Posts

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. ...

I’ve been a huge fan of Microsoft Exchange ever since I’ve been involved in managing email servers. Exchange has been a topic of several of my posts this year because let’s face it, Exchange is the 100 lb gorilla of mail servers and has been for some time. But I’ve seen a fair number of colleges using a new mail system from Zimbra so I thought it was my duty to try it out. After all, there is a free 60 day trial of a VMware appliance available so what did I have to lose? ...

This is a series of posts designed to help readers understand how the Internet works. This specific post looks directly at how devices know what machines are on their network segment. In previous posts, we looked at how machines communicate on the same network by utilizing frames, and how machines on different network segments use packets. The next logical question is, “How do machines know if these machines are on the same network or not?” The answer to this question is subnetting. ...

This is a series of posts designed to help readers understand how the Internet works. This specific post looks directly at collision domains. Ethernet uses a process called “Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection” or CSMA/CD for short. This is a very long way of explaining the process of how network adapters can share the same media to communicate. Think about it if you have 10 machines on a network that are all sharing the same wires or devices, how can any of the devices understand anything with all those frames? ...

This is a series of posts designed to help readers understand how the Internet works. This specific post looks directly at how machines on different network segments communicate. In my previous post, we looked at how two machines on the same network segment exchange information by using frames. So what happens when two machines on different segments need to communicate? Encapsulation Before we get too involved in the discussion, we should take a peak at what an IP packet looks like. IP Packets relate to Ethernet frames much like one nesting doll relates to the rest in the set. ...

This is a series of posts designed to help readers understand how the Internet works. This specific post looks directly at how machines on the same network segment communicate with each other. We’ll look at the concept of a network segment in a future post, but for now all you need to think about is how two computers communicate on a Local Area Network. MAC Addresses Before we discuss how machines on the same LAN segment communicate, we need to understand what Media Access Control (MAC) addresses are. A MAC address is the physical address of a network adapter. These are 48 bit addresses that are expressed as 12 digit hexadecimal notation and are unique to each network adapter. Each manufacturer has an assigned range that they are to use for their first 24 bits, this is known as the Organizationally Unique Identifier (OUI). The second 24 bits are known as the Network Interface Controller (NIC) specific and must be unique within that vendor’s range. Keeping these ID’s unique is imperative for successful LAN communication. ...

HP announced a new virtual storage appliance (VSA) recently at their annual HP Discover conference. This is a virtual appliance based on the StoreOnce line (formerly known as D2D) of hardware appliances that HP has sold for a long time. These appliances have the catalyst software which allows for deduplication of all your backup data, hence the term StoreOnce. These devices have allowed administrators to switch from the older tape based backups to a virtual tape library (VTL) or a NAS type backup solution. It has replication options in it which allow for deduplicated data to be migrated or copied without re-hydrating the backups and wasting valuable bandwidth. It also allows for federated backups and when matched with HP Data Protector 8 (also newly released) can throttle bandwidth during backup operations in order to prevent production slow downs. ...