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HP Recently announced OneView which looks to be poised to manage their converged infrastructure, and datacenter products. As the name might suggest it can be used to manage all your HP products from one console. One of the things that grabbed me was that it is deployed to a vSphere environment with an OVA file which makes it super easy to deploy. In the past some of the HP Management tools like Insight Control required a whole slew of prerequisites before the product could actually be installed. Once that was installed, there was a tedious process of configuring it with all of your network devices and if you didn’t configure them in the right order, they wouldn’t relate to each other correctly. ...

 I’m am very excited and honored to be voted in as a delegate for the Virtualization Field Day 3 event in Silicon Valley on March 5th through the 7th. This is an event that gets a group of independent delegates together and reviews, provides feedback and comments on different types of technology that are entering or shaping the virtualization segment of the Information Technology industry. Great companies with new products can come and give demonstrations on their solutions. If they have merit these delegates will likely tout how impressive they are through their social media channels, but if they have deficiencies are likely to point them out. ...

If you’ve got a home lab to play around in, it’s great to have remote access so that you can try things out from the road. This might mean purchasing an expensive firewall or VPN appliance but openvpn has a nice 2 user appliance that can be downloaded as an OVF file, right into your vSphere environment. Installation I mentioned that this is an OVF file, so you know the installation is going to be a snap. Download the bits from OpenVPN.net and deploy into your vSphere cluster. I’m not going to go through the entire OVF deployment, I think you’ll find it very simple even if you haven’t done it before. ...

Microsoft IPAM (IP Address Management) is a feature that was released in Windows Server 2012 to help administrators manage decentralized DHCP and DNS Servers. Previously administrators may have needed to use spreadsheets to keep track of DHCP Scopes, IP Addresses DNS Names etc but with IPAM installed, a single server can refresh all of this data and put it in a single, always up to date place. Deployment Guidelines There are a few things you should know before installing IPAM. ...

Good news for all of you eagerly awaiting the next iteration of the PernixData FVP software. Version 1.5 is now in Beta and you can request the download for your own testing from the following link http://info.pernixdata.com/Betaprogram. Disclosure: At the time of this writing I am a PernixPro which entitles me to early access to software, licenses or other merchandise. The thoughts expressed in this post are my own and have not been vetted by PernixData. ...

Mobility is no longer a challenge to traditional IT environments, it’s the standard. Users work from home to save office space, need to be connected during sales trips and are consistently not in the corporate office connected to the local area network (LAN). Combine this demand for a mobile workforce with the ever increasing security requirements put forth such as HIPPA and PCI-DSS etc make this a significant hurdle for IT departments. Microsoft Direct Access may be a solution that eases this hardship. ...

These days, companies are dealing more with mobility, than ever before. IT infrastructure is now spread out in the cloud, and users may be working from the road, remote offices or from home. This is making it more difficult to manage a secure IT Infrastructure. Microsoft is taking steps to allow IT Administrators to start controlling machines even when they aren’t connected to a corporate infrastructure. Microsoft Offline Domain Join was released as a new feature with Windows Server 2008 R2. This feature allows a machine that is not directly connected to a network with Active Directory, to be joined anyway. ...

Microsoft has a new file system designed to increase data integrity, scalability and availability called the Resilient File System (ReFS). This file system has leveraged many of the NTFS file system goodies and expanded them to make it more scalable and prevent corruptions. ReFS was released with Server 2012 and at the moment is designed for use with file shares. It cannot be used as a boot volume at the present time, but this file system seems poised to replace NTFS down the road. ...

Microsoft Storage Spaces feature used to handle data redundancy, scalability and performance. Storage Spaces takes a set of Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) and pairs them together to allow for; either failures of a disk, gaining the performance of multiple spindles, or gaining the space of multiple disks. Traditionally this has all been handled by creating a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) group. Some examples of RAID would be: Striping (RAID 0) Mirroring (RAID 1) Parity (RAID 5 or 6) Storage Spaces create a similar type of RAID Group but then throw a virtual disk on top of them so that multiple types of stripes can be used on the same disks. For example, three physical disks can be put into a storage space. From there, three separate types of VDISKs can be created, Mirrored, Spanned and Parity can then be placed on the same set of disks with no issue. The diagram below shows an example. ...

It has been an exciting year and I wanted to take a second to thank the sponsors of theITHollow.com. Maintaining a blog and putting out new content on a regular basis is a time-consuming activity and also costs money. Luckily, I’ve got some great sponsors and I look forward to working with them again next year. Thank you to: Also a BIG THANK YOU to Erik and Carolyn Schonsett for the awesome graphics on my site. If you’d like to see more of their work, or need graphics of your own, check out: ...