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Another year has come and gone. The aspirations that we had for our past trip around the sun have been extinguished and a new set of goals wrapped in confident optimism are on our horizons. For many, the end of the year is used to recharge and take a break from work to celebrate with our families. Now with rejuvenated ambition we can set our backlog of objectives for a new year’s worth of challenges. This post attempts to relate some agile principles used for work in your everyday struggle to meet the new year’s goals. ...

If you follow me on twitter, you’ve probably seen a little bit of back and forth between myself and a Seattle fellow named Jason Langer. Jason and I have known each other for several years now over social media channels due to our similar interests in VMware technologies. I usually run into Jason only once a year at VMworld, but it’s one of these situations where I feel like we chat often enough just because of twitter conversations. ...

A recent vendor product briefing during Tech Field Day 12 got me thinking about the term “pay-as-you-go”. In my line of work, I talk about public cloud a decent amount and maybe I take pay-as-you-go for granted. When I think about this term it means that as soon as I’m done with a resource, I can destroy it and no longer have to pay for it anymore. It also means that I can scale when I need to and just start paying for the new resources as I start consuming them. ...

I was pretty unsure of the value proposition from DriveScale in the weeks preceding Tech Field Day 12. Maybe the reason is because I’m not a Hadoop expert by any means. They have a pretty interesting idea though, so I wanted to make sure others were clear about what their solution was capable of. In a virtualized world, we’re pretty familiar with decoupling disks from our storage. It’s done via storage arrays that present iSCSI, Fibre Channel, NFS or whatever. Once we’ve presented a pool of disks to our hypervisor, we can carve up small virtual disks to be used with our virtual machines. In a Hadoop world, we want to have direct access to our drives so that HDFS can manage the storage. For this, we usually have rack mounted pizza box type servers with a certain amount of storage in them and then we can add multiples of them to form a cluster. DriveScale wanted to give HDFS some extra flexibility by allowing a pool of disks to be added, or removed to our servers. ...

I’ve always liked the idea of taking a series of Microsoft PowerShell scripts and putting them behind a user interface so that I can give the tool to other users. I’m not sure why this idea appeals to me, but probably because it makes me feel like a programmer, if only for a little while. I came across this post by Stephen Owen and I had to try it out. The project that I picked for this was based on the AWS PowerShell tools that I hadn’t used yet. Let’s face it, this is a good way to check out two different things, I didn’t have much experience with: The AWS PowerShell Tools and XAML for creating GUIs. ...

If you’re trying to get started with vRealize Automation and don’t know where to get started, you’re in luck. Pluralsight has just released my course on “Getting Started with vRealize Automation 7”, which will give you a great leg up on your new skills. In this course you’ll learn to install the solution, configure the basics, connect it to your vSphere environment and publish your first blueprints. The course will explain why you’d want to go down the path of using vRA 7 in the first place and how to use the solution. ...

vRealize Automation has had a different upgrade process for about every version that I can think of. The upgrade from vRA 7.1 to 7.2 is no exception, but this time you can see that some good things are happening to this process. There are fewer manual steps to do to make sure the upgrade goes smoothly and a script is now used to upgrade the IaaS Components which is a nice change from the older methods. As with any upgrade, you should read all of the instructions in the official documentation before proceeding. ...

It’s the time of year in the United States where we celebrate Thanksgiving. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s a holiday where we give thanks for those things which have blessed us and to take a moment to reflect on all the good things that we have. I recently came home from Tech Field Day 12 and was reflecting how some people have positively affected my career and possibly had no clue what kind of impact they’ve made. ...

Customers have a ton of requirements around log aggregation, file shares, media streaming repositories, and just a simple place to store objects. It can be difficult to manage all of these different use cases but Dell EMC Isilon might just be the solution that can help to manage these requirements. Many times customers have several small islands of storage used for different purposes. Maybe this is because of a brand new requirement like “all security camera data will be stored for seven years”, which might require some additional storage space. Whatever the reason, companies many times will have small islands of storage, possibly even from different storage companies. This can become tough to manage and require more storage administrators with differing skill sets. ...

I was pretty unfamiliar with Cohesity until the recent Tech Field Day 12 presentation but they’ve been receiving a lot of buzz in the industry. If you’re like I was and weren’t paying enough attention, you should at least check them out. Cohesity’s go to market strategy is based around covering all aspects of the secondary storage market. The thought being that there are way too many solutions in use by the enterprise and that all of these different solutions makes it difficult to manage. For example, the secondary storage solutions include media servers, backup managers, target storage for backups, cloud gateways, test/dev storage, file shares for archives and a copy of data for analytics. This is a big task to tackle but the real goal for Cohesity is to replace all of these individual server types into a single scale-out solution. ...