Varrow Blogs

Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/user/varrowinc#g/u
Also, check out Mike’s blog (our customer with UCS) here: http://healthITguy.wordpress.com
We posted up some youtube videos we took of a customer site where we just racked up some new Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) chassis and interconnects.  This is not yet in production but this should give viewers a better idea [...]

In my last post I described my experience to date with Windows 7.  In summary it has been good but there were a few programs that were not compatible with the new operating system.  The one that caused me the biggest inconvenience was not being able to connect to a VMware View session.  My first [...]

There’s a new functionality on the horizon with EMC Storage Arrays and the way that they handle their data.  The standard way to provision storage has always been to size your performance requirements correctly and statically assign a RAID Group with a certain number of disks running either SATA or Fibre Channel, and most recently

There’s a new functionality on the horizon with EMC Storage Arrays and the way that they handle their data.  The standard way to provision storage has always been to size your performance requirements correctly and statically assign a RAID Group with a certain number of disks running either SATA or Fibre Channel, and most recently EFD (Electronic Flash Drives).

With FAST, the goal is basically to allow EMC customers to get the best value out of their storage.  This works by letting the array automatically provision and re-provision data to the most appropriate storage tier based on  performance requirements.

Take a look at this video to see how the performance increases using FAST and EFDs.  The example is using Symmetrix, however, note that it mentions that their medium class (CLARiiON) and NAS class (Celerra) arrays will be supported as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofKBDvo8214

I was able to install Windows 7 a few weeks ago and so far I’ve been impressed.  Originally I was running regular Windows Vista 32-bit which wasn’t exactly horrible but the only way I could really come to deal with it was to make it look and behave as much like Windows XP as possible.  [...]

Just a little FYI.  If you aren’t paying attention when configuring your port-profiles which turn in to your VMware Port Groups the default maximum number of ports is 32.  If you try to add another server you’ll get the following error:
The resource vim.dvs.DistributedVirtualPort is not available in vim.dvs.DistributedVirtualPortgroupYourPortGroupHere.
It’s an easy fix.  Just go to the [...]

Interesting little article came out yesterday about something I’ve been wondering for a while but haven’t had the resources to really test.  How cold do you really need to keep that data center?  I spend a good bit of time in different data centers and some are like a meat locker.  I always question the [...]

Just a little tip in case someone else hits this.  If you have an ESX host that can’t scan for updates or gets the following error in vCenter check the DNS config:
Host cannot download files from VMware vCenter Update Manager patch store.  Check the network connectivity and firewall setup, and check esxupdate logs for details.
This [...]

I’m sure there are a lot of consultanty-type people out there like me that use Macs and WWAN adapters. One little reported feature of Snow Leopard is that it now directly supports a lot of WWAN adapters. This means you no longer need to use your cell providers software. This let me [...]

My worlds collide!  Great little tool for those EMC (and soon other arrays) people out there.  SANCalc is an iPhone/iPod Touch tool that lets you size up RAID Groups, LUNs, etc right on your phone.  It even understands Vault Drives.  Right now it supports the EMC CLARiiON AX4-5, CX3, and CX4 arrays.  Very handy.
Pic below.  [...]

    I, like you, am trying to make sense of vSphere’s new Pluggable Storage Architecture or PSA. Acronym’s galore float through that camp, so if your not careful you may find yourself in the middle of cosmic confusion. So here’s my crack at the different functions of each plug-in and specifically their interrelations. Up first…
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EMC Drive Sizing
When working with SAN/NAS configurations one of the core design decisions is almost always centered on the hard drives.  No surprise right, after all, that’s the whole purpose of the SAN in the first place…..to store data on disk.  Almost always in design discussions with clients and our own account executives the question [...]

When configuring Windows 2008 Clusters with iSCSI devices on NSX arrays, you need to ensure that the NAS code version on the NSX array is at release 5.6.39 or higher. This release of NAS code supports the SCSI persistent reservation (PR) commands that are used by the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 cluster management subsystem. [...]

I recently passed the VCP 410 exam and was surprised to find several questions on Guided Consolidation, a very basic tool that I had really no experience with.  To get more acquainted with it, I decided to write a blog about it. If you are preparing for the VCP 4 exam, and have little or [...]

I had an issue when running the XenDesktop Setup Wizard where the wizard wouldn’t connect to the provisioning server.  This is because many of the ports have changed recently due to port collision issues.  To resolved this it is necessary to edit the SetupToolApplication.exe.config file and change the following settings. The default installation path is C:\Program