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Reading Time: 3 minutes Hyper-converged architectures consolidate and manage computing, networking, and storage resources via software so they can run on any vendor’s server hardware. Several years ago they where (apparently) strange approach to storage implementation used mainly for cheap solution (using VSA, that lacks, in much cases, of right scalability), or for special user cases like ROBO or VDI (with solution like NexentaVSA for View). But starting with Nutanix (probably the first real player in those kind of solution) the idea of simple VSA (Virtual Storage Appliance) has dramatically changed by introducing a large scalability with new scale-out (or web-scale, […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes In an old post about storage architectures is described in a simple way some basic concepts, including the scale-in (or scale-up) vs. the scale-out approach. They are different approaches in scaling with different implications. Unfortunately there is a simple an well accepted definition on what is a scale-out storage is (or not is): some are limited in specific contests (like this one only for NAS or this SNIA tutorial still applied to a NAS storage), other are too much vendor specific. But usually a scale-out storage imply: Multi-device (or multi-array) storage systems (aggregated in a […]

Reading Time: < 1 minute In previous post we have already see how add custom drivers to an ESXi installation ISO and how use ImageBuilder to make custom ESXi ISO, but in other cases you may need to define some custom settings during the installation or add custom vib files. Booting from CD is not the only way, but custom ISO could be used also for boot from USB or for boot from virtual devices (like the iDRAC or ILOE).

Reading Time: 4 minutes In the previous post we have talk about the VMware Horizon View Event database and how purge the old data in order to free some space. You can have similar issue also with the VMware vCenter Server database, considering that it can continuous grow due to the statistics and also due to the events/tasks. In really small system a simple solution could be re-install a fresh version of vCenter Server (maybe during an upgrade) and re-create all the configuration stored only in the vCenter Server database. But in several cases this approach is not realistic. […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes In an installation of VMware Horizon View one requirement is the VMware Composer database to keep track of the various pools with linked clones. But this is the only mandatory DB (if you have linked clones), because for the various View Connection Servers there isn’t any strictly database strictly requirement, since they exchange and share data via a specific data structure based on Active Directory Lightweight Mode (actually an LDAP tree replicated between each replication server). But in real scenario, it becomes useful, from the management point of view, set up a shared database for […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes In most cases (in small environment) a default installation of vCenter Server and its components could work. Considering that the default disk of Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012 is 40 GB (at least in a VMware virtual environment) it can store all the installation without any directory changes. Except for the Upload Manager (VUM) that need a reasonable space for store the patches (usually not more than 20GB, but in some case also more, and the installer suggest at least a 120 GB disk). If you forget to change the patches directory during the […]

Reading Time: 4 minutes In VMware ESXi the All Paths Down (APD) or Permanent Device Loss (PDL) condition is what occurs on an ESX/ESXi host when a storage device is removed in an uncontrolled manner from the host (or the device fails), and the VMkernel core storage stack does not know how long the loss of device access will last. A typical way of getting into APD would be a Fiber Channel switch failure or (in the case of an iSCSI array) a network connectivity issue. But there are also other scenarios that we will discuss later. VMware vSphere […]

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