Varrow Blogs

Unification, confluence…the time for convergence is now.  Timely, you know? Multiprotocol and Multi-feature arrays are hotter than a stolen tamale, and why wouldn’t they be. CIFS, iSCSI, FC, NFS, 3D (dedup), and replication (of some flavor) just to spiff the fire all shelled within in a single iron frame. Its quite poetic if you ask [...]

Well its been a while, thanks for returning. This is the third installment of the Recoverpoint Bit Series, finishing it out with design considerations. Now to this point I have sprinkled in a few design tips for any Recoverpoint implementation such as repository sizing but really nothing else of any girth. Point noted. So lets [...]

Big shot by Citrix today.  They’ve announced that the full feature version of XenServer is now available for free and will be included in other products such as XenApp.  Trial version is available here.  The final will be out next month.
We have free hypervisors now so why is this a big deal?  It just really [...]

No…there still isn’t a Citrix XenApp client for the iPhone but Citrix did just release some new videos showing their Citrix Receiver that is coming at some point.  Click here to view them and see some updated information.  Hopefully it won’t be much longer!

Taking a different view on things tonight….  I just got back from the gym and as usual, used my iPhone while doing cardio for music and podcasts.  There are some really interesting podcasts out there for the technology  geek and it’s a great way to stay caught up or learn something new without sitting in [...]

VMware Fault Tolerance
Currently the VMware Vi3 infrastructure has many features that make life a little easier for IT departments.  vMotion allows the hot migration of virtual machines from one host to another and allowing hardware maintenance to occur during business hours.  HA enable the automatic reboot of a VM on a new host should its [...]

http://blogs.vmware.com/partner/2009/02/hp-proliant-is-highest-performing-server-in-latest-vmmark-comparison.html

VMware View 3 Multimedia Performance
Implementing a VDI infrastructure in your environment can have lots of advantages including simplified management and lower hardware costs.  This is attractive to most companies but one concern that almost always comes up is that of performance, in particular multimedia performance.  How well will video and other multimedia files perform over [...]

The partitioning alignment “bug” in Windows 2003 and earlier has been fixed in Windows 2008.
You no longer have to use diskpart.exe to align new partitions in Windows 2008.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738145.aspx
http://theessentialexchange.com/blogs/michael/archive/2008/03/07/Exchange-2007-Disk-Performance-Partition-Alignment-.aspx
Posted in EMC, Microsoft, windows2008 Tagged: EMC, Microsoft, windows2008

Well here you have it the first of a multi-vid series on RecoverPoint configuration scenarios. This vid walks through the process of configuring a Consistency group from scratch up to the point of adding the replication sets (soon, Bit II). The shots were taking from the 3.0 RP Simulator, so some options may be different [...]

I recently was involved in a SAN project implementing two EMC Clariion CX4 arrays. In the past I have used Navispere to create the Raid Groups and LUNs but this time I decided to use the command line tool navicli.exe.
Creating the RGs and LUNs via Navispere is very painful because of Java and all of [...]

Every once and a while at client meeting the discussion about Flash Drives or Solid-State Drives (SSD) comes up.  Flash drives are now an option in EMC’s Clariion arrays.  Usually the first question is “I heard they’re expensive, what do those things cost anyway?”  Well the short answer is A LOT.   Retail from EMC is [...]

Interesting move by VMware to head-off some competition in the open source arena.  Yesterday they released an open source client to access virtual machines such as remote desktops.   It supports VDM 2.0, 2.1, and the new View 3.0.  The source is released under the LGPL (Lesser General Public License) which is not as restrictive as [...]

More videos!  In this video I walk through converting a physical server running Windows in to a virtual server on VMware ESX.  This uses the built-in P2V conversion tool in Virtual Center.  The video is available here:

YouTube (Part 1)
YouTube (Part 2)
Screencast (Higher resolution)

Be sure to check out our other videos on the Varrow YouTube channel.
[...]

Beyond all the most notable changes to Recoverpoint, such as consolidated snapshots and sync remote replication over FC, there are a few other wildly needed changes that I am glad to see hit the pavement. The full list is here within the release notes back in Nov. Sorry I forgot to post on them.

Consistency Group [...]