Sony MDS-X10 Giveaway courtesy of Veeam

We’ll be giving away a pair of the Sony MDR-X10 headphones courtesy of Veeam. If you’re in the market for a stylish set of shiny new headphones and don’t want to shell out hard earned cash for them, this is your lucky day. During the vsphere-land.com top virtualization blog contest I was fortunate enough to win a pair of these to give away on my site. Here is how you can win a pair of these headphones for yourself. ...

March 31, 2014 · 1 min · eshanks

Website Badges for Top 50 vsphere-land Bloggers -2014

Each year Eric Siebert at vsphere-land.com has a voting process where you can cast your ballot for your favorite virtualization blogs. He lists those blogs on his vlaunchpad site if you’re curious to see who made the list. Luckily again this year my friends over at whateverinspires.com were kind enough to provide a logo for any bloggers who made this prestigious list. This year there are Gold, Silver, and Bronze badges depending on your status. If you made the list, please feel free to download the image and use it on your site. ...

March 27, 2014 · 1 min · eshanks

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 1)

If you’re a vSphere Administrator and have compliance regulations to deal with, vShield Endpoint might save you a lot of hassle. From my own experience with PCI-DSS, it was important to limit the cardholder data environment scope. The fewer devices that touch credit card data, the fewer items that had to be protected. In the same breath, it was important to have Anti-Virus, malware protection, firewall rules and file integrity monitoring. vShield Endpoint allows for all of these things to be handled in a single package. This post looks specifically at Trend Micro’s Deep Security Product. ...

March 24, 2014 · 3 min · eshanks

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 2)

In the first post in this series, we deployed the vShield Endpoint host driver and installed the Trend Micro Deep Security Manager on a Windows VM. Trend Micro Deep Security Appliance Deployment First, we need to login to the Deep Security Manager which is conveniently accessed as a web page. Go the the DNS name of the Manager that you entered during the setup wizard in part 1 of this series. Log in with the username and password that you specified. ...

March 24, 2014 · 4 min · eshanks

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 3)

The first parts of this series focused mainly on how to install the Trend Micro Deep Security product and how to prepare your environment. This post shows you a bit more of what can be accomplished with the product. vShield Endpoint Part 1 vSheidl Endpoint Part 2 Policies This is the guts of the product. All the configurations you’ve done up to this point have been leading up to a solution that can help secure your environment and possibly make it comply with a regulatory body. ...

March 24, 2014 · 2 min · eshanks

Use CloudPhysics to Determine How Much SSD Cache to Buy

CloudPhysics continually surprises me with their innovation when providing cards for simulation purposes. I’ve posted a couple of times already about how I really like their AWS pricing calculator (they also have vCHS as well). Having a good idea about how much your existing environment will cost if you make modifications is a pretty big win for a CIO. While I was at GestaltIT’s Virtualization Field Day 3, two weeks ago, Irfan Ahmed showed us a new card that would simulate how much SSD Cache you should buy based on your current workloads. ...

March 19, 2014 · 3 min · eshanks

Getting started with vCNS

VMware has a very nice solution for managing network access between virtual machines. In a physical environment, blocking access between servers would require routing network traffic through a firewall. This might mean several vlans, subnets and routes. Luckily now that many infrastructures are virtual we have an alternative. vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) is a solution that can be used to block traffic between virtual machines. vCNS can be a bit intimidating so this is a quick, getting started, guide on how you can test it out in your environment. ...

March 17, 2014 · 3 min · eshanks

Atlantis USX with VMware VSAN?

Last week I attended the Virtualization Field Day 3 put on by the amazing staff at GestaltIT. One of the sessions was hosted by the folks at Atlantis Computing and they were giving us an overview of their Atlantis USX product. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given. Atlantis USX Overview Before we get to the crux of the issue, a quick refresher on what Atlantis USX does. The USX product will utilize existing SAN, NAS and DAS and combine it with a server ram to do caching. The value proposition is that Atlantis USX can carve out RAM to be used as either a whole datastore (SUPER FAST) or combine it with existing storage and have it act as a cache. Keeping the cache so close to the processor without having to go across a bus or HBA, which can add additional latency, can be an important addition to a performance strapped storage solution. ...

March 13, 2014 · 3 min · eshanks

CloudPhysics vSphere Design Based on Big Data Analytics

One of the companies I was most interested in seeing at the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day 3, was CloudPhysics. I was already a little familiar with the company because I’d written a post on my experience in the lab. While my original post was obviously good, you can’t really get a more passionate and knowledgeable explanation of the solution than from the Co-founder and CTO Irfan Ahmad. The presentations can be found online. ...

March 11, 2014 · 3 min · eshanks

Virtualization Field Day 3 Twitter Statistics

When there is a big event that I’m affiliated with, I like to do some quick analysis on the twitter statistics, just to put things into some perspective. For this query, we’ve looked at all tweets with the hashtag #VFD3 from March 5th - 7th specifically. This should take into account most of the Virtualization Field Day 3 Twitter Statistics. Enjoy. Oh and some of you tweet WAAAAAY to much. :) ...

March 10, 2014 · 1 min · eshanks