Category: virtualization archive

  • Dogs, Rush hour traffic, and the history of storage I/O benchmarking–Part 2

    Part one of "History of storage I/O Benchmarking" attempted to demonstrate how Synthetic Benchmarks on their own simply cannot generate or measure storage performance in a meaningful way. Emulating real workloads seems like such a simple matter to solve, but in truth it is a complex problem involving technical, and non-technical challenges. Assessing workload characteristics…

  • Dogs, Rush hour traffic, and the history of storage I/O benchmarking–Part 1

    Evaluating performance of x86 based servers and workstations has had a history of deficiency. Twenty years ago, Administrators who tested system performance usually did little more than run a simple CPU benchmark to see how much faster a 50MHz system was than a 25 MHz system. Rarely did testing go beyond this. Nostalgia aside, it…

  • Interpreting Performance Metrics in PernixData FVP

    In the simplest of terms, performance charts and graphs are nothing more than lines with pretty colors.  They exist to provide insight and enable smart decision making.  Yet, accurate interpretation is a skill often trivialized, or worse, completely overlooked.  Depending on how well the data is presented, performance graphs can amaze or confuse, with hardly…

  • Your Intel NUC Home Lab questions answered

    With my recent post on what’s currently running in my vSphere Home Lab, I received a number of questions about one particular part of the lab; that being my Management Cluster built with Intel NUCs. So here is a quick compilation of those questions (with answers) I’ve had around this topic. Why did you go…

  • My vSphere Home Lab. 2015 edition

    The vSphere Home Lab. For some, it is a tool for learning. For others it is a hobby. And for the rest of us, it is a weird addiction rationalized as one of the first two reasons. Home Labs come in all shapes and sizes, and there really is no right or wrong way to…

  • Applying Innovation in the Workplace

    Those of us in this IT industry need not be reminded that IT is as much of a consumer of solutions as it is a provider of services.  Advancing technologies attempt to provide services that are faster, more resilient, and feature rich. Sometimes advancement brings unintended consequences while simultaneously creating even more room to innovate.…

  • Sustained power outages in the datacenter

    Ask any child about a power outage, and you can tell it is a pretty exciting thing. Flashlights. Candles. The whole bit. The excitement is an unexplainable reaction to an inconvenient, if not frustrating event when seen through the eyes of adulthood. When you are responsible for a datacenter of any size, there is no…

  • A look at FVP 2.0’s new features in a production environment

    I love a good benchmark as much as the next guy. But success in the datacenter is not solely predicated on the results of a synthetic benchmark, especially those that do not reflect a real workload. This was the primary motivation in upgrading my production environment to FVP 2.0 as quickly as possible. After plenty…

  • Using FVP in multi-NIC vMotion environments

    In FVP version 1.5, PernixData introduced a nice little feature that allows a user to specify the network to use for all FVP peering/replica traffic. This added quite a bit of flexibility in adapting FVP to a wider variety of environments. It can also come in handy when testing performance characteristics of different network speeds,…

  • Using vscsiStats to better visualize storage I/O

    As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. This isn’t more true than in the world of data visualization. Raw data has its place, but good visualization methods help translate numbers into a meaningful story, and assist with overcoming the deficiencies associated with looking at a spreadsheet of raw numbers. A good…