VMdamentals.com

Archive for December, 2012

After a long time I want to continue my series on building out your own home lab. Up next: Storage. What to choose, how to build it? I will be focussing on building out shared storage in this blog post. Yes you could use local disks just fine without sharing them outside that one box, but that is not where the hard choices lie. Once you decide you want shared storage, the questions start to pop up and decisions have to be made.

Different approaches to storage in your home lab

Before you start buying disks or SSDs, first things first. To begin with it is very important to make some base decisions. Some the most important Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I did a presentation at the Dutch VMUG event around SDDC with a techical focus on the storage bits and pieces you could build inside the hypervisor to accomodate this. I want to share this presentation with you together with a little background on the subject.

Software Defines Virtually Everything

VMware has taken a big step towards the Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC). This is where things are going for sure (also see my related post Cool Tech Preview: VMware’s distributed storage). The idea is that since “everything” runs on x86 anyway, you can potentially run all code on a common platform. From that view, everything will run in software. Read the rest of this entry »

People who have been using VMware Data Recovery quickly discovered that this product had issues. VMware’s take on Data Recovery was that they wanted to have a backup product for the smaller shops with a short time-to-market. Too bad it was this product that drove a lot of users to Veeam or PHDvirtual because of its many problems. In secrecy VMware started working together with EMC’s BRS division to build a brand new backup product leveraging EMC’s Avamar technology under the codename “Project Toystory”. This product has seen the light of day as “vSphere Data Protection 5.1” or vDP for short. In this post I will be looking into vDP version 5.1, which is actually the initial release.

Introduction to vSphere Data Protection 5.1

This is the first release of vDP, so actually a 1.0 version. I will not be expecting a fully feature-rich product, but one that actually WORKS would be nice. After all, it is a “free” product Read the rest of this entry »