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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. ...

I was asked to provide some twitter statistics for VMworld -Barcelona like I did for the VMworld San Francisco this year. Here were the results #VMWorld Tweets by time of day are as of US Central timezone. This is why there are so many at 2am. Central time is -7 hours behind Barcelona. Most Mentions Tweet Map #vExpert Most Mentions #VCDX ...

I think the Olsen twins have been using FT longer than VMware has. Awesome! So you’ve got your brand new shiny VMware cluster all setup with HA and think, “Man, I’m in great shape now. Downtime is a thing of the past!”. Well, not so fast! VMware High Availability just means that if a physical host fails, the virtual machines can reboot on another host which LIMITS your downtime. What if your machines are so critical that you can’t have this reboot time in the case of a host failure? The answer might be VMware Fault Tolerance (FT). ...

Today, VMware announced the new and much improved VMware vCenter Operations Management 5.8. The new features of 5.8 are poised to make this version of vCOps much more useful to hybrid environments that use both ESXi and Hyper-V, or hybrid cloud environments that utilize vCloud Director and Amazon Web Services. Extensibilty VMware has taken the approach that vCOps needs to be able to change quickly so that multiple types of platforms can be monitored from a the application. Being able to quickly handle different types of environments will likely increase the adoption of a VMware application, but it’s good for everyone. ...

The annual Chicago VMUG Users Conference will be held on Tuesday October 22nd and you will not want to miss this one. With the recent announcements at VMworld, this will be a great opportunity to learn about the new offerings that will affect the industry. Oh, and by the way, there is an opportunity to win a brand new VMware home lab valued at $4000. Jay Cuthrell is a thought leader within the Office of the CTO at VCE (A company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware, and Intel) working with service providers, systems integrators, ISVs, and media & entertainment companies to deliver converged infrastructure. He is a frequent industry speaker currently based on the West Coast of the United States. Previously, as a strategic technology consultant with cuthrell.com he worked with service providers, startup companies, and investment groups in addition to writing for ReadWrite and Telecompetitor. He has held CTO, VP, and GM roles at Digitel and NeoNova (an Azure Capital and Bridgescale Partners portfolio company) and infrastructure consulting roles working domestically and internationally for Fortune 500 clients. He also served at Scient (formerly iXL now Publicis), Nortel, Analysts International, IBM, and NCSU College of Engineering. He holds a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from North Carolina State University and grew up in Beaufort, NC. His blog can be found at fudge.org ...