A few weeks ago, @JimPeluso sparked a great question, "How will a Vblock change IT in 5 years?"

Let's examine how everything is done currently. An IT Manager is given a virtualization/VDI project with a budget of $900k. The IT Manager gathers his network, storage, and server teams and discusses what can be done. Or perhaps he grabs his one lonely systems admin and asks what can be done. No matter what size the company, this is going to be a long battle with a bunch of different vendors. Each person does their part and narrows down the playing field to 3 specific vendors they want running in their data center. Each vendor has a different plug, gimmick, and sales pitch, but in the end, all an IT Manager cares about is getting the job done and helping the business succeed. The IT Manager listens to the high level pitches then hands it off to engineers to develop a solution. Every vendor, both storage and servers, are going to ask the same questions, "What kind of workload are you running?", "Do you know the IOPS?", "Do you know what kind of performance you need?" and so forth. Yet, the same questions are being answered multiple times to several different companies. A week or so flies by and the IT Manager receives multiple solution responses and discusses it with the engineers over the next few weeks to decide we want Vendor X for storage and Vendor Y for servers.

What a year! More has happened in 2010 than anything else I could have imagined. I can honestly say I've crossed off a few bucket list items. Well, maybe not bucket list, but it's sure a great feeling to have accomplished what I did this year. First, I really made an effort to start blogging more, and that is what primarily led to greater things. I started KendrickColeman.com back in 2009 and completed a total of 13 posts. Ya, only 13! This year in 2010 I've done 88 posts including this one. Perhaps in 2011 I'll hit that triple digit mark. I still want to only create posts that will add value to an admin's life because who really needs another blog about VMware patches and releases?

Here are the Top 10 blog posts of 2010:

10. VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools For Advanced Tasks

In a series of blog posts, I'm going to be covering some of the basics that people just happen to overlook. Let's forget about cloud and look back to the real reason why we started virtualizing in the first place, the virtual machine. The virtual machine is key component to cloud, but having machines that are lean and clean allow greater density and better performance.

Last week I touched on P2V Clean-up and aligning your storage is very much a part of the P2V clean-up process.

There are plenty of great blog post articles out there about storage alignment, so I'm not going to dive much into that because we don't need to beat that horse to death much longer. One of the best easy to read and beginner articles I've come across is Best Practice for File System Alignment in Virtual Environments by NetApp and My #1 Issue with VMware ESXi Today by Aaron Delp. Why all the fuss? Misaligned VMs negatively impact performance resulting in increased IO and search time. Everyone is aware of the alignment issues, but we're not 100% sure on how to fix these issues.

There are 3 layers when dealing in a virtual alignment. The Array, VMFS, and the VM.

In a series of blog posts, I'm going to be covering some of the basics that people just happen to overlook. Let's forget about cloud and look back to the real reason why we started virtualizing in the first place, the virtual machine. The virtual machine is key component to cloud, but having machines that are lean and clean allow greater density and better performance.

Last week I touched on P2V Clean-up and the 1vCPU goal. This post continues on with the 1vCPU goal and addresses the issues of moving between single processor and multi-processor VMs.

As I said last week, we should be striving to keep our virtual environment lean and clean by moving to a standard 1vCPU for all VMs that don't have multi-threaded applications. So what happens if we P2V a dual core physical machine but it only needs 1vCPU?

HAL, otherwise known as Hardware Abstraction Layer, is the software that talks directly to the hardware so the applications don't have to. The HAL provides routines that enable a single device driver to support a device on different hardware platforms, making device driver development much easier. It hides hardware dependent details such as I/O interfaces, interrupt controllers, and multiprocessor communication mechanisms. Applications and device drivers are no longer allowed to deal with hardware directly and must make calls to HAL routines to determine hardware specific information. Thus, through the filter provided by the HAL, different hardware configurations can be accessed in the same manner. Article ID: 99588

In a series of blog posts, I'm going to be covering some of the basics that people just happen to overlook. Let's forget about cloud and look back to the real reason why we started virtualizing in the first place, the virtual machine. The virtual machine is key component to cloud, but having machines that are lean and clean allow greater density and better performance.

We all began a journey with Physical to Virtual (P2V) migrations. Converging infrastructure to run multiple virtual machines on top of beefy physical hardware. Along with this comes what I call The P2V Dilemma.

A physical server needs drivers to talk to it's hardware. A virtualized server, in essence, does the same thing. VMware presents new hardware to allow the virtual machine to talk to it's hypervisor. Think of the driver issue in a P2V migration like removing a video card and installing a new one. The drivers and hidden hardware are still there just in case you feel like popping the video card back in. A P2V will still have all of the old hardware in the virtual machine. Don't forget about services that physical servers used, namely HP server management services.

Solarwinds is looking for beta testers for a new product they are launching. Read Below.

Solarwinds is preparing to enter the App-Server Management market with the launch of Orion APM in early Q1 2011. Over the next few weeks, SolarWinds is offering the opportunity to preview the product, before it is available to everyone else. They're looking for a few good sys admins and IT managers to review the new Orion Application Performance Monitor... pre-launch. The process is pretty simple… There are few qualifications that folks need to meet, but if you get yourself an invite the company will give you some free software, a flip cam, and would just ask you to talk honestly about your experience trying out the product.  You can get more info here…

In a series of blog posts, I'm going to be covering some of the basics that people just happen to overlook. Let's forget about cloud and look back to the real reason why we started virtualizing in the first place, the virtual machine. The virtual machine is key component to cloud, but having machines that are lean and clean allow greater density and better performance.

I've gone into plenty of environments and every single VM is configured with 2vCPUs or more. Why is this such a problem? It all comes down to CPU cycles and ready time.

We as VMware admins have a virtualize first policy, but even more so, we should have a 1 vCPU first policy. Setting new virtual machines to 1 vCPU will result in an environment that won't be fighting for CPU cycles. A 2 socket server with quad core processors will give 8 cores of CPU on a host. A VM running on 1vCPU can use any one of those 8 cores whenever it's available. The "whenever it's available" is referred to as CPU Ready Time and can be viewed in ESXTOP. The ready time of a virtual machine, which is measured in milliseconds, is best described as the VM was ready to execute but had to wait for CPU resources. There in lies the problem with 2vCPU, 4vCPU and up VMs.

• 1 vCPU VM - can execute it's CPU cycle when any 1 of the 8 cores
• 2 vCPU VM - can only execute CPU cycle when 2 of the 8 cores are available
• 4 vCPU VM - can only execute CPU cycle when 4 of the 8 cores are available
• 8 vCPU VM - can only execute CPU cycle when all 8 cores are available

Usually, the load of LinkedIn emails seem to head right to the trash. But I saw a Merry Christmas from Veeam for all VCPs, vExperts, and VMware Instructors. Veeam is giving away 2 socket licenses of Veeam Backup and Replication along with Reporter for NFR use.

Early Merry Christmas. Thanks Veeam!