Recently-Added

VMware announced Site Recovery Manager version 6.1 this week at VMworld in San Francisco California. Several new features were unveiled for VMware’s flagship Disaster Recovery product. Storage Profile Protection Groups Remember back in the old days (prior to today), when deploying a new virtual machine we had to ensure the datastore we were putting the virtual machine on was replicated? Not only that, but if this new VM was part of a group of similar VMs that needed to fail over together, we needed to make sure it was in the same protection group? Well VMware decided this was a cumbersome process and added “Storage Profile Protection Groups”. ...

I ran into that funny problem where if you have so many wireless devices you’re overloading your tiny wireless router that you’ve had for 5 years. After looking around a bit I settled on the AC3200 Triband Router from Linksys. I wanted something that would be really powerful to handle all of my devices and something with a cool factor. The device arrived and had some simple instructions to configure it. Connect to the default SSID via a wireless device and open up your web browser to myrouter.local to get connected. The setup had a “Quick Setup” mode to get everything running quickly but I found that the quick setup would not work for my environment. The quick setup expects that you’ve connected your Wireless Router directly to a cable modem and in my case I’m connected to a layer three switch behind an ASA firewall. After resetting the router and doing the manual setup though, everything was good. ...

I have to be honest here, I’d heard of Scale Computing before but never really paid too much attention to them. That is, until I got to see them present at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston Massachusetts this year. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtualization Field Day 5. This was the only compensation given and did not influence the content of this article. ...

What can I say? We started building servers on top of servers and it temporarily blew people’s minds. The next logical step is to build a cloud inside a cloud. Ravello Systems is trying to make this process simple and easy. Ravello Systems was kind enough to present at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston at the end of June and I’m happy that I was able to participate at a delegate. They presented some really fun technology. ...

Orchestrating a disaster recovery scenario is no simple task. It involves setting up an entirely different data center, figuring out how to manage IP Addresses after a failover, having procedures for users in an outage event and figuring out how to fail back after the disaster is over. Handling orchestrated DR has gotten much easier in the last ten years thanks to virtualization but it’s still not a walk in the park. VMware’s Site Recovery Manager, Zerto and Veeam have dominated this market over the past several years but there is a new kid in town. I got to see OneCloud at Virtualization Field Day 5 and I think they’ve got something worth a first look. ...

It’s pretty weird to get excited about backups, but I’ve found myself thinking how cool the new technology that Rubrik’s designing. If you haven’t heard of these guys yet, you will. They presented at Virtualization Field Day 5 in Boston and had some new announcements that will blow your socks right off your feet. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtualization Field Day 5. This was the only compensation given and did not influence the content of this article. ...

CTO Satyam Vaghani was kind enough to announce several new products and features relating to the future of PernixData at Virtualization Field Day 5. If you’re not familiar with PernixData, they got their start with their FVP product which provided server side flash for both a read cache or a write-through cache. I’ve used the product several times and it really does some amazing things to smooth out latency and can give your storage array some serious umph! ...

Last year I wrote a post on VMTurbo and its method of using the idea of a market economy to manage your infrastructure. If you need a refresher (or because you didn’t read my blog, shame) take a look here. If you aren’t going to read it, the gist is that VMTurbo monitors your virtual environment and uses the hardware as though it is a supply, and the workloads that run on it as the demand. Based on the demand of a workload and supply of a resource there is a cost associated with the workload, and VMTurbo uses these metrics to determine the most cost effective way to balance these. ...

I got up this morning to receive news that I had completed the qualifications for the VMware Certified Design Expert certification. This is a group of around 200ish individuals who have completed this exhaustive process which included three exams, submitting an enterprise design and then defending that design in front of a panel of other VCDXs. From the VMware education site: VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) is the highest level of VMware certification. This elite group is comprised of design architects highly-skilled in VMware enterprise deployments and the program is designed for veteran professionals who want to validate and demonstrate their expertise in VMware technology. ...

Last week was packed full of announcements since Microsoft Ignite and EMC World were two large trade shows happening simultaneously. One announcement that excited me was a free virtual storage appliance from EMC. The appliance has the same look and feel of a VNXe but is completely virtual. You know what that means? If you’re like me, you like to tinker with things in a lab environment so as to not destroy a critical production network. Also, if you happen to write posts on things like VMware Site Recovery Manager, you’ll want to have a storage array that can replicate to a second one. That leaves you with the Netapp Simulator or the HP StoreVirtual appliance unless you want to actually buy two storage arrays. (That ain’t cheap). Well, now we have the EMC vVNX. ...