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Active Directory (AD) is the base of most enterprise level infrastructures and has been for some time. We have become accustomed to seeing this structure and depending on it. But AD has been a thorn in our side since virtualization has become popular due to the inability to take snapshots. This is no longer the case if your shop is running Windows Server 2012 with Active Directory. With the release of Active Directory 2012, Microsoft has added a new object called the VM GenerationID that allows us to snapshot AD Servers. ...

My brand new shiny HP Microserver arrived in the mail and I was excited to try it out. I had four 480GB OCZ SSDs to add to this baby server and wanted to get it up and running. Unfortunately, the HP Microserver is built for 3.5 inch drives. Luckily I found great solution. Newer Technology AdaptaDrive 2.5" to 3.5" Drive Converter Bracket. Attach your 2.5 inch SSD to this bracket, then attach the bracket to the HP MicroServer Drive Trays and you’re good to go. ...

Cloud Physics generated a lot of buzz during the 2012 VMworld in San Francisco. I remember them sharing a booth with Fusion-IO and having a large crowd most of the time. They had a little different idea about how to get viability into vSphere environments and it was through the concept of cards. The Installation of Cloud Physics may be one of the simplest ever done. 1. Go to the CloudPhysics site and sign up for their service. (There is a 30 day free trial available as well). ...

As many of you know I’ve been a fan of the VMware Product called Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for a disaster recovery solution, I even wrote an SRM 5.5 Guide for using it. But many people I talked to told me to check out Zerto as a DR solution because of how simple it was to use and setup. I figured that I owed it to them to at least try them out, and so they are now in my lab. ...

I was fortunate enough to get to spend an hour with Dmitriy Sandler from Nimble Storage to see what all the fuss was about with their product and more specifically their Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) File System. Hardware Overview Let’s cover some of the basics before we dive into CASL. The storage array comes fully loaded with all the bells and whistles, out of the box. All the software features are included with this iSCSI array and include items such as: ...

Hard drives are not the most fun thing to talk about, but it’s important to know some of the concepts when it comes to disk latency. Disk latency refers to the time delay between a request for data and the return of the data. It sounds like a simple thing, but this time can be critical to the performance of a system. We should be surprised that traditional hard disks work at all when we consider that head designed to read minute magnetic fields sits 3 nanometers off a platter is spinning between 5400RPM and 15,000 RPM. Amazing when you stop to think about it huh? ...

I recently had the opportunity to check out a new product called Maxta. If you’re not familiar with the company yet, that’s ok as it’s just now hitting the market with some vigor. The Generally Available (GA) version of Maxta is a software-centric solution that make the most out of storage all ready available on your servers. Maxta takes local storage on your ESXi hosts and creates a VMware datastore out of it. At first glance it’s hard not to immediately compare it to VMware new VSAN solution that is coming soon. Aside from the fact that Maxta is available right now, there are some other major differences. ...

After watching Alan Renouf’s video about Open-VMConsoleWindow, I got excited about PowerShell again. In my current job I don’t get to do much scripting anymore but wanted to give building a form for PowerCLI a try. I’ve secretly wanted to be a programmer as long as I didn’t have to do it full time. :) Using the video from Alan, and a Video from the LazyWinAdmin (included in this post) I created a fairly simple form that could run some commands on my home lab. My main goal was get a refresher on some PowerCLI and how to use Primal Forms. ...

This is a Site Recovery Manager 5.5 Guide to help understand the design, installation, operation and architecture of setting up VMware SRM 5.5 SRM 5.5 Architecture SRM 5.5 Installation SRM 5.5 Site Configuration SRM 5.5 VM Replication Configuration SRM 5.5 Array Replication Configuration SRM 5.5 Virtual Appliance Replication SRM 5.5 Protection Groups SRM 5.5 Recovery Plans SRM 5.5 Bulk IP Customizations SRM 5.5 Test Recovery SRM 5.5 Recovery SRM Gotchas Official Documentation Links SRM 5.5 Release Notes SRM 5.5 Compatibility Matrix SRM 5.5 Documentation Center SRM Port Numbers SRM Product Page ...

Solid State drives are much faster than their spinning disk predecessors, but can also have performance degradation due to how they interact with Operating Systems. Flash consists of blocks of data and those blocks are full of smaller items called pages. A typical SSD might have block sizes of 512KB and 4KB pages. There are 3 statuses that a healthy page could be in on a flash disk. Written to: Data from the OS has been written to the page. Unwritten to: The page is free and available to be written to by the Operation System. Invalid: The page has data in it, but is available to be overwritten by the Operating System. ...