Blog with Integrity
Posts Tagged ‘Storage’
All IT solutions will experience problems at some point in their life. Supporting IT solutions is difficult, time-consuming and costly, but also a fact of life – a fact as a systems administrator I am thankful for. It means, I have a job. Problem solving skills are absolutely necessary, but all administrators need the expert [...]
Simplify. Eliminate duplication of effort. Reduce costs. Play to your core competencies. Standardize. All of these are themes I have heard in my own company as we have looked at ways to improve our IT operations. Like many companies, we try to form a plan of where our IT operations should move, motivated by making [...]
VMware PowerCLI rocks
23, Mar 2011Its pretty easy to see where I stand on PowerCLI from the headline on this entry. Disclaimer, I haven’t used it extensively, but I can already see the why VMware has chosen to embrace PowerCLI for scripting. These are some of my initial thoughts after some light usage — in short, I think PowerCLI is [...]
- In: Everything Else|HP|Storage|Virtualization|VMware
- Tags: ESX, EVA, Hewlett Packard, HP, PowerCLI, Storage, VMware
SafeCopy: My answer to the Mozy changes?
10, Feb 2011I got a comment on my recent Mozy post which offered SafeCopy as an alternative to Mozy. When my current subscription to Mozy ends, I’m certainly in the market for a more favorable solution to meet my needs. Mozy’s new plans, in my opinion, do not offer enough space for the price they charge and [...]
Preserving and protecting old (and new) photos
6, Jan 2011Quite a while ago, I began trying to scan old family photos and preserve them. Some were in pretty rough shape and took a while to restore and fill in blemishes to the prints. Most were in very good shape, though, so I was able to go through some of my family’s oldest photos and [...]
Apple releases new Mac Mini with HDMI
15, Jun 2010Apple 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 [...]
Finally bought a Drobo for home
14, Jun 2010Last 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 [...]
Path failures on ESX4 with HP storage
8, Apr 2010Since 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 [...]
(For PowerCLI commands to accomplish the same best practices, see this post). 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 [...]
- In: Storage|Virtualization|VMware
- Tags: HP, Storage, Virtualization, VMware, vSphere
Carefully planning ESX4 and HP Storageworks EVA
6, Jan 2010As 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 [...]