So the other day, a bunch of us were asked the question: “A customer of ours has asked if the partial writes issue with linked clones that was found in View and fixed in 5.2 with SE sparse disks has also been fixed in vCloud Director Fast Provisioning with SE sparse disks” Cormac Hogan wrote a really great article on SE Sparse Disks, which can be read by clicking here. This is possibly the most exciting new storage feature in the vSphere 5.1 release. Space Efficient Sparse Virtual Disks (or SE Sparse Disks for short) were designed to alleviate two issues. Let’s describe these issues first of all. Problem Statement #1 – Let’s take a Guest OS running on a linked clone (View desktop if you will), and this Guest OS issues a 4KB write. vmfsSparse disk (which is the format used by traditional linked clones) has a block allocation […]
vCloud Disaster Recovery White paper published
Alan Renouf and Aidan Dalgleish have written a white paper on how to automate the failover of your vCloud environment. This case study is a really interesting read, with some really cool concepts in it. Definite recommended reading for anyone looking to automate the disaster recovery of there vCloud infrastructure and provide business continuity. Click here to read the whitepaper VMware vCloud Director® enables enterprise organizations to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere®, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling vSphere virtual resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. It helps users build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time to market for applications and the responsiveness of IT organizations. Resiliency is a key aspect of any infrastructure, it is even more important in IaaS solutions. This technical paper was developed to […]
vCloud vApp Design and Use Case – Part 3
This article is part 3 of my vCloud vApp design considerations and use cases definition. Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2 In this follow on article we will look at some more of the use cases for vApp’s and what type of vCloud Director networking they will use. Use Case 3 – vApp Network (Routed) You would typically use this configuration where there is a requirement for connectivity between multiple vApps but in addition a requirement to provide controlled segregation between them. In this example multiple vApps of the same configuration can be deployed without risk of conflict due to the firewall and NAT capability being introduced. vApps will have connectivity to an isolated Organization network for inter vApp connectivity, but there is no external connectivity available and all network traffic within the Organization is isolated at Layer 2. If you think of a training environment, where […]
RISC OS RC 8 Released
They are coming thick and fast at the minute, the latest update to RISC OS for Raspberry PI is available for download now. This page contains links to SD card images for various operating system distributions. The minimum size SD card you can use is 2GB, but it is recommended to get a 4GB SD card or above. For each distribution, we provide both a direct HTTP download, a torrent file and a SHA-1 hash; the total number of concurrent direct downloads is limited, so we encourage you to use the torrent file if at all possible. It’s helpful to us if you download the torrent from this page, because it means we can see how many downloads are going on and use that to make rough predictions about sales. If you’re a total beginner and the above paragraph makes no sense at all to you, please come to the […]
Michael Owen to retire – my farewell
I have read the news today that Michael Owen is going to retire at the end of the season in May. BBC Sport reported here. To begin with, this post has nothing to do with Virtualization or technology in any way but I felt the need to publish my thoughts on this special football player. Former England striker Michael Owen is to retire from football at the end of the season. Owen, 33, who scored 40 goals in 89 internationals, played for Liverpool, Real Madrid, Newcastle United and Manchester United and is now at Stoke. He said: “It is with an immense amount of pride that I am announcing my intention to retire.” Now this makes me feel old today. I have grown up with watching Michael Owen in an England shirt. He was awesome. I actually got to see him play at Wembley in 2007 against Russia when he […]