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 ...

There are lots of content available nowadays especially with the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, there are many on how to migrate off VMware and feature function comparison. One of the great content that is easily digestible from 2TekGuys . Below is a breakdown from the video on the features that was mentioned available on other hypervisors in comparison with VMware vSphere. I am not going to go into feature beyond mentioned in the video. Here are the list of features mentioned: Load Balancing : Moving using live migration of virtual machines (VMs) between hosts to due to contention. Backup : Support of backup from popular backup vendors or from hypervisor vendor themselves. Storage : Able to utilize external network storage/SAN or hypervisor own hyper-converged storage only. Live Migration : Ability to move VMs without any downtime between hosts. Having specialized on VMware vSphere for a long time in my career and been in a technical role from picking up VMware. I am always amazed by...

For users who have been using Nvidia GPU for machine learning processing and huge data processing, many a times, you like to know how is the GPU card been utilize and if its is sufficient.  If you are running VMware platform you will be in luck. vRealize Operations (vROps) has just the management pack from Nvidia can help you on that. If you are using GPU on your VM and you are not using Nvidia GRID (aka Nvidia AI Enterprise - NAIE) technology but using a passthrough, you might want to explore of Nvidia GRID can meet your requirement. Only certain application required the entire GPU card that is when you use passthrough. However, if that is not the case, you might have over provision your card and might be wasting resource that can be use by other. To give you a quick explanation, Nvidia GRID was the technology that is introduced by Nvidia and supported by VMware vSphere to slice your GPU just like how you do it on CPU with partnership between the two companies. With GPU sharing, y...

There are multiple What's update and overview when vSphere 7.0 Update 2 was released on 9th Jan 2021. I am not here to list down those however, you can check it out below. VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 2 VMware vCenter Server 7.0 Update 2 Release Notes vSphere 7 Update 2 Part 2  (updated 18 Mar) What I like to pinpoint out here is what I find will be useful for an architect choosing the right solution for the right use case and be aware of what is useful to help customers in running it after deployed. I will break this down into three portions in the area of vSphere with Tanzu, AI/ML Platform and vSphere improvement. vSphere with Tanzu As you know vSphere with Tanzu or TKG-s has been introduce when vSphere 7.0 was released. With update 2, it now able to leverage on NSX Advanced Load Balancer (previously known as AVI), an enterprise grade Load Balancer for Supervisor Cluster, Guest cluster (TKG) and Kubernetes Services of Type LoadBalancer deployed in TKG clusters. Check out this articl...

Been setting up POC environment for customer and this time wrong got involve with using Nvidia GRID. Encounter some setup steps that are missing from nVidia Deployment guide. In fact, every single setup guide uses the nVidia K1 & K2 card as a reference and those cards have EOA. Here will share with you if you are using any of the newer cards e.g. M60, M6, M10, etc. Here are some resources you should refer to when setting GRID on Horizon 7.x. Register an account on nVidia to download the vibs for ESXi and nVidia License server and Nvidia Driver for Windows OS. Deploying Hardware-Accelerated Graphics with Horizon 7 GIRD Virtual GPU I love to use this guide as a reference to what profile is available for each card type. In a summary what needs to be done on the master image: Install VMware tools Install Horizon View Direct-Connect agent (you know why this needed later) Shutdown VM Edit VM settings, add shared PCI device, select your GRID profile Take a snapshot (in...

If you have not read about what was on Day 1 check out here .  There ain't much announcement on solutions here on the second day.  There are quite a lot of announcements on EUC space and that you can read it here .  There are also mentions of CloudVolumes which was recently acquired by VMware just last week, a few partnership with Google and nVidia on Chromebooks and Horizon DaaS which lightly further expansion from the acquisition done on Desktone . Also VMware has joined as a Gold Partner in the Open Compute Project as reported by AMAX . With VMware been the first partner of SAP with AirWatch and SAP Mobile Secure into the mobility space on security and experience stated here . On vCloud Air, there is on demand which was previously mentioned and as well as vCloud Air  Object Storage offering.  Check out all the new announcement by Bill Fathers. To sum it all, the second focus much on the EUC and mostly partnership betwee day 1 and 2.  If you ar...