Cloud Computing.. whats so special in you???

Cloud Computing has been a very fancy name in all organizations. Yes i agree it feels good to say “We have a cloud infra” rather than “we have a virtualized infra”. Now there is a huge huge deference between a  virtualized infra and a cloud infra.
Below are some characteristics of a Cloud,

1) 100 % network up-time (the network cant go down come-what-may)
2) Tasks such as patch management/application install shouldn’t affect end users productivity.
3)  Load Balancing (Best use of the hardware)
4) Reliability (In case of a BCP/DR)
5) Rapid Elasticity (On demand provisioning of resources) 

If your system doesn’t have have all the above characteristics then its not a cloud.
 
My personal opinion is that not every organization needs a cloud infra. It depends on certain very specific business objectives to set up a cloud. If you are as huge as Facebook/Google go for a cloud infra because in this case u don’t want to compromise on quality.

If i was a small IT industry i would go with virtualized infra which again gives me a high availability and load balancing. Setup a optimized virtual infra and re-build my business objectives after 2 years. Switch to Cloud if situation demands and of-course will think twice 🙂   

 

 

 
 

 

Virtualization at a very basic level (home computers)

I have Win XP and Puppy Linux hosted on my Win Vista home computer though Vmware workstation. Y Vista?? I love to work on OS which gives more issues 😉
Vmware workstation is again a Vmware masterpiece to have virtualization at the very basic level (home computers). It feels nice to have multiple OS on your computer so that you switch to any installed OS depending on the project/work that you are doing. To clear your doubts, this is not similar to dual boot from Windows login.
Below is how my VMware workstation looks.

 

 One click will launch the Virtual OS and you can also have your Virtual OS in full screen mode.
I would also bet that Virtual OS will be faster than your host OS provided you have VMware tools installed and adequate space assigned.
Virtual OS doesn’t eat up your system RAM, it uses hard drive space as a virtual memory.

To know more about VMware workstation : Click here

New to VMware??

I was going though the VMware website and found a very simple document on basics of VMware. This is strictly recommended for all of you who are new to VMware.
The document will give you a brief description on what Virtualization is and how VMware ESX and VMware Server/workstation works.
This document can be used as a guide for all of you preparing for VMware job interviews.

Click on VMware Basics to download ESX and VMware serverq.doc.
Click on VMware community to check the website below downloading. This document (ESX and VMware serverq.doc) is uploaded by pradeep_kr in one of his posts.

Will soon post some more interesting documents on Virtualization 🙂

A.Mikkelsen – http://www.amikkelsen.com/

You have VMware ESX scripts, commands, tools, latest updates and many more on this website. If you are a Vmware Fan, then A.Mikkelsen is strictly recommended..

Cirtrix XenServer for free

You can download Cirtrix XenServer for free – Click here .
The main difference that i noticed when compared to VMware ESXi is that Max Virtual CPU’s allocation for a VM can go upto 8 in Cirtrix XenServer. For a VMware ESXi it 4.

Port Group in ESX

Port groups aggregate multiple ports under a common configuration and provide a stable anchor point for virtual machines connecting to labeled networks. Each port group is identified by a network label, which is unique to the current host.
You can create a maximum of 512 port groups on a single host.

Vmware Tools

VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine’s guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine.

DRS in Vmware

When you enable DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) in a cluster, VirtualCenter continuously monitors the distribution of  resources (CPU and memory) for all the hosts and virtual machines in the cluster.
DRS evaluates both the specified configuration settings and the current load and thus helps in migration of Virtual machines from one host to another to balance the load.

Host Failure in ESX

The maximum host failures allowed in a cluster is 4.