Storage / SAN Compatibility Guide For ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi35_san_guide.pdf Last Updated: December 3, 2008 What’s New Changes since the last edition of this guide include:

Phil Koster, a systems engineer who blogs under the name "Joe, the Consultant," has an informative post up about VMware issues. His basic premise is that VMware has made VI so easy to set up, that it's easy to not know your stuff and miss a bunch of important factors, like storage, security and networking. You need to learn how this works (or at least RTM) in order to have a properly functioning VI environment. Good stuff.

Companies concentrating their datacenter automation efforts on server automation are making a strategic mistake. That's the view of Glenn O'Donnell, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. He believes what's needed is a more holistic view of datacenter automation. "It's misguided to give server automation all your attention," he said. "You have to look at servers, the network, storage and applications together. The real magic is orchestration."

A few months ago a number of us came together to create "The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum". The purpose of this group is to discuss the creation of a common cloud computing interface. The group is made up of a some of the largest cloud related vendors and startups who all share the goal of cloud interoperability as well reducing cross cloud complexity.read more

Database workloads are very diverse. While most database servers are lightly loaded, larger databaseworkloads can be resource-intensive, exhibiting high I/O rates or consuming large amounts of memory. With improvements in virtualization technology and hardware, even servers running large database workloads run well in virtual machines. Servers running Microsoft's SQL Server, among the top database server platforms in the industry today, are no exception.

Just had a weird problem with the firefox title bar that wasn’t appearing in Ubuntu 8.10. A quick search on google revealed that a “F11″ to enable full screen and a “F11″ again to disable full screen was a workaround. But I don’t want to do 2 x F11 every time I start firefox. So I kept trying. For some weird reason the following combination worked...

Some of you might have looked into VIMA already. Those of you that didn’t please check it out because I expect this to be the way that VMware is heading. Note, I don’t know if it really is the way VMware is heading, but a Service Console with VMotion capabilities sounds like a winner to me. A little birdie also just told me that APC, the UPS Company, is finishing their VIMA Compatible UPS software agent!

VMware has lost a key executive today with the departure of Nand Mulchandani, former Senior Director of Security Products, who has decided to take on a job as CEO for OpenDNS instead of staying on at the troubled virtualization leader. Virtual Iron has lost its Director of Corporate Marketing Tim Walsh, who started his own consulting business.

If you've been working with computers for a while, the acronym "DMTF" should be a familiar one to you. But if you still think of it as "Desktop Management Task Force," then you probably aren't aware of what this group - now known as the Distributed Management Task Force - does to make your life so much easier. Without the interoperability standards developed by DMTF, you'd find it very hard to manage a heterogeneous computing environment. Now, the DMTF is working to standardize how virtual environments work.

A year in which the economics of the travel and hotel industries are so bad that business analysts keep making comparisons to the months immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York is not generally the time most IT people would be comfortable putting together a disaster recovery plan for the first time. Most would be in their offices, sweating over spreadsheets, looking for ways to trim spending a bit more, or push a project to drive down operational costs.