Last Friday Cory Romero announced the first intake of the 2016 VMware vExperts. As a five time returning vExpert it would be easy for me to sit back enjoy a perceived sense of entitlement that comes with being a vExpert…but times have changed. The award has changed and the way people feel about the program […] Read More
Rubrik Hands On: Initial Setup and Configuration
Why Veeam’s software-driven, hardware agnostic approach makes sense for backups Late last year I attended a bloggers briefing for the launch of Rubrik Converged Data Management where the secondary storage startup announced version 2.0 of their hardware plus software backup platform. This week Rubrik will be presenting at Tech Field Day 10 and have […] Read More
Top Posts 2015
2015 is pretty much done and dusted and it’s been an great year in for Virtualization is Life! There was a 300% increase in site visits this year compared to 2014 and 1600% increase in visits since the first year I began blogging in 2012. In 2015 I managed to pump out 110 Posts (including this […] Read More
Dell PowerEdge FX2: CMC Configuration Gotchya
Back in September I wrote an introductory post (If you haven’t read that post click here) on the DELL PowerEdge FX2 HCI hardware and why we had selected it for our VSAN Management platform. After a busy two months consisting of a VMworld, vForumAU and VeeamOn it’s finally time to put start working towards putting these babies into production. […] Read More
Quick Post: E1000 vs VMXNET3
There are countless posts out there comparing E1000s and VMXNET3 and why the VMXNET3 should (where possible) always be used for Windows VMs. http://rickardnobel.se/vmxnet3-vs-e1000e-and-e1000-part-2/ http://longwhiteclouds.com/2014/08/01/vmware-vsphere-5-5-virtual-network-adapter-performance/ Last week I was provisioning a new Windows 2012 R2 VM to act as a Veeam Repository. For mass storage we have MD3200i’s presenting block storage over iSCSI. Going through […] Read More
Released: PernixData FVP 2.5
PernixData have GA’ed FVP 2.5 and it’s got a number of enhancements over the previous 2.0 release. For those running ESXi an haven’t heard about FVP here is a quick summary: PernixData virtualizes server-side flash and server RAM across all hypervisor nodes in a compute cluster and hooks the high-speed server-side resources into existing VM I/O […] Read More
January vCenter and ESXi 5.5 Patch Releases: Critical CBT Bug Fixed
VMware released new builds for vCenter and ESXi 5.5 today. The builds contain mostly bug fixes, but I wanted to point out one fix that had affected those who use CBT as part of their VM backup strategy. Veeam users where initially affected by the bug…though Veeam released a work around in subsequent Veeam 8 builds this […] Read More
VCAP-VDCA550 – Objective 4.4 : Configure and manage vSphere Replication
One of the new Objectives in the VCAP-DCA 550 is around the vSphere Replication Appliance. The Blueprint specifics that there will be one Replication Appliance in the Exam Lab so safe to assume you will be getting a question on vSR. Objective 4.4– Configure and manage vSphere Replication Skills and Abilities Configure and manage a […] Read More
CloudPhysics: Enhanced Storage Analytics Cards [Part 2] – Snapshots Gone Wild 2
Following up from Part 1 which focused on the Datastore Contention v2 Card, I’ll shift focus to what can sometimes be a Virutalization Admins worst nightmare…Snapshots. Snapshots are not backups (repeat x100) …but backup systems such as Veeam utilize VMware Snapshots to do their thing…and sometimes the process of SnapShot consolidation can fail, leaving unplanned SnapShots in […] Read More
PowerCli IOPS Metrics: vCloud Org and VPS Reporting
We have recently been working through a product where knowing and reporting on VM Max Read/Write IOPS was critical. We needed a way to be able to provide reporting on our clients VPSs and vCloud Organisation VMs. vCOPs is a seriously great monitoring and analytics tool, but it has got a flaw in it’s reporting […] Read More