Category Archives: Enterprise Servers
Creating a Highly Available VEUC Storage Design
One of my clients is in the peak phase of deploying about 1200 virtual desktops across the organization, and they have placed a premium on desktop uptime. There are always tradeoffs when we do VEUC strategy and design. What can you afford vs. what performance/availability metrics would you like to achieve?
Luckily, we were able to design a solution that met their needs, at a pretty reasonable cost. They already had a VNX array dedicated to the VDI workload, so rather than do something like double the spindle count and switch to RAID6, we decided to look at EMC VPLEX. The added benefits were just too good to pass up. They could achieve their uptime requirements, and gain independence from underlying disk subsystems, while also avoiding ...
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Profiling Tier 1 Oracle Performance on vSphere
Welcome! To begin my blogging efforts with Ahead I wanted to go back and post an older entry from my own blog that was pretty interesting. I'm seeing a lot of effort beginning lately around virtualizing tier 1 apps, especially now that most customers have successful virtualized their Tier 2/3 apps. This testing was done on vSphere 4.1, but I hope to update with performance results based on vSphere 5 soon! Ask questions and let me hear about your own experiences virtualizing Tier 1 apps in the comments!
From June 2011:
Profiling Oracle 11g Performance on vSphere with vscsiStats
One of my larger projects recently has been to virtualize a Tier 1 Java application on vSphere for the State of Wisconsin. This application previously ran on WebSphere 5 and Oracle ...
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The cost of Cisco UCS?
Lately I have been having a lot of discussions around Cisco UCS and the common theme of these meetings tends to be "My traditional servers cost much less."
A lot of times there is a misconception of what's included with Cisco UCS compared to what's included when purchasing traditional servers. UCS is more about a server architecture and less about just your typical server blade, so you need to factor in more components when comparing it to a traditional servers.
Below is a summary of components that you should consider when comparing the cost of Cisco UCS to traditional servers.
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What’s the “Big Deal” about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 Fabric?
What's the "big deal" about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 fabric? Two words: bandwidth and flexibility.
Cisco recently expanded the UCS product line to include an additional Fabric Interconnect (model 6248), an additional Chassis IO Module (model 2208), as well as software release 2.0 with many new features. The new 2.0 components support existing chassis and server blades, and are back-compatible to inter-operate with existing first-generation UCS hardware (in original modes of use.)
Although the new models need not obsolete the original hardware, many of the recent Cisco UCS deployments by Ahead have opted to take advantage of the benefits of the new components.
The new 6248 Fabric Interconnect packs 48 Unified Ports into a 1 RU form factor. Any of the base Unified Ports may be configured to ...
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