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 [...]
Like many shops, we have finally attained buy-in from all our stakeholders for virtualization. As a result, we’ve pushed more and more into our infrastructure. And while VMware is the most datacenter ready solution for virtualization, it is not without its shortcomings — monitoring and visibility into the infrastructure being one of the biggest. While we were [...]
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 [...]
Among the new technologies introduced with ESX4, I’m particuarly inpressed with the vNetwork Distributed Switch. We have chosen to slowly introduce the dvSwitches into our environment and transition VM’s over to these switches. The distributed switch allows us some new capabilities such as centralized management, individual port assignments, retained state after vMotions, port statistics and [...]
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 [...]
Well, its a new quarter and I feel a big obligation to post something to the blog. I cannot believe it has been three months since my last post. I have several irons in the fire, but on the work front, I am glad to report that the vSphere upgrade has been completed and we [...]
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.
After completing our upgrade to vSphere’s version of vCenter Server, there were a few incompatible plugins left from our VI3 install. Most of these were easy to remedy – especially the VMware provided add-on products like Converter and Update Manager which were on the same DVD media as vCenter Server. But, if you have any [...]
I had the priviledge of meeting Scott Lowe this past year at VMworld. Scott’s wife Crystal arranged trips and adventures around Las Vegas for the wives whose husbands were attending the conference. But that’s besides the point – Scott has a new book coming out soon – Mastering Virtual Infrastructure - that is all about the [...]
Today, VMware made their official announcement of vSphere, the next generation of virtualization technology in their flagship ESX line. There has been a lot of coverage of vSphere online in the weeks leading up to today’s big announcement. To me, the most interesting information and the most sought after is the answer to one simple [...]
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