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Zerto has been a great product for companies looking to deploy an easy to use disaster recovery solution. One of the limitations of the product was that it only worked with VMware vSphere, but not any more. Version 4 just dropped and it’s got a myriad of new goodies. New User Interface Cross-Replication from vSphere to Microsoft SCVMM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Sizing improvements More Secure Virtual Replication Appliances vSphere 6 support The most appealing new capability was the ability to fail over a vSphere environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This could save small businesses A LOT of money. Small businesses that have a disaster recovery requirement no longer need to have a dedicated co-lo and spend money on equipment when they may never use it. AWS provides compute, storage and network on an as-needed basis and most of the time, the disaster recovery site is not needed which correlates to savings. ...

Setting up a DHCP relay is a pretty common task that performed by network administrators when setting up a new LAN. If you’re not familiar with a DHCP Relay, take a look at the example below. In order for a client to get an IP Address from a DHCP Server, it sends out a broadcast once it’s plugged into the network. The broadcast is asking for any servers that are DHCP servers to reply. Remember that a broadcast is a frame that is forwarded to all hosts on a Local Area Network. The DHCP Server will reply and the client will get it’s IP Address. ...

The vSphere-land top virtualization blog voting is now over and theITHollow.com was voted #35 which is up from number forty last year. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank everyone who voted for the site. There are very few rewards for all the time that is spent posting content, but seeing that the hard work is benefiting others, and is useful to the community, are among the top for sure. ...

If you’re in the market for a Load Balancer and don’t mind that it’s virtual, check out Kemp’s Virtual Load Balancer. Even better is if you want to try stuff out in your lab because you can get the Virtual Load Balancer for free! There are some limitations, I mean everyone has to make money some how and theres no reason to buy the cow if you get the milk for free, am I right? ...

Many of my daily activities at work now revolve around the idea of a Hybrid Cloud so some of my home lab activities have also followed suit. I realized it had been a while since I wrote up the particulars of my home lab and I’ve added some equipment so this gives me a good opportunity to show some of the upgrades. Configuration The environment consists of four physical ESXi hosts that run most of my virtual machines. These servers have three nics that handle all of the virtual machine traffic and the NFS Storage traffic to a pair of Synology NAS devices. ...

There is a new kid in town when it comes to infrastructure monitoring. Opvizor is a pretty neat little solution for identifying issues in your environment before they become a problem. The install was simple enough, only requiring me to run an installer and connect it to my vCenter Server. Once that was done, it was a matter of clicking a button to scan and upload my data back to Opvizor’s servers (anonymized data of course). These uploads are scheduled to prevent all this manual nonsense, but I couldn’t wait to see what my environment looked like so I uploaded it right away. ...

You’ve got to be a serious geek to want to install your own SSL Certificates on your home NAS. I mean come on, who really has their own certificate authority sitting around at home and is so annoyed with a little warning page when they access the GUI? Well, since you’ve landed on this page, I assume that I’m in some similar company :) Login to your Synology NAS and open the control panel. Click Security and then the “Certificates” tab at the top. You’ll notice the subtle “Self-signed certificate” status blazoned in red lettering. Don’t worry, thats what we’re going to fix. ...

Amazing news that the latest version of vSphere has been announced. vSphere 6 is now just around the corner from being generally available, but one can assume that the VCP 6 exam is still several weeks away from being available. If you’re like me, your VCP 5 is scheduled to expire in March. AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Quick, study for an exam that you’ve already taken and passed in the past so that you can keep your certification and then take the VCP 6 which is likely just around the corner. ...

I got a chance to take a quick peak at the vCloud Air beta during the Early Access Program and wanted to share some of the experience. I found the solution very simple to use and straight forward, even without needing to look at any install guides or user manuals. The interfaces were very intuitive. Right off the bat, you get to select your virtual Private Cloud region and then create some virtual machines from pre-defined templates. The templates are based on bare bones operating systems templates such as CentOS, Windows 2012 etc and depending on the type of template you choose, a different pricing methodology will be applied. Let’s face it, open source OS’s are free and Windows isn’t. Gotta pay the bills right? ...

I had one of those serious first world problems where I was intermittently getting poor wireless connectivity from my upstairs bedroom at night. My wireless router is downstairs in my office on the opposite side of the house, and my neighbors’ wireless was also causing some interference. So I was about to get out my chainsaw to start taking out a wall and part of my upstairs floor, when I thought “Maybe a wireless extender would work for me?” ...