This may come as a shock to my handful of readers but I am still in good health and my computer is working just fine. Why the long break between postings then? Mostly I have had my head down working on several new projects which is a good thing but unfortunately other activities had to take a back seat for a little while including updating this site. I hope you'll find that when the new projects are available that it was well worth it! There are some things I can mention that will be coming out soon that I will be blogging about when the timing is right. This includes a couple of Microsoft tradeshows such as TechEd EMEA and SQL PASS both scheduled for the week of November 8th (bummer too because instead of heading over to Berlin I'll be driving to downtown Seattle to work the EMC booth for SQL PASS highlighting our Microsoft virtualization solutions for SQL Server. To all my DBA followers (and I know there must be many), be sure to stop by!), several new whitepapers focused on designing and deploying EMC solutions with Hyper-V, as well as even some new or updated product releases for Hyper-V. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
So today I wanted to share with you Dell's Reference Architecture solutions called Business Ready Configurations for Virtualization. Like EMC's Reference Architectures, these documents are designed to help end users understand how to design and deploy a virtualized infrastructure when using the same components as featured in the document.
The solution that Dell built uses M610 servers connected to Dell and Brocade switches attached to a Dell\EMC CX4-120 array connected via Fibre Channel and using Microsoft System Center to manage the virtual components. Included in their documentation is not only a summary of the hardware used but they include architecture and infrastructure diagrams, detailed networking information such as VLAN IDs for the public network and server port mappings and driver firmware versions so it is easy to replicate what has already been tested and proven as successful in Dell's labs. They even provide screen shots along the way including virtual adapter configuration, EMC management screens and network settings for Microsoft clustering if using Live Migration.
One thing that is different from EMC's reference architecture documents for those who may be familar with the work we have done is that there aren't any specific applications or workloads highlighted in these Business Ready configurations but that is intended. These documents are more about building the right infrastucture to support a set number of virtual machines regardless of the workload. Obviously your mileage may vary but it covers most customer environments and it is highly scalable since more servers can be added or the EMC SAN can be expanded to include more disk drives (without any distruption to the environment of course).
The best part? They provide order information within the document so you can purchase all of the components used in the reference architecture so you don't need to worry about making sure you included everything when trying to order a similar configuration. It truly is Business Ready! This Dell\EMC based virtualization solution comes in 3 sizes including Entry, Advanced and Premium configurations covering all type of scenarios.
Now only if my other projects were so easy...
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