Musings of Rodos

Well I have seen the light. Today I forked out my own money to purchase computer hardware (its much better when someone else is paying ). And what did I purchase, a MacBook. Its for the children, really.

Must say that after a day we are impressed. Use iMovie to create a fantastic short 5 minute film with lots of things that would have been hard on a windows box with Movie Maker. The wireless setup instantly. All devices seam to work and its not hard to use the applications we have tired. The build in camera is nice and the children love it.

Must admit I would not have got it if VMware Fusion was not around so we could run the occasional Windows app however I have worked with Keynote and the other Apple applications in the past and if they are not better they are at least as good. The only real issue is compatibility, which is where Fusion comes in.

Its also nice to use a system where you do not know how to do everything. Learning is always fun and so far, "it just works".

As a VMware geek one of the things I am often doing is searching through the Technical Resources Documents which are found at http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/cat/91

However it can be very hard to find relevant documents. There is effectively no search function and you have to go into the subpage to read the description.

To work around this I created a searchable document which list all of the technical papers, their descriptions and links. Its on one page so you can simply search it for key words.

The document is VMware Technical Resource documents listing at http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-2590

I hope you find it useful.

I am a big fan of the FireFox browser. The foxmarks extension which syncs your bookmarks across different computers is very handy.

The best thing though is the keywords for bookmarks. If you have a bookmark you go to a lot you can enter a keyword for that bookmark. Instead of typing in a URL you can enter the keyword.

Forget using the mouse to click on the address bar and then type in some long address, simply do a CTRL-L (or CTRL-T if you want a new tab) and then enter your keyword and hit enter. The keyboard is so much faster.

For people like me who are always looking up reference information on the same pages its a great feature.

I really should blog more. Oh well.

Its hard to have a conversation these days without someone trying to convince me that Fiber Channel is dead and iSCSI is where it is at. Whilst I agree with this in the long term I don't see it in the short term. Sure anyone can get iSCSI working in a lab hacking a few free things together, but thats not comparing apples with apples. You need to compare deploying iSCSI in a best practice environment to a FC one.

Here is my current argument, email me if you think I am wrong or have missed something.

• Fiber Channel switch costs. If you only have two hosts, which can be common in a VMware environment, you can get away with no FC switches. Just connect each port of dual dual HBA to each storage processor on you SAN. If you have more than two hosts then you are going to need some FC switches, say $3.5K each. If you are following best practices for your iSCSI you would have a separate switching infrastructure for the storage, these are going to cost you about the same. Let alone what a 10G switch will cost.
  
• HBA cards. Well a dual port HBA card is going to cost you about $2K. Two high end network cards with TOE are going to cost you about $1.6K, thats not a great saving.
• A lot of the arguments are based on 10G Ethernet. People are not already running this so they are going to have to go out and purchase bleeding edge switches and cards compared the now commodity fiber channel equivalents.
  

Now there are lots of other elements to consider but for the big ticket items for the size of installations I see (two to ten servers running VMware) the cost difference is not drop dead argument of iSCSI is so much cheaper than FC.

If it was not for VMware I think FC would be dead a lot sooner than it otherwise would have been, its still got some legs for a while.

Just an update on my old post on OpenFiler.

I wanted to give iSCSI a play and I notices that the OpenFiler people have a prebuilt VMware appliance, sweet.

Downloaded the appliance, created a new virtual disk and presented it via iSCSI. I then install the Microsoft Initiator and connected things up. It was reasonably straight forward. The only two issues I had was you can't configure anything as iSCSI until you setup some networks and the chap authentication caused me grief for quite a while. Lastly there is very little debugging or technical info for OpenFiler, that I could find. However, I did get it running in a short period of time, that was cool.