvokeIT!
For an intro of Nutanix in 2 minutes have a look at these videos:
Overview:
NetApp Virtual Storage Console for XenServer – #XenServer #CitrixSynergy #NetApp #VCS
This is looking really nice! Have a look at the capabilities of the NetApp VSC plugin for XenServer demo video;
Citrix Synergy 2012 demo: NetApp VSC 1.0 for Citrix XenServer – SR management
Virtual Storage Console reduce cost and complexity with integrated, end-to-end storage management for Citrix infrastructures. Improve administrative efficiency for both your Citrix and storage administrators.
So if you’re a NetApp shop why not try it out?
It’s really nice that you can do most of the config from the XenCenter console! I’m right now doing the Cisco UCS and XenDesktop lab here at Synergy and playing around with it and it’s neat! Once the plugin is installed you can interact directly with it from the XenCenter console.
Here you can configure the preferences in a simple way (even though the User Preference console/plugin isn’t the coolest looking tool)!
UCS and XenDesktop – Best Practises guide #Cisco #UCS #XenDesktop #VXI
I must admin that the Cisco, NetApp and Citrix story around providing a great offering around a complete server hardware, storage and networking solution!
I’m currently attending the 5h SYNBCN12-614W-Platform training on XenDesktop with Cisco Unified Computing System and NetApp session here and I must say that I like the offering due to the broad capabilities of the products included in the solution.
I think that one of the real added values that companies will like is that you have ONE (1) support contact (Cisco) for the whole solution, then Cisco wodk with the others to solve any potential issue etc.
And while playing around here the trainer also mentioned this best practise guide, and it looks good;
Additional info about the Cisco VXI – Desktop Virtualization can be found here.
Cheers!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 