Varrow Blogs

Cisco today announced a new technology called Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV).  Not a great name…not cool like vMotion or anything but it’s still pretty neat.  My background is heavily networking so I love the fact that the networking field is now working tightly with virtualization (and storage..but not today).  If you remember back when I [...]

One of the main advantages with introducing virtualization into an environment is the ability to logically provision compute resources on demand.  This allows for a tremendous amount of flexibility in dynamically scaling up to meet the needs of a workload and to ensure maximum utilization of physical servers, but what happens when resource utilization goes [...]

It’s all over for the 146GB drives.  Last week EMC announced that the 146GB fibre channel disk drives will no longer be available for new Clariion and Celerra platforms.  I don’t see this as a huge deal to most customers but for some very specific applications the drives were very useful. 
Some databases that we run [...]

When you’re using an HP C-Class with Flex-10 adapters there is an option called Smart Link that you can enable which passes the status of the links from the chassis switch down to the blade.  This way the blade knows if its uplinks have failed and can fail over as necessary.  There is a bug [...]

In case you missed it, the release of the Citrix online plug-in v11.0 this past year signaled the end of Program Neighborhood.  PN is considered a legacy client which allows for making direct connections to Presentation or XenApp servers.  While there are certainly better ways to provide access to Citrix resources in a user environment, [...]

I have been tasked with setting up a Cisco Catalyst 6509 that Cisco loaned us in our lab. I wanted to get a good idea of what IOS was already on the switch, so I consoled in:
Console> sh vers
WS-C6509 Software, Version NmpSW: 8.1(3)
Copyright (c) 1995-2003 by Cisco Systems
NMP S/W compiled on Oct 10 2003, [...]

I got the chance to play around with a new WYSE P20 thin client today at our lab.  The new P20 is designed specifically to take advantage of the new PCoIP technology found in VMware View 4.  What makes this thin client different is that is optimizes performance using a dedicated HARDWARE PCoIP engine from [...]

Taking a break from blogging about virtualization, storage and disaster recovery, I thought I’d blog about the other big part of my life these days, baby management. My Wife recently gave birth to twin girls back in October and the road traveled so far as been quite challenging, but rewarding.
I have discovered along the [...]

Virtualization has been around for a while (Timeline of virtualization development). It is not a new concept. I started playing around with virtualization when I obtained a copy of VMware’s virtualization software around the 2005-2006 time frame. Virtualization is the next greatest thing. Everyone is virtualizing some aspect of their data [...]

One hot topic when discussing Avamar always seems to be tape out for weekly and monthly backups. In the past it has been a functionality that was missing from Avamar. All that has changed with the release of Avamar Data Transport.
Avamar Data Transport is a server that runs virtually inside ESX 3.5 U4 or ESX [...]

Well, it was formally announced.  The Apple tablet…the iPad…is here.  Like every other major announcement the reviews range from the Apple fanatics that love it no matter what to those that point out every single thing it doesn’t have, or was supposed to have depending on where you get your rumors.  It doesn’t have a [...]

It’s not unusual for a columnist to write an edgy piece and buck the norms and trends of an industry.  Sometimes they truly feel this way, sometimes it’s for hits, and sometimes it’s just to be the guy that’s different and if you’re right you hope to look like a genius (I’m looking at you [...]

As arrays become more and more dense and as energy costs trend upward, it becomes more imperative to take advantage of such features of Disk Spin Down Technology. As part of FLARE 29 on the EMC Clariion CX4 arrays, the ability to track disk idle time is not only an important feature but a necessity [...]

EMC has released Storage Viewer for vSphere Client Version 2.1.  This release is compatible with and should address any issues that occurred with VMware vSphere Client V4.0 Update 1. See Matt Taylor’s blog – vSphere Update 1 Breaks EMC Storage Viewer
EMC Storage Viewer compatibility matrix

For more info, please check the EMC Storage Viewer for [...]

This past week while working on an EdgeSight for Load Testing engagement I discovered an incompatibility with the Launcher and version 11.2 of the Online Plug-in.  Upon trying to launch an application session for script recording, the session would immediately close.  Uninstalling 11.2 of the client and reverting to version 11.0.0.5357 of the XenApp Hosted [...]