The great battle of enterprise storage is on! The time has come to take sides on the core question of storage for virtual servers: Do you want storage intelligence to live in the hypervisor or the array? Most administrators are already lining up on one side or the other, unintentionally casting … [Read more...]
Is My Favorite vSphere Tool Going Away?
August 24, 2010 by 4 Comments
The following post was contributed by Dwayne Lessner (@DLink7). While going through the release notes for vSphere 4.1 I noticed one of my favourite vSphere tools be might be going away. vCenter Update Manager (VUM) 4.1 and its subsequent update releases are the last releases to support scanning … [Read more...]
Future vCenter And SRM Requirement For 64 bit OS Means More vCenter VMs
June 24, 2010 by Leave a Comment
VMware engineer Michael White’s post 64 bit is almost here – are you ready? on the Uptime (VMware and Business Continuity) Blog foretells of the future 64 bit requirement of both vCenter and SRM (Site Recovery Manager). White writes: “I wanted to remind everyone, of what I have already seen … [Read more...]
Storage I/O control – SIOC – VMware DRS for Storage
May 12, 2010 by 1 Comment
Following VMworld in 2009 a number of articles were written about a tech preview session on IO DRS – Providing performance Isolation to VMs in Shared Storage Environments. I personally thought that this particular technology was a long way off, potentially something we would see in ESX 4.5. … [Read more...]
PowerCLI: A Simple VMware Backup Script
May 6, 2010 by 11 Comments
Lately I've been doing a lot of work in a lab environment. Some of the work I'm doing is quite important to me so I decided to workout a way I can backup my VM's onto a backup device. To my surprise this was pretty simple to do. Here is how I decided the script should function: Send myself an … [Read more...]
Likewise Agreement Means Active Directory Integration In Future vSphere Versions
March 25, 2010 by Leave a Comment
A recent announcement from Likewise Software hints that future versions of VMware vSphere may make it easier for companies to manage ESX hosts using Active Directory (AD) credentials. vCenter, which runs on a Windows Server operating system, is commonly added to an AD domain already, but special … [Read more...]
Design Challenges Of Virtualized vCenter With A vNetwork Distributed Switch
March 22, 2010 by Leave a Comment
The vSphere Enterprise Plus vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) has been heralded as, and I might add lives up to it’s reputation of, an administrator’s time saver and single point of virtual networking configuration and visibility across many ESX/ESXi 4 hosts. However, the vDS presents some … [Read more...]
EvoStor: VMware Storage Evolved!
September 11, 2009 by 6 Comments
Server virtualization challenges the enterprise storage status quo, so storage must change to support virtualization. Virtualization platforms like VMware vSphere concentrate and randomize I/O, demanding low latency and high performance from underlying storage systems. Although many conventional … [Read more...]
Storage Changes in the VMware vSphere 4 Family
April 21, 2009 by 2 Comments
VMware officially launched their next-generation (version 4) enterprise family of products today under the “vSphere 4″ name. As I’ve been doing for the last few major ESX releases, I’m focusing this post on the storage changes present in vSphere 4. For more information on earlier updates, … [Read more...]