VM-Aware

Following on from an earlier post NetApp have released an updated best practices guide for the Open Systems SnapVault.

A 24 page beauty that will get you heading in the right direction with this new development.

Download the pdf here.

Something that I had suspected for a while now has been ‘confirmed’  by VMware - Virtual web servers scale and perform better than physical servers.

Now I know that evidence could be produced to the contrary, but the stats are quite impressive.  The following graph show the SPECweb2005 aggregate metric values are twice that of physical boxes once scaled up to 6 nodes.

AS I said I suspected for a long time that some workloads are more suited to virtualisation and it is nice to seem some justification of this.  Read for yourself here.

I know everybody loves Dilbert, but two of my favourites of recent times are below:

Also this little beauty from last week:

I’ve been on a bit of a mission of late to find articles that make the sometimes complex seem more simple.

I don’t know about you, but I find navigating around the Sharepoint licensing model a complete and utter nightmare. So how pleased was I when I found Lady Licensing. Simple diagrams covering the following scenarios:

• Intranet Portal
• Intranet/Extranet
• Internet

Brilliant! It even comes with pictures. Need I say more? I thought not, check it out here.

Sanbarrow has released a masterpiece for all administrators out there. The MOA LiveCD is a fine example of what true dedication can bring you.

3 years in the making the LiveCD allows you to boot into BartPE style environment with VMware related applications installed. The idea being that you can attach a physical disk for forensic/repair purposes etc.

Other useful applications include RoboCopy to get your important files off before the hard drive fails for good. Registry backup tools, VMware Converter and a multitude of others.

It comes in at 500mb, but you can run it from a USB key (if you have a degree of dedication) or CD.

Download it here, read all about it here.

I’m sure that most people are either aware of these documents already or would have stumbled across them at some point.  Here though is the link to all the SRM related documentation on the VMware website.

Of particular interest to me was the storage vendor HCL.