The other day (Nov 16, 2011 to be exact), my fellow nerd and Tech Field Day delegate, Tom Hollingsworth crafted a great blog post on the new movement in IT, and business in general… Bring Your Own (Apple) Device to work. If you have not read the post yet… you gotta check it out. This is … [Read more...]
ESXi 5.0–1.5 Hour Boot Time During Upgrade
December 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment
I have to say, I am quite shocked that I am on the tail end of waiting 1.5 hours for an ESXi 5.0 upgrade to complete booting. Seriously… 1.5 hours. I have been waiting for some time to get some ESXi 5.0 awesomeness going on in my environment. vCenter has been sitting on v5 for some time and I … [Read more...]
vSphere 5–PXE Installation Using vCenter Virtual Appliance
September 27, 2011 by 2 Comments
The release of vSphere 5 has a lot of little gems. One of which is the availability of a SLES-based vCenter virtual appliance. So, while that is really cool, there is another little nugget of joy waiting for you in the vCenter virtual appliance (‘VCVA’ for all the hip kids)… specifically, your … [Read more...]
VMware vCenter Operations–Standard Edition
September 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment
All of us “Virtualization Admins” are always looking for more information about the performance of our environment. As VMware ESX products have progressed, more and more performance metrics have been gathered and presented to us… and we appreciate it oh so much. However, one of the largest … [Read more...]
I/O Virtualization Redux (c/o Virtensys)
September 15, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Alright… back in the day, I posted an article regarding a startup in San Jose, Aprius. You can find that post here: http://virtualbill.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/tech-field-dayaprius-high-bandwidth-ethernet-allowing-for-virtual-pcie/ Without reciting everything in the post, the single sentence … [Read more...]
VMware Fling–PXE Manager for vCenter–How To Setup And Get Installing
September 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment
VMware employees are encouraged to work on pet projects during their spare time. Sometimes, these projects are posted online for the world to enjoy. These projects are called Flings… and they can be found at labs.vmware.com/flings. If you are not too hip to them, you should totally check them out. … [Read more...]
IT and End Users: Becoming Corporate Partners
September 8, 2011 by Leave a Comment
In my day to day work routine, I make a point to catch up on some technical sites. Sure, it is fun seeing what is going on in technology-land on a daily basis. However, keeping abreast of trends and issues in technology-land is super important. This morning, I came across a very interesting … [Read more...]
Virtual Bill’s Tech Field Day 5 Review
May 31, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Woah… figures that when I get back home from Tech Field Day #5, I am completely slammed at work and home and I have barely found the time for the usual things, let alone blogging. So, while I have been away from the Virtual Bill blog, the other delegates from TFD5 have produces some amazing … [Read more...]
Fixed Block vs Variable Block Deduplication – A Quick Primer
March 14, 2011 by 2 Comments
Deduplication technology is quickly becoming the new hotness in the IT industry. Previously, deduplication was delegated to secondary storage tiers as the controller could not always keep up with the storage IO demand. These devices were designed to handle streams of data in and out versus random IO … [Read more...]
User Classification And Standardizing
February 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Growing up, my parents have always told me “Everyone is special in their own way!” Those words of wisdom are very true and something I plan to impart upon my daughter as she grows up. They help explain to children why someone is taller, shorter, larger, smaller, better at basketball, or sucks at … [Read more...]