Hardware Abstraction - No, it's not VMware

I've been busy explaining to my IT colleagues that we've reached a new frontier on the server systems side. I like to call it the new "Hardware Virtualization" layer, jokingly we refer to it as "VMware on VMware". Although its not about VMware, actually to understand it you must forget about VMware for a minute. What's happened is that the leading high density server providers have responded to customer demands and are now opting to aggregate network and storage cables, plan for all blades to be boot-from-san, and carve out virtual network and storage adapters in server profiles. What is required? The physical server must have a CNA and the blade enclosure must have high bandwidth I/O. What is the result? Server instances are tied to a Server Profile that is not bound to any specific hardware. Now we can move a server profile (OS must be powered off) from one physical blade to another blade in another enclosure or another data center. This is very cool and opens a world of opportunities. Being a VMware guy it really feels like we virtualized the hardware again once over to reap the "Virtualization Abstraction" benefits. HP and Cisco are definitley leading the market in products that embody this new concept. The initial requirement is cable aggregation. Cisco takes the requirement a step forward and has implemented FCoE right up front. What's next? With 40Gb ethernet and 16Gb FC right around the corner, expect that the next generation of HP and Cisco blade enclosures to do massive cable consolidation and ready for next hop FCoE to the SAN switch. Oh and don't forget to install VMware on top of all that! :)

Server Virtualization with VMware 4.1

I have to say that so far I'm extremely impressed with the latest version of VMware. VMware vSphere 4.1 is proving to be the most advanced server virtualization hypervisor to date. Recently I was able to configure multiple systems on HP BL 460c G7 using Boot-from-SAN, Cisco 1000v DVS, HP Virtual Connect Flex-10, and Fault Tolerance. Its amazing how the new VMware 4.1 hypervisor has optimized memory oversubscription so that resource pool sharing is more efficient than ever before. I suspect that we've been the first to vet a premium Cisco 1000v on HP Virtual Connect using HP G7's. Next up, load and failover testing..