virtual insanity

If it sounds too good to be true, it can still be true – PernixData FVP

Brandon Riley — Fri, 10 May 2013 19:13:54 +0000

If you said your mission was to “bring scale out storage to every virtualized datacenter”, you can bet that your Twitter follower count would drop immediately, and your peers would think you had gone off the deep end. That is, unless your name was Satyam Vaghani, and you had already invented VMFS, brought VAAI [...]

One Blox To Rule Them All. . .

Brandon Riley — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:57:07 +0000

This past week, I had the good fortune of attending Storage Field Day 3 (SFD) in Denver, Colorado. Field Days are events where a group of independent IT professionals chosen by a committee of like-minded people are brought together with start-ups, and mature companies who have new, innovative products. These companies all have [...]

The Application Blueprint … is it the Future of Software Distribution?

Aaron Sweemer — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:25:21 +0000

I remember many years ago when I was studying at the University of Maryland, one of my professors listed WordPerfect as one of the requirements for his class. So I went down to the campus bookstore and bought a copy. The clerk handed me a big bulky box and I remember thinking “gee, this [...]

vShield App Upgrade Tips for the Paranoid*

Brandon Riley — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:01:35 +0000

If you haven’t yet upgraded vShield App to version 5.1.2, here are a few tips not included in the instructions that could save you some pain during the process. Before you do anything, the obvious first step would be to snapshot your vShield Manager VM. Right after that, I recommend going in and setting [...]

My next chapter…

Scott Sauer — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:11:28 +0000

Making career choices is never an easy thing to do as there is no manual or guide book that helps you along the way. But like with most things in life, we take the millions of different pieces of information and form a conclusion that makes sense personally. I have been with VMware [...]

Download the VMware vCAC Icon Pack

Scott Sauer — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 16:06:33 +0000

Introduction VMware vCloud Automation Center is a very powerful tool that many of my customers are starting to deploy within their organizations. What is vCloud Automation Center you say? Directly from our vCAC website: “Rapidly deploy and provision cloud services across private and public clouds, physical infrastructures, hypervisors and public cloud providers with VMware [...]

Keep SRM From Renaming Datastores on Recovery

Brandon Riley — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:19:19 +0000

VMware Site Recovery Manager is one of the best products in the VMware arsenal. If you’re using SRM, there have been some welcome changes in recent versions. One is the sheer magic of automatically resignaturing your datastores, and managing the whole process transparently. The only problem is, when the datasores fail over, they get renamed like [...]

Limiting vCOps Access to vCenter Resources Using Permissions

Brandon Riley — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 15:41:56 +0000

If you’ve found your way to this blog post, you have likely already read, or even implemented the VMware KB articles on this. I am not going to link them here, as there are some missing pieces in each of them. With several hours of trauma under my belt, and a few e-mails back and [...]

Set Your MaxHWTransferSize for vSphere Hosts on VMAX

Brandon Riley — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:45:34 +0000

I finally got around to trying the new settings for MaxHWTransferSize on my VMAX connected vSphere hosts, and it really is a shocking performance boost when doing Storage vMotions. Basically we’re telling the VAAI hardware assist to use 4x larger chunks to do this data copy in the background. Net result is any VAAI [...]

Removing an Orphaned Port Profile from the Nexus 1000v

Brandon Riley — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 15:43:00 +0000

Now that Cisco is giving away the Nexus 1000v, I am guessing we will see less people removing 1000v’s and going back to the standard vDS. If you do need to remove a 1000v instance however, there is a possibility that certain port profiles will remain in vCenter after the removal. Here’s how to fix [...]