This site is designed as a resource center for everything Virtual. With that said most of this site will discuss the only real virtualization technology in the market today; VMware. I will try and post anything I find about other products I.E Microsoft Virtual Server and VirtualIron. But this site is a place to find useful information about designing, deploying and managing a virtual infrastructure.
There are really two main sections of this site rigth now (will try and grow over time). First there is my blog, posting from things I run into with my day-to-day workings with virutalization. The second is my utilities page, I believe there is a need for a more user frienly interface for the RCLI and some daily tasks that we do within VC could use help. So I'm working on creating a few add on, utilties, tools etc.
My name is Rob Wilson and over the past eight years I have found myself primarily working on projects that have centered on server consolidation and server containment in large scale enterprise environments (1000+ Intel servers). With that I was turned on to VMware and its product line of virtualization software. Since that day I’ve been spending about 99% of my time working on a design for an enterprise class solution for VMware ESX servers. I started deploying ESX servers into a production environment in late 2002. I have designed VMware ESX server farms for a few of the largest insurance companies in the United States (and the world).
My approach is easy... Good design with good planning leads to a solid deployment of a virtual infrastructure. Throughout this site I am hoping you'll find information to help you deploy your own solid VMware environment. Included are articles, web links, and utilities, white papers that helped me understand the good, bad and ugly about deploying VMware. (Mostly the good) and I'm hoping you'll find some of the information useful.
I created this site as a place to host everything and anything Virtual (It's All Virtual). I consider myself a very knowledgeable (and very experienced) engineer when it comes to using virtualization technologies in the Intel server space. I've been working on Intel server consolidation project since the "dot com" bust a few years ago. File migrations, SQL consolidations, and of course the design and deployment of VMware ESX server farms.
When it comes to VMware I became involved with the release of ESX 1.5. I created a VMware ESX server farm using Dell servers (see download section for the whitepaper I wrote for Dell PowerEdge magazine) and EMC Symmetric storage. I continued to work with ESX 1.5.2 and 2.0 and VI3 releases. I also work with VirtualCenter and managed two ESX server farms and became an extreme user of VMware's VMotion technology. Some of my personal "claim to fames" are:
I am arguable the first person to run production ESX servers on EMC Symmetric storage. I can not confirm I was the first but in talking with EMC at the time (well before they considered buying VMware) I was the first and only one asking for support. I actually helped my EMC SE write the initial article for support request (RPQ)
I worked with Dell to help create hardware support agents for ESX 1.5.2 (Dell OMSA). I co-authored an article that was published in the March 2004 PowerEdge magazine. I also worked with Dell to deliver OMSA agents the monitored the Perc raid controller card. For those of you running ESX 1.x with Dell server know that feature was missing from the basic OMSA agents until a resent release of ESX and OMSA.