frankdenneman.nl

Dutch vBeers

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Simon Long of The SLOG is introducing vBeers to Holland. I’ve copied the text from his vBeers blog article.

Every month Simon Seagrave and I try organise a social get together of like-minded Virtualization enthusiasts held in a pub in central London (and Amsterdam). We like to call it vBeers. Before I go on, I would just like to state, although it’s called vBeers, you do NOT have to drink beer or any other alcohol for that matter. This isn’t just an excuse to get blind drunk.
We came up with idea whilst on the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day back in April. We were chatting and we both recognised that we don’t get together enough to catch-up, mostly do to busy work schedules and private lives. We felt that if we had a set date each month, the likely hood of us actually making that date would be higher than previous attempts. So the idea of vBeers was born.

The second Amsterdam vBeers will be held on Thursday 3rd of February starting at 6:30pm in ‘Herengracht Cafe’ which is placed close to Leidseplein and Dam Square. This venue serves a fine of selection of beers along with soft drinks and bar food.
Drinks will not be paid for, there will not be a tab. When you buy a drink please pay for it as no one else will be paying for your drinks.
* Location: The ‘Herengracht Cafe‘ Amsterdam
* Address: Herengracht 435, Herengracht/Leidsestraat
* Nearest Tram Station: Koningsplein – Lijn 1,2,5
* Time: 6:30pm
* Location: Map

Funny: HA and DRS technical deepdive audiobook

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During a conversation the idea of an audiobook of the HA and DRS book spawned. Within a couple of minutes, I found the following in my inbox….
Once a tiny little vm found himself in a big bad cluster filled with big vm’s……
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, set down your high shares!
Then the admin installed the LittleBoyBlue patch on the Dike server, and plugged the memory leak.
Odysseus set a CPU limit on the Cyclops-VM so low that Cyclops couldn’t even see. “Who are you?” yelled the Cyclops. Odysseus replied, “My name is No One!” When the Cyclops complained to the Scheduler, it asked, “Who has limited you so badly?” “No One has!” replied the Cyclops…. (BTW who makes a creature with one eye? What a horrible single point of failure to bake into your design!)
But the third little VM had his very own Resource Pool, and he huffed and he puffed and he outcompeted the much bigger VMs who were all sharing their Resource Pool shares…
Just let’s focus on publishing an ebook first…..

HA and DRS Technical deepdive available

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After spending almost a year on writing, drawing and editing, the moment Duncan and I waited for finally arrived… Our new book, the vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive is available on CreateSpace and Amazon.com.
Early this year Duncan approached me and asked me if I was interested in writing a book together on HA and DRS, without hesitation I accepted the honor. Before discussing the contents of the book I would like take the opportunity to thank our technical reviewers for their time, their wisdom and their input: Anne Holler (VMware DRS Engineering), Craig Risinger (VMware PSO), Marc Sevigny (VMware HA Engineering) and Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nl). And a very special thanks to Scott Herold for writing the foreword!
But most of all I would like to thank Duncan for giving me this opportunity to work together with him on creating this book. The in-depth discussions we had are without a doubt the most difficult I have ever experienced and were very interesting, both most of all fun! Thanks!
Now let’s take a look at the book.Please note that we are still working on an electronic version of the book and we expect to finish this early 2011. This is the description of the book that is up on CreateSpace:
About the authors:
Duncan Epping (VCDX 007) is a Consulting Architect working for VMware as part of the Cloud Practice. Duncan works primarily with Service Providers and large Enterprise customers. He is focused on designing Public Cloud Infrastructures and specializes in bc-dr, vCloud Director and VMware HA. Duncan is the owner of Yellow-Bricks.com, the leading VMware blog.
Frank Denneman (VCDX 029) is a Consulting Architect working for VMware as part of the Professional Services Organization. Frank works primarily with large Enterprise customers and Service Providers. He specializes in Resource Management, DRS and storage. Frank is the owner of frankdenneman.nl which has recently been voted number 6 worldwide on vsphere-land.com
VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive zooms in on two key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a “how to” guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a VMware HA and DRS cluster, but even more important explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA and DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA and DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools and host affinity rules. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures.
Coverage includes:
• HA node types
• HA isolation detection and response
• HA admission control
• VM Monitoring
• HA and DRS integration
• DRS imbalance algorithm
• Resource Pools
• Impact of reservations and limits
• CPU Resource Scheduling
• Memory Scheduler
• DPM
vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive cover
We hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we did writing it. Thanks,
Eric Sloof received a proof copy of the book and shot a video about it.

Best practices

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Last week at VMworld and the VCDX defense panels I heard the term “Best Practices” a lot. The term best practice makes me feel happy, shudder and laugh at the same time. Now when it comes to applying best practice I always use the analogy of crossing the road:

I am born and raised in the Netherlands and best practice is to look left first, then to the right and finally check left again before crossing the road. This best practice served me well and it helped me avoid being hit by a car/truck/crazy people on bikes and even trams and trolleys. But I ask you does this best practice still apply when I try to cross the street in London?
Don’t get me wrong, best practice are useful and very valuable, but to apply a best practice blindly won’t be as lethal as my analogy but it can get you into a lot of trouble.