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Iometer. As good as you want to make it.
Most know Iometer as the go-to synthetic I/O measuring tool used to simulate real workload conditions. Well, somewhere, somehow, someone forgot the latter part of that sentence, which is why it ends up being so misused and abused. How many of us have seen a storage solution delivering 6 figure IOPS using Iometer, only to…
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Seattle VMUG Meeting for August 2013
VMworld 2013 is just a few short weeks away, and with that comes a lot of excitement in the virtualization community. Whether or not you plan on attending VMworld, there is plenty to be excited for with the next Seattle VMUG on Wednesday, August 14th (5:00pm to 8:00pm) at the Bellevue Art Museum. If you…
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Hunting down unnecessary I/O before you buy that next storage solution
Are legacy processes and workflows sabotaging your storage performance? If you are on the verge of committing good money for more IOPS, or lower latency, it might be worth taking a look at what is sucking up all of those I/Os. In my previous posts about improving the performance of our virtualized code compiling systems,…
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Fixing host connection issues on Dell servers in vSphere 5.x
I had a conversation recently with a few colleagues at the Dell Enterprise Forum, and as they were describing the symptoms they were having with some Dell servers in their vSphere cluster, it sounded vaguely similar to what I had experienced recently with my new M620 hosts running vSphere 5.0 Update 2. While I’m uncertain…
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My VMworld “Call for Papers” submission, and getting more involved
It is a good sign that you are in the right business when you get tremendous satisfaction from your career – whether it be from the daily challenges at work, or through professional growth, learning, or sharing. It’s been an exciting month for me, as I’ve taken a few steps to get more involved. First,…
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Configuring a VM for SNMP monitoring using Cacti
There are a number of things that I don’t miss with old physical infrastructures. One near the top of the list is a general lack of visibility for each and every system. Horribly underutilized hardware running happily along side overtaxed or misconfigured systems, and it all looked the same. Fortunately, virtualization has changed much of…
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Vroom! Scaling up Virtual Machines in vSphere to meet performance requirements–Part 2
In my original post, Scaling up Virtual Machines in vSphere to meet performance requirements, I described a unique need for the Software Development Team to have a lot of horsepower to improve the speed of their already virtualized code compiling systems. My plan of attack was simple. Address the CPU bound systems with more powerful…
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Using a Synology NAS as an emergency backup DNS server for vSphere
Powering up a highly virtualized infrastructure can sometimes be an interesting experience. Interesting in that “crossing-the-fingers” sort of way. Maybe it’s an outdated run book, or an automated power-on of particular VMs that didn’t occur as planned. Sometimes it is nothing more than a lack of patience between each power-on/initialization step. Whatever the case, if…
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Vroom! Scaling up Virtual Machines in vSphere to meet performance requirements
A typical conversation with one of our Developers goes like this. “Hey, that new VM you gave us is great, but can you make it say, 10 times faster?” Another day, and another request by our Development Team to make our build infrastructure faster. What is a build infrastructure, and what does it have to…
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SSDs in the workplace. Trust, but verify
Most of my interests, duties, and responsibilities surround infrastructure. Virtualization, storage, networking, and the architecture of it all. Ask me about the latest video card out there, and not only will I probably not know about it, I might not care. Eventually problems crop up on the desktop though, and the hands have to get…