Tag Archive - consulting

VMWARE vCenter operations

May 30, 2011 in , , , , , , , with Comments Off

VMWARE recently quietly released a product called “vCenter Operations“. The product helps system administrator get a better view of the general (and specific) health of their infrastructure.

I’d suggest anyone with a vCenter/vSphere setup to try it out. The results are pretty amazing: the graphs and the analytic engine helped me quite a few time to diagnose issues clients have been reporting. Here is a quick screenshot where you can see the default view of one of my Labs environment, configured for testing purpose – a cluster of 3 ESX hosts and 12 VMs:

Overview of your system health


Ok, this might not be very interesting, but if you click on any items, a datacenter, cluster, esx hosts, vm… you get a screen similar to this one:
Cluster metrics/data

Way more interesting data & metrics. You also have a quick analysis of resources in contention, of your current usage and growth/run-way space.

As the software is available for larger environment (package ‘minimum size’ is 50 licenses), this should produce some pretty interesting metrics/data once deployed. I’ll try to do that soon ;-).

CloudComputing @ LibrePlanet – Mako Hill talk

March 21, 2009 in , , , , , , with 152 Comments

Mako Hill on cloud computing @ LibrePlanet

Keyword: Affero GPL, autonomo.us, cloud computing, software services.

Interesting talk covering a very very wide array of topic, from “free software usage in provider infrastructure” to “usage freedom of networked services” going through “ownership problems of user data on networks”.

It brings out quite a few important points about network services closed infrastructure (even if it use free software and are open about it). This is very important because it underline differences between Laconica and Twitter, between Amazon and more open infrastructure…

I’ll need quite some time to digest this talk and think about the implication about cloud computing. While I’ve been working in this domain for couples years, pushing free software mentality to services (not only the software) is quite interesting and important for the future of cloud computing.