‘Twas the week before Christmas: Virtualization Log

Despite the impending holiday and our stubbornly long shopping list, SearchServerVirtualization.com and SearchVMware.com keep pumping out the virtualization content. Highlights of the week include the following:

• An extremely well read-article on how VMware pricing may be alienating large enterprise customers. We’d love to hear from you if you’ve had similar experiences, or if, on the contrary, you’re A-OK with how VMware prices its products and negotiates its enterprise license agreements.
• More about storage — specifically, some thoughts on sizing logical unit numbers (LUNs) for virtual machines; and an Ask the Expert question on who supports iSCSI best: VMware, Citrix/XenSource or Microsoft?
• A beta tester’s guide to deploying Microsoft’s new Hyper-V; as expert Anil Desai finds, “the system requirements for Hyper-V are far from ordinary,” requiring the latest 64-bit, virtualization-enabled chips. That may prohibit all but the most advanced test labs from taking this baby out for a spin.
• The benefits of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), by Barb Goldworm, who describes one IT shop that virtualized 800 desktops to 14 IBM BladeCenter machines accessed by thin clients, cutting their annual power consumption from 80,000 to 17,000 watts, for a savings of almost 80%!
  
• Scott Lowe answering what inquiring minds really want to know: What exactly is a connection broker, and what does it do? You read it here first.
• Last but certainly not least, expert Craig Newell discusses how to configure Ethernet network interface cards on your ESX host, whether its a tower, rack or blade server. Word to the wise: A VMware host needs more Ethernet ports than your average server.

One last thing: A story on SearchDataCenter.com finds that, despite growing industry concern about saving power, no one actually shuts down servers over the holidays. Or do they? If you’re planning on using VMware’s new Distributed Power Management (DPM) next week and shutting down some systems, let us know.