It is still practical and possible to build a shared storage cluster using Solaris, rather than buying super experience appliance storage. But you must always spec at least two storage nodes, otherwise you lock yourself into a structure that can be difficult to change. That includes changes that involve upgrades.

Virtualisation technology has moved a long way in the last couple years. And while I’m still formulating a new approach, there are many more options for flexible micro virtualisation clusters.

There are still a few questions regarding file caches and disk images. In general I’m happy that it’s ready for production.

Image by Trey Piepmeier via Flickr

Useful article on template windows vmware images. One point of great note:

As a result of point (4), your OS disk is now perfectly aligned with the storage layer below it, increasing disk I/O performance. This is actually a server OS problem that applies to all of Microsoft’s pre-Windows Server 2008 server operating sustems, and Windows XP. A simple explanation is that systems like to write data in 64k chunks onto disks with 64k sectors. However, they create their very first chunk at only 63k in size. That means every subsequent chuck writes at least 1k to the previous sector, resulting in every read and write going to two sectors and resulting in two I/Os per operation instead of just one I/O. This is what you’ve just corrected in (4).

On Monday, Intel launched its “Dunnington” six-core processor, AKA the “Xeon 7400,” designed to dramatically improve the performance of virtualization applications.

These new 6 core processors will be interesting, increase potential processing density to match the reduced cost of memory dentisty.

I haven’t tried KVM yet as I’ve been too busy and Xen is more mature – but many of the accounts I’ve read seem to indicate that for Linux its performance is very good maybe better in some cases than Xen. Management is another issue, but that is just a matter of time and development enegry.

From lwn.

• ESXi 3.5 does ship with the ability to run SSH, but this is disabled by default (and is not supported) – from.
• ESXi and what it does NOT have compared to regular ESX 3.5
• Upgrade ESX eval to ESXi.
• Some Basic ESXi questions.
• 8.04 and ESX.
• Motherboards and unsupported servers that work with ESX 3.5 and / or ESXi 3.5 Installable
• 
  Running ESX 3i Installable from a USB Flash Drive

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Check out the download link at the end of the press release.