Varrow Blogs

Recently we’ve had some clients interested in the ability to geographically separate some of their Microsoft clusters.  Honestly I wasn’t aware that EMC even had a product to enable this until one of my colleagues mentioned RecoverPoint/CE.  So I did a little reading and thought I give a brief summary of what it is and [...]

Best practice definitely dictates that one should detach an ESX host from any SAN LUN’s before installing ESX.  This is to prevent overwriting shared VMFS volumes and therefore wiping out your virtual machine environment. However, while this step is necessary it can sometimes be a big inconvenience or outright impossible in certain circumstances such as [...]

The number of remote replication technologies available from EMC today is dizzying. From MirrorView to SAN Copy, Open Replicator to Celerra Replicator, to RecoverPoint and SRDF, all have come about to fit a need or to fit a platform. The title of this post, Explaining heaven to bears is in most counts like explaining the different EMC replication products to someone not in the know. Its not a matter of intelligence or aptitude, its a matter of product overload or even product overlap in some…

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Uh oh. Something just happened to your VSM (Virtual Supervisor Module). Maybe the config was cleared or the entire (or both) VMs are gone and you don’t have a backup. How can you recover your now orphaned distributed switch? It’s not as hard as you’d think. This recently happened to me. Through an unusual chain [...]

I finally bit the bullet and downloaded the WYSE Pocket Cloud application from the App Store.  My hesitation…….at $29.95 it’s not exactly the cheapest app you can find.  I have to say however that after I downloaded the app it was well worth the money.  I had tried several other RDP type clients for the [...]

I’m a little late on this post I know, anyhow, better late than never right?  VMware PEX 2010 was two weeks ago and a lot of information around its contents has already been discussed and talked about. However, I do want to share my experience around the event and my take on things that were

How are SANTap/Recoverpoint and ornamental grasses a like? Well think about this, grasses can be used in all different types of landscapes and climates. Whether its the tall prairie grass of the Midwest or the brown, itchy, sneezy bermandagrass in my backyard. Grasses..overcome..and integrate nicely into any environment.
Quick Facts.. Grasses are adaptable to changing conditions and can thrive in poorer quality soils than any other plant Grasses seemly operate with little effort to…

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Over the last 18 months, my air travel has considerably increased, so much to the point where I now give a lot of thought about how I will pack.  I am certain to ensure that I keep checked baggage to a minimum and make certain that I don’t pack pocket knives, lighters or anything that could [...]

VMware has release View 4.0.1 (Build 233023). VMware View 4.0.1 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues in the previous releases. This release also includes some new features as well: Localization of VMware View, VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 and ESX 3.5 Update 5 Support and Enhancements to the PCoIP Display Protocol. View Manager [...]

We’re starting to see a serious uptake in interest in deploying the Nexus 1000v virtual distributed switch.  I believe the latest service release calmed some fears about this new product and having some references to point at always helps.  As we perform more implementations we’re starting to see some things that customers need to be [...]

Multi-Tenancy by the shear definition of the word has been around for years. Wikipedia states traditional multi-tenancy is, “..a principle in software architecture  where a single instance of the software runs on a server, serving multiple client organizations (tenants).” It goes on to say, “..multiple customers share(ing) the same application, running on the same operating system, on the same hardware, with the same data storage mechanism. The distinction between the customers is achieved…

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If you are looking to keep the OS of your Neverfail Hearbeat servers up to date or just need to patch the OS, you may need help on how to do that with as little interruption to production as possible. I found the following link to be very helpful.How to apply Operating System (OS) patches [...]

There are number of different splitting mechanisms that RecoverPoint can use to facilitate its I/O copy for remote or local replication. We know this from previous posts that I have done that these split cowboys can be accomplished via Array, Host or Fabric splitters.
Each have their place, each have their limitations. The main purpose of the splitter  is simple, take an I/O destined for primary storage and copy it to an appliance for transmission locally or remotely. Whether the…

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