Fascinating stuff from the Scobleizer Take a virtual drive around San Francisco, with Virtual Earth Streetlevel

Following my earlier post on HP Servers for VMware ESX, one of my colleagues suggested that I look at the pain points would be when buying blade infrastructure for ESX deployments. This got me thinking that what I actually need to show is what is the marginal cost of each virtual machine. To those not well versed in economic theory, marginal cost is normally described as the cost that a manufacturer encounters to produce their next widget. So the with an ESX deployment the marginal cost will be the...

I've got to admit that I am one of life's individuals who considers email to be something of a pain in the backside. Okay, it's great if you want to get a message to someone quickly, it's cheaper than a second class stamp, but within the enterprise I think it can prove to be one of the biggest barriers to effective communication since the Berlin Wall. I listened with interest to Robert Scoble's comments in a recent Technet Radio piece where he is extolling the virtues of blogging within the enterprise....

I came across a handy tool from HP this morning that gives you a simple GUI through which you can create a bootable USB stick - Handy if you need this facility. The tool can be downloaded from http://h18007.www1.hp.com/s... The tool seems to be quite happy to work with non HP devices...

I've come across an interesting piece which gives cause for concern over the way that hypervisors share HBAs. "The HBA presents a WWN (World Wide Name) to the I/O driver of the server, and that server uses it as it will. In a virtual server mode, all of the server instances can see and access the same HBA - and all the same logical unit numbers (LUN) attached to it." Read more...

Over the last couple of evenings I've had the misfortune to have to call BT's Broadband support line owing to the fact that my connection was down. Okay this is a bit of a niggle in what otherwise seems to be a fairly good and stable service, but I must admit that I am most concerned over their security practices, most notably their protection of my password. There are two issues that give cause for concern: Firstly, when attempting to login to service directly on the broadband router last night,...

In response to my previous post Dave Caddick has queried the suitability of the BL25p as a virtualisation platform, given that it can support 4 cores. In response I'd like to point out that the BL25p features 8 memory slots, giving it a maximum capacity of 32GB if each slot is populated with a 4GB DIMM. When creating virtual machines one should be mindful of the advice given in Ron Ogleby's book, VMware ESX Server Advanced Technical Design Guide. Ron highlights that many engineers over-spec the amount...

In recent posts on the VMware forums the choice of servers was under discussion. One of the posts queried how HPs DL585s compare in terms of cost against BL25p blade servers. As a starter I've created the following spreadsheet. I take no responsibility for any omissions so use the information with caution, it's for guidance only and was quickly knocked up using HP's Product Bulletin. The spreadsheet does not include any storage for VMs, I'm assuming the machines will be SAN attached, and I've not...

Hi In the posts that follow I hope to be able to share some of the insights that I gain working as a Technical Architect (at least for now anyway) at a FTSE 50 Energy company. My particular areas of interest, at the moment, include server build & management, Enterprise Systems' Management (in all its guises) and VMware ESX. In the past I've worked in several different areas of corporate IT functions including application development and support roles, system implementation, project management...