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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
VMworld 2011 was held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Over 25,000 attendees this year. It was held in Las Vegas, but the sites and attractions didn’t take away from the event. Despite all the distractions that Las Vegas can provide, there was too much going on at VMworld to get caught up in the city. My favorite part of VMworld was the Hands on Labs. After signing up for the specific lab you wanted, you were ushered to your assigned desk. There were dual screen workstations setup at every desk and very straight forward instructions on how to complete the labs. These labs would get very in depth and would show you why and what was happening behind the scenes when you would perform your operations. I especially enjoyed the Netapp lab. ...