March Madness is here and in full effect. If you’re reading this post you probably aren’t paying close enough attention to the results pouring in from the round of 64. Today and tomorrow will make or break your bracket! Take appropriate action. As soon as I hit “publish” on this post I promise you that I will.
We have some fun things going on here during the tournament. If you’re watching the games you may see some UCS ads (yes, server ads from Cisco on TV…believe it!) We teamed up with CDW and Charles Barkley to celebrate the soothing hum of the data center in this spot, and there are a couplemore that touch on Cisco Data Center more broadly.
These ads come on the heels of a big push we’re making at Cisco to spread the good word about Unified Computing. We have print and digital ads running across the big tech pubs that talk about the very real application performance and IT operations benefits the UCS brings.
Can you see it? The end is nigh! The end of this blog series, not necessarily “the end” as in AMC’s the Walking Dead sort of end. Are you Zombie stumbling across this blog from a random Google search? Here is a table of contents to help you on your journey as we once again delve into the depths and address another question on our quest to answer… The VDI questions you didn’t ask, but really should have.
Got RAM? VDI is an interesting beast both from a physical perspective as well as the care and feeding of it. One thing this beast certainly does like is RAM (and braaaiiiins). Just in case I am still being stalked by that tech writer, RAM stands for Random Access Memory. I spoke a bit about Operating Systems in our 5th question in this series, and this somewhat builds upon that in regards to the amount of memory you should use. Microsoft says Windows 7 needs: 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit). For the purpose of our testing, we went smack in the middle with 1.5GB of RAM. Does it really matter what we used for this testing? It does a little – one, we need to have sufficient resources for the desktop to perform the functions of the workload test, and second, we need to pre-establish some boundaries to measure from.
Calculating overhead. In order to properly account for memory usage, we need to take into account the overhead of certain things in the Hypervisor. If you want to learn more about calculating overhead, click here. Here are a couple of things we are figuring in overhead for:
On Engineers Unplugged this week, we are trying something new, a double edition! First up in Episode 5, VCE’s Jay Cuthrell (@qthrul) and Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) talk shop in terms of Automation and the evolution of Open Source, including GitHub, and the role of Community in Tech solving problems. Amazing discussion with practical guidance on how you can get more involved:
Jay Cuthrell and Nick Weaver take the Community Unicorn Challenge!
In this great article on Cisco’s Private Cloud: Pain and Profit we learn some of the real life lessons of one of the most successful private cloud deployments in the industry. The detail of how Cisco IT increased agility, lowered costs, and enhanced security with the use of Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud for this deployment is located here. I like using Cisco IT’s experience in their journey to cloud to give us insight into what a private cloud looks like 18 months after first deployment. Morphing as planned from the first use case of Infrastructure as a Service to being an “Enterprise Store” across multiple service delivery towers is a key theme I predicted and continue to see, across many customer deployments. In the image below, we see a typical Service Taxonomy, where Cloud is just one of the icons in the total service catalog.
IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) with underlying automation is bubbling up as critical for corporate IT strategies. As IT shops increase their level of comfort with a service catalog, self service and orchestration for compute, virtualization, network, and storage; the attention shifts to other areas such as applications, virtual desktops, and other technology domains such as collaboration technologies. Let’s take a detailed look at where the Cisco IT eStore and Intelligent Automation for Cloud have gone in those 18 plus months since ignition. The home page of the eStore shows the current catalog of some key services being offered and other services being migrated over as we speak. We immediately see Virtual Desktops, and Home & Remote Access in addition the beachhead of IT Infrastructure and Platform Services
For today’s post, I’m very pleased to introduce our guest blogger, Vincent Rosolen, a Cisco Sales Engineer in Luxembourg, who developed a brief Nexus 1000V case study of his customer, CETREL, the largest PCI payment card services vendor in the country. CETREL speaks highly of the ability of the Nexus 1000V to return administrative controls to the network policy team, as well as the consistency in managing and deploying Nexus 1000V with other Cisco physical network gear (all running NX-OS).
Before I turn it over to Vincent, this is probably a good reminder that the beta version of Nexus 1000V for Microsoft Hyper-V is now widely available to practically anyone who wants to evaluate it. For more details, if you missed it, check out my recent blog or the Nexus 1000V community page for more details. And now, over to Vincent…
CETREL is the leading actor in the PCI sector in Luxembourg, serving the complete electronic payment value chain from the cardholder to the merchant accepting electronic payments.
Member of Swiss SIX Group, CETREL is investing in new applications to support its business growth into an international market. CETREL is also active in the sector of IT Services, supporting the Luxembourg Financial Industry with infrastructure and application management services. Read More »
