I have been contacted by Kevin Tolly the founder of
http://CommonTestPlan.org to evaluate their Virtual Server Performance Test Plan & provide suggestions in that regard about two weeks ago. Kevin & his team were kind enough to provide me with a one year license to their Virtual Server Performance Test Plan Document for my own personal use without any string attached. I believe they are offering the same to many other Virtualization Experts around the globe in order to improve their document & get some honest feed backs from professionals who hit the virtualization field on daily basis. Below is my honest review & thoughts of the document.
Being on the vendor side & visiting many customers a day who is looking to find out which virtualization solution fit them best has made me used to the question: “Which virtualization solution is the right one for me?”
I wish there was an easy answer, where I can say this solution or that solution is best for every customer. As each customer is unique & has its own unique requirements there is no one solution that fit all. Below are few points I always bring to my customers attentions to take into consideration when helping them decide on the best virtualizaiton solution for their enviornment & thought might help many of you taking the right decision.
It seems Red Had is shifting their focus from Xen as their virtualization platform to KVM. Their new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaiton solution is based on KVM. It seems that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaiton Solution, when combined with their new management tool called RHEV-M will offer many advanced features. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Solution seems to successfully copy many of VMware and other Virtualization vendors features like: 1- Live Migration 2- Load Distribution 3- Clustering & High Availability 4- Memory over Commitment 5- Transparent Memory Page sharing 6- Virtual Machine Snapshot 7- Host maintenance mode & many other feature. If you have been using VMware for a while all these features should be familiar to you, though Red Hat are promising that their pricing model will be much cheaper than VMware. I have not got to see Red Hat pricing yet, and it will be too early to compare the two products pricing. Before sharing a video of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with you, I believe its worth to mention that reading Red Hat data sheet of the product as well watching their marketing demo video make Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization seem too good to be true for the kind of pricing Red hat is promising to offer. Its worth to note there is one catch to this product at the moment, its not as easy to setup as you expect unless you are a Red Hat guru. In another words if you are not a Red Hat guru & never had setup a Red Hat cluster & GFS, then Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Solution will be a steep learning curve for you. I really hope Red Hat will look into making their system setup easier and totally independent of how they currently setup clustering. I believe it should be some how included in RHEV-M interface instead of having to use the Red Hat Clustering Interfaces. That have been said I hope you enjoy the video below: : If yo u care to learn more about the product, you might want to look at the great break out session published at: http://www.virtualization.info/2009/09/red-hat-releases-enterprise-linux-54.html
I know I have been pushing back my vSphere exam for a while due to the amount of projects I am working on this year. I have finally passed my exam two days back with a blazing score of 494(haha thought it would be quite lower than this, but I guess the elimination process of answers that does not make sense had worked out very well on this one). I would love to thank everyone in the VMware community who had posted tips for the VCP exam especially Kumaran, Brian, Scott Vessey. As my return to the community I have decided to post some tips for the exam:
As most of you already know VMware Storage VMotion is the ability to live migrate a virtual machine from one storage to another without any downtime. The usage most IT Professional relate to VMware Storage VMotion is the following:
The ability to move your virtual machines from a storage or datastore to another for maintenance reason or storage replacement without downtime. Though I had just came to discover another reason where it became vital. Thanks to Vladan as he brought it to my attention when he commented on my previous post:
VMware ESX 4 Reclaiming Thin Provisioned disk Unused Space
