Varrow Blogs

How brazen of me, who am I to make such a bold and definitive statement. Well the fact is if we as individuals could move away from the notion of comfort that some how those little data filled cartridges provide to us, we could lend a hand in bringing the title of this post to [...]

Here is a little “mini-healthcheck” for the EMC Celerra.
1) Log in as nasadmin and su to root
2) Type “/nbsnas/sbin/enclosure_status -e 0 -v”.   You will get a quick all-around healthcheck of the hardware of the entire unit:
[root@ns20-prod nasadmin]# /nbsnas/sbin/enclosure_status -e 0 -v
 DEVICE A                         DEVICE B
——————-PRESENCE——————–
 00 60 16 0B 48 11    MAC     00 60 16 0B 48 [...]

Here’s a quick one. We all know EMC’s Recoverpoint Appliances are nothing more than Dell 1950’s, of which I talked about here. DRAC or Dell Remote Access Card’s are pretty standard on most PowerEdge’s and ultimately provide out-of-band remote IP management, we all know this so I wont go much deeper. To enable configuration of [...]

After my last blog entry regarding Microsoft VECD licensing it appears I was still confused.  Here is the way VECD licensing works (really this time).
 
 
 
 

The Clients:
-          Licensing must be purchased through the Microsoft Open Value Program which is a 3yr subscription
-          For desktop/laptop Clients the OS must be upgraded to Software Assurance licensing for Vista
o   [...]

I thought it would be helpful for all of the engineers out there that have a VMware ESX background and are starting to implement Citrix XenServer. There are a lot of similarities between the two virtualization platforms.
One of the issues I ran into recently was the changes made to a host via the cmd line [...]

Then check out Odiogo…Simply enter you blog URL/RSS address here and your email address, confirm that you are the owner of said blog and allow Odiogo to convert your content to audio. Its that simple..with a small piece of HTML code you can quickly link to your now RSS voice enabled blog. Here is what [...]

Continuing on with the video demonstrations I have prepared one showing the Celerra’s autoextending filesystem feature.  This feature lets you set high watermarks on a filesystem and automatically extend it should it hit those marks.  This is a great feature for the overworked administrator so you don’t get paged on a weekend when a user [...]

So I was playing with SRM in our new Charlotte lab.  I must say, it’s nice having a couple of EMC Celerra NS20s all to yourself.  Anyway…I hit a problem with the SRA when configuring Site Recovery Manager and thought I’d pass along a little note.  The error I got was:
Invalid XML returned from storage [...]

Understanding Microsoft Licensing for VDI Environments (i.e. VECD)
When it comes to the topic of virtualization, VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) has been one of the fastest growing areas.  The ability to virtualize your desktops and then manage and store those images back in the datacenter offers many advantages over standard thick-client computing.  By creating one “golden [...]

In my first ESXi blog post we discussed how to create the ESXi image on a USB stick.  In this second post we will briefly discuss the VMware ESXi 3.5 U3 Installable with HP Management Components. 
This is the first ESXi image that I have seen which includes the necessary server management components “baked into” the image.  [...]

There are lots of posts out there on creating a USB stick that will boot up ESXi.  The process is quite simple.  The first part is to get the VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.dd file extracted.  The next step is to write the .dd file to the USB key.
“dd” is a linux/unix command that performs tasks such as writing [...]

Check out my updated User Profiles Best Practices White Paper.
http://www.varrow.com/index.php?id=98

Posted in Citrix, Microsoft, windows2008, xenapp, xendesktop Tagged: Citrix, Microsoft, xenapp

Don’t blink an eye you may miss them. What are they? They are RDM (Raw Device Mapping) helper VM’s and they are new to SRM Update 1. What do they do? The facilitate the handoff of RDM’s in virtual mode to their respective recovered VM. Now I say these little boogers are new to Update [...]

Many VMware administrators don’t know you can move VMDKs without taking down the virtual machine using them.  I have created a video showing how to do this using the Storage VMotion feature in VMware.  Storage VMotion allows you to move the back-end virtual disks to a different datastore without affecting the running virtual machine.  By [...]

Here is a demo video of VMware Lifecycle manager I created.  It gives a very basic overview of what LCM can do.  Almost all fields and processes can be customized in the product.  This gives the administrator very granular control over who can request and create different types of VM’s within an ESX environment.  LCM [...]