Sep 29 2008 6:24AM GMT
Posted by: Raj Perumal
Symantec,
Virtualization,
VMWare,
virtual machines,
backup,
Microsoft,
virtual,
Backup Exec,
Hyper-V,
ESX,
ESXi,
Symantec Backup Exec 12.5,
backup agents,
windows agent
So this just in. Just in case if you were still wondering if there was anything to the virtualization mantra that is being constantly recited through the IT community, Symantec has announced that you no longer need to purchase individual Symantec Backup Exec agents for each guest OS that exists on one physical box. Instead you only need to license once per Hypervisor with Symantec Backup Exec 12.5.
That’s right, you heard me, one agent, multiple virtual servers, one physical box. Can I get a booyah!?!?! I told you this competition would be great for consumers! Microsoft breaking into Hyper-V to compete with VMWare has been great for the market. First VMWare’s ESXi becomes free, then Microsoft relaxes their licensing restrictions in relation to VMWare, and now Symantec makes it cheaper for businesses to use Symantec’s backup software if they virtualize.
Now that’s what I’m talking about! It’s about time companies stopped penalizing people for virtualizing and instead start encouraging it! This is a great move and I commend Symantec for taking this step. Symantec Backup Exec is probably one of the most popular pieces of backup software out there and this announcement will definitely help push business in what I believe is the right direction towards virtualization.
I hope this war doesn’t end for a long time, because the longer it plays out, the more benefits to the consumer it will bring! You can read more about the announcement here.
-RP
Jul 12 2008 6:20PM GMT
Posted by: Raj Perumal
Virtualization,
VMWare,
cooling,
blades,
virtual,
Hyper-V,
IT consultant,
thermal,
Windows 2008,
Windows Server 2008 Core,
thermal efficiency,
thermal management
With it being summer, it’s got me thinking about heat on a daily basis. Especially server room heat. I’ve been through my fair share of server rooms and I’ve seen all sorts of solutions to the ever increasing heat problem. It seems more and more applications require a specific server to run; and more and more software requirements state that this piece of software can’t run on the same box as that piece of software. This leads to purchasing more servers and ends up leading to a lot of power draw and more heat in your server room.
Some people decide to cool servers the proper way by installing the proper cooling units into their server rooms, and other people decide to go the old fashioned way by leaving the server room door open or by putting a lot of home based oscillating fans in the room. Unfortunately this leads only to two very bad things, poor physical security and recirculation of hot air over the already warm servers.
If you need to cool your server room and don’t have the proper cooling, you seriously need to figure that into your next budget so you can have it. Also see what you can do to consolidate the roles of your servers so you have less servers taking up valuable space in your server room and also less servers generating heat.
As I’ve mentioned before, Blade servers and VMWare are a very good idea for server consolidation. Not only are they good for saving power but they are great for keeping the heat down. Also with Windows 2008 out now and Hyper-V, there really is no reason not to try and virtualize even if you are not a VMWare expert. Any way you slice it the thermal savings will be substantial.
-RP
Jun 28 2008 5:40PM GMT
Posted by: Raj Perumal
server consolidation,
VMWare,
HP,
blade servers,
blades,
virtual machines,
VMware ESX,
virtual,
HP BladeSystem c3000,
ESX Server,
power efficiency,
thermal,
Power and cooling
There is one commonality here in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Lots of servers, using a lot of power. Being a province that generates our own Hydro, we have pretty cheap electricity without having to worry about the expense of power like other provinces or states do. However this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be a little more green to help out the rest of the world.
It is quite often I will see server rooms filled with racks and racks of servers with no heed paid to virtualization at all. A lot of people believe it or not, still haven’t even heard of it as they are busy focusing on other things in their business and don’t keep their ear to the ground in the IT world. It’s at times like these that I like to point out the benefits of virtualization.
You can easily take an HP C3000 blade enclosure (this enclosure, aka the “shorty” is targeted at the SMB market) and fill it with server blades, a tape blade and a storage blade, and consolidate racks worth of servers down into 6U of space. Then you can install VMWare ESX Server on the server blades and potentially have tons of virtual machines per blade server. If you haven’t looked into these technologies lately I suggest you do, they are the next big thing in IT and have just been getting better and better.
By doing this you can save your company money on power, thermal, physical space constraints, and sheer amount of servers and racks you have to buy. Also by implementing VMWare on a blade enclosure, you increase the level of redundancy you have greatly over what you would typically have in standard configuration of one server installation per rack mounted server by taking advantage of the features available to you in VMWare and in the blade enclosure.
-RP
