Comments for Pivot Point

Comment on Meet Me at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco by drummonds

drummonds — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:49:41 +0000

Definitely the “outperforming” session. A mistake was made in the best practices perf talk that got it knocked off the Copenhagen agenda. But there are are 1100 people signed up for that talk in SF so I hope to get the mistake corrected soon.

Scott

Comment on Meet Me at VMworld 2010 in San Francisco by Iain

Iain — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:53:05 +0000

Scott

Am I right in thinking that you’ll be replicating these sessions in Copenhagen? I’ve seen that the “Outperforming” module is in the schedule.

Thanks

Comment on Using Perfmon For Accurate, ESX Performance Counters by High CPU Ready, Poor Performance | VMtoday

High CPU Ready, Poor Performance | VMtoday — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:53:18 +0000

[...] I was dealing with a resource contention issue. I had the VMstats provider running in the guest (http://vpivot.com/2009/09/17/using-perfmon-for-accurate-esx-performance-counters/) showed me that there was no ballooning or swapping going on, and that the vCPU’s were not [...]

Comment on vscsiStats for ESXi by Andrew Storrs

Andrew Storrs — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:38:28 +0000

It’s much appreciated and given that you now live 8 or 9 thousand miles away and don’t work there any more – completely unexpected – if I was making it to VMworld this year I’d buy you a few, but alas I’m not and you’ll probably be drunk from jet lag anyway

Comment on Economic Theory and IT by drummonds

drummonds — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:03:41 +0000

I have asked nearly every customer I have met in the past three months if they are implementing Chargeback. Few are and most cite the complexity of the process (not the tools) as blocking their efforts. Amortizing hardware costs over a varying number of VMs seems to be the toughest issue.

I have sometimes suggested that VM cost might decrease when some features are enabled (like FT or SRM, as an example) since they decrease the energy required to manage hardware failures. This is somewhat like the trust you describe. But when “trust” decreases the charged cost, but its implementation results in a higher VMware license, I see customers’ foreheads wrinkling.

Sticky space…

Comment on vscsiStats for ESXi by drummonds

drummonds — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:58:13 +0000

Done. Again, apologies for this taking longer than it used to.

Comment on Economic Theory and IT by Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:57:42 +0000

Fantastic perspective….and even better as it merges two of my favorite areas (economics and IT). I remember reading fat history books about the KGB when I stayed with my uncle as a kid.

Now here’s a question….how do you value the intangibles? Can we measure everything in IT? (the reliability of internal resources we trust, the value of external resources we trust, etc.) One theme in that to me is trust — cost is one measure of value….and while you may have an SLA attached to that cost (where an SLA is almost a measure of trust), SLA’s are only worth so much (the “virtual paper they’re not printed on” maybe) when you’re in the midst of downtime. I think there will always be a premium for trust while for enterprises will come somewhat second to the cost metric (take a look at the cost per GB of enterprise storage as Exhibit 1).

And that reminds me….I need to read the Wealth of Nations again sometime soon….

Comment on Economic Theory and IT by drummonds

drummonds — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 09:58:08 +0000

Fantastic addition to the discussion, Matt. I love the comment.

Comment on vscsiStats for ESXi by Andrew Storrs

Andrew Storrs — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 07:13:44 +0000

Another client, another request… 3.5 build 238493

Comment on Economic Theory and IT by Matt Povey

Matt Povey — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:14:54 +0000

Love it. I like to say half-jokingly, half-seriously that IT service management is often indistinguishable from Soviet style planning. In IT, there’s a tendency to think in terms of ‘what the business needs’ in the complete absence of any real feedback loop or mechanism to check whether what you’re supplying is what the business is really demanding or vice versa.

The standardization mandated by many ‘maturity models’ can serve to make this worse in a lot of instances. IT decides what it thinks is best for the business and then works to supply it – whether that’s what the business wants or not. Add to that the experience of virtual queues in the rain for a loaf of bread (three months to provision a server) and you have something that sounds a lot like the end-days of the USSR.

The last time this happened, the business went around IT’s back and introduced open systems. We’re seeing a similar situation today and unless IT starts to rely on the only reliable feedback mechanism we know about (prices) to match supply and demand, the problems we’re seeing will only get worse.

On the bright side, it’s massively simpler to introduce effective pricing than it used to be. Here’s working for the victory of the invisible hand over the five year plans in IT!