As many of you know I’ve been a fan of the VMware Product called Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for a disaster recovery solution, I even wrote an SRM 5.5 Guide for using it. But many people I talked to told me to check out Zerto as a DR solution because of how simple it was to use and setup. I figured that I owed it to them to at least try them out, and so they are now in my lab. ...
I recently had the opportunity to check out a new product called Maxta. If you’re not familiar with the company yet, that’s ok as it’s just now hitting the market with some vigor. The Generally Available (GA) version of Maxta is a software-centric solution that make the most out of storage all ready available on your servers. Maxta takes local storage on your ESXi hosts and creates a VMware datastore out of it. At first glance it’s hard not to immediately compare it to VMware new VSAN solution that is coming soon. Aside from the fact that Maxta is available right now, there are some other major differences. ...
After watching Alan Renouf’s video about Open-VMConsoleWindow, I got excited about PowerShell again. In my current job I don’t get to do much scripting anymore but wanted to give building a form for PowerCLI a try. I’ve secretly wanted to be a programmer as long as I didn’t have to do it full time. :) Using the video from Alan, and a Video from the LazyWinAdmin (included in this post) I created a fairly simple form that could run some commands on my home lab. My main goal was get a refresher on some PowerCLI and how to use Primal Forms. ...
I was asked to provide some twitter statistics for VMworld -Barcelona like I did for the VMworld San Francisco this year. Here were the results #VMWorld Tweets by time of day are as of US Central timezone. This is why there are so many at 2am. Central time is -7 hours behind Barcelona. Most Mentions Tweet Map #vExpert Most Mentions #VCDX ...
I think the Olsen twins have been using FT longer than VMware has. Awesome! So you’ve got your brand new shiny VMware cluster all setup with HA and think, “Man, I’m in great shape now. Downtime is a thing of the past!”. Well, not so fast! VMware High Availability just means that if a physical host fails, the virtual machines can reboot on another host which LIMITS your downtime. What if your machines are so critical that you can’t have this reboot time in the case of a host failure? The answer might be VMware Fault Tolerance (FT). ...
Today, VMware announced the new and much improved VMware vCenter Operations Management 5.8. The new features of 5.8 are poised to make this version of vCOps much more useful to hybrid environments that use both ESXi and Hyper-V, or hybrid cloud environments that utilize vCloud Director and Amazon Web Services. Extensibilty VMware has taken the approach that vCOps needs to be able to change quickly so that multiple types of platforms can be monitored from a the application. Being able to quickly handle different types of environments will likely increase the adoption of a VMware application, but it’s good for everyone. ...
The annual Chicago VMUG Users Conference will be held on Tuesday October 22nd and you will not want to miss this one. With the recent announcements at VMworld, this will be a great opportunity to learn about the new offerings that will affect the industry. Oh, and by the way, there is an opportunity to win a brand new VMware home lab valued at $4000. Jay Cuthrell is a thought leader within the Office of the CTO at VCE (A company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware, and Intel) working with service providers, systems integrators, ISVs, and media & entertainment companies to deliver converged infrastructure. He is a frequent industry speaker currently based on the West Coast of the United States. Previously, as a strategic technology consultant with cuthrell.com he worked with service providers, startup companies, and investment groups in addition to writing for ReadWrite and Telecompetitor. He has held CTO, VP, and GM roles at Digitel and NeoNova (an Azure Capital and Bridgescale Partners portfolio company) and infrastructure consulting roles working domestically and internationally for Fortune 500 clients. He also served at Scient (formerly iXL now Publicis), Nortel, Analysts International, IBM, and NCSU College of Engineering. He holds a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from North Carolina State University and grew up in Beaufort, NC. His blog can be found at fudge.org ...
vSphere 5.5 went GA on Sept 22nd 2013. If you’re ready to upgrade your home or work environment, here are some suggestions: Upgrade order 1. Take a Backup! You want to have a backup of your vCenter database in case the unthinkable happens. You will probably want to backup your SSL certificate folder as well. It can be located here: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%VMWareVMware VirtualCenter It may also be worth your time to save an updated host profile so that you can re-apply it if needed after your upgrade. Perhaps your host upgrade fails and you re-install from scratch. Now you’ve got all your configs that can be re-applied quickly. ...
If you’ve got a some hardware lying around for your lab, Windows Server 2012 may be a great solution for a home storage device. You can now do both block (iSCSI) and NAS (NFS) on the same server, as well as having an OS to install some management apps on it. In my lab, I use this management server to run Veeam for my backups, PRTG network monitor for bandwidth tracking, as well as using this server for both iSCSI targets and NFS mounts. ...
Windows 8.1 is set to be released on October 17th but the Release Preview is available for download and testing as of right now. Some of the biggest criticisms of Windows 8 was the new MetroUI and lack of a start menu. Windows 8.1 isn’t abandoning these new features, but have tweaked them up a bit to make them slightly more user friendly. While Windows 8 may great for a tablet, normal PC users have been frustrated with the learning curve. ...