New Cloud-Enabled Dell Servers, they’re amazing!

Yesterday I saw the new Dell Poweredge C-series servers, and they’re really DENSE!.

in my opinion they’re an awesome platform for Private and Public Cloud based on VMware, take a look at this picture:

It’s a 2U rackmount server that house 4 independent servers, each module is serviceable on its own, and each module hosts two Intel 5600 processor with a whopping 96GB of RAM.
Another fellow blogger Dave Graham already got his hands on it, check out it’s post and first-hand photo gallery here.

Universal WWN Decoder is online again!

I’ve chose to rehost my old Universal WWN Decoder, you can find the link to its page on the upper bar.

Let me know any feedback at fabio@p2v.it

Fabric Zoning, what’s best?

How to properly zone a Fabric is a recurrent topic in the storage world, there are different kinds of zoning starting from the most permissive (multiple-initiators, multiple-targets) to the most segmented (single-initiator, single-target) but before the deep dive, let’s explain the basics:

There are three types of zoning:

• Hard Zoning
• Soft Zoning
• Mixed Zoning

Hard Zoning is when your zones are made using Port numbers instead of WWNs, It is quite useful if you’re zoning the switch in advance, so if you do not know the WWNs yet you can label the ports and instruct the field technician to just plug the right connectors in the right ports, it is also useful to reduce the number of zones when you use N-Port virtualization (NPIV) where multiple N-Ports (Node Ports) are presented to a single physical Port.

Soft Zoning instead is a zoning made with WWNs instead of physical ports, it’s currently the preferred type of zoning by most people in the industry, It is the most granular type of zoning, and the one we will cover here in this post.

There’s also Mixed Zoning, discouraged by everyone, and it consist of a zone with a mix of Ports and WWNs, it’s currently the worst choice because normally the ASICs of the switch cannot segment the traffic this way and they need to resort using the switch main CPU, resulting in very bad performances.

What’s the best zoning?

Considering that historically an Initiator (Server HBA) and a Target (Storage Port) always presented themselves as such, the best zoning policy, to achieve a balance between security and manageability, was the Single-Initiator, Multiple-Targets that consist in a zoning strategy made by zones constructed with a single Initiator (Server HBA) and multiple Targets (Storage Ports), the Target ports would not talk to each other and having a single Initiator in the zone will prevent RSCN issued to other Initiators causing troubles.

But today a good number of next generation storages, present their ports as Targets and Initiators, both at the same time, so it is very important to shift to a Single-Initiator, Single-Target zoning, take a look at this:

That’s really important, especially when using array-based replication, because storage ports who have this “double personality” can see each other using normal Single-Initiator Multiple-Targets zones and you can easily break the link between the two if you don’t pay enough attention when you rezone your SAN.
Feedbacks and Comments are very welcome!

My thoughts on Microsoft RemoteFX

I just read this article from Max Herrmann on the new RemoteFX, a superset of RDP which is set to release with the SP1 of Windows Server 2008 R2.

Now everybody in the industry is yelling at Microsoft for the approach they’re taking related to a VDI approach of the technology, but I think that there’s a point that has been overlooked by most, and that’s the Remote Desktop scenario.

During my many PoC on VDI I found out that many customers can easy classify users in tiers (I’m oversimplifying but try to get the point):

• Simple users – Office suite users, Internet browsing.
• Power users – Rich media users, CAD / CAM users.
• C-Level users – No VDI for them, top level personal notebook.

Now for Power users until recently there was no real VDI solution, they were confined to PCoIP using teradici host cards on physical hardware and nothing more, when View 4 came out PCoIP became a real solution for those workers.

C-Level users are usually a matter that no ICT manager want to deal with, they like to have the best technology always at hand, they don’t want to work with restriction, they want a notebook (even if they use it exclusively at the office) so no VDI for them is a no brainer.

Now let’s focus on Simple users, they do not have a real need for performance so a PCoIP client with a dedicate VM would be overkill, a dedicated PC is out of the question (for manageability and cost), so they’re a perfect candidate for a Remote Desktop session on a Terminal Server!

Right now the RDP 6 protocol running on Terminal Server is more than sufficient for Office purposes, but the web experience is getting more and more rich and the Simple users are getting constricted by RDP, and this RemoteFX could boost their experience.

So it will be nice to see Microsoft play hard in this space, VDI in my opinion is in its early stage of life more can be done and that’s a step in the right direction.

Technorati Claim

Just a maintenance post, for technorati claim. R2GQU58XR8X5