Apple quietly released a revision to the Mac Mini this morning while updating the online store. The new version features a new unibody Aluminum enclosure for the Mac Mini, a slimmed profile, and best of all HDMI — making it the first Mac with a native HDMI port. I had been contemplating getting a Mac [...]
Last week, I found a deal I could not pass up. B&H Photo has a deal on a Drobo for $299 though 6/30/2010. If you’ve never heard of a Drobo, it is an external storage enclosure from Data Robotics that offers some enterprise-class, automated mirroring/striping for your data across multiple hard drives. Data Robotics calls [...]
Since we began upgrading our clusters to ESX4, we have been having strange “failed physical path” messages in our vmkernel logs. I don’t normally post unless I know the solution to a problem, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Our deployment has been delayed and plauged by the storage issues that I mentioned [...]
HP provided us with the best practices document for ESX4 connected to an HP EVA array. There is a major change in ESX4. For the first time, ESX is ALUA (Asymmetric Logical Unit Access) aware. (See this post on Yellow Bricks for more detail about ALUA.) ALUA allows the array and ESX to determine the [...]
As in my post about Lessons Learned on ESX4 rollout, we had a pretty serious hiccup with our storage and the ESX systems in December while trying to bring up our ESX4 environment. The primary trouble uncovered was what I’ll call “controller ping-pong”. An EVA normally has two (maybe more, I’m not primarily a storage [...]
Following my November upgrade of Flex-10 VirtualConnect on my blade enclosure, I have begun my rollout and upgrades to ESX4 on a new blade cluster as well as one existing cluster. There are quite a few lessons that I’ve learned on my roll-out.
Twas the night of new years, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The little one had passed out, and we’d put her to bed. We had all celebrated with Carson, Dick Clark and the rest. Mom in her kerchief and I in my cap, had just settled [...]
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