I haven’t had 3 weeks off of anything since summer break in college. 1 week here and their for vacation, maybe stretched it to 10 days occasionally, but the email leash was never really off. Here I am 3 days into my “break” and I am finding myself mostly just filling time. The good news is that changes tomorrow. So far, I did do a kick ass job on organizing my contact list, and it is now in sync between by iPhone, computer and Yahoo account. The gutters on our house are spotless (that was a real treat). We dominated the Gilroy outlets over the weekend and celebrated victory with a little In-and-Out Burger. I am catching up with lots of people via Facebook/LinkedIn etc. Last night, I had a great time with my close work friends over some beers and dinners (thanks everyone for coming, it was really great to see all of you!). But tomorrow, tomorrow things really get fun! Joy and I fly out tomorrow night on a redeye to Puerto Rico and then on to Tortolla. We are meeting some close friends for a week of boat camping….we rented a 47 foot powercat (perhaps the ugliest boat known to man) and will be cruising the BVIs for the week. Gilligan’s Island, here we come!
After that trip, I am back to San Jose for a couple of days before heading back to the east coast to spend a week with my parents, gram, sister, brother-in-law, and nephews. I don’t think I have spent more than 48 hours in the town where I grew up in more than 10 years (now that I think about it, that coincides with the time I started my most recent job).
After that, I want to do something really fun with my wife (just the 2 of us) somewhere on the west coast. Not sure what that will be yet, any suggestions for a good 2-3 day long trip or activity?
As the deployment of 10G switches gains traction, the case studies, 3rd party “independent” test and rebuttals are flowing like mad. I thought Omar Sultan from Cisco did a very good job with this one (rebuttal to a recently published Network World article) in particular in making the case that while 0-60MPH testing is certainly interesting, the majority of us drive on highways, back roads, traffic jams, parking lots, bridges, tunnels, and a variety of other places which require our cars to be good in a lot of different scenarios, not just on the drag strip (although, as a amateur track enthusiast, I love taking off fast).
http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/comments/the_perils_of_equipment_testing/
Net-net, network devices need to be able to perform well in a variety of scenarios, not just on the drag strip. A test drive is the only way to determine if a “car” is right for you.
Now that the VMware ESX vSphere 4.0 U1 update has been released, customers are moving from 3.0 and 3.5 to 4.0 at a very accelerated pace. U1 means that the technology is stable, the kinks have been worked out and gremlins have moved on to terrorize something else. It is also a major mental barrier (like Service Packs in the Windows world). Now that the barrier has been removed, there are a lot more fact and experience based analysis coming from users championing for and against new features and solutions inside of the vSphere 4 offering.
A great example of this is captured over at Search Networking comparing 2 separate articles. The first, by Bob Plankers (lead Linux and VMware systems engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he also runs The Lone Sysadmin blog) is why the VMware vSwitch is good enough for most. The 2nd, by David Davis (a virtualization author), does a good job of articulating the why the Benefits outweigh the extra cost of Cisco Nexus 1000V.
In addition to David points, I would add one point of clarification which Bob might not be aware of. The Nexus 1000V is sold and serviced through both VMware and Cisco. In fact, VMW offers a couple of bundles of the Nexus 1000V with the vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses (both full license and upgrade license). When VMW sells the Nexus 1000V with the vSphere software, they also sell support (in conjunction with the vSphere support). Both the VMW and Cisco support teams are trained on the Nexus 1000V at the same time and both equally capable of handling support issues. And if things get really tricky, the Cisco TAC backs up VMW’s support organization with a direct line into our engineering department.
Oh, one other thing. The latest release of the Nexus 1000V software (1.2) includes a simple GUI to allow you to complete the initial config in about 7 minutes. There is a VOD posted here to show just how easy it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sxWiz7S-z0
It is great to see more real world analysis from real users. Looking forward to reading more of these in the future.
Check out the Brighttalk Virtualized Data Center Webcast this Thursday….lots of good topics including mine on the Nexus 1000V!
http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/8134/attend
Where does policy definition, enforcement and auditing belong in a data center? Should it be silo’d for individual functions or aggregated into a centralized policy solution. There are a log of established and emerging companies in this space (Voyence, HyTrust, Embotics, etc), but each of them focused specifically on 1 area of the DC (for the most part) like VMs, Network or Storage. How do these solutions fit together to support APPLICATION level policy (what customers really care about) inclusive of all the pieces and parts (the building blocks, if you will) that need to come together to deliver that application
I would argue that the silo specific (VM, Network, Security, etc) policy management needs to be a tightly integrated key feature of the silo specific device management & provisioning solution (all of which should be fully automated, of course). On top of this, there needs to be an Application level policy solution that seamlessly ties each of the silo specific offerings together (the building blocks) to allow the definition of, enforcement of and auditing of App policy in customer/cloud environments. The question is, how do you effectively tie all these blocks together?
What do you think?
