With my last 3 years of experience, I had seen numbers of companies require significant expansion in the data center to support the business growth, just because of the additional 200 to 2000 servers or storage shelves they need to put in to the data center. With the technology today, it does help us to reduce the space we need to slot in the servers, and storage thanks to the success of virtualization and higher capacity disk drives in the market. To run a full solution of data center with less number of server racks for SME and enterprise, will no longer be a dream due to some facts below,
- Higher consolidation ratio in virtualization with the latest CPU, memory and servers performance
- Higher capacity disk drive which significant reduce the number of storage expansion require
- Virtual I/O which allow the higher utilization of the available bandwidth in data center
- UCS to provide consolidation and higher capacity of bandwidth to support network and storage utilization in the data center
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With the recent experience I had on the deployment with vSphere 4 and PowerVault MD3000i, I found there are plenty of room you may able to further fine tune to improve the performance of the storage and virtual infrastructure. Before this, the initial deployment was done by default configuration without any fine tune yet, and I found that the storage performance looks little bit slow. Therefore, I had decided to further research and fine tune everything we had to improve the performance.
Equipment List
- 2 x R710 with Intel 5530
- 2 x PowerConnect 5424
- MD3000i with 15 SATA Disks
- Software ISCSI initiator from vSphere 4
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Storage Vmotion through GUI is available on next version of ESX vSphere. This had provided the capability to perform the storage Vmotion from 1 to another datastore with no downtime. The entire process is been simplified through graphic user interface. Full features been integrated to vCenter without external plugin.
Select Change datastore at the 1st screen. Note that the option 1 is use for Vmotion on virtual machines. Option 3 is only available when VM is been powered off
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There are more users considering to virtualize their SQL servers today, but performance requirement always become the major concern before they virtualize the SQL servers. I had read through lots of the forums, white papers and articles, which all discussed about SQL server in virtual environment, and I found some useful information here which I agree with the inputs from drummonds.
Click here to read more about the Best Practices for SQL Server on VMware
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Latest news from Cisco which confirm the release of Code Name California by early of March 2009. The solution will provide integration for Data Center Servers, Network Management, Virtualization and Storage Management from 1 console which the vendor believe to simplify the IT management which we had suffer for Years. HP is currently working on the product which provide the same features as Cisco California did. IBM will also soon to join the competition of this product range. With this technology in place, it may change the environment significantly for the next generation data center and my personal point of view is still the cost, features and reliabilities of the products. It will be good for consolidate with acceptable pricing and reliabilities especially at the current economy. Anything that help to save cost will be the top priority to be considered for IT spending.
