First off, V-Kernel is going great – ive settled on a theme, ive created content already, and i got 15 hits in my first 36 hours of being online (all direct, nothing from google as i havent added it yet). I configured Akismet, and ive created the “About Me” page etc and all is going well! Matt has joined the VKernel Team and he will be posting about security and linux, as well as various other items – and i will be posting on Virtualization and whatever networking topics i can get my hands on!

In a side note, Dell warranties are very f… silly; apparently the warranty doesnt cover accidental damage: so what is the point in taking out a policy?! Its apparently £200 to replace the screen, although ive found a screen on ebay for £120 i can replace myself so Fran will save a little bit of cash i guess!

In other news, im going home for my birthday this weekend with Fran, big family party etc will be nice nice nice!

And finally, went to see “Dark Knight”, the new batman film last night. At first, i thought all the hype about Heath Ledger being amazing as joker was just because he was dead and people like to rave about dead actors etc, but Oh, my, god, he is actually immense! The film is amazing and definitely one to watch, 9/10, 2nd to top bracket (top being Godfather pt 2, Scarface, Raging Bull, Tax Driver etc).

Stay tuned to www.vkernel.co.uk and get your RSS feeds tuned in!

VKernel is now live with its first post, comparing Para-virtualization. I had a bit of a ‘mare, whereby i overwrote the SQL DB by accident and lost 3 hours worth of work… but oh well. Its up and running now and all linked in. I set up email etc and ive just finished configuring Google Analytics (c) so that i can monitor the hits i get.

Also, got 2 x 2GB PC2-5300F on eBay, for a sum total of £35! Bargain or what, it arrived today so im eager to get it in my system and test the crap out of it! Fun fun.

Today, the 29th July, the Virtualization/Server blog  – Vkernel.co.uk, is born! Yes thats right, this blog will now become solely my personal blog for whats been going on in my life, and nothing to do with technical stuff. That will now be handled by VKernel.co.uk – which will be pushed as a technical go-to page for news and information!

Thanks,

Sam

Evening all.

Not a bad weekend so far – spent today in Lydiard park chilling out in the sunshine with everyone, playing rugby with raj, broom, andy li etc. Came back to mine, had chinese and now were just watching a film (too skint to go out!).

Had a technological thought (not sure if its already been done) to allow better quality (possibly HD) video/audio to be streamed over a network using up less overhead than a standard stream at the moment.

Broadcast a low-res, low quality version of the stream and installing upscaling/Codec software on the client recieving the images, which then process the low stream images into high def media in seconds. If this can be done, then you can get HD content on a 1mb internet connection!

Morning All,

Have been thinking a bit more about virtual networks recently – studying on Virtual DMZ infrastructures etc. One thing that i have thought about, which hopefully someone with a few more figures than me, can answer.

In normal P2P transfer/ad-hoc network transfer; the data transfer rate (MBps) is constrained by the medium; the NIC, the stack and the drivers, normally limiting to either 100Mbps or 1000Mbps (full/half). These are physical issues which need to be addressed at a layer 1 level / layer 2 level.

My question to you, the world, is – why arent virtual networking p2p transfers faster? If you want to transfer files beetween 1 VM and another VM; the transfer should be upwards of 1/2GBps – as you are transferring files in beetween the same file system (granted via a few security measures). There is no interaction with the physical NIC’s or mediums at all. In theory, all it will be doing (please correct me if wrong), is transferring a file out of the virtual machine hard drive, from the hard drive through the VM Container, out onto the VMBus/Hypervisor bus, back into the other container, and then into the other VM’s hard drive. The only constraint here, is the TCP/IP stack, which im sure can be slightly modified / a new protocol made for VM Transfer, allowing 2/3/4 GBps and upwards transfer.

Morning All.

On this momentus occassion, the 200th blog post of Sam-Marsh.NET, i feel it may be time to announce some news. Due to my heavy involvement with Virtualization and Servers over the year, ive decided to apply some of that knowledge to a technical discussion / news website on virtualization, to post the things ive managed to find via my research which can hopefully help people like me who are studying are for their VMWare Certified Professional qualification (VCP).

I will announce the new website etc later on when i get chance to buy it all etc then i can start posting all the VM info ive managed to dig up that im going to be using in my dissertation later this year.

Cheers, and happy 200th post!

Evening all. Im starting to think more in-depth about my final year project / dissertation for University, or “college” as you Yanks call it.

My main areas are Networking/Virtualisation, ive got experience and skills in both and im very competent in either. Anyway, at first i was looking to do a quantitative comparison using benchmarking software (various) into the feasibility of using Virtualisation to consolidate an entire infrastructure into one physical piece of hardware. I was going to create 7 VM’s on ESX, create my infrastructure as i would in any IT Org. (e.g. a DHCP Server, a DNS Server, an Active Directory Server, a File Server, etc). I would benchmark them, do the same on XenSource, benchmark it, then install W2K3 on the server, benchmark it again, and compare the results to see what trends i can see/spot, performance decreases etc.

Anyway, im also looking for ideas as to what else i can do for my Final Year Project – something to do with Networking. I was thinking about an investigation into RADIUS/TACACS using Virtualisation as a Testbed; or an investigation into Virtualisation security – Sandboxing etc. Anyone have any ideas comment? Please let me know.

Ive also began looking for places to work after University (June 2009 i graduate, with a predicted Upper Second / First Class Degree in BSc (Hons) Computer Networks), so if anyone out there wants to pay me lots of money to be clever, then drop me a line!