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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. ...

In order to deploy a fully provisioned automated deployment of a server we have to look past just deploying a virtual machine OS and configuring an IP Address. In order to get something usable we also need to configure the server with some applications or make post provisioning changes. For instance we might want to install Apache after deploying a Linux machine. In vRealize Automation deployments invoke a post-provisioning stub to call vRealize Orchestrator workflows to make additional changes. This works very well on a vSphere environment since we can leverage VMtools to access the guest OS. But if you’ve ever deployed an instance in Amazon EC2 you’ll know that this isn’t quite as easy. EC2 instances don’t have VMTools to allow us into the guest OS. To make matters worse, the current version of vRealize Automation doesn’t pass the IP address of the guest Operating System to vRO. See this KB article from VMware for more information. ...

It may be necessary to connect to a Linux Guest thats that been provisioned in Amazon Web Services so that you can perform additional operations on it. One of the ways you might want to configure your instances is through vRealize Orchestrator. One of the hang ups with using vRealize Orchestrator to connect to your Linux EC2 instances is that you’ll need an SSH key to connect. This post shows you how you can do this. ...

OK, I know that most of the known world is all of a sudden working on making everything scriptable so that it can be automated or just run from a command line, but come on we still use the GUI for some quick tasks don’t we? One of the cool things about the vSphere Web Client is its ability to create a custom search based on a set of criteria. Just to recap, I said there was a cool feature of the vSphere Web Client. ...

Have you ever tried logging into vRealize Automation and gotten an Incorrect username/password but you’re positive you typed everything in correctly? You try again and find out that if you put the User Principal Name suffix everything works fine. If you’re using a solution like vRealize Automation and notice the login doesn’t work unless you specify a a User Principle Name (UPN) in the form of [email protected], try the following correction. ...

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. ...

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. ...