So you all have probably heard the Netapp value proposition by now and why NFS, the technology that has been around for so long is now experiencing a resurgence.

While NetApp isnt the only NFS solution on the market, it sure is a compelling NFS solution and there are a myriad of blogs out there explaining why. From my perspective there are some interesting things that NFS does that really work well for VMware products. One of these is the whole thin provisioning thing.

I had a lengthy discussion with a number of people I know recently around thin provisioning and we came to the conclusion that "thin provisioning" on the storage level is fantastic and can add real value to a large scale deployment. Thin provisioning at the VMware level on NFS can cause quite a management nightmare. Let me explain why.

The next perth VMUG is on the 10th of April 2008, please click on the link below for more detail.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmug/asia_pacific/perth

Theme is "higher availability and disaster recovery", with the venue and refreshments sponsored by NetApp.

Please register through the VMware front door as descibed in the posting, so that we get accurate numbers.

Something that continues to surprise me is the number organisations who wrongly assume they have to be a “big” IT department to get any value out of virtualisation. – and the recent arrival of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) makes it even easier for smaller IT departments to justify virtualisation 

Of late I have been realising that less and less people consider desktops when the create their DR plans and processes. When you virtualise your servers, apart from the obvious benefits we always associate with server consolidation it becomes a DR enabler. So the next logical step is a business continuity plan. People talk about Recovery Point Objectives for the business and tier service levels to accomodate the RPO within the budget.

The key thing that people often miss is the desktop connectivty associated with the DR/BC strategy. It is fine to have a killer DR plan that enables all of your key infrastructure and services to be running in a heartbeat via SAN replication or VM level replication. But how are those end users going to connect ?

VDI

That is the answer, we all know what VDI is in principle. In fact VMware didnt even have a boxed product to sell you for VDI until they went out and bought a connection broker. The simplest form of VDI is a workstation running on your ESX infrastructure with a RDP connection to it.

How much easier can it be to resolve connectivity issues at your disaster recovery site for your staff in the event of a disaster if all they have to do is find an internet connection and RDP into virtual workstations running on ESX ?

When you are considering purchasing that infrastructure for the Disaster Recovery site, think about the workloads associated with running x amount of virtual machines on it. Then you do not need to consider how you are going to find x amount of physical workstations to get up and running.