Varrow Blogs

Ok, so here we go.  1st off I am really excited just to be here.  10,000+ virtualization nuts in one place has got to be interesting.  2nd, the whole east coast, west coast time difference thing REALLY bites.  I love me some VMware, don’t get me wrong, but not enought to be motivated to roll [...]

Lately I’ve been talking with a lot of people deploying the Nexus 1000v in to their environment.  The question always comes up about doing a complete migration to it and what needs to be done.  It’s pretty simple, but if you miss some things, like I did the first time, it won’t work and you’ll [...]

This one is going to be a short post as I just got home from the race track and I am wore out to say the least.  Tomorrow I will be starting a POC for a large educational institution in NC so I thought that I would share some of the resource which I find [...]

There are several front-end director bit settings that are required for Windows 2008 connectivity to Symmetrix DMX.  These are configured to allow appropriate communication between the host operating system and storage array.  The proper front-end director bit settings for Windows Server 2008 in a fiber channel switched fabric environment are: Common Serial Number (C), Enable [...]

Its no coincidence that the name of this post follows this doc, here.
Go ahead open it up, its worth a read. If your considering replicating your virtual environment then you best get up to speed. I know you have many questions, you always do..so what scenarios does this cover? Well here are few…

Replicating a [...]

Snow Leopard is just the gift that keeps on giving!  For only $29 (or $49 for a Family Pack) it’s a great deal.  I applaud Apple for releasing an update with the primary focus being on speed and efficiency with some nice minor feature enhancements thrown in.  It’s much smoother and faster on both my [...]

 I am slowly learning the models, options and capacities of the Data Domain line now that EMC has swallowed them up.  In this week’s post I want to take a look at the 500 series appliances with the way the drives are configured and note some things to think about.
There are 3 models in the [...]

On April 24, 2009 Dan W. blogged about accessing the Celerra file systems from the control station to give another means of accessing the CIFS and NFS directories for file removal and manipulation.  This could be done by changing to the /nas/quota/slot_2 on the Celerra control station.  Changing to this location would give you access [...]

So I hit a bug the other day with the Cisco Nexus 1000v and thought I’d spread the word, just in case….  My setup was an ESX farm using Generation 1 Emulex CNAs.  Since you can’t do a standard vPC with Gen 1 cards (known limitation…not a problem with Gen 2) I was using vPC-HM [...]

It seems like all too many times I have witnessed people in the IT industry use training as an excuse not to learn something new…sounds backwards right?  Well basically, I think that people tend to get upset when their employers cut training or travel budgets  and use that as an excuse not to help themselves.  [...]

A few weeks back I posted a blog titled “XenServer and VMware vSphere – A Cost Comparison” where I voiced my OPINION on some of the costs and features of the two hypervisors.  I was surprised by a few things very shortly after the post went up.  First, I received lots of responses so my [...]

If you are integrating Citrix XenServer with EMC Clariion storage the Navisphere Host Agent (naviagent) can be installed in the Linux management OS (domain 0) so that the host registers with Navisphere.

Download the Navisphere Host Agent 6.28 from here (requires Powerlink login) - http://tinyurl.com/n5cbu2
Unzip and copy the RPM to the /tmp folder of the XenServer [...]

I’m excited to see that EMC is making VMWare information visible in Navisphere.  You can read more about it in Chad’s blog here: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/07/state-of-the-art-integrating-storage-and-vmware-part-ii.html

Have you ever experienced a situation where your workstation or server is completely out of space?  Trying to hunt down where all that valuable storage went can be frustrating.  Not to worry, there is a free tool available that will not only search and display all folders listed in order by space used, but it [...]

When running Avamar in a lab environment, I have come across situations where I want to use a node that was part of a previous Avamar configuration and make it a spare, single node server, a data node  or possibly even an accelerator node for another Avamar Data Store.
In the past I was [...]