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Scott Drummonds on Virtualization

EMC Hands-on Labs at Sydney vForum 2011

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Every VMworld attendee knows how important the hands-on labs are to the show’s success. Many attendees cite the HOLs as the most important part of the show. EMC picked up on this and in recent years has offered its own interactive demonstrations at the EMC booth on the showroom floor.  We have taken these labs on the road and I am happy to announce they will be featured at Sydney vForum 2011.

The Sydney vForum runs from 19-20 October at the Sydney Exhibition and Convention Centre.  This will be my third year attending this show, which is one of the largest VMware events in the Asia Pacific region.  VMware will offer the same hands-on labs to the Sydney vForum attendees that they offered to VMworld attendees.  So EMC decided to add a small set of our own labs at the EMC booth.

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Custom Alarms for VMware SIOC

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Over a year and a half ago I previewed VMware’s unreleased feature, Storage IO Control (SIOC).  SIOC creates new intelligent latency metrics to evaluate the health of VMFS volumes.  The same latency measurements are used in storage DRS, which VMware released in vSphere 5.  While automated performance correction is great, vCenter should warn VMware admins when latency crosses defined thresholds.  Custom vCenter alarms can do this.

With hardest work of making vSphere 5 generally available behind him, one of VMware’s engineers, Balaji Parimi, recently sent me scripts he wrote to create SIOC alarms.  These alarms can be used to tell administrators that SIOC is throttling some virtual machines to save high priority applications from ailing datastores.

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vSpecialists Needed In Singapore

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We at EMC are increasing the number of technical vSpecialists in our Southeast Asian vSpecialist team. This role will be based in Singapore and will support EMC’s customers and field in the surrounding countries of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and others. Our regional manager will consider exceptional talent from anywhere in the world.

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9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 Bytes

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In 2008, the year before I left VMware, I was invited to help measure the amount of information being enterprise computers processed in the entire year.  My invitation came from Dr. James Short of the University of California, San Diego, who was on the team leading this project.  The team called their project “How Much Information?” (HMI).  And Dr. Short, or Jim, wanted me to provide comment on a small portion of the systems that process information: enterprise hardware.

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