Plain Virtualization

This week marks my 90 days in NetApp. It was truly an eye opener to what thought to be a storage company can do beyond just data storage. NetApp has evolve over the years and with the amount of R&D and investment made to its portfolio that I believe most are not aware just like myself. In my 90 days, I should address what NetApp offers in a nutshell: 1. The only true hybrid and multicloud solution that allows customer to consume storage solution in any shape and form with the same skillset and knowledge. NetApp's secret sauce, ONTAP is the underlying software that empowered its storage solution since the very beginning as the King of NAS. Of course as a software, it has been able to support block and object similarly well. ONTAP One is the only soft license that comes in all NetApp unified storage solution at no additional charges. But the power of ONTAP does not stop there, ONTAP Select , a virtual machine offering allows customer to consume the same ONTAP storage, right off ...

Yes you hear me right. Check out the vSphere 8.0U3e  release notes . VMware is releasing the ESXi 8.0U3e as an entry-level hypervsor.  To download, head to https://support.broadcom.com/ and create an account if you have not done so.  Follow the screenshot below: Software> VMware Cloud Foundation>My Downloads Next click on Free Software Downloads available HERE. Scroll down to VMware vSphere Hypervisor and click on it. You will be lead to it. You will be able to download it. It will be about 618Mb That is definitely a good news for those who needs it for Home lab testing. But not sure if this going to be a one off. Also to note, it is on a 60 days trial but not sure if it behaviour the same as pre-broadcom after expiry. Thanks to Joey Ware for tipping off in Facebook group.

As per the article and confirmation from email from Broadcom to all their partners, there will be a minimum purchase for New VCF license purchase starting 10th April 2025.  What will be your impact to customers like yourself? Basically for any new project, a minimal purchase of 72 cores license is required whether or not your compute workload is going to be lesser. This does not change the minimum purchase of 16 cores per CPU which still stand. While that is true, the above statement only applies to new purchase, if you are doing expansion or renewal of licenses, this does not change. So if you really just need a small setup using 3 servers each, taking a supported Dell PowerEdge R350 with vSphere 8.0U3 as per VMware site , with a minimum of 8 cores per CPU, you will need 24 cores license which will have a surplus of 48 cores (72-24). That is a bumper. For the above example, this will be wastage. However, as I mentioned, expansion and renewal are not impacted.  In another ...

VMware vSAN is a Hyper-Converge Infrastructure solution which is part of VMware Cloud Foundation  (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) bundling.  While VMware vSAN helps customer to achieve a SAN like storage pooling using local HDD on each server together, it is still limited on features it encompasses in comparison to a physical SAN. This is where NetApp ONTAP Select which will complement the missing gap. ONTAP Select is the virtual appliance of the well known ONTAP that runs on all NetApp Unified Storage appliance. One of the major function that ONTAP Select brings to vSAN is on Data management and Protection. This is very useful for protection specific applications especially application aware application by ONTAP Select. Some of the enterprise applications supported can be found here . A detailed kb from Broadcom can be found  here . With ONTAP Select, these applications that are supported can be protected via SnapMirror which can provide an application consiste...

First of all congrats to all vExpert 2025 announced . This year, there is some additional entitlement not made known to the community. I was surprised when I received the below email: And yes, you got it. All vExpert 2025 are given a year of VMUG Advantage entitlement. This includes a 50% one time certification fee and many more which you can find out more here . This is definitely an icing on the cake.

Back in the days of VMware, I was fortunate to talk to many customers and involved in numerous discussion on helping them from on premise to private cloud, hybrid cloud to public cloud and MultiCloud to today, Intelligence running in the cloud. Many thought that might change when I move on to my next career. In fact, I carry on that discussion with my customers today the same way I did in the past. That was also one great reason I joint NetApp. Let me show you where this happens: Reference link As changes of IT evolved, the amount of data customer have to collect, manage, protect and secure is way more than before. More so around complexity and managing the amount of data threats. In 1996, NetApp introduced ONTAP to solve the issue with local data siloes with NAS to help customer manage the large amount of data in files and block. When virtualization take place, NetApp supported a wide range of solutions such as VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, etc. helping customers manage that data growth. Even...