Musings of Rodos

Well as I am about to start a new job the whole concept of Employee-Provisioned hardware programs is top of mind for me at the moment. Do I want to be shackled by a corporate SOE that's years behind? I am a knowledge worker. Therefore I am attempting to start with a Mac. Thankfully the company I am starting with is open to this.

So an article "Is it time for Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs" over at CIO got me thinking about this and virtualisation.

According to an article Gartner estimate 10 percent of companies have a bring your own notebook program and it can reduce costs by 9 to 44 percent. Yet it has not proved as successful as people might have thought, due to support and compatibility issues.

However I think one comment in the article hits it right.

There are tools for PC virtualization that will allow companies to reach out to noncompany-owned devices with full security. That market is still maturing.

The whole reason why I am confident that I can bring my own device to my organisation without it becoming a time sink for me is virtualisation. As I have been using VMware VDI for my desktop since October 07 for all local and remote business work, I just need access to a network and my VDM broker.

I am planning on getting a MacBook. Running Fusion I will be able to have the best of both worlds. I can run the corporate SOE and the IT department can maintain it. I can launch individual apps like Outlook from the SOE VM and even better with reverse association when I click on a URL in Outlook it opens my Mac browser and not IE in the VM. Could you ask for more than that? Well off-line VDI which VMware have coming real soon means that when I am flying I will be able to take my SOE and do corporate work (although this working with Fusion may be a while away).

So I say the tools are here. I will let you know how I go.

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.