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Weekend Surprise: Thoughts on Article Category

  • Artikkeli

Hello everyone,

in todays blog post, I will talk abit about one of the wiki article categories that I personally found quite handy when researching a topic I have to implement - and how I think it could be extended.

For Hyper-V Tony Soper started the article "Hyper-V: Gotchas". It's a very good example in my opinion of an article where the wiki shines, both when it comes to collaboration as well as a compact overview of pitfalls. However, sometimes I am looking for the opposite kind of article, not what should be avoided, but what people implemented - or tried to - a certain way, and why it worked for them or didn't. It's overlapping with "best practice" I guess, the difference is the focus (best practice suggesting a preferred solution, while the "user experience/scenario" type article doesn't evaluate, just shows an approach and if - and ideally why - the approach worked or worked not for the explained scenario).

Let me give an example (though I have to confess I haven't written down that article yet). A while ago were considering building our Hyper-V Cluster Nodes diskless, letting them boot from iSCSI disks. You won't find much on such a scenario on the internet, so it would be optimistic to make an article and call it best practice. Still, for us it was an interesting scenario (all physical disks monitored in the same place, the SAN). In the end, it turned out, while the boot from iSCSI would have worked just fine, the NIC used to boot from can no longer be used for Hyper-V (you cannot make a virtual switch from the NIC used for iSCSI boot). In our scenario that was the end of diskless nodes, we would have had to sacrifice a 10GBit Port just for booting the host. However, it might work for example in a 1GBit environment (Quadport cards are common there, I haven't seen any for 10GBit so far), so no judging of the scenario, just what worked and what didn't and why.

What do you think? Would such an article category be useful to you? And if so, how would you call it (e.g. Scenarios: Hyper-V)? For which topics would you want to see articles?

Discuss :)

Florian

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