As many of us rejoiced at the release of VSAN 6.2 that came with vSphere 6 Update 2…those of us running DELL PERC based storage controllers where quickly warned of a potential issues and where told to not upgrade. VMwareKB 2144614 referenced these issues and stated that the PERC H730 and FD332 found in DELL […] Read More
VSAN 6.2 – Price Changes for Service Providers!
Who said big corporations don’t listen to their clients! VMware have come to the party in a huge way with the release of VSAN 6.2…and not only from a technical point of view. Ever since the release of VSAN the pricing structure for vCloud Air Service Provider partners has been off the mark in terms of […] Read More
VSAN 6.2 – Things Just Got Interesting!
There is a saying in our industry that Microsoft always get their products right on the third attempt…and while this has been less and less the case of late (Hyper-V 2012 didn’t exactly deliver) it is more or less an accurate statement. Having been part of the beta and early access blogger sessions for VSAN […] Read More
Preserving VSAN + DELL PERC Critical Drivers after ESXi 6.0 CBT Update
Last week VMware released a patch to fix another issue with Change Block Tracking (CBT) which took the ESXi 6.0 Update 1 Build to 3247720. The update bundle contains a number of updates to the esx-base including the resolution of the CBT issue. This patch updates the esx-base VIB to resolve an issue that occurs […] Read More
#VeeamOn 2015: Scale-out Backup Repository Will Be Brilliant for Cloud Service Providers
[UPDATE] – This feature will not be available for Cloud Connect in the initial releases but will be supported in future updates…. Hopefully sooner rather than later! Veeam has been releasing new features for Backup & Replication v9.0 for a while now, but the recent announcement around the Scale-out Backup Repository is probably the most […] Read More
First Look: PernixData Architect (Beta)
PernixData had a number of announcements at Virtualization Field Day back in June including details around their v3 release of FVP as well as the announcement of their Freedom Edition. The other announcement was around Architect which is PernixData’s play at deep storage Analytics and Intelligence. With the advantage of being plugged right into the ESXi […] Read More
First Look: Dell PowerEdge FX2 Converged Platform
For the last six months or so I’ve been on the look out for server and storage hardware to satisfy the requirement for new Management Clusters across our Zettagrid vCloud Zones… After a fairly exhaustive discovery and research stage the Dell PowerEdge FX2 dropped at the right time to make the newly updated converged architecture […] Read More
PernixData FVP Freedom: Setup and First Look
At the Virtualization Field Day back in June PernixData Announced they would be releasing a free version of their FVP software…FVP Freedom. Overnight Freedom was released and as I have been eager to put it to use in my Lab for a while now I’ve gone through the install steps and put together a guide/first look. […] Read More
Quick Tip: Re-IP VNX5300 …or any VNX
Our Operations Team where faced with an unfamiliar situation a few weeks back where we needed to re-ip an EMC VNX5300 that had it’s warranty extended and was relocated to a new Availability Zone. Generally once warranty terms and finance expire old SANs like this get returned to sender to be replaced by a newer […] Read More
Quick Post: Removing Datastore Tags and Mounts with PowerCLI
Over the past couple of weeks i’ve been helping our Ops Team decommission an old storage array. Part of the process is to remove the datastore mounts and paths to ensure a clean ESXi Host config as well as remove any vCenter Tags that are used for vCloud Director Storage Policies. Looking through my post […] Read More