Sidney Smith

I just stumbled upon a fresh post by Hal Rosenberg, a Performance Engineer from VMware. Its a great doc, titled Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4. It has some great flowcharts and steps to take to come to a root cause analysis for performance issues. Although it is written for vSphere 4, much of the [...] ... (more)

More on Cisco UCS, HP Matrix and ITaaS

I just finished reading Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server - UCS (Unified Computing System) from Cisco. It gave an excellent take on Cisco’s view of how UCS benefits a datacenter. It also explains how new technologies from Intel, QLogic and Emulex all complement the Cisco gear. As a matter of fact, the first [...] ... (more)

Stevie’s Unified Event Management, My Cloud Shangri-La

If you know Steve Chambers you know he just moved to Cisco. Before that, he was with VMware and has been a pillar of the VI:OPS boards. He is now working on a document about Unified Event Management and in the spirit of community, he is looking for comments, suggestion, etc. He called my attention [...] ... (more)

What’s New with Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

As many of you know, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is the (soon to be released) second release of Microsoft’s free hypervisor.  This is the version of Windows Server 2008 that is a free download – no license needed.  It’s locked into a Server Core installation, capable of only running the Hyper-V role.  There’s some new [...] ... (more)

Storage Protocol Differences and FCoE Diagrams

Just thought I would share these diagrams that I used in a recent training session. I used them to explain the differences in the storage protocols that may be used for a vStorage Cloud and how FCoE works. Click on the images for a larger view. The first image shows the differences between the common storage [...] ... (more)