Recently in VMware Category
Dell released some details about their new 11th Generation PowerEdge line, and while of course it's more of the usual faster procs, more embedded hypervisors, and higher density and more power-efficiency, the thing that catches my eye is just how awesome they look.especially when you've got them all stacked together.
The new M710 Blades are looking pretty cool, too. I'd love to have 8 of these arranged in an awesome renderfarm, grid, or VMware ESX Cluster. By my count, there are 18 memory sockets, which means at least 72GB of ram for the max (assuming 4GB modules).
Still only two CPU sockets (can I get some 4-way action please?***), but with 6-cores (and likely 8-core procs on the horizon), that's still a good deal of compute-power in a 0.8U package. Here's my favorite picture from Dell's 11G Flickr photoset (because I'm a geek about blades).
And believe me when I say that I wish I could wake up every day and look at a row of DataCenter equipment that looked this HOT!
*** In the immortal words of Vala Malderan, "Not everything I say is innuendo!"
I've just gone through the rigmarole of upgrading (nearly) our entire VMware ESX installation to the latest version, ESX 3.5. After doing some testing, I thought it would make the most sense to get it up and running ahead of the Microsoft Patch Tuesday cycle since a) there's a VMware Tools upgrade that should take place for all Virtual Machines which requires a restart and b) most of our VMs are running Windows.
The other thing that I was looking forward to is Storage VMotion. In the throes of our IBM SAN disaster at the beginning of the month, we employed a secondary site's SAN storage to host our most critical Virtual Machines. The VMs' CPU, Networking, and Memory were still hosted in the main DataCenter, but their storage was migrated to the secondary DataCenter. At the time, running ESX 3.0.2, we had to turn off the VM, first, in order to transfer the virtual disk files to another data store.
In ESX 3.5, with Storage VMotion, basically you can transfer the virtual disk files from one SAN to another with zero downtime. This is the last remaining piece of the VMotion feature set, covering the full range of virtual hardware.
In the world of server virtualization, this is the New Hotness.
Just ran into this announcement/blogpost on CNet's Newsblog (when did a blog entry start qualifying as an announcement?).
Looks like SQL Server 2008 has been delayed until the second-half of 2008! What does this mean for us? Well, it means we can hopefully delay the inexorable thrust to getting the latest and greatest database technologies in-house, and actually develop really mature standards around the existing and in-production database platforms that we have running.
The SQL Admins might have a better statement on that front, but basically, we're still in the throes of a migration from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005, so thinking of how to migrate from 2005 to 2008 seems quixotic.
Here's a link to Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 Product Overview. While I'm a little removed from the compelling developer/application-centric features of the SQL-sphere, as a Sysadmin, I'm liking the sound of the: Resource Governor, backup and database compression, and transparent data encryption.
What new features in SQL 2008 are you looking forward to the most?
