Managing VMware: Tips & Tricks

I had the great pleasure of co-hosting one of Hyperic’s regular webinar series with Jonathan Bryce and Jason Bartels from Mosso. I have spent quite a bit of time with these guys over the past couple months, as Jonathan worked with me to build a case study. Through that experience, I became totally intrigued with how these guys set themselves up. Mosso is a division of Rackspace that helps folks build websites fast, and make sure everything is always running. They guarantee 100% uptime, which is cool. They get scale. When I first met Jonathan in late September, his company was hosting 25,000 websites. Now he’s hosting 35,000. They get how to run about 200 different technologies (in my estimation, and yes, it may be exagerrating – but only a bit) . They get virtualization – they use it to make sure that they can quickly deploy more horsepower to a site when it gets hit by Slashdot, Digg and Reddit all in one hour.

So, when we were talking last month about what we should add to January’s schedule – I wondered out loud, why not work with Mosso to talk about managing virtualization? Not many people get it. Its not easy. I still see statistics citing more than half of production experiments with virtualization fail. I think some of that has to do with not being prepared for, as Jonathan calls it, the obfuscation of the architecture. It makes the whole environment harder to read, and introduces a new layer that actually taxes the the hardware and makes troubleshooting hard to do. Yesterday, we recorded that HyperCAST and it is now posted for replay. If you want to check it out, hear all the stories and see what works, you can do so here.

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