Sorry, I couldn’t resist the title, but I bet it got your attention.  Don’t worry it’s nothing that requires a trip to the clinic or a shot of penicillin.  In fact, it’s a good thing.  “VE” is techno-acronym for Virtual Edition and is used to identify products that either run as a VM or virtual [...]

Wow, what a year! Some great partnerships are made public, “Cloud” is no longer a dust bowl term of ambiguity, and M&A continues. Not to mention on the home front, Varrow rocks the Casbah with a number of accolades. Its no doubt IT budgets in general were depressed but you would have barely noticed depending on the sector of IT you were in, namely storage and virtualization. So here are some notable moments in no particular order… vSphere 4 Released-The long awaited vSphere 4 was…

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Wow, what a year! Some great partnerships are made public, “Cloud” is no longer a dust bowl term of ambiguity, and M&A continues. Not to mention on the home front, Varrow rocks the Casbah with a number of accolades. Its no doubt IT budgets in general were depressed but you would have barely noticed depending [...]

Well, it’s Sunday night and I’m doing a little research in preparation for a View 4 project in the lab next week.  So I thought I would share some of the resources that I found which should be a mandatory read if your planning to either upgrade to or implement a new View 4 environment.  [...]

I’d like to think so or perhaps its written in the stars already (hence the image) …but has replication even been discussed? Sure there is a lot of talk about easing the transition from “private clouds” to “public clouds” but what about replicating internal private clouds 2 private clouds, clearly this is more approachable of a subject then the aforementioned. Why RecoverPoint?
Besides the obvious plus’s of which I have hooted and hollered over, these points seem to make sense… Cisco…

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I’d like to think so or perhaps its written in the stars already (hence the image) …but has replication even been discussed? Sure there is a lot of talk about easing the transition from “private clouds” to “public clouds” but what about replicating internal private clouds 2 private clouds, clearly this is more approachable of [...]

Recently EMC released Rainfinity FMA/VE.  VE stands for Virtual Edition.  So now instead of a hardware/appliance based file management and archiving platform you can run it as a VM in your existing VMware environment.  You can use FMA/VE to archive older data from you NAS to cheaper tiers of storage or a CAS device like [...]

I picked up this tip last week and thought I would pass it along. To rename a virtual machine in vCenter, right-click on the VM, select “Rename” and type in the new machine name. To rename the files that make up the virtual machine, simply migrate that virtual machine to another datastore with Storage vMotion. [...]

NetScaler VPX is now available for ESX and ESXi.  http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?content

NetScaler VPX is now available for ESX and ESXi. 

http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1689968

I was rebuilding a PVS infrastructure with a new database and ran into an issue with the migration.  I was trying to decide whether it would be faster to migrate the existing database or start from scratch and rebuild everything.  Nothing was in production yet and after a little research, migrating the existing PVS database

I was rebuilding a PVS infrastructure with a new database and ran into an issue with the migration.  I was trying to decide whether it would be faster to migrate the existing database or start from scratch and rebuild everything.  Nothing was in production yet and after a little research, migrating the existing PVS database to the new server could be tricky.  Instead, I decided to start from scratch and export my devices from the old PVS database and import them into the new.  Citrix wrote this helpful guide on how to export to a .CSV and I was able to get everything transferred over quickly without any issues. 

http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX118832

So, if you’re migrating to a new database server and want to start fresh with a newly created farm, this is for you.  Take advantage of this opportunity to perform a redesign without having to recreate all of your devices.

I use my Mid-2009 MacBook Pro all the time. As a consultant it goes everywhere with me and I run a lot of different applications all at the same time. I’m happy with the 2.53GHz Core2Duo CPU and 4GB of RAM (though I want to up it to 8GB) the hard drive is [...]

Fasting for FAST? Well there’s nothing fast about its introduction to market. But as the adage goes, Good things come to those who wait, and wait we have.

So what is FAST? Fully Automated Storage Tiering or another wards ILM reincarnated, with the difference being full policy driven automation that is…

• Pool resources of storage
• Define policy
• Apply to an application
• Let ‘er Rip-Sounds simple huh?

Is FAST one product?

No, FAST is a suite of products rather.  For the CLARiiON that includes FAST LUN Migrator, Navi-Analyzer, as well as Navi QOS. In conjuction with Navi analyzer, LUN migrator examines analysis information to target LUN profiles that would benefit from movement to Flash for better performance or movement to SATA for lower storage costs. The core mechanism behind this migration is Virtual LUN technology. Technology that has been apart of the CLARiiON line for a few generations now and has certainly proven itself.

FAST is configured via navicli, supported on CX4 arrays running FLARE 29 and Navi-Analyzer.Its important to note that FAST on CLARiiON’s is unidirectional meaning you can only migrate from FC to SATA disk or FC to Flash. Of course this only applies to CLARiiON’s, bidirectional movement of data is supported on the Symmetrix and Celerra line. And quite the contrary, this doesn’t mean you cant manually migrate a LUN back to FC once the automated migration has completed. I am sure futures will change this one-sidedness, we can only hope..

What to Expect..

Here’s the step-by-step approach (albeit high level) for CLARiiON CX4 FAST:

1.The measurement period for analysis of Fiber Channel LUNs is defined.

2.Analysis is run.

3.Results are assessed and migration of data to Flash and/or SATA is executed.

Futures..

Sub-LUN migrations are planned late 2010 as well as better alignment between FAST implementations across the various platforms (Symmetrix, Celerra and CLARiiON).

That’s it! Look I only got 60 Seconds…