The problem with not having an editor…

Well…it seems that I made a mistake! When I created this blog, I fat-fingered the hostname and I’m the proud owner of Ken’s Virtual Realty blog – notice that’s “Realty” as in “Real Estate” as oppossed to “Reality” as in “what I meant to type”…

So – I’m going to retain this site as a reminder to myself that I really do need to be careful about what I type – but I’ve also created a blog with the correct name where I’ll be posting new stuff. Please jump over to Ken’s Virtual Reality for all the latest.

I have to thank Eric Seibert for pointing this out to me. I guess it’s only fair – I was one of the reviewers for his forthcoming book and caught some of his errors, so he’s only returning the favor!

When is it OK to default on your VI?

I’ve noticed something about engineers. They’re never happy with the way something is configured out of the box – there’s always a better way! Well, I have a different philosophy:

“If you don’t have a very good reason to change a default value, don’t change it!”

To me, this seems totally obvious – in most cases, the default values are there for a reason.

Reaction to “Say it isn’t so: Hyper-V and XenServer outperform ESX”

Jason Boche posted an interesting article on his blog today, and I thought I’d offer my thoughts on it.

First, here’s the article from Virtualization Review magazine that started all this furor!

My guess is that part of the difference comes from both Hyper-V & Xen requiring VT capable CPUs (i.e. the VM always runs within a VT jail) while ESX supports binary translation (BT) for some 32-bit x86 instructions. The first generation of chips that supported VT weren’t very good, and VMware’s BT would often do a better job of executing the protected instructions than the hardware assist provided by the CPU. Intel has gotten better in the hardware support for virtualization which is shown in the subject test.