Browsing Posts published in June, 2015

Reading Time: 3 minutes Historically, Nutanix was built around iSCSI but then they have add the ability to run NFS as well as other front-end IP based protocols. Starting from version 2.5, NFS/NDFS has become the preferred protocol for the Nutanix cluster. Although the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) is stretched across all nodes and build on the pool of each local storage resource, all I/O for a VM is served by the local CVM. The storage can be presented via iSCSI, NFS or SMB3 (introduced in NOS 3.5) to the hypervisor from the CVM (not only the local, […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes One of the big announces at the .NEXT Conference, was the introduction of erasure coding across nodes (in RAIN configuration) in Nutanix Operating System (NOS) version 4.1.3 (actually it’s a tech preview). Nutanix Erasure Coding–X (EC-X) is a proprietary, native, patent pending, implementation of Erasure Coding. With EC-X, Nutanix customers are able to increase their usable storage capacity by up to 70%. As written in a previous post, Erasure Coding (EC) is a way to implement data proctection in storage systems instead of using RAID techniques.

Reading Time: 4 minutes When you talk about data protection against hardware failure in storage system, probably RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is the first technology that you think. RAID could be hardware or software based, and in the second case it can be implemented (with functions similar to RAID, but not necessary the same) also at the filesystem level (think about ZFS, for example). But with the new hard disk drive (HDD) capacities edging upwards (6TB HDDs are now available) the traditional RAID is becoming increasingly problematic both for the rebuild time and the bottleneck related to each single […]

Reading Time: 8 minutes Parallels is a well know company in the virtualization ecosystem and has some interesting solutions: Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac (to run Windows and other OSes on your Mac), Parallels Access (a simple remote access to your Windows or Mac computer from anywhere), Parallels Mac Management for Microsoft SCCM (able to extend your existing SCCM infrastructure to discover, enroll, and manage Mac computers the same way you do PCs, all through a single pane of glass), all 2X Software solutions and products (Parallels has acquired this company on Feb 2015) and Odin (formally the cloud […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes Orchestration in VMware environments is something still not so well explored and explained. Historically there was only vCenter Orchestrator from one side (if you are looking something at high level) and scripting from the other (if you know PowerShell or other scripting languages). Now for the first part there is vRealize Automation, but still the Orchestrator part could be necessary (for example to use vRealize Automation with VMware NSX). The book “VMware vRealize Orchestrator Cookbook” has the ambition purpose to explain how to master the configuration, programming, and interaction of plugins with Orchestrator to efficiently […]

Reading Time: 4 minutes VMware vCenter Server is a critical component in a vSphere environment, because is needed to provide some cluster functionality. A good design and deployment (that are different from version 5.x and 6.0) are important to avoid possible issues. And, of couse, a good availability of this kind of service. Troubleshoot this component is not always simple and there are a lot of VMware KB articles, but not a good single resource from where start in this kind of tasks. The purpose of this book is really clear from the title itself (vCenter troubleshooting) and the […]

Reading Time: < 1 minute CloudPhysics will make some changes to their Free Edition, effective July 1, 2015: The newly updated Amazon Web Services Hybrid Cloud Cost Calculator is being moved from our Premium Edition to the Free Edition. With this card, in just minutes you will be able to assess the cost of migrating some or all of your vSphere infrastructure to AWS. CardBuilder is being moved from CloudPhysics’ Free Edition and will now be available only to our Premium Edition customers.

Reading Time: 3 minutes VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) was a big event (usually in February) for all VMware partners: like a VMworld, but smallest and for several aspects better (see VMware PEX 2013: Why attend). I’ve attend at PEX 2010 (where I had also my VCDX defense) and PEX 2013 and I consider this event really valuable for VMware’s partners with good technical sessions (better than in VMworld, in my opinion). But seems that this year’s VMware Partner Exchange conference will be the last. Going forward, VMware will morph PEX into VMWorld and add the Partner Business Summit 2016 […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes Ravello ’s Smart Labs have self-contained capsules to run your VMware/KVM development, test, training and demo environments in the cloud without migration. One unique feature of Ravello platform is that you can simple run on AWS or Google Cloud, without any changes,  VMware vSphere workload or also ESXi nested! It’s very nice for testing or lab purpose, where you don’t need anymore of local resources and you can have the speed and the elasticy of the cloud.

Reading Time: < 1 minute Veeam has realesed the Veeam Backup & Replication 8.0 Update 2b (see KB 2024) that add several performance improvements in the update 2 of the product. Note that Veeam Backup & Replication checks for updates automatically once a week (unless you have disabled that). This means that everyone who had not updated yet should get a notification within the next 10 days or so. B&R 8.0 Update 2a was officially released at the begin of June, but there where a new critical issue in VDDK 6.0 that forced Veeam to rebuild the update code again, […]

Reading Time: 14 minutes The 2014 spring (EMEA) edition of E2EVC is now over and it’s time to archive it and take some considerations. E2EVC Virtualization Conference is an independent, non-commercial, virtualization community event build from experts to experts. This edition was from Fri 12 to Sun 14th June 2015 in in Novotel Berlin Mitte Hotel, Fischerinsel 12, 10179, Berlin, Germany. This was my third E2EVC event (I’ve attend at the E2EVC XX Rome and E2EVC 2014 Brussels) and I can confirm the reason to attend at this kind of event (see E2EVC 2014 Brussels: Why attend).

Reading Time: 2 minutes Until now Microsoft simple does not support nested virtualization in its Hyper-V product. Nothing wrong with it, but it’s a case where not supported means also that it simple does not work at all. So the only way to test Hyper-V (or other hypervisor) in a lab with a single physical system (server or client) was using other hypervisors (VMware ESXi, Workstation, or also Paralles or others). Or using this trick (useful also with the new hardware requirement of the next Hyper-V) but with the big limit where the VMs cannot be powered on at […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes Recently I’ve got a strange issue on ESXi 6.0: after an host reboot the ESXi hosts display a false positive warning: Deprecated VMFS volume(s) found on the host. Please consider upgrading volume(s) to the latest version Starting with vSphere 6.0 the VMFS3 version is now deprecated, but in my case all block based datastores were already at VMFS version 5!

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