Posts by Simon 49

VMware customer reaction to Broadcom may set the future of software licensing

Depends - in many/most cases there's a way to mitigate a known vulnerability elsewhere in the stack, it may be suboptimal, but may give the time required to migrate to another solution.

I see 1/3 customers paying up, at least for now, 1/3 (who are already hyper converged) jumping to Nutanix (which I don't really understand, as that's a lot of upheaval for few features, less support of virtual appliances and almost as expensive), and the biggest 1/3 in my case going to KVM, as they already have a cadre of Linux admins.

Nutanix doesn't expect a rush of VMware refugees – maybe for years

Re: Hyperconverged

There's a boatload of NFS based shops, happy with their Tintri and NetApp, and still a ton of Pure and other FC/iSCSI. Many of these customers like the storage they have and are running workloads where a ton of storage is in use by a smaller number of nodes. Yes some will go converged when they refresh, but plenty won't. Nutanix missed a trick not dropping an NFS client at this point.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

The team is distributed across the country anyhow, all meetings are on screen rather than in a room for at least several participants - which makes the whole thing ridiculous - productivity is much better at home, without the commute, and with a guaranteed and optimal workspace free of noise of everyone else. Wasting two hours a day to driving only to sit with a single monitor with headphones on all day is idiotic.

Cisco dumps its Hyperflex hyperconverged infrastructure

Re: Not surprised

Anything multi-vendor is a PIA come upgrade time. Straight vSAN with other VMware products on top is bearable provided you follow the correct order, Lifecycle Manager gets better each release. Flex / Rail etc. you have to wait longer for patches or upgrade guidance and when it comes it's touch and go whether it works or not.

SmartNICs haven't soared so VMware will allow retrofits in old servers

Majority of ESXi servers are disk/RAM bound

With the third place bottleneck CPU, and network I/O below that too. Mostly been selling servers with 2 or 4 25G ports, or 2 X 100G, I've yet to see servers push > about 55 except during bandwidth testing. All of which adds up to SmartNICs not really giving ROI in general purpose use cases. Yes if you're building 5G telecom nodes or a very large private cloud fine, but otherwise VMware's move to limit each socket license to 32 cores runs right into this - where its moved the scale out v scale up value point, plus failure domain becomes huge if you're at only small numbers of huge hosts.

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

No that's a wife thing. Mine her a memory that works differently than mine, and will do the same launch into a continuation of a past conversation and not understand why I can't just pick it up without context.

Intel pulls plug on mini-PC NUCs

Re: Small Edge compute clusters are ideal fodder for ARM already

Agreed that the vendors really want you locked in, Sunlight et al do indeed base node cost on at least a triple digit purchase. At that scale you can roll your own with open source but the maintenance cost won't be insignificant and yes you have to re-roll for a change of platform, but then at least containers are portable. Be nice if the ARM ESXi build was a thing and could be consumed with ROBO licensing...

Re: Small Edge compute clusters are ideal fodder for ARM already

It's a way longer list than you may realize, I've sold/deployed two major competing platforms, one of which brags about some very big name customers. In both cases end customer had a hundred odd sites with a need for a reliable compute cluster - but were rolling out their homebuilt containers. Yes target had to be switched to ARM but beyond that the containers don't care. These were both little plastic stacking servers with 16GB RAM and a couple of M2 each, personally I wish there were 1U and not bright colors but whatever. Looking at the ESXi ARM fling HCL there are more chunky boxes out there now than a couple of years ago too.

Small Edge compute clusters are ideal fodder for ARM already

There are a whole bunch of ARM platforms from Pi up to much pricier and more NUC comparable ARM based platforms - not good for gaming/PC use so much but if you're wanting to run a K8S cluster of 3 low energy nodes in a retail store then way more suited than anything Intel have. X86 was ubiquitous, you needed it to run what software you needed without horrible emulation penalties if it could even be done. Now much less so - MS and Apple both have ARM desktops, ARM is available as a target in the big clouds and it already owned phones and embedded devices. I'm just not sure how Intel gets back on top now, GPUs are encroaching the high end, RISC the low.

Dyson moans about state of UK science and tech, forgets to suck up his own mess

Re: Pay

That's just not true, what costs, and where? There's massive regional variations here in US, but the UK has some of that too especially in housing.

Where were you on 100K Euro, I made 230 in Dublin and certainly didn't feel like that much once taxes and housing costs were taken into account.

My 4 bedroom house with a garden and a garage is comparable in price to one in the home counties, despite being in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in California. All my utilities are lower, as is my insurance, food costs etc. Cars, appliances, etc. are less, let alone the price of petrol, though arguably that's not a good thing, but I'll enjoy my 5 liter Rover until it dies then go electric.

Again despite California being high comparative to rest of US, my taxes are less here than they'd be in UK. 10% sales tax rather than 20% VAT, income plus property taxes work out to about 25% of income. Traffic sucks so can kind of agree with the commute part, Americans think nothing of driving an hour here and there, I've been mostly WFH for twenty years but it does suck to have a two hour drive to a meeting once or twice a month. But South East England ain't great on that front, if we came back we'd look at a village in Surrey or Hampshire most likely and have exactly the same kind of lengthy irregular commute.

Sungard files for Chapter 11 in US, keep eye on restructure

Re: Forecast cloudy

It's not like it was a great proposition even without the cloud, the colo space is competitive enough their premium wasn't worth it.

Cisco warns VMware vCenter bug puts hyperconverged tin in ‘unrecoverable’ state

Yes. I HATE the way HW vendors are using the HCL to force refreshes on customers - by refusing to certify anything greater than 18 months old. Sucks for homelabs too - trial and error and forum digging is required moreso than it should be.

I agree that people should have more sense - but 7.0 has been out nearly 7 months and U1 is generally the place where enterprises start upgrading. Why has Cisco not got it qualified and addressed these issues yet?

I'm sure VMware will fix, but pre-April release was the time for Cisco to test this and raise the bugzilla ticket to have it fixed.

Even the stragglers of the storage and security vendors finally released 7.0 support in the last couple of months (probably initially timed to coincide with VMworld)

Data centres are warm and designed to move air very efficiently. Are they safe to visit during the pandemic?

All the biometrics are annoying though

Have to touch several hand scanners between the street and my cage - and while my cage one likely hasn't seen anyone for months, the mantrap ones must be a pool of lovely germs.

Kubernetes is 'still hard' so VMware has gone all-in on container-related tech with expanded Tanzu, vSphere 7

Multi-cloud is their big bet

Yes it's not cheap by any means, but the extra abstraction layer gets you the ability to run cloud native workloads on premises, plus have mobility of those workloads between on-prem and multiple clouds - this is worth the money for some folks, though not for everyone.

Credit where due, VMware ease of install and lifecycle management has improved a ton the past few years, for many environments the cost is worth it for the management/ops tools. VCF is a heck of a big footprint for small shops though, they need to come up with some new Essentials like cheaper option that is limited enough to not cannibalize Enterprise sales but still has all the shiny new bits. Wavefront (now Tanzu Observer or something) and CloudHealth have been way under marketed too. Watching with interest.

How four rotten packets broke CenturyLink's network for 37 hours, knackering 911 calls, VoIP, broadband

Control plane policing?

This isn't a new thing, mind boggles how they would not either have completely OOB access and enough reserved CPU cycles to service admin access.

Peak smartphone? iPhone X flunks 'supercycle' hopes

Another 7+ owner here, I always make it two years between replacements and when I'm lucky three (don't drop it too much). Brought the wife a 7+ 256GB refurb for a good price a couple of weeks ago, would expect that to now last her two years too.

The changes are either incremental or unwanted (FaceID) this go round and while I see a surprising number of X's on planes and in peoples hands (work in Silicon Valley) unless there's a massive leap in the rear facing camera I can wait.

I was an Android person years ago, but twice burnt purchasing top of the line devices which the manufacturers decided to stop updating 18 months post my purchase. Say what you like about Apple but at least if I can make a phone last three years I know it will still run the latest software with patches.

vSphere has been moved onto VMware's slow development train

Maybe need to be clear here - the new HTML5 client is the replacement for the older (and Flash based) Web Client. This has been a Fling this year, and iterated every few weeks - it's not perfect / fully functional yet, but that team are going great guns.

California to put all your power-hungry PCs on a low carb(on) diet

Re: I wonder what they're planning to break

But their DCs are not here, but in Oregon, Washington, and Nevada. The reason is California power prices are massively higher.

HPE rushes out patch for more than a year of OpenSSL vulns

I don't have the time or inclination to go through all their download pages, but for the 5900 Comware image the fixes were posted early January, so this may be more a notification issue due to one or two laggard builds.

Walmart sues Visa for being too lax with protecting chip cards

Re: Zip code for non-US cards

The PAYG thing is insane, go to the trouble of getting your phone unlocked, manage to find a nano-SIM on a UK PAYG net, then find the only way to get more credit on it is buying a retail voucher - marked up massively compared with online. Seemed to be 4:1 last time I tried this, 2014 I think, I spent 100 quid on what online should have been 30.

'Apple ate my music!' Streaming jukebox wipes 122GB – including muso's original tracks

Re: 122GB ? Pah. Windows 10 OneDrive client ate over 200GB of my files!

OneDrive is so not-fit-for-purpose that I think it only exists to demonstrate how well sorted DropBox is.

VMware, Microsoft in virtualised Exchange blog battle

Re: "CTO ambassador"???

His title is Staff Solutions Architect, he is also a member of the internal CTO Ambassador program, think someone transcribed from the wrong line on his mail sig.

White House backs US web sales tax - eBay hits panic alarm

Re: Sounds fair

That's precisely why when congress last discuss this back in the 90's, they delayed it pending the setup of the 'SST' streamlined sales tax arrangement, where a bunch of states agreed to pay for 3rd parties to collate and calculate and file taxes for small business. These days using a SaaS service to calculate the tax is easy and free (the states pay rather than the business).

Don't forget people are supposed to have been paying their out of state sales taxes all along, just by adding them to their tax returns at the end of the year, just nobody did.

VMware and partners to build uber-vCloud to take on Amazon

Re: Obvious strategy is obviously missing

I think part of the problem is the obsession with VM mobility rather than application workload mobility. It's much easier to distribute load with an F5 GTM or equivalent between environments fairly seamlessly than it is to vMotion to another environment over limited bandwidth, then have all the challenges of overlay networking in order to retain IP addressing.

By all means develop Cloud Connector to move VMs around and translate between different hypervisor VM container formats, but the higher in the stack you do some of this stuff the easier it is, both to accomplish and especially to support and troubleshoot.

Disclaimer - I work for F5, I know there are other solutions available.

Brocade has 2-year Fibre Channel headstart on rival

FCoE was trapped at top of rack until the multi-hop additions were added - it's still very limited compared to FC, so I'd fully expect FC to reign for a while longer in the core of large SANs. Not forever though, maintaining a whole separate SAN infrastructure just doesn't add up with 10 and soon 40 gig Ethernet cheaper and with QoS/lossless extensions, Brocade better stockpile that hay...

Launcher Pro

What widgets are in the screenshot?

I like the date/time and weather with a transparent background.

Arista goes modular with 10 Gig E switches

Cisco comparison is a bit silly

Yes the currently shipping Nexus blades have 32 ports of which only 8 are available in 'dedicated' non-oversubscribed mode, but that's a first generation card. There's a 32 port non-oversubscribed one due in a couple of months - still only 256 ports I know, but I doubt Arista has shipped any of these yet either. So you'd only need a pair of Nexus 7010's or one Nexus 7018 to reach 384 ports. The Cisco also has a modular backplane, and a roadmap for a lot more performance.

Granted I'm sure the Arista will still be much less expensive.

Mozilla catches half of Firefox users running insecure Flash

Bloat contributes to this

As Flash / Acrobat / iTunes / whatever version increment they get bigger and bigger and slower and slower - so even if security flaws are present there's a disincentive to let them upgrade themselves.