Linkedin on The IT Hollow

Extending Windows System Drives with vSphere

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:29:13 +0000

vSphere has made it very simple to resize disks. They old days of finding larger disks to put in your severs and cloning or migrating data aren’t necessary now that virtualization has become widely used.

If you’re using vSphere you can easily extend non system drives by changing the size of the Hard Disk, and then going into the virtual machine and using diskpart or Disk Manager and extending the drive.

SAN Snapshots vs VMware Snapshots

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:33:24 +0000

I found people have a hard time understanding that a SAN Snapshot and a VMware snapshot are fundamentally different. I think because unless you’re a storage administrator, you’re probably not dealing a whole lot with snaps to begin with. VMware has made it more commonplace for System Administrators to deal with snapshot technology.

SAN Snapshots

Lets first look at how traditional SANs take snapshots.

To start we have 6 blocks being used. The file system has marked blocks which blocks are being used.

Exchange Split Brain ... On Purpose?

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:42:40 +0000

I was recently tasked with performing a company wide disaster recovery test. The test had the normal goals with a standard recovery time objective, and recover point objectives. Unfortunately, the test needed to be performed during the middle of a production day, and not affect production. Under normal circumstances we could assume that our production servers were disabled or destroyed in some manner and we could power up our DR servers and continue the business. During this test however we needed to make sure that both networks could run at the same time.