Dell EqualLogic Blog
2/29/2008 -- Comments

I had the chance yesterday to meet Marc Farley who is a new to Dell via EqualLogic. He is running a blog on the Equallogic site. Marc participated in the EqualLogic webchat we did on DellTechCenter a couple of weeks ago as a subject matter expert. So I had kinda met him before, but this was the first in-person meeting.

We had a great discussion about the things they did at EqualLogic to connect with their customers and we talked about some ideas for continuing that now that EqualLogic is part of Dell. We are currently in the process of getting some of the new EqualLogic arrays into the TechCenter lab. So let us know what kinds of things you would like to see / hear about.

Todd -- Comments




Firewall VMs and Virtual Switch Security
2/27/2008 -- Comments

On the Tech Tues chat yesterday a question came up about setting up a firewall VM by connecting one of the NIC ports on the ESX server to external Internet. The question was - Is this a good idea? Is it secure? What is the best practice?

I did a little research this morning and found a white paper from VMware that mentions the exact scenario of having one VM connected externally and acting as a firewall. On page six of VMware Networking Concepts (located at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf ) there is a diagram and discussion about it.

There is another VMware doc titled ESX 3 Best Practices Guide that I found attached to a VMTN discussion ( http://communities.vmware.com/message/861839#861839) that covers networking best practices. It also has the same recommendation that using virtual switches is very secure and allows for things like firewalls to be setup in a VM.

Todd -- Comments





New Storage VMotion Demo
2/21/2008 -- Comments

I had a chance to play around with the new Storage VMotion feature of VMware ESX Server 3.5 / Virtual Center 2.5 and found it to be easy - once you get the command line tools in place. You have to have the Virtual Infrastructure Remote CLI package in place to be able to execute the svmotion command.

I was able to move the SQL Server VM from one LUN to another while under stress using Storage VMotion. I think that it's kinda cool to see in action - so I captured it in a quick video.

Yes - That's my voice on the demo - so be kind with your comments!

Todd -- Comments




Virtualizing Big Databases
2/20/2008 -- Comments

I've been doing quite a bit of work over the last few years to provide some data as to how things like SQL Server databases and Exchange mailbox servers perform inside a VM. All in all the story has turned out to be pretty good. Sure, running in a VM does have a certain performance overhead or penalty, but when most servers are running at 20% utilization or lower - this turns out to not be a problem.

Specifically I have been running some SQL Server 2005 tests, which I am wrapping up now, in the last few weeks. On a conference call today where we were discussing the results a question came up that I thought was pretty good -

What "size" of SQL Server database do most people run?

Of course this is an impossible question to answer, but of course I came up with an answer anyway! In terms of SQL Server databases that are running in VMs - I think that so far most people have only migrated "smallish" databases. Ones that don't have extremely high transaction rates. I do know of a few cases where more performance intensive databases have been virtualized, but these are the exception today. I think that in the future more of these high performance DBs will also be virtualized.

I think that many IT shops are looking at virtualization and think that it would be really cool to move some of their "bigger" stuff into VMs. To take advantage of a better way to manage things, but they are waiting to see how everything plays out before they begin to virtualize big apps like SQL Server, Exchange, Oracle, etc.

Todd -- Comments