Reviews

VMTurbo was kind enough to come to the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day 3, and present to a group of technical bloggers about their product “Operations Manager”. I was familiar (or thought that I was) with this product so I expected to see a presentation about some software that would give you alarms when virtual workloads started to misbehave. I found out that my perception about this product was misguided so I wanted to clear it up for anyone else who was under the same impression as I was. ...

I was fortunate enough to have spent some time at the Coho Data headquarters this week for the announcement that their new product, DataStream 1000, is now generally available. The announcement was made at the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day 3, which was streamed live and the recordings can be found online. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given. ...

If you are coming up on a storage refresh cycle soon, Pure Storage is worth taking a look at as your new storage array. I was fortunate enough to see them present their solution at Virtualization Field Day 3 this year and got a good look at their storage. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given. ...

Good news for all of you eagerly awaiting the next iteration of the PernixData FVP software. Version 1.5 is now in Beta and you can request the download for your own testing from the following link http://info.pernixdata.com/Betaprogram. Disclosure: At the time of this writing I am a PernixPro which entitles me to early access to software, licenses or other merchandise. The thoughts expressed in this post are my own and have not been vetted by PernixData. ...

While I was at VMworld this year in San Francisco, there was a lot of buzz about this company called PernixData. Maybe the buzz was just from some of the superstars that built this company such as Co-Founders Satyam Vaghani (better known as the father of VMFS) and Poojan Kumar (also co-founder of Exadata). Given the smart minds that have been around the company since the start, I thought I better stop by their booth and at least say “hi”. ...

I’ve been a huge fan of Microsoft Exchange ever since I’ve been involved in managing email servers. Exchange has been a topic of several of my posts this year because let’s face it, Exchange is the 100 lb gorilla of mail servers and has been for some time. But I’ve seen a fair number of colleges using a new mail system from Zimbra so I thought it was my duty to try it out. After all, there is a free 60 day trial of a VMware appliance available so what did I have to lose? ...

I’ve almost always preferred HP laptops for work purposes based on how stable they’ve been for me. But while shopping for my last laptop, I decided to try out the Samsung Series 9. To be honest, the biggest reason I decided to look at this laptop was the sleek design. I knew that I would be traveling a lot with my new position and having a light weight laptop was certainly preferable. In addition an SSD drive made me feel better about jostling the laptop around without damaging it. ...

I decided to check out the new HP Performance Viewer and found it to be pretty useful. The appliance comes as an OVF so it’s great for importing into your vSphere environment. Once it’s installed you can go to the management URL and all you have to do is provide the name of the vCenter and login credentials. That’s all for the configuration! At this point I’d give the appliance some time to gather statistics, but if you just can’t wait I’ll give you some of the details from my install. ...

I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about PHD Virtual after seeing them at VMworld and the Chicago VMUG Conference and thought that I’d try them out. I was quite pleased with their product and recommend that you check them out if you’re looking for virtual backup solutions. I know that the big player in the market seems to be Veeam so if you’d like a comparison of features, check out this information from ITComparison.com to get a non-biased opinion. ...

VMworld 2012 was in San Francisco this year and the weather was beautiful. San Francisco was a lovely host and the Moscone Center proved to be very capable of handling the large crowds that were around for the event. The Solutions Exchange was massive. It included companies like HP, EMC, Netapp as well as some startup companies like Tintri, PHD Virtual and a very new Cloud Physics which was the talk of VMworld this year. Check them out at http://www.cloudphysics.com. ...