Welcome to the year 2009 and I do hope to see the change of VMware in term of their products strategy & marketing strategy too. Everybody aware that the pricing of the ESX enterprise could be the show stoppers to some of the potential users who want to choose VMware instead of the competitor such as Hyper V and Xen. In the current economy downturn, VMware should try to reduce the licensing costing to increase the market share as well as benefits to their customer. Customer will always sign up for the support agreement on yearly basis and it does be another way for VMware to generate revenue in long term base.
Beside this, training and certify is another big issues in here. Most users will not affordable the training fees which is very expensive today to get certify. The value of the VCP should be the quality of deliver, and should not be restricted to rich guy who able to pay for the course fees. Most expert are capable and experience but had not been attended any training and not certify is due to the expensive training cost.
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There had been numbers of review and discussion always regarding the choice of storage for us to run on Virtual Environment today. I believed that the hot discussion is always moving talk about the right storage with right design and implementation to the VM farm always. The most hottest topic are still regarding the NFS, ISCSI and FC implementation which provide better features, performance and reliability.
Personally, I had 3 of it running in my environment now and of course, I had spent a huge number of times to really test out all the solution and compare apple to apple to further study my requirement. Here is some reading I get from my test for 3 solution above.
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Recently I run some stress test on our VMware farm due to the prove of concept we try on some new products and I have some finding would like to share.
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Personally, I just initiated the prove of concept with the local vendor in our environment regarding the Xsigo Virtual I/O integration with our existing Network, Fiber Channel and ESX 3.5 Virtualization server. I would like to share some of my finding which I think may be useful for reference purpose.
Before the approach on Xsigo, I am actually working on the new design plan to improve the performance and capabilities of the existing virtual infrastructure for the large scale virtualization in our environment. I am actually think about the Cisco director switch on Fiber channel and the network switches of 6509 with 10Gb module. The cost of doing this, is really kill us for the current economy down turn. Suddenly, I been introduce by my buddy with this brand new products which I setup the POC now and I found that is more make sense to look in this product to unlock the under utilize bandwidth in our DC include both Network and Fiber Channel.
Advantages:
- HCA is cheaper than HBA as we may need 2 HBA per server for redundancy purpose, which only provide 8Gb bandwidth, the HCA will provide 20Gb per HCA, which will be powerful enough for virtualization purpose.
- HCA will combine both network and fiber channel capabilities, reduce cabling requirement and improve bandwidth utilization.
- With Vnic and Vhba, we will able to create and utilize existing available bandwidth by reduce the number of FC and Network switches in the Data Center.
- I will able to reduce the cabling from 18 to 2 HCA connection per ESX in my environment
I am currently stress test the performance on the Xsigo chassis on our ESX, interesting that it will not sacrifice the performance as it able to perform as same as the previous configuration we done. Now, it provide the opportunity for me to utilize the FC ports in my Data Center without increase the number of FC switches, which is currently 95% utilize. Imagine, with 4Gb FC for HBA, except the high performance database server, we will not able to utilize the storage bandwidth on each FC ports. Same time, the gigabit network, will not be consume for more than 10% most of time, will provide more resources for the system which require extra bandwidth in the data center. Xsigo has the intelligent to manage the bandwidth and assign as needed.
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What is “Buy VMware“?
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Look carefully at the images show as above! I’m sure you will notice Google search engine result could not find “Buy VMware” keyword on pages from Malaysia(Ignore Sponsored Links). This is NOT for fun which actually I found on Malaysia VMware sitemeter report. Does Google search engine stupid or intelligence? Google search understand English? What do you think? Probably this article will show on top on Google search result later. Yeah! SEO expert here …..
Anyway other keywords such as “Buy VMware ESX” and “Buy VMware Workstation” either from google.com or google.com.my worked perfectly which it will show VMware Store URL: http://www.vmware.com/vmwarestore/.
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