This is a whitepaper that John Dodge and I wrote in February 2008 for Kingston and was released as part of the Windows Server 2008 "Heroes Happen Here" product launch events held by Microsoft.  The paper discusses Windows Server 2008 memory strategies with regards to:

• Windows Terminal Services in Server 2008
• Server Core
• Hyper-V
• Visual Studio 2008
• SQL Server 2008

The whitepaper defines the above-listed memory roles and shares recommendations on memory management and provisioning to help you stay ahead of the curve and proactively plan for optimum physical memory requirements.  You download the paper on Kingston's site here , or download it below from this site.

Download: Windows Server 2008: Memory Provisioning Recommendations (1.8 MB)

This is another recently-published whitepaper written for the folks at Kingston about VMware HA and DRS Capacity Planning.  This paper was yet again a collaborative effort between myself and a great colleague, John Dodge, and started as a pet project while working with a few enterprise customers.  It rapidly evolved out of the obvious misunderstandings around HA, DRS and memory overcommitment.

Memory overcommitment is a great feature of VMware ESX - one that really separates it from the competition (at least for now).  However, I was surprised at the lack of understanding around the limits to which overcommitment was being pushed and the implications when using VMware HA and DRS.  VMware's own somewhat vague messaging is partly to blame, not really getting the information out to customers on reasonable limits and shortcomings.

Anyway, I digress...  This paper delves into the details of properly planning for capacity when leveraging HA and DRS in VI3, and how overcommitment plays into these scenarios.  It also details precisely what HA does and does not do, something I find isn't documented very clearly by VMware. 

The whitepaper can either be downloaded from Kingston's site here, or from my site (below).  Enjoy!

Download:    VMware HA and DRS Capacity Planning Recommendations (2.4 MB)

This paper was co-written with a great colleague and friend of mine for Kingston and released at VMworld 2007.  The paper defines the planning process for determining the appropriate amount of memory for a VI3 deployment, dispels some common misconceptions, and describes the consequences of sub-optimal sizing.  Physical memory is a critical component of all VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) deployments, and appropriate sizing is necessary to ensure the success of solutions based on VI3, such as Server Consolidation. Provisioning the ideal amount of physical memory for VI3 components is more important as systems with an ever increasing number of CPU cores and processing threads rise in popularity.  The paper can be downloaded from here (below) or from Kingston's web site directly.

Download:    Memory Provisioning Recommendations for VMware Infrastructure 3 (201 KB) 

I co-wrote this whitepaper back in the Spring along with a few colleagues of mine.  It focuses on some security-realted best practices around VI3 deployments, and offers some additional/different advice from the VMware-published paper.  This paper was developed to help network administrators, server administrators, and other individuals specifically focused on security, understand and address the many security implications of Virtual infrastructure. It provides objective guidance for integrating VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and IT infrastructure without compromising security in the process.  The paper can be downloaded from here (below), or from Foedus' web site.

Download:   VMware Infrastructure 3: Security Best Practices (336 KB)

Check out this new white paper on VMware's web site.  This particular paper is titled "Getting Started with Virtual Infrastructure" and discusses leveraging VI for simple server roles like File and Print servers.  This one was actually written by me, so it is my first "official" publication!  The whitepaper can be downloaded from here (below) or VMware's web site.

Download:  Getting Started with VMware Infrastructure 3 (2 MB)