TuxRunner

OOooo…I had to post this simply because I love VMware products (I don’t even have a Mac or use Fusion). Diggnation, the Revision3 netcast which covers the weekly top stories submitted to Digg.com is running a promotion with VMware to offer VMware Fusion for the Mac for $50. Here’s the scoop:

Special for Diggnation viewers: Visit www.vmware.com/go/diggnation and enter the coupon code “diggnation”for $10 off VMware Fusion. This combined with the current $20 standard rebate running through the end of the year, means Diggnation viewers can get VMware Fusion for $49.99 (continue reading…)

I’m amazed sometimes to think about how much power as ESX/VirtualCenter admins we have over an entire collection of servers. Here you have a group of physical servers with very beefy hardware, 16/32 processors, 32-64 GB of RAM, 14 network interfaces… and underneath all of that you have virtual servers, connected to virtual switches via virtual NICs, using virtual RAM, and virtual CPU’s. All of them playing around in this little playpen we call a VC Cluster where they can freely roam around from ESX host to ESX host at will with VirtualCenter’s DRS permission of course. At any given time, there might be 12 VMs running on an ESX host, or there could be 30+. It doesn’t matter. But with the click of a button, I can scatter all those VM’s to other ESX hosts, and drop that ESX host into maintenance mode to do anything I need to. I guess if you were malicious you could just as easily shutdown that ESX host and drop all those VM’s off the face of the network. It’s happened before, but usually not on purpose. And it’s bad when it does. It’s like we’re managing a little virtual world inside these ESX servers. Kinda like the Matrix. Those VM’s are all just like the humans plugged into a simulated reality. Except that their reality is a “datacenter” instead of Earth. We could alter their experience simply by changing the settings on an Application Pool…or we could give them more space to play in by adding another ESX host. After spending quite a while in VirtualCenter, you almost stop looking at them as servers with C:\ drives, and a registry, and NICs. They’re just a name in a list. Just like looking at Active Directory users. Those aren’t people, it’s just a name in a list. VM’s are nothing more than a name on a file which resides in a filesystem. The simplicity of it is what makes it feel more powerful. Back when cars were simple, people worked on them at home and fixed them. We had power over cars, but now that they’re overly complex, nobody works on their own car anymore….we’re powerless when it comes to our cars. Well I’m glad that’s not the case with servers anymore. I enjoy the simplicty of managing things that really don’t exist…like powering off servers when there’s really no power going to them, or plugging in a NIC by just clicking a checkbox, or adding more RAM without having to pop the case open on a server. That’s powerfully simple…and simplicity is genius.