Plain Virtualization

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...

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...

With the announcement and also from the datasheet , it seems to be pretty lots of functionalities been added.  However there are some critical ones that are more appealing and wanting to see approvement or resolution to those who are already using since vSphere 4 and prior till today which are not make known to many. Storage There were many discussion over storage UNMAP via thin provisioning and many called it a "myth".  This was also discussed heavily in our Facebook VMUG - ASEAN group.  This was due to many changes since VMFS3 to till VMFS5.  Cody wrote a long history of what are the changes for those who have missed out here . A KB was also release and this create some discussion VMFS3 with different block size would benefit thin provision so to speak before vSphere 5.0 Update 1.  Sadly after which, all UNMAP was not possible via GUI or automatically other than via command line or script. I try to ask internally as well and luckily Cormac with his f...

Have you ever wonder or encounter when asked about network ports requirements for each and individual solutions from VMware?  Whether as a presales, an architect or even a VMware support engineer. No fear!  VMware has just release a very informative network diagram show casing all the network ports and communications in between vSphere and vCloud Director components in a diagram format which makes it easier to understand than just text based. The only catch?  This is based on the current release at the time of writing and likely it would not be updated as frequent so you might have to do your own updating whenever a new release is out. At least it's better than none and going through all the installation guides or KBs would be a killer. Now you can spend more time doing other things. Here is the KB to the network diagram.  This is based on four other KBs as listed: TCP and UDP Ports required to access vCenter Server, ESXi/ESX hosts, and other n...

With the introduction of vSphere 5.1.  There would be many questions on the new features and enhancements been made.  So here are the breakdown of all the new and enhancement documents. What's New in vSphere 5.1 Introduction to VMware vSphere Data Protection Introduction to VMware vSphere Replication Introduction to VMware 5.1 - Performance Introduction to VMware 5.1 - Storage Introduction to VMware 5.1 - Platform Introduction to VMware 5.1 - Networking Hope these will give you a good idea on the changes. As for the editions and add on,  the same editions that are in vSphere 5 are still here which includes Essential, Essential Plus, Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. What has been added is Standard with Operations Management.  This edition adds in vCenter Operations Suite Advanced for active monitoring and capacity monitoring and vCenter Protect Standard for patching.  This edition is very useful for customer starting on a small virtuali...

Some you of you might come across when using openfiler like myself of non existing volumes however it is still mapped to the target. Or you wanted to remove those non existing volumes which keep showing in your volumes list. First, to unmap the volumes from your target you have to edit the following file and restart your iSCSI target service. iscsi_settings.xml in:  /opt/openfiler/etc/iscsi/targets remove all ghost target, only from sub tag to tag (included), not then main tag. Secondly, to remove the non existing volumes, my volumes.xml from /opt/openfiler/etc/ The file should look like the below, remove   ... /> for each of your non existing LUN.