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Hewlett-Packard is unveiling a new product called HP OneView which is designed to give you a one stop shop to managing all of your data center management responsibilities. If you’re familiar with the HP System Insight Management and Insight Control, you are probably aware of the difficult setup procedures required to get everything setup correctly and running smoothly. The products are really useful in having a single place to manage the data center, but the setup process is a bit tedious. My take on HP OneView is that it is a complete revamp of the HP SIM design which should be a welcomed site to those of you familiar with the old process. ...

vSphere 5.5 went GA on Sept 22nd 2013. If you’re ready to upgrade your home or work environment, here are some suggestions: Upgrade order 1. Take a Backup! You want to have a backup of your vCenter database in case the unthinkable happens. You will probably want to backup your SSL certificate folder as well. It can be located here: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%VMWareVMware VirtualCenter It may also be worth your time to save an updated host profile so that you can re-apply it if needed after your upgrade. Perhaps your host upgrade fails and you re-install from scratch. Now you’ve got all your configs that can be re-applied quickly. ...

If you’ve got a some hardware lying around for your lab, Windows Server 2012 may be a great solution for a home storage device. You can now do both block (iSCSI) and NAS (NFS) on the same server, as well as having an OS to install some management apps on it. In my lab, I use this management server to run Veeam for my backups, PRTG network monitor for bandwidth tracking, as well as using this server for both iSCSI targets and NFS mounts. ...

Windows 8.1 is set to be released on October 17th but the Release Preview is available for download and testing as of right now. Some of the biggest criticisms of Windows 8 was the new MetroUI and lack of a start menu. Windows 8.1 isn’t abandoning these new features, but have tweaked them up a bit to make them slightly more user friendly. While Windows 8 may great for a tablet, normal PC users have been frustrated with the learning curve. ...

While I was at VMworld this year in San Francisco, there was a lot of buzz about this company called PernixData. Maybe the buzz was just from some of the superstars that built this company such as Co-Founders Satyam Vaghani (better known as the father of VMFS) and Poojan Kumar (also co-founder of Exadata). Given the smart minds that have been around the company since the start, I thought I better stop by their booth and at least say “hi”. ...

VMworld 2013 is now over and its time for a rundown of what went on during this years show. As always, this is THE event that virtualization junkies must attend. This year there was no shortage of things to do. Keynotes, Hands on Labs, Solutions Exchange, VMware Education Services, Blogger hang out, parties, meetings and social gatherings. I wear a Jawbone UP device that tracks my steps and it was not uncommon to hit 20,000 steps each day. Reminders for anyone going next year, that comfortable footwear is a must. ...

I’ve been interested in using twitter’s API to do some analytic analysis of things lately. If you’re interested in this as well, there are several sites that can help you do you’re own queries, or use the Microsoft Office analytic tool. Here are some interesting stats about VMworld. #VMWORLD stats #vExpert Stats I also thought it might be worth looking at where the vExperts call home (assuming geolocation was turned on and accurate, Yes, I’m talking to you Josh Andrews) ...

VMware announced their new product called VSAN this week at VMworld in San Francisco CA. The VSAN is a new offering that will allow customers to provision “shared” storage by using locally direct attached disks. Traditionally, in order to use the features like vMotion, customers had to have an external NAS or SAN device to house the virtual machines. VMware isn’t abandoning the idea of SAN or NAS, but they now have a lower cost offering that can help smaller businesses get more out of their capital investment. Consider disaster recovery scenarios where a company might not want to spend the upfront cost of a SAN that may never (hopefully) be used. This will allow a basic DR plan with less cost. ...

This week at VMworld 2013, VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the new features of vSphere 5.5. The entire list of updates can be found in the " What’s New?" file from VMware but here are some of the highlights. Single Sign on was completely re-written. I would bet that the #1 reason that users didn’t adopt vSphere 5.1 release was due to issues with single sign on. VMware re-wrote this code not only fix the bugs, but make the entire experience better. This feature was a necessity for VMware to move forward with the vSphere platform. Additional GPU Support. This may be a big deal for some companies who are afraid to switch to a VDI infrastructure because of limited graphics processors. 62 TB VMDK’s now supported. Bigger is always better… right? This could be a very big deal. I know several clients who got into a jam when they created their 2TB vmdks only to find out that they couldn’t snapshot them or expand the disks any further. 62TBs should suffice for now! :) Flash Read Cache. VMware now natively supports using SSD’s as read cache for specific VMDK files. In the past vSphere could use local SSDs for host cache. This was used to mitigate the issue of swapping to disk. If you have to swap to disk SSD is at least better than spinning disks right? Well now you can use local host SSDs as a read cache for an entire VM or maybe just a single disk. vSphere vCenter virtual Appliance can now support up to 5000 virtual machines. I’m having fewer and fewer reasons to build out an entire VM now. This makes me want to just deploy the vApp and be done with the whole process. Application HA. vSphere has been able to provide virtual machine high availability for a while now, but with the release of 5.5 they can also take action against guest services as well. Additional Announcements VMware NSX will be taking over for vCNS (vCloud Networking and Security). I was told that vCNS will still be available in 5.5 but future iterations would be inside the NSX Product. NSX uses the VXLAN protocols to virtualize the physical infrastructure. ESXi hosts will now be able to manage internal routing, switching and firewalls. ...

In the event that you’re heading to VMworld 2013 in San Francisco, this post should help to prepare you for what to expect. Packing This is a five-day event that will consist of a ton of walking, some bouts of sitting, social engagements, labs, and fun. Packing rule #1 - wear comfortable shoes. Walking back and forth from your hotel, to the conference center for sessions, to the solutions exchange and general moving about will destroy your feet. ...