I am in love!

May 26th, 2010 Paul Fazzone 1 comment

Categories: Fun, Porsche Tags: , ,

Go Open vSwitch go, hurray for 1.0!

May 18th, 2010 Paul Fazzone No comments

Open vSwitch 1.0 was recently posted at openvswitch.org.  Check out a quick write up at virtualization.info.  And another at Infoworld.

The open vSwitch development effort was brought on following the introduction of VMWare’s DVS and Cisco’s Nexus 1000V last year.  This effort brings advanced networking capabilities to hypervisor platforms like Xen, XenServer and KVM.

Categories: Data Center, Server Virtualization Tags:

VMWorld Nicira Presentation….NEED YOUR HELP!

May 16th, 2010 Paul Fazzone 2 comments

I am trying to get my company’s session approved for this year’s VMWorld.  When you aren’t a Platinum sponsor, it is a little bit more difficult to get these things pushed though.  So, I am asking for help from anyone who has a VMWorld account to go and vote for the session.  Many of you have been asking me what Nicira is up to.  This session is a great way to find out.  Here are the session details and link to cast your vote.

Cast your vote here

Title: Reworking the Network to Support Today’s Virtualization & Cloud Demands

Speaker: Martin Casado, Nicira CTO and Founder
Company: Nicira
Session Id: PC8430
Abstract: “The networking industry is lagging far behind the virtualization trends which are transforming our datacenters into pure resource pools of compute power. Traditional approaches to networking hamper the adoption of virtualization with scaling and mobility limitations, vendor lock-in on hardware platforms & management APIs, and an inability to seamlessly bridge physical and virtual topologies. This session will review a networking architecture that offer the guarantees of the physical network, while retaining the flexibility of the cloud. Solutions will be described which tackle problems such as providing strict isolation, bridging physical networks, providing accurate SLAs and billing information, and offering inter-subnet migration with persistent IP addresses. In this talk, real world experiences designing & building multi-tenant virtual networking infrastructures which scale to hundreds of thousands of virtual machines and tens of thousands of tenants will also be discussed. “

“3 things I really don’t like…

April 19th, 2010 Paul Fazzone No comments

…hot beer, cold women, and a$$holes.”

This was one of the numerous snippets of bar wisdom I encountered on signs and tee shirts last month while cruising the British Virgin Islands with my wife and some close friends. The one above just cracked me up (from Foxy’s on Jost Van Dyke if memory serves me correctly).

Then there was this one:

“Notice: Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

My guess is that many folks spend much of their day reacting to emergencies and fire drills that could have probably been avoided with a little better planning. Add in the time spent responding to emails and phone calls and the day is pretty much shot. When does the real work get done? Nights, weekends, never?  I actually blame your boss and their boss for this, as $hit roles down hill.  If they didn’t create the fire drill, you wouldn’t be fighting the fire.

3 suggestions:

1. Schedule daily head’s down work time and make it a priority (do you really need to be in all those meetings?)! This will allow forward progress every day.

2. Don’t respond blindly to fire drills. Think them through first before reacting and don’t be afraid to push back or question what you are being asked for if it doesn’t smell right.

3. And for those bosses and their bosses, think about the chain reaction you may be starting and who it may impact before you ring the fire alarm…there probably is a much more efficient way to get what you need which won’t turn your team on their heads and keep real work from getting done.

Note:  Customers and spouses are allowed to cause fire drills, they come first no matter what ;)

Categories: Fun, Management Tags:

Who’s got the most servers?

April 18th, 2010 Paul Fazzone 2 comments
Categories: Data Center Tags: