Building A Hyper-V Cluster On The Cheap
I don’t intend to re-invent the wheel with this post, nor do I quite have the expertise of others to provide a real detailed step-by-step guide (not yet anyway, but I am working on it!).
To help me as well, I am going to use this page to dump a whole lot of links and resources on how to deploy Hyper-V hosts in to a cluster, with a mixture of shared storage options.
The point of this article and it’s links is to provide information to either lab setups or startups that can’t afford a few Dell R710 servers, EMC storage and Cisco switches. The info below should help lay out basic architecture design, and simple setups as well as some basic principles that can be applied to increase performance.
Utilizing SAN Storage with Windows Failover Clusters
Creating a SAN using Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3
Rough Guide To Setting Up A Hyper-V Cluster
How to Build a Hyper-V Cluster Using the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target v3.3
UPDATED: How to Build a Hyper-V Cluster Using the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target v3.3
Hyper-V Cluster: Be Careful With Your Protocol Bindings
To be honest, just follow this blog: http://www.aidanfinn.com/!
I will also try and get some other links up regarding the use of other SAN software such as Solarwinds and Openfiler when I get a chance.
The Most Powerful Colors in the World
This is an old article from Colour Lovers; old being 10 month, but I have only got round to reading it now. The article looked at the colors in brands from the top 100 websites, and analyzed them; producing some excellent graphics along the way.
You will instantly notice the popularity of the colours red and blue, which I assume are designed to have some impact on the end user. I certainly get the use of red, to enforce and a sense of dynamism, excitement and energy. I guess the blue epitomises a more passive, and relaxed approach to the service of the website- you could certainly look at Facebook in this way (…despite Mark Zuckerberg’s admission of colour blindness). Thoughts?
The image above is a representation of website favicons, which is also very heavy on the reds and blues. I love favicons, and it used to drive me nuts that IE6 was very fragile when it came to detecting and displaying favicons. They just add such a simple, yet effective aesthetic pleasure to browsing. It is another way for a website to advertise its brand, as well as provide a new avenue of design in a 16px x 16px graphic.
I noticed straightaway that there is very little green in the graphics above; hope for demonGREEN yet…although BP certainly hasn’t done the colour any justice recently!
Tokyo Time Lapse Video
Another piece of visual art from Joshspear.com, and another time lapse video to compliment others that I have posted.
The latest time lapse is Tokyo city. The video doesn’t quite have the same impact as the Cape Town video did, however the mix of music and timing of the cinematography is just awesome. A video of details.
The video is by posted on Vimeo, by inter // states from Samuel Cockedey. The photography is by Samuel Cockedy and music by Paul Frankland.
Things to Buy: Vectorfunk Rorschach Posters
I have been an avid follower of Josh Spear whilst he was at Cool Hunting, and then spun of on his own. He always digs out of the coolest stuff, and the latest is this series of prints by Matt W. Moore, at MWM Graphics.
The graphics are inspired by classic Rorschach Tests (Learn More) with hyper-colorful and psychedelic twists. The really fun part for me is that when asked “What do you see?” everyone has a different response.
Now Available in the MWM Graphics Online Shop, the prints are produced on heavy stock, signed & numbered (x/100), and shipped in sturdy tubes.
Cool Video Sunday
A collection of very cool videos to gaze over on this beautiful Sunday afternoon…
The Quirky Manifesto (Manifestos have become a cool factor since Holstee’s, which has gone viral)
Quirky Manifesto from Quirky on Vimeo.
The JamChain
Turf Geography Club
Turf Geography Club from Cosa Mas on Vimeo.
The Cloud Will Be Won With Management Not Hypervisors
VMware is the virtualisation leader. I have limited experience with VMware, and have mostly worked on Hyper-V, but I am not ignorant enough to defend Hyper-V yet. I think Hyper-V has its place, and I think is giving VMware some nice competition to ensure this segment does not get scale; Red Hat and Citrix are also not also-rans just yet either.
Hypervisors will continue to mature, but they will soon reach a point where their rate of growth in features will slow, and stability will be a core focus. Outside of the hypervisor, is the management systems, that create, deploy, maintain, manage, live migration/V-move, update and control the virtual machines running on the hosts.
With Microsoft’s latest beta release of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012, it has the ability to manage different hypervisors, deploying them to bare metal hardware. I think a single hypervisor environment will be a strategy for small players, with the big guys looking to maintain real HA VMS on VMware, and possibly less important virtual systems running across Hyper-V, Red Hat or Citrix. A number of VPS hosts already provide a number of hypervisor options to customers.
What you won’t find, is multi-management systems, and the key to the virtualisation war will be which vendor can offer a management system to control the data centre and the hypervisors. No one wants to control different systems in different places, and management systems are expensive whereas the hypervisors are free.
VMware have already started to look at XVP, and Veeam have also started to work on Hyper-V compatibility.
I also think Microsoft know: they CAN’T beat VMware in the hypervisor and its features. VMware are just too stable, too good, and too mainstream. I think Microsoft’s tactic will be to fight them in the management space, offering a management system that can control BOTH Hyper-V and VMware and Citrix. That way, they make up ground via licence costs in SCVMM, and hopefully push other tools such as SCCM and SCOM; maybe even Opalis.
This has turned in to a little bit of a topsy-turvy post, probably not making much sense – so I hope you can sort of make sense of it all. Just keep an eye out for VMware’s behaviour over the next few years. They have normally behaved in a sort of “we are the best, and don’t care about the rest”, however I expect this to change as they try to fight out a number of strong competitors.
The Unbalanced Discovery Boosts The Unseen Blast
The unbalanced discovery boosts the unseen blast.
Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
I can’t remember how I came across the video, other than a recommendation on a blog I found somewhere…
That doesn’t matter, it is still an incredible video, presented in such an original and imaginative fashion. If you’ve got about 11 minutes to spare, I highly recommend watching this video. It’s by Dan Pink, author of the book Drive.
In this video, Dan talks about what motivates us in a way that’s both creative and resonating, while doing a great job of relating to any
frustrated leaders who are trying to motivate their own teams. Go ahead and watch it; I bet you’ll enjoy it as much as I did!
Windows Tip: Open Command Prompt Here
If you ever work in deep level folder structures, and need to then open a Command Prompt to run a command, you can save time navigating your way down to that folder level, by holding Shift when right-clicking in white space and selecting “Open command window here”.
