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Tonight my home-built Nexenta-VM decided to reboot itself during my nightly backup cycle. Not too nice, but it recovered without too much hassle by itself. Even though the NFS shares were available again, my vSphere 5.1 environment now has a pretty large number of VMs that have become grayed out (Inaccessible), even though they are still accessible on the NAS shares. Easily solved, if you know how…

What it looks like

We start with an email I found in my Inbox, stating that my Nexenta-VM had a problem and was rebooted at 1:26AM. After the reboot all the shares became available again, but my vSphere environment was left in a mess: Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

It’s that time again. VMworld Barcelona is around the corner. And this time, VMworld TV and EMC Netherlands have a great raffle!

What can you win?

Possibly you can become immortal because VMworldTV might put you on video! What could be better than this??? And ow yeah, you can also win an Iomega IX2 NAS device 🙂

Iomega IX-2 NAS device

How to participate

To participate, you have to do three things:

1. Take a photograph of yourself at/in/under/on top of the EMC stand at VMworld Barcelona (stand D207 or DD2) and place it on the timeline of the facebook page of VMworldTV;
2. Like VMworldTV’s facebook page;
3. Like EMC Netherlands facebook page;

… And you’re IN! Best of luck to all!

Looking through VMware’s newly announced things at VMworld 2012, the one thing that stood out for me was vSAN or (vCloud) Distributed Storage technology. From what I’ve seen at VMworld sessions, the vSAN technology creates a “distributed storage layer” across ESX nodes in a cluster – yes, up to 32 of them. Disclaimer: Even though I work for EMC, I have NO further insite into this development, nor do I blog for EMC. These are my own thoughts and ideas.

Just a VSA on steroids or way more?

So what is this distributed storage technology? At the first glance, it would appear to be something much like the VSA, but its implementation would be more comparable to Read the rest of this entry »

Today VMware released its newest version of vSphere that was launched at VMworld 2012: vSphere version 5.1. You can download this new version as of NOW from the VMware download site.


Latest and greatest

For those owning a registered version of vSphere, as of today you can download vSphere 5.1 and the entire vCloud suite! Direct links:

Download the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1

Download VMware vSphere 5.1

Wondering whta’s new in vSphere 5.1? Check out the vSphere 5.1 Whats new PDF!

Get it while it’s hot!

At VMworld 2012 vSphere 5.1 was introduced. One of the features is “Enhanced vMotion”. Using Enhanced vMotion you can migrate between “shared nothing” hosts. Yes, you can now migrate live between local storage and shared storage as VMware has combined the storage vMotion and vMotion all-in-one. Cool new feature that can’t be missed, or just another tick in the box to keep up with Hyper-V in the announced Microsoft 2012 server?

Enhancements on vMotion called “Enhanced vMotion”

What a catchy name! 😉 So what does it do? Well, for one it allows you to Read the rest of this entry »

Announced this year at VMworld 2012 (Watch the Monday general session from 51:26) were several cool technologies coming from VMware in the near future that focus on storage, or rather vStorage: Virtual Volumes (vVols), Virtual SAN (vSAN) and Virtual Flash (vFlash?). So what is this all about, and where is it going?

Virtual Volumes or vVols

How SAN and NAS systems work today, is something that they have been doing for years: Take a bunch of disks, stripe data across Read the rest of this entry »