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I realised when auditing my delicious bookmarks recently how much I rely on Wikipedia to look things up and today donated for the first time.

I had previously moaned about seeing Jimmy Wales’s face every time I logged in, like this

and laughed my head off at this piss take from The Daily What:

I found today at Information Is Beautiful the following demonstration of just how effective the campaign has been though.

Wikimedia have done some nice analysis of the campaign on the Meta Wiki if you are interested.

Give to Wikipedia here

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I remembered seeing Simon Long’s comment on twitter a few weeks ago and it was rattling around in the back of my mind.

Will #VMware Load-Based Teaming remove the need for #Cisco EtherChannel? Discuss….

I long ago investigated NIC Teaming algorithms and settled on IP Hash with Cisco Etherchannels for most environments, only really using something else if the client happened not have stacked switches. Thanks to Scott Lowe for this superb article on the matter.

When vSphere 4.1 came out with Load Based Teaming, I was pleased that at last we had an algorithm that would have a go at proper load balancing and not just load distribution but had not got round to investigating much more.

At Forward we have just updated to 4.1, Enterprise Plus and have bought some shiny new Extreme Summit X650 Series 10G switches; so Simon’s comment was particularly apropos.

I had decided I wanted to try and use LBT but was unsure if I should port-channel the uplink ports. It turns out you can’t. I thought maybe you should to be honest, it does not mention in the dvSwitch guide as far as I can see but the ESX host requirements for link aggregation KB (updated today) is very clear

• The switch must be set to perform 802.3ad link aggregation in static mode ON and the virtual switch must have its load balancing method set to Route based on IP hash.
• Enabling either Route based on IP hash without 802.3ad aggregation or vice-versa disrupts networking

ie you need both IP Hash and EtherChannel and neither will work without the other.

In answer to Simon’s question, my feeling is you may still get better performance from EtherChannel and IP based hash for some workloads but would guess “usually” LBT wins. I think the case where you may get better utilisation is when certain VMs have very high bandwidth requirements to different IPs. As described here IP Hash is the only way to allow traffic from one vNIC to leave over different pNICs at the same time.

It is interesting that even with LBT bandwidth is still limited to the maximum bandwidth a single pNIC can provide for individual VMs / vmkernels, also IP hash will not get higher than a single pNIC for a vMotion or other point to point connections. So 10G is going to perform better for these operations than 10x1G, however you team them.

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We recently bought the Hyper9 capacity planning, reporting and monitoring solution for our VMware infrastructure and I quite soon made use of it to troubleshoot some problems reported to us like backups taking longer and databases being slower than normal.

In the 3par storage I could see that IO was unusually high of late.

Then I looked at the top-n datastores by IOPS and graphed them

A huge jump for sharedstorage8, so I looked at its VMs

and found the culprit VM.

Here it is against our big “Superhero” database and the vCenter server with the DB.

A lot of IO from a machine the owner thought was doing nothing!

Hyper9 is a pretty good tool for reporting, alerting and troubleshooting your VMware infrastructure, the query language is lucene based and this gives you lots of options in creating custom views and alerts.

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Here are two Wordle visualisations, first the words used in my blog. I like reading obviously but it seems to be quite heavy on stuff from the single article I wrote on Rhipe – unusual words I suppose.

The second is my del.icio.us tags, when is later going to happen?

With delicious closing I am looking at alternatives, send recommendations if you have any.

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Well, I guess I need to say something about my company Christmas present to all of their ~150 staff, a three day trip to Vegas.

We flew out last Thursday and stayed for 3 nights at the Wynn, which is a great hotel.

Thursday: Arrive and sleep (forgive me I only just got back from Egypt after flying to Manchester instead of London and having to sit all night on a freezing cold coach!).

Friday: Flew in a helicopter into the Grand Canyon which was rather awesome.

Sat: Went to see Zumanity by Cirque du Soleil, it was amazing, I must see them again.

Sunday: A few of us went shooting,
An M16

An H&K MP5

A Mac-10

not firing it gangster style unfortunately.

A Tommygun

A Desert Eagle

And I did a Shotgun

And I’ve got the T-shirt to prove it

Peace Through Superior Firepower indeed

Pics On Flickr

Vids On Youtube

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Posted by tom under travel | 1 Comment »

I has been a crazy few weeks, after being in the UK only 2 days after the Egypt trip I went to Las Vegas with Forward and I am just getting my head back together now.

You know you are a huge geek when you take as much space for books as clothes.

The trip was ace, a week on the M/S Hamees, Stopping at:
Valley of the Kings
Temple of Queen Hatshepsut
The Colossi of Memnon
Edfu Temple

Kom Ombo, which I had not heard of but has some extraordinarily vibrant original colour remaining

Abu Simbel

Karnak Temple

Luxor Temple (we had the place to ourselves at night, it was amazing)

5 Nights in Movenpick El Gouna on the Red Sea and 2 nights in the Nile Palace

It was incredibly relaxing, nice to be incommunicado for 2 weeks and catch up on some reading and just mince around the beach. I managed to read Godel Escher Bach at last and also ticked off The Ode Less Travelled from my 101 Goals. It was weird not having my phone to distract me in spare moments, making me daydream more and think about people and events I have not thought about it ages, I should do it more often.

Pictures are on flickr

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