Posts by Guy Dawson

Tintri's VDI flash disk mix: The kit that booted 1,000 virtual desktops

I think they actually mean 'provisioned' not 'booted' in 150mins.

Plane or train? Tape or disk? Reg readers speak

Versioning File Systems

Novell's filesytems ('tradational' and NSS) will, space allowing, keep copies of deleted files and allow users or admins to undelete or 'salvage' them. A very useful feature that will be missed as we migrate off Netware onto Linux.

Obama gets personal V-22 Osprey tiltrotor

V-22 safety record

Are they trying to kill the President by flying him in one of these?

The curious incident of Oracle and HP-UX on Itanium

I'll be part of the backlash!

Having first used Oracle on VAX/VMS in 1986 and finding an SQL query that could lockup a VAX (as Oracle found out) I've been using Oracle on and mostly off for a while.

I'd be hard pressed to recommend Oracle as a platform to anyone who wants any control over their IT destiny. I'm not even an Itanic fan!

HP loses massive DWP contract

What difference will this really make?

I bet most of the HP/EDS staff get TUPE'd over to Fujitsu Services. If so it will be little more than a case of rearranging the deck chairs!

Mark Cuban counsels Google-busting bribery

Being paid to look like you've gone bust

So, I can take my million, change my robots.txt file and wonder why 80% the the web's searchers think I've gone bust. Great!

Then, when that 80% realise that I've not gone bust they can get p'd off because they have to use a different search engine to find me. Will they bother?

Is server virtualization delivering for you yet?

SME gains

We're a SME (140 staff) and our server virtualisation project has been very successful.

4 main servers (DB, 2 email and web app) and 24 small servers have all been consolidated onto 3 Vmware ESX servers plus a management server. 28 on 3 or 4 if you count the management server.

We virtualised a mix of operating systems including Novell Netware, SUSE Linux, Windows SBE 2003, Windows XP and FreeBSD.

Our savings are principally on space, power and cooling. Our gains are on DR, flexibility, management and the ability to add new virtual servers at no or little extra hardware cost. A bit more memory would help but what's new?

The big driver for virtualisation was DR. With the previous mix of physical servers meaningful DR was impractical. Now it's easy.

We have lots of operational flexibility. We can test software upgrades to production servers by taking a copy and testing in a separate virtual environment and a snapshot before doing the upgrade in the production environment. Belt and braces.

While we have 3 ESX hosts 2 are enough to run our production systems so should a host fail or need maintenance we can cope with minimal disruption.

This all sits on an EMC SAN which is working very well too.

We've been able figure out much of this for ourselves with the help of the various on-line forums.

I'm happy.

Croydon devil dog execution: Exclusive photo

T-shit

Is this available on a t-shirt?

Guy