Advanced VMware Certifications.

The new VMware certs have names and paths. The official announcement from VMware is forthcoming. To all the VCP3's out there ... you have to upgrade in order to get these.

Cool Stuff. Be sure to plan ahead as you progress.

Link to Stuff here :).

Network World. SWEET!

So NW just published an article on iSCSI & Fibre ... it's not a comparison article, but a why not? type argument.

Check it out here:

LINKY

Shout out to Jim Duffy. A great dude to speak with and a nice guy to boot. I really respect Jim for the attitude he had when we discussed this subject.

Going to have some time this weekend to do more UCS and iSCSI stuff. I hope to have some more information for you guys soon.

UCS & iSCSI.

Lab is almost there ... just a couple of config changes and then we plug the UCS FI's into it and see if we can get it to work :).

Probably won't make any progess until the weekend on this. But I'll keep you up-to-date on all the progress.

UCS & iSCSI

Can you boot UCS from an iSCSI SAN, without local disk?

Interesting question. In the next few days some guys and I are going to see if we can make a stateless UCS environment with iSCSI.

-Stay Tuned-

VMware Workstation 7 Key.

If you are like me then at times you may have misplaced your VMware workstation key. I am running ver 7.0.1 on Windows 7 64-bit.

Due to this you might have to do a touch more digging. It's true you can search the registry but come on we all know that is a HUGE pain in the bum.

Here is the shortcut: The tricky part on 64bit versions of windows is the 3rd tree.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Wow6432Node/VMware, Inc./VMware Workstation/License.ws.(your version here)

Then in the right-hand pane the Serial key is the one your after.

Hope that this helps.

Talk to you again soon.

Cloud Storage.

With the latency and need of faster storage in the Data Center, Nicole brings up a good point in the post below.

Can you provision high-performance storage in a Cloud that will provide storage to a separate Cloud infrastructure? I was thinking about this and with the network guys having a love affair with iSCSI and it's associated technological topologies. Could you have a low-latency storage system on-demand in the Cloud (Public Cloud NOT Private Cloud). Currently it's not quite there to provide FC-like low latency storage to compute nodes. If you have a server that uses iSCSI you could potentially have that speedy enough to house it in a Public Cloud. Your design would require some good DR.

I can see a SATA based array hooking up to an Ethernet drop. At that point you could use some of Cisco's MDS line to provide FCIP WAN acceleration and provide storage to a completely different Cloud .... reliability would be an issue.

The Cloud in a Cloud in a Cloud

I was meeting with some IS Directors a month or so ago and they asked:

How do I better understand how all these "cloud" offerings interact with each other?

So, assuming that you use the cloud for storage, but you use another cloud service for a specific application and have all this served to a VDI client....That's alot of movement in the cloud. I understand his concern for the security of this data, but also the importance that these partners work together.

I would think that strengthens the cloud vision that host all cloud services out of the same DC. I believe you can clearly have different clouds for unrelated things like conferencing with Webex where you host the service and it clearly does not interact with many other parts/pieces, but what about the clouds within a large cloud. All this has my head in the clouds.