Characteristics of vmware’s own infra: 4000 non-production srvrs, 500 production, 290 physical hosts, 4 PB storage….nice #vmworld

— Viktor van den Berg (@viktoriousss) October 17, 2013

Hope it is all virtualised! ;)

• Unless it is a major new launch or a brand new product line I tend not to really focus on the spec bump launches from Cisco. However the Cisco Datacenter Blog has an interesting post on the new Nexus 3100 series. The highlight of the post is the platform architecture white paper, those tend to be very useful. The super unfortunate part is that you cannot download it without handing over your details, bummer.

As per my post on the formal announcement of vCAC 6.0, this video shows the process in motion using a beta version. You can view the vCAC integration module on the VMware Solution Exchange. They also have a pretty good Word document available that goes through some of the concepts in the video.

I really think this sort of integration where you can configure the service, ensure the service is as designed and publish the service to end users (vCAC also includes a service provisioning portal, custom forms and all!) is the way forward. I’m sure there are plenty of other competing products (I can think of a dozen off the top of my head) but the difference, from the outside, is the ability to get right into the guts of the system. vCAC not doing something for you out of the box? Fine I’ll just write a Puppet module. Need to perform some bizarre provisioning logic? vCO has you covered.

• Is there a difference between vCPUs and the cores setting in a VM? Yes and no, from vSphere both are just logical data constructs but when looking at the physical side you need to take into account NUMA. The vSphere Blog has all the details and even some light benchmarking.

• Marcel Van Den Berg over at UP2V, who works with vSphere and Hyper-V, has a nice breakdown of the differences between vCHS and Azure. My take is that vCHS is targeted at enterprises and Azure is for public cloud, wannabe AWS. The differences in how you buy the services really highlight this for me.

For those that are unaware, VMworld Barcelona is currently going on and with it brings new product updates. In my quest for automation knowledge I’ve become quite interested in vCAC. The unfortunate downside is that (like all “automation” systems, I’m sure) it is quite involved in setting it up. With that in mind I’ve only spent a little bit of time trying to get it going but I’ve learnt one thing, it sure isn’t a next, next, next install! If you want to give it a crack I would recommend looking at this blog post by Jonathan Medd as he has written a PowerShell script to at least automate the prerequisites.