I will be returning to my Virtualization 101 series but I decided to crib an idea from Scott Lowe and start a category around what I’ve been reading around the “internets” recently — links plus some commentary. With any luck I might even step up to 2 posts a week (no shortage of possible topics right now).

Sean McGee — UCS Uber-Dude

I ran across Sean’s site from Jeremy Waldrop….now following all his posts. Interestingly enough, Sean previously worked at HRP on their blade server team. Some of the older posts are great in getting up to speed on UCS. The titles are my take of course.

• Why blade servers don’t need to be mini-racks (with all the annoying increased amount of management)
• Statelessness and why it matters (i.e. why Cisco UCS does it right basically). Nice reference list of the “96 stateless items”.
• HP blades only handle “12 stateless items”…..so not hard to migrate to UCS which handles “96 stateless items”.

More UCS…

• Great post by Jeremy Waldrop (of Varrow no less) on UCS Service Profiles — deploy tons of servers quickly.
• Found from Jeremy’s post — Boot from SAN 101 with Cisco UCS

Storage and stuff…

• It took me a while to get back to reading this but Justin Warren has a nice multi-part blog post on SNIA ANZ with a writeup for the sessions with each vendor — EMC, IBM, Hitachi, and NetApp. This then led me to some older posts on his blog…
• I Believe You Have My Stapler – this definitely rings true for me. When people are highly paid, it’s silly to not to just take care of the small stuff.
• 5 Tips for Conference Calls – in short, go read it and do it. To take my own medicine, I definitely need to make sure I arrive on time to conference calls or a couple minutes early….too easy sometimes to be a slacker.
• Chargeback vs. Pricing – I found this off Justin’s blog actually (he wrote about the same general topic here). Turning IT from being viewed as a cost center to a strategic partner/business enabler/value provider/etc. is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. The thoughts on pricing are….well..interesting (and Mike Riley from NetApp chimed in as agreeing in the comments no less).