Posts by Robin Turvey

Nutanix server-storage half-bloods armed with Xeon E5s

Re: Really? Wow!.... so what?

let me help you ..

they don't claim there is anything special about the hardware - just the opposite, that it's standard commodity x86 gear... however....

assuming you are talking about their claim of 400 VM's per 2U cluster ( which contains 4 nodes )

4 nodes, each with 16 cores is 64 cores in total plus hyperthreading is 128 threads - so 400/128 = 3.125 - slightly heavy maybe but for knowledge worker desktops not unreasonable

256GB of memory in each node - which is 1TB of memory - divide this by 400 and you get 2.5GB of memory per VM - seems ok to me

Storage again 4 nodes each of 5TB raw gives 20TB RAW - lets assume mirroring so 10TB protected storage - divide that by 400 ( assuming there is no de-dupe of templates etc .. which there is ) would be 25GB per VM - again not unreasonable. With de-dupe of the base images this number would rise dramatically.

The clever part being they take jbod in each node - and form a fully protected clustered filesystem across all nodes - with data replicated across the cluster for protection

The innovation is a cluster that scales linearly in small increments, that provides a single global namespace that looks just like a SAN ( data protection/snapshots/replication/compression all built in ) from local storage - whilst providing the performance of flash storage through the use of automatically tiered data.

If you know a junior sys admin who could build this - he/she shouldn't be a junior sys admin, but running their own company ....

Red Hat sprints past ESX on VM running

Let's see the documented benchmark then .....

Claim: Max of 35 VMs .... Patently untrue - I have personally seen ESX systems running in excess of 70 VMs.

People like this should be asked to produce their validated test criteria, benchmarking method, and results by the journo ( if he/she is at all professional ) - without this it's worthless posturing in the hope that some hack rag ( ie the Register ) will pick up on it and write something about it.

Move along .... nothing to see here ... as usual.

BT Vision targets Xbox gamers for growth

BT vision on xbox ... BT what ?

"BT vision to comes to Xbox" - and lo there was a collective shrug of the nations shoulders as they continued not to care about BT vision ....

Dell's 'Veso' appliance runs on four-core Opterons and thin VMware

VMware - a true leader where others would love to follow

<<To get the light version of ESX, VMware did little more than strip out the close-to-2GB service console that's part of the core ESX Server product.>>

You have to love the register with its throw away comments. Clearly it was a trivial exercise to build a hypervisor with the features and quality that VMware have with ESX - and clearly it was also trivial to create a embedded hypervisor.

It's a wonder eveyone on the world doesn't do it - oh hang on - *slaps forehead* - It's actually pretty hard... that'll be why...

We aren't talking about just slapping a USB stick in the side and booting Linux with Xen here - this is a whole new category of hypervisor - the folks at VMware continue to amaze

Is VMware too close to Linux?

ESX is definately NOT based on linux ..

The service console in ESX 3 does not boot the vmkernel ( the hypervisor ). The vmkernel boots the system - and then brings up a virtual machine that contains linux that is called the service console. The service console is purely a place for people to put bits of software that do hardware monitoring, backup and so on.

If you actually read the article the author states the opposite - and is therefore 100% wrong - guaranteed - anyone who actualy has an ESX system knows this as they see it when ESX boots.

The vmkernel is not based on linux - if you dont believe me - download a trial copy from their website and try it for yourself

Flawed Base premise

Unfortunately the premise that the linux kernel included in the service console in ESX bootstraps the vmkernel is incorrect - the vmkernel boots the system, and then brings up the service console.

As the base premise of this argument is incorrect - it follows that the argument is incorrect.

Move along ... nothing to see here ... as ever bloggers on the net making wild claims to get people along to their site ....