There are no formal prerequisites for any CCIE track. People often get associate or professional-level certifications prior to CCIE, but the only things actually required are passing the CCIE written and lab exams.
Possibly auditory neuropathy. I have similar issues understanding speech if I'm not looking at the speaker, which can make phone calls painful and out of sync audio/video almost completely unintelligible without closed captioning.
I know they 'allow' some virtualization, through their VPC solution only, and with the caveat that 'in some cases we may not be able to support you if the problem cannot be tested on bare hardware'
This isn't true anymore, see http://www.windowsservercatalog.com/svvp.aspx?svvppage=svvp.htm
The referenced configuration (Fusion on OSX) definitely isn't on the SVVP list, but the bulk of Microsoft's applications (including SQL, Sharepoint, Exchange, etc) are now fully supported on VMware ESX(i), Citrix XenServer, Hyper-V and several other virtualization platforms. Really they had to get behind running apps in virtualized environments if they wanted Hyper-V to gain any traction. There is a caveat in the support agreement that they won't support application problems that are definitively caused by virtualization-specific behavior (app crashes consistently after a VMotion/Live Motion, problems caused by hypervisor-level swapping, etc) but it's still a vastly improved stance
This isn't lockstep. In storage terms, if you think of lockstep as synchronous replication, this is more akin to asynchronous snapshot-based replication. The metaphor falls apart a bit because the primary does wait for acknowledgment before modifying its external state (sending network packets or writing to disk), but can otherwise continue execution.
Actually, after reading the paper, this is no threat to Stratus or other players in the space like Marathon or VMWare's FT. The performance impact is pretty significant - by their own benchmarks there was a 50% perf hit in a kernel compile test, and 75% in a web server benchmark.
This is an interesting approach and seems to handle multiple vCPU's in the VM which I haven't seen done by the software approaches like Marathon and VMware FT, but I think it will mainly be used in applications that would have never been considered for a more expensive solution anyway.
Disraeli was pretty close: actually, there are Lies, Damn lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, and Delivery dates.
