“Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of Nearly 1,600 CIOs Shows IT Budgets in 2010 to be at 2005 Levels”

Cloud Computing is listed as No. 2 priorities for FY2010 IT budget spending to reduce cost. Is this applicable to our local context? Are we ready for SaaS, IaaS, PaaS ? Where are we now? A few weeks ago I was making an inquiry to a local reputable accounting package where they are rank top 5 in terms of market share as far as I know. I send a mail to them asking whether they are interested to provide their solutions on SaaS platform since I was soliciting content for a solution provider. I do get an acknowledgment they receive my mail & will look into it & revert to me. But till today I have not heard anything since then.

This is what puzzle me is Cloud ready for Malaysia or is Malaysia ready for cloud?

http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/

Here you can have more information about the next generation virtualization.

My personal point of view, this had been something we are looking at for quite sometime. It will be really nice that we could virtualize the data center, with the combination of cloud computing concept cum the virtualize data center together. As more and more application including messaging, ERP, Web hosting are adopting to virtualize, I believe the virtual datacenter will able to simplify and provide better way of managing the next generation enterprise computing.

Not sure when the Beta test will be started, but I will be more than happy to be enrolled if possible.

Here I would like to specify talk about ESX storage planning. As many of the cases I read and experience before, more and more users are really heading to the stage of choosing specify storage for specify solutions. Example you may think off for using Netapps on NFS for ESX, which claim better performance, dedupe and protocol different. Somehow, the users had forgotten that they had not run any of netapps storage in their existing environment. When we look at the management perspective, the operation management for IT support is not SIMPLIFY. Everyone know how important to standardize our environment as well as simplify out IT environment. The more complex you have, the more pain you will feel.

ESX had been design to run on multiple different range, different brand, as well as different type of protocol of storage in the market today. The reason of this is able to provide users a number of choices to be choose for deployment which may really fit the existing environment. Most users are now been looking at the storage specifically for Virtualization, that was really due to the marketing strategy or brochure been always claim the specify products will gain better performance. If you are the storage guys in your IT department, maybe you should consider what will be the best fit for your environment VS what is the coolest technology in the world for VMware.

Let talk about 1 scenario here, a user who had existing running with cx3-80 EMC SAN storage with all fiber switches ready. The storage is only 50% populated. The storage guys had raised the request to bring in the latest ISCSI technology from netapps and Equal logic. When it does the price comparison, the TCO and implementation cost of ISCSI become too huge different VS extending the enclosure on cx3-80. Back to real world, I am really curious that if SAN Fiber storage will be poor perform and inconsistent compare to ISCSI if you have everything setup and configure correctly in your fiber SAN. Most of the case is NO. As in my POC test, I can see that the performances on the Fiber are still better and stable.

ISCSI is really simple and easier manage, but somehow, there are many technical details that require redeploying the entire environment to gain the peak performance you expected. That is definitely an advice at the end you will get from the vendor. Therefore, a best fit storage for your own environment is more important always. You should look at CAPEX vs OPEX when you plan the storage for virtualization.

I am strongly disagreed with these comments as most of us know that the reason of consolidate and virtualization, is not for performance reduce, is really to improve efficiency and utilization of the hardware that we purchased. Networking play a big parts in VM infrastructure and most of the time, it did become the performance bottle neck for most users. Let me talk about some example below.

1 of the case i saw here, which the engineer configure it’s ESX in to a server which only have 2 physical NIC connected for VMnetwork interface to allow VM to be connected to the production network. There is more than 10 VMs on the ESX servers which connected to the 2 gigabits NIC and share among each others. In physical environment, for 10 physical servers, they always get 1gb per servers and is not in shared condition. But now, since virtualized, they need to share 2gb with 10 VM. Guess what, the users start complaining slow performance on the network file transfer, the backup through Network is slow as well as any reason that the network slowing down due to the high peak bandwidth utilization from any of the VM which shared on the 2 NICs. Not only the NIC causing the performance issues, and the switches uplink to the DC switches had also another thing you may need to keep an eye on. No matter how many gigabits connection you connected your servers through, it will still depend of the total uplink for your switches to route the traffic to the DC.

In this case, they not really figure out the performance issues as they won’t notice this performance bottleneck in the performance chart from Virtual Center. Most of the time, only the network guys will able to identified these issues. It really hit hard to some of the engineer which push hard on the virtualization, but it did become performance sacrification to the customers at the end. I will not want this to happen for myself, as we had invested SAN storage & High capacity servers which is not cheap solution.

Therefore, I will recommend that to deploy the VM Infrastructure in to enterprise environment in Data Center, we should always plan ahead including the Networking conditions. Again, Virtualization not meant performance sacrification, and virtualization do provide a lot of benefits which physical servers don’t.