Cluster

Processing several terabytes of data per day is not too uncommon and easily possible with Splunk - that is one of the many things I learned at .conf 2013 in Las Vegas.

My last post on VMware VMotion urged several readers to protest, maybe because of its provocative title. What I did was to compare VMware clustering with Microsoft failover clustering. I got to the conclusion that both significantly add to the complexity of the environment. Interestingly, most commenters said, yes, Microsoft clustering is complex, but no, VMware clustering is not, yet failed to explain exactly why.

Some time ago I attended a presentation by a former VMware, now Microsoft employee who claimed that Hyper-V’s lack of Live Migration aka VMotion is not relevant at all. According to him, the only people vigorously demanding such a feature are consultants, never customers. At the time I thought: “What a silly marketing number this is. Microsoft does not have it, so they tell everyone that it is not really needed until they have it.”

While working on the next edition of my book I found several documentation errors on Microsoft’s Technet pages describing the command line tools of Windows Server 2008. One of the graver errors relates to clustering.