Posts

During Storage Field Day 6, I was fortunate enough to get presentation from Andrew Warfield from CohoData about a variety of things. I’ll say a variety mainly because my head is still swimming from all of the concepts that Andy was trying convey. If you don’t believe me, watch the videos and decide for yourself. WARNING!!! BE PREPARED TO PUT YOUR THINKING CAP ON! One of the concepts Andy was talking about was the idea that going forward, all arrays should be hybrid arrays. Immediately, my mind wondered what some of the “All Flash” array vendors would say about this, but he went on to explain this premise in more detail. ...

It’s hard to get too excited about a monitoring system, especially one that’s main focus is to notify a hardware vendor of a problem. However, Nimble Storage has an impressive phone home solution called InfoSight that they are leveraging for more than just fault notifications and opening tickets on failed hardware. This solution is being used for a variety of analytical purposes to both improve their product as well as improve the customer’s experience with their array purchase. ...

I’ve seen front-end storage systems before and never really been too impressed with them. My primary thoughts about a front-end storage system was this, “My storage array already has a front-end, why do I want to put another layer of abstraction in front of it.” Obviously, there is still a use case for having a single namespace to hide the underlying systems, which might be neat so that a company could use multiple arrays of different types or even vendors and have a single place to go to access that storage. For the most part, I still think that this is a luxury that many companies can’t justify since some extra time spent by the infrastructure team will do the job. ...

This week there will be another great TechFieldDay.com event, November 5th - 7th in Silicon Valley. If you’re not familiar with the Tech Field Days (and shame on you if this is the case), this is an event that brings together IT product vendors and independent bloggers to share thoughts and ideas. This event specifically focuses on enterprise storage and data protection for both physical and virtual environments. You guessed it, this one is called a Storage Field Day and it’s the sixth SFD that the folks at GestaltIT have put together. ...

During a recent install, I got stuck on an issue (or so I thought) assigning an SSL Certificate to some of the vRealize Automation Appliances. I went through all of the installation procedures and the appliance stated “SSL Certificate Installed Successfully”, but when I went to the appliance, the certificate still showed the default VMware certificate. You can see when I go to the appliance, I was getting a warning on the SSL Certificate. ...

The home lab got a vCAC (now renamed vRealize Automation) refresh to version 6.1 recently and although I’d posted a guide to installing vCAC 6 earlier, I found myself having a few errors with my vCAC 6.1 deployment. The only difference in my environment was the version of Windows I used for the IaaS components. Instead of using server 2008R2 as I did with 6.0, I used Server 2012 R2 for vCAC 6.1 since it was now supported. ...

I was asked by a coworker, why I blog. He asked, “Why would you spend the time writing, when people have official documentation to use?” His point was that it’s silly to write how-to articles about things that are already officially documented by a vendor. To further his curiosity, he wanted to know why I would post things that could possibly get me into trouble if I’m posting negative things or incorrect information. ...

I recently had to rebuild part of my home lab due to a very poor decision to host all of my nested ESXi hosts on a single SSD. Kids, Do NOT do that at home! Obviously this is a lab and budget was a constraint, but it was a bummer when my SSD finally failed. It might be useful to review some steps used to build ESXi Servers inside VMware Workstation. Especially since Workstation 10 can clone ESXi which makes things much quicker. ...

When I work with smaller sized customers, I often hear that they don’t have any networking monitoring software available. Usually there is some server monitoring there, and something that pings network devices, but nothing that can display how much bandwidth is being used, and when. If you are in this situation, I implore you to check out PRTG monitor from Paessler. This is a great piece of software, that can do much more than monitor your Internet bandwidth, but that’s what I use it the most for. There is a full version, but the free version will allow you to monitor up to 10 ports which is plenty if you’re just monitoring your WAN, or a few ports like your ESXi hosts in your home lab! ...

I never thought that I’d be writing this post, but the day has come where I decided to switch to an Apple laptop. If you’ve known me, you were probably aware of my disdain for Apple products. I was of the opinion that they are offering the same equipment with a higher price tag and people who purchased that stuff were suckers. So now, either I’ve been snookered into this mass hysteria of Mac Madness, or things aren’t really how I originally thought. ...