This morning I was on the phone with Ivan Pepelnjak (@ioshints) to decipher some of the paragraphs in one of his latest posts on Nicira Open vSwitch inside vSphere. He always has to bear with my stupid questions so I can see him (virtually), from time to time, facepalming some of my questions. Long story short we …

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There have been a lot of discussions lately about a topic I find extremely interesting: vendor lock-in. Multi-hypervisor is a discipline where you can apply the high level ranting below but you can really apply it to pretty much everything in IT. I started this blog post writing a couple of pages (as usual) and then I …

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Last week I came across an interesting blog post from Mark Thiele. The idea of the article is that, as virtualization becomes a relevant cost for IT, it becomes a target for savings. I tried to engage with Mark on twitter but discussing a matter like this in 140 chars becomes a bit frustrating. So I decided to share my …

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This article was originally posted on the VMware vCloud corporate blog. I am re-posting here for the convenience of the readers of my personal blog. This topic is (rightly so) coming up a lot lately with the Service Providers (SPs) I am working with so I thought I'd share some high level ideas on how we are engineering …

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A few weeks ago Adrian Cockcroft (Cloud Architect @ Netflix) wrote another very interesting post on his blog. Adrian warms up the discussion sharing his experience about the reasons for which you may want to use public cloud services. While there are a lot of people (including myself) sometimes advocating about these …

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My old vCloud Director Networking for Dummies post is still going strong according to my blog statistics. I believe this is an indicator that people are looking for more information about this topic so I thought I'd give it a little bit more color and create a few real life examples on how that theory works in …

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We have known this for years but it's only when you get a slap on your face that you understand what's going on for real: the GHz metric is useless these days. I was experimenting with vCloud Director the other day and I was checking out from the catalog my Turnkey Linux Core virtual machine (I use that because it's …

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A few days ago we had a big election day in Italy for renewing a good part of the public local administration. For and in itself this wasn't a big deal and something that wouldn't have generated a lot of attention among the 60M people living here. However, without getting into a lot of details, suffice to say that this …

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An entire Amazon AWS Region was recently down for four days. Everyone has got to blog something about it and this is my attempt. Just as a warning: this post may be highly controversial. There has been a litany of tweets pontificating how applications on AWS should be deployed in a certain way to achieve the maximum …

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A few days ago I was in a very interesting meeting with a big Service Provider in Europe and I heard a lot of interesting comments. I'd like to quote the best that I heard which was "Oh a portal? Oh not another one... we have many of them already!" but this will open up a different can of worms so I am not …

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