Are you familiar with VCE? If not, add it to your IT acronym dictionary, but it’ll be something you hear more about in the future if virtualization, shared storage, converged networks, and/or server infrastructure are in your purview. VCE stands for “Virtual Computing Environment” and is a consortium of Cisco, EMC, VMware, and Intel (funny…if you take three of those initials, you get V-C-E). The goal and objective, which they seem to be realizing, is to deliver a “datacenter in a box” (or multiple boxes, if your environment is large), and in a lot of ways, I think they have something going…
The highlights for quick consumption:
a VCE Vblock is an encapsulated, manufactured product (SAN, servers, network fully assembled at the VCE factory)
a Vblock solution is designed to be sized to your environment based on profiling of 200,000+ virtual environments
one of the top VCE marketed advantages is a single support contact and services center for all components (no more finger pointing)
because a Vblock follows “recipes” for performance needs and profiles, upgrades also come/require fixed increments
Cisco UCS blade increments are in “packs” of four (4) blades; EMC disks come in five (5) RAID group “packs”
Vblock-0 is good for 300-800 VMs; Vblock-1 is for 800-3000 VMs; Vblock-2 supports 3000-6000 VMs
when crossing the VM threshold for a Vblock size, Vblocks can be aggregated
Those are the general facts. So what does all that mean for interested organizations? Is it a good fit for you? Here are some takeaways I drew from the points above as well as the rest of the briefing by our VCE, EMC, and Cisco reps…