computing.dwighthubbard.info

There is a new script (createvideoposters.py) to generate posters for mythvideo in the download area.

Just a quick note since multiple people have noticed this.  The current released version of VMbackup does not work with the final release version of VMware Server 2.0.

The final release made changes that cause VMbackup to not function.  The new method of interacting with virtual machines have not turned out to be straightforward to implement and I am still working on getting it to work.

I have decided to leave Symantec to do something that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time … start my own consulting business to provide cost effective automation solutions to businesses of all sizes. Many of my friends know that I have been talking about going independent and moving into consulting for a while now.  Changes in the structure of Symantec’s IT organization have made me decided to make the change now.

The background

I was hired at Symantec a little more than 3 years ago to administer customer facing Solaris and Linux servers.  My area of responsibility rapidly expanded to the point where my primary area of responsibility involved managing several hundred Solaris and Linux servers, including the companies primary ERP systems.  I eventually moved to a small group to rapidly design and deploy an enterprise VMware based virtualization infrastructure in order to rapidly consolidate a datacenter.  I have since then been doing engineering and deployment work to constantly expand the infrastructure for the rapidly changing corporate requirements.

Moving Forward

Today I announce the creation of Effective Automation Solutions LLC. This consulting practice allows me to provide the architecture and support services for businesses of all sizes in concert with a number of other computing professionals I have had the privelege to work with over the last 22 years.

First it’s important to understand that although a virtual machine appears to the operating system to be a physical machine, it is not a physical machine.

There a number of differences between the two.

A physical machine is normally purchased one time and generally requires additional, money, and significant downtime to upgrade. In contrast although the resources to run a virtual machine cost money, they are shared and can be upgraded in the future easily from the shared resource pool.

This difference is a important because normally the specifications of a physical machine will be defined to meet the peak usage at the end of the estimated service life of the physical hardware. If this same method is used on a virtual machine it will waste money and negatively impact of the performance of not only the virtual machine itself but also other virtual machines running on the same virtualization server.

The reason for this is that in order for a virtual machine to run all the virtual resources that the virtual machine needs have to be allocated and available to it. So for example if you build a virtual machine with 4 virtual cpus it will not be able to begin executing until 4 individual CPUs are available for use. Also, while it is executing it will use all 4 CPUs, preventing other virtual machines from being able to use those resources and thereby impacting their performance. As a result a virtual machine that use fewer resources will less frequently have performance issues when there are other virtual machines needing the same resources.

So, to get the best performance out of a virtual machine you want to provide it with all the resources it will need with as little headroom as possible.