Posts Tagged ‘esx’

It's fast, it's wild, and it's out of NDA.
I'm furious, I'm excited and I'm off the hook.

If you are a VMware guru, the first few episodes in this series are not meant for you. You would probably be interested when we reach the level of configuring things like the Cisco Nexsus1000v, create host-profiles, or do some FT magic. Between now and then, it's all for the newbies coming to our wonderful virtual world, and have no clue where to start and what platform they should adopt.

I've been willing to do a similar series in VI3 for quite some time, and start from the basics all the way to advanced configurations, but now that the vS4 is out, well, almost, I said why not, it's a learning journey for me before anyone else.

You have to be patient with me however, the video recording is fairly easy, but the editing and production is quite hard and time consuming to present in this format. If you have any feedback, corrections or anything that can help improve these videos, please don’t hesitate to drop a comment or an email.

What are we waiting for? Let’s do this:

Intel’s next-gen microprocessor, Xeon 55xx series (codename Nehalem) will soon rock our virtual world with VMware’s ESX4 expected GA sometime this year. I’ve seen an excellent and detailed presentation from intel last week talking about this new architecture and how it’s meant for taking the performance to the next level, but it was quite interesting to read today’s article on eWEEK that explains how that will be of a great benefit for VMware ESX4.

I highly recommend to you watching these quick demos from intel before reading the eWEEK’s article to have a clear idea about what is written over there:

• Nehalem architecture overview:
  http://www.intel.com/technology/architecture-silicon/next-gen/demo/demo.htm
• Intel QuickPath architecture:
  http://www.intel.com/technology/quickpath/demo/demo.htmiid=tech_nehalemdemo+infolnk_quickpath 

IBM will be officially announcing their next generation of intel-based blades (HS22) tomorrow, March the 31st , which will be equipped with this mind-blowing performance microprocessor, I was fortunate enough to see and touch this blades myself last week which comes with a few other surprises as well.

One of the great features that came out with ESX 3.5 is the NetFlow support. NetFlow is originally developed by Cisco and used mostly for IP accounting and network visibility. In this video we will use this protocol with the AdvenNet NetFlow Analyzer to have a better visibility for our ESX/VMs traffic. VMware still consider this as “experimental” but I’ve been running it in my production ESX farm for more than 3 month now and it’s running flawlessly with no overhead whatsoever on the ESX hosts. I’ve been using also NetFlow since 2004 in many ISPs and Carriers, and it has been always a big hit everytime I use it, mainly for the incredible visibility you get out of it and its ease of use.

Video Links: BlipTv | Vimeo | YouTube

 VMware technical resource: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1014