So Say SMEs: Little Things Can Be Big Later

In this week's episode of So Say SMEs, Kong and I discuss how small strategic additions can be big later.  We also manage to relate this to football - as usual.

A production note - the door behind us didn't open a single time during filming (unlike last week).  Although there were a couple of people that started to walk towards us right at the end, but finished before they were able to get on camera.

Super Bowl and Content Deduplication

On this week's episode of So Say SMEs, Kong and I discuss the end of the football season and content de-duplication.

If you watch you will see that the door behind us kept opening.  Normally we just roll with these types of events on So Say SMEs, but in the case the noise from the servers was too loud and we had to wait for the door to close again before continuing.  Awesome work by the team of video editors to put things right.

The Hitchhikers Guide To ESXTOP Counters

For all the other performance people out there that spends time using esxtop to do deep analysis of ESX performance, there is a great document that you really should know about.  It is called vSphere Monitoring and Performance for vSphere 5.1 / vCenter 5.1 / ESX 5.1.

My favorite section is a detailed list of all the esxtop counters and exactly what they mean and how they inter-relate.

For example, I had a question about what is the difference between the %USED and %RUN for a VM.  On page 155 and 156 of this great document it gives you the specific formula for %USED, which is:

%USED = %RUN + %SYS - %OVLP

It also explains in the %RUN definition that on systems with hyperthreading enabled, the %RUN value does not account for hyperthreading.  This can cause %RUN to be twice as large as %USED.  But wait this can't be possible based on the formula - except in this case it is because %USED accounts for hyperthreading.

Another mystery of the universe is solved with the help of the vSphere Monitoring and Performance guide.

Super Bowl Competition and Tech Cooperation

In this week's episode of So Say SMEs we have a fun talk about the Super Bowl and in true geek fashion manage to relate it to the tech world and then it back to Fantasy Football.

Included references to Hyper-V vs vSphere, Ravens vs 49ers, and Dell vs HP - so fun for everybody.