Varrow Blogs

I’ve seen many different ways to represent rack layouts in the past.  The most common is usually it is a simple Excel spreadsheet.  This generally works pretty well, doesn’t take much time and makes it relatively easy to represent each “U” of the rack buy using an Excel cell to represent each 1U in the [...]

Well here’s a real humdinger that has been driving me nutzo for a while now and what do you know…it has to do with SRM and the MirrorView SRA.
Apparently there is an 8 source LUN limit for LUNs within in a consistency group of which you want to take “consistent” snap sessions. Which is [...]

OK, so this topic has already been covered in the Varrow Blogs, mostly on Calfo’s Blog. I want to bring it up again, however, because I keep seeing environments that stand to benefit greatly by putting this or a similar technology into place in their ESX environment.

There’s no argument that VMware makes things easier for your IT Department but could it be argued that it makes things a little too easy? Now that you can have a new windows or linux guest up, running, and configured in minutes rather than hours everyone wants part of the action, right???

Of course they do and why would you blame them? Most administrators try manage provisioning tasks manually and quickly get overwhelmed. Ed, the exchange admin, had you create him a test server last month. Is Ed done testing now? Can you shutdown Ed’s VM and free up some much needed resources? We can ask Ed, but oh yeah.. that’s right, Ed’s on vacation for a couple of weeks. Will we forget to ask him when he gets back?

You get the picture. It can get really nasty trying to keep up with everyone and every project that requires use of your ESX infrastructure. For this reason and after some recommendations from coworkers I started looking into VMware’s vCenter Lifecycle Manager. It appears that it will give IT the ability to automate much of the lifecycle process and hooks right into vCenter 2.x. I’m hoping to evaluate it in depth soon but you can check it out on VMware’s page here:

https://www.vmware.com/products/lcm/

And check out Calfo’s demo video he posted at the beginning of the year.

http://calfo.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/vmware-lifecycle-manager-demo-video/

Nothing thought provoking here, just some corralled words… I must say I have been truly impressed, as of late, with the integration points and awareness between EMC products (most notably RecoverPoint and Navi) and VMware.
Being one that has always been on both sides of the electric fence (VMware/EMC storage) there has for many years [...]

I work for a reseller of both Citrix and VMware products.  In many client meetings we often debate over which virtualization platform a client should use for server virtualization and which one is “better”.  Now, if I were to ask all of our engineers (and I have) which hypervisor they would choose (XenServer or VMware) [...]

Well, well, well…. I wrote the other day that Microsoft was making some drivers available to the Linux kernel under the GPL license. Many people were surprised but it really came down to functionality with Hyper-V. Turns out, there is a little more to the story as reported here.  The problem is [...]

I recently setup Celerra Repliator v2 between an old NS to a new NS to migrate CIFS shares and VDM configuration. The replication worked great and replicated 3 TB of data in about 30 hours. Once replication was complete I switched over the files system and VDM replication sessions in Celerra Manager. The switcheover went [...]

After helping someone recover data from a corrupt virtual machine last night I thought this would be informative to many people.  A lot of us Mac users still have to run WIndows for one reason or another.  If you do I highly suggest you look at VMware’s Fusion that allows you to run it as [...]

VMware has a pretty handy guide out there for those migrating to vSphere…but it’s also pretty useful even if you have already made the move.  It’s the vSphere Migration Prerequisites Checklist available here.  It’s useful because it gives you the requirements and limitations when upgrading to vSphere or implementing the cool new features like FT [...]

http://www.cio.com/article/497667/Microsoft_Linux_Move_Puts_Pressure_on_VMware?taxonomyId=168354

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/072009-microsoft-linux-source-code.html

Wyse recently announced the release of a software-only based solution for accelerating RDP and ICA traffic using both Wyse thin clients and standard workstations.  This is pretty exciting news as we all know that the user experience can often make or break a VDI/SBC deployment and anything that can make it better, specifically for remote [...]

vSphere has been in the marketplace as a production release for about 2 months now and is becoming more prevalent across the install base of virtualization environments at a rapid pace.  This quick adoption is good for the community as a whole but can be challenging for the initial organizations that dive into this unchartered [...]

Microsoft surprised some people today with the announcement that they are contributing some drivers to the Linux kernel project.  There is a lot of mis-information and confusion running around..look no further than Slashdot!  Some things just never change….  Anyway, the purpose of Microsoft’s contribution is simple, better support for Hyper-V.  By adding these kernel extensions [...]

If you’ve read a lot of the Varrow blogs you’ll see information and talk about Cisco’s Nexus technology and products.  To be blunt, it can be confusing and a bit convoluted.  The hardware products, the Nexus 5000 and 7000, have been out for a little while now and we’re seeing more and more interest in [...]