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 ...