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End of Availability for VMware vCenter CapacityIQ

1 February 2012
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To simplify and streamline product portfolio, VMware has decided that the vCenter Operations Suite replaces vCenter CapacityIQ and vCenter CapacityIQ as a standalone product will be discontinued from  January 24, 2012.

Customer of vCenter CapacityIQ with an active support and subscription (SnS) contract, are entitled to upgrade to the vCenter Operations Management Suite Advanced edition free of charge. The advantage of this entitlement, is to access not only an enhanced set of capacity management features, but also benefit from analytics-based performance management capabilities and a new operations management dashboard only available in vCenter Operations.

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VMware

General Availability of VMware ESX 4.1 Patch

31 January 2012
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VMware has just released new patches for vSphere 4.1. Detailed information regarding resolved and known issues and enhancements can be found at:

VMware ESX 4.1 Patch is available for download at http://www.vmware.com/patch/download/ or they can be handled with VUM.

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Dell KACE – K2000

31 January 2012
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The Dell KACE K2000 is a client OS deployment appliance that supports both Mac OS and Windows OS images. The KACE K2000 comes as 1U rack-mounted server or in a VMware virtual machine (VK2000). It runs, as also the K1000 appliance, a version of the BSD OS… for this reason the virtual appliance isn’t supported on Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform.

The key points of this solutions (from Dell KACE site) are:

  • Easy to use: train your staff (and yourself) in just hours, and deploy in as little as a day. An intuitive Web-based interface allows administrators of virtually all skill levels to execute advanced administrative duties.
  • Comprehensive: automate pre-deployment configuration tasks such as hard drive, BIOS, and RAID configurations. Then automate post-deployment tasks including software distribution and configuration management.
  • Affordable: enjoy low total cost of ownership with a hardened, self-healing appliance that has no hardware or software pre-requisites, no incremental professional-service fees and no hidden costs.

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Dell KACE – K1000

30 January 2012
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The KACE Management Appliance delivers a fully integrated systems management solution, unlike traditional software approaches that can require complex and time-consuming deployment and maintenance. KACE accomplishes this via an extremely flexible, intelligent appliance-based architecture that typically deploys in days and is self maintaining. The KACE Management Appliance also provides direct access to time-saving AppDeploySM systems management community information using AppDeploy Live, the leading destination for end point administrators. The result: Comprehensive systems management that is easy-to-use and that can be more economical than software only alternatives.

This appliances family can provide a lot of functions (that usually may require several different systems and software), included the deploy and configuration of the Secure Browsers. It also support several type of operating systems:

  • Windows 7 (Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate), Windows Vista (Business, Enterprise, Ultimate) , Windows XP SP2 – latest (Professional), Windows 2000 (Professional)
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 (Enterprise, Standard, Web), Windows Server 2008 (Enterprise, Standard, Web), Windows Server 2003 (Enterprise, Standard, Web), Windows 2000 (Advanced Server, Server)
  • Mac  Mac OS X 10.4 – 10.6 (PowerPC and x86 architectures )
  • Linux  Red Hat Linux AS and ES (Versions 3, 4 and 5, 32-bit and 64-bit architectures)

Instead of analyze the several advantages of this product, well described in the online documentation (with also some small labs and exerciese), in the webcast demo, in the interactive live demo, in a huge screenshots tour, … I would like to point some aspects that can be improved:

  • During the configuration too much reboot are required (it is a Unix system, just a service restart could be enough).
  • An automatic inventory of all the IT devices could be great (at least for all Dell devices, but it will overlap the OpenManage and similar tools).
  • The system can handle the upgrade of software components on supported operating systems, and BIOS / firmware upgrade only on Dell systems with a supported operating system. Could be nice it can handle also other devices.
  • Actually the supported operating systems list is etherogenous, but limited. More Linux distributions and why not, also ESXi?!
  • Actually is designed most for traditional PC management, with several function for servers and some for other end-user devices like smartphone and tablet (some functions already exist for iOS and Android devices, but more are needed, like firmware and software management).
  • This kind of service could become a nice type of cloud SaaS service (like for example Microsoft Intune). Of course a specific license will be needed as also a complete multi-livel  and multi-company interface). Actually there is an implementation of a multi-organization interface (using the /system URL instead of /admin), but is just a first step.
  • The script builder can be improved (at least with a visual approach as the one on the K2000).

For an intruduction of the KACE suite, see the related post.

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Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for Microsoft v4

26 January 2012
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The Dell EqualLogic team has officially announced the release of Host Integration Tools for Microsoft (HIT/Microsoft) v4.0, now available for download.

The EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for Microsoft (HIT/Microsoft) tightly integrate the EqualLogic PS Series arrays with Microsoft host operating platform and host applications enabling consistent data protection (using snapshots and replicas), performance optimization (with a specific multipath module) and streamlined management and operation (for example to help to connect a host or to initialize an array).

I’ve see HIT/Microsoft 4.0 during the last Dell Storage Forum and also during the beta period and it’s a new release with a complete new GUI and several interesting features. The only possible issue is that seems a little slower compared with the 3.x version (but maybe was related to the beta code, now I have to repeat some tests).

The new features include:

  • HIT Groups: Auto-Snapshot Manager/Microsoft Edition (ASM/ME) has a new feature called HIT Groups that allows users to manage multiple Microsoft hosts from a single server offering centralized data protection.  With HIT Groups, users can create and manage Smart Copies and Smart Copy schedules on all Microsoft hosts, and simultaneously edit settings on multiple hosts. When a new host is added to a HIT Group, the Host Integration Tools get installed on the host automatically.
  • Enhanced Support for Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV): With this version of the Host Integration Tools, users can create Smart Copies and Smart Copy schedules of CSVs including those that contain virtual machines running on other cluster nodes. There is no need to create a separate Smart Copy schedule for each VM. This feature helps protect all virtual machines on a CSV with a single snapshot as well as ability to quickly restore the whole CSV.
  • Richer usability and functional experience: The ASM/ME GUI has been redesigned. It features a dashboard that provides an at-a-glance overview of the hosts, volumes, iSCSI connections, schedules, Smart Copies, collections, and applications that users are managing with ASM/ME. In addition, there are several usability improvements.
  • Remote Installation and Upgrade capability: There are now two methods—a PowerShell script and ASM/ME’s Add Hosts wizard—for remote installation of the Host Integration Tools. Remote installation saves a lot of time, particularly in large scale installations. When the Add Hosts wizard is used, multiple installations can be done in parallel, saving even more time. Upgrading the version of Host Integration Tools on each host is also easily accomplished through these methods.
  • PowerShell Tools Enhancements: New cmdlets have been added to the PowerShell Tools that offer enhanced management functionalities. This includes cmdlets to configure PS Group access to LDAP servers, to list details for  iSCSI connections to volumes and snapshots, and to list and manage individual replicas in a replica set.
  • Proactive Alerts:Expanded email alerts for scheduled tasks and proactive visual clues in the ASM GUI to notify the user of potential problems.
  • Enhancements to Volume-Based Collections: Users can now specify whether or not you want a Smart Copy schedule for a collection to fail if the contents of the collection differ from the time the schedule was created. This is useful in cases where a volume is hosting a set of databases that changes frequently.

Additional information and references on Host Integration Tools for Microsoft software v4.0 release:

DellTechnologies, Microsoft, vStorage ,

Is VTL dead?

25 January 2012
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One curios thing of both ExaGrid and Dell DR4000 solutions (but also other solutions) is that they lack of a Virtual Tape Library (VTL) feature and only work as a network share (with CIFS or NFS). In both cases the reason was not technical (but I think that the main reason is still just a way to reduce cost and complexity) but marketing/strategy (customers just don’t ask at this feature). But moving from a backup to tape (B2T) to a backup to disk (B2D) solution does not necessary mean move to backup to file (over a share) solution.

All backup applications can  usually write to three targets:

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Highlights, vBackup

Is backup to tape dead?

24 January 2012
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LTO Tapes Reading Time: 3 minutes

Several new solutions seem demonstrate that backup destination is moving from tape to disk. It isn’t really a new trend of last year (for example see this paper from Lisa 2006, or Microsoft that has removed the tape support in his OS included backup solution starting from Windows Vista), but now more products are pointing to the disk solution.

The Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium (whose member include Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Quantum) has officially released specifications for the LTO Generation 5 with around 1,5 TB of native capacity and a throughput of 140MBps (uncompressed)… and is working for the future standards. But also disks are growing, especially in size.

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Highlights, vBackup
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