Varrow Blogs

I haven’t been really talking about the fact that I was pursuing my VMware VCDX certification over the last 6 months or so. It’s a long process that takes a lot of work and I didn’t want to mention it in case it didn’t end well. I’ve been working on this post over the last [...]

Day 1 here at VMworld 2010 has come and gone, and from my perspective, this is the pinnacle of engineering dreams. Another Varrow employee put it as the Land of Milk and Bunnies!? This is a great place to come and learn a lot of different things about our beloved VMware. : insert singing chorus [...]

Howdy from “abnormally cool yet virtually hot” San Francisco, home of VMworld 2010. There is no shortage of fun and geekiness at this years event, lord knows I am paying the fun tax today from the awesome WuPaaS event at the Thirsty Bear yesterday evening. Conversations were alive from the likes of @rbrambley, @rickvanover, @aarondelp, @2vcps, and @kendrickcoleman to name a few. All in all a formidable event that is the talk of the town.
Fast forward to this morning, Awaking from a pool of…

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What a long day. I’m beat. I’ve been in San Francisco for a week now. I had to fly in last Monday for my VCDX defense in Palo Alto…. I’m already starting to feel drained from being on the other side of the country from home. Today was the first day of VMworld, you know, [...]

Replication in the IT space is pretty common place.  We replicate just about everything from SAN’s and NAS arrays to backup appliances.  Eventually during discussions around replication the “how big of a pipe do I need” question has to be addressed.  To figure this out is not complicated but it can be a pain to [...]

Its amazing the progress being made over the last several years specifically with hardware offload from the compute perspective. Its accelerated to the point where generally speaking, compute has no longer been a point of contention in most environments. This is primarily due to the fact that most processors out for x86 architectures now support some layer of hardware extension or offload. With the introduction of AMD-V and Intel-VT back in the mid 2000’s, often once repetitive tasks performed…

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I learned something new about NFS exports on a recent EMC NS480 project. The client I was working with wanted some CIFS shares that could be accessed by both Windows and NFS clients at the same time. I initially thought that this wouldn’t be possible because the CIFS shares were going to be on a [...]

Just a quick note about a quiet change to how ESX 4.1 handles SSH access:  In previous versions of ESX, you would open the VI client or vSphere client, connect directly to the host and create a user with “allow shell access” checked.  With 4.1, you now also need to go to the Permissions tab and [...]

I recently have had a few people ask me what Cisco UCS adapter placement policies are used for and how/when to use them. This post will hopefully answer those questions and give a few examples. First I will start with the Cisco definition of what vNIC/vHBA placement policies are. This definition was copied from the [...]

Well its that time again. Another soon to be, wildly successful, overly indulgent, pot of gold on the horizon we like to call VMworld. Its year 7 for you new comers, my 4th. And although its old hat for me, I never get tired of the hoopla heading into the final hours.
The parties percolating, the labs a building, the dry run sessions being murmured across this planet, are all tell tell signs of a storm a brewing. You see, there is no bigger virtualization gathering on the planet than…

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A while back I wrote about best practices for CLARiiON and Virtual Provisioning, and while it was an excellent feature when introduced with FLARE 28.5,..it’s gotten even better in FLARE 30. If your not versed on the concept of Storage Pools yet then search through www.varrowblogs.com as there is a ton of good info on [...]

EMC is set to release a new version of the FLARE operating system for CLARiiON CX4 arrays in the next couple weeks.  This version, FLARE 30, includes a number of highly anticipated features and I have a lot of customers anxiously awaiting its availability.  Two major new features are FAST (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) and [...]

Back around the end of 2009, EMC released the first promising step towards automated tiering Nirvana within their storage platforms.  And while it was a step in the right direction, that main drawback at least in the CLARiiON and Celerra arrays was that data had to be tiered at the LUN level…meaning that the whole [...]

If you haven’t heard yet, VMware will be changing its licensing model (yeah, again) for some of its vCenter based products like Site Recovery Manager.  At least the per processor licensing model for vSphere will stay the same.  When I first heard about this change my first thought was, WT* is VMware smokin’ over there!  [...]