Month: October 2009

More 3PAR announcements!

Wow 3PAR is really on a role of new announcements for upcoming versions of the InServe OS. The official 3PAR announcement can be seen here.Highlights Include:- Federated multiple InServe arrays so they appear as one large storage cluster. The various arrays could be miles apart.- Persistent cache, where if your...

VMware Workstation 7 released!!

If you are a VMware workstation 6.x user, workstation 7 is a must have upgrade. You can read more about it here. In a blog earlier this month I listed many of the new features. Check it out! Aero Glass for Windows 7 VMs is really killer.

Virtualize ESX inside VMware Workstation

If you want to experiment with ESX(i) on your home computer and have VMware Workstation 6.5, it's pretty easy to do. Two key steps are needed in order to be successful.1. When creating a new VM inside Workstation for ESX(i), chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit.2. After you have...

SharePoint 2010 rocks!

I'll be the first to admit, my experience with SharePoint has been from the end user. But, if you are a SharePoint developer, check out the great blogs at PointBridge. This week in particular, their blogs have been smoking with wazoo (technical term) goodies for developers. 90% of it is...

Are your fabrics converging to FCoE?

If you are planning a major datacenter upgrade in 2010 or beyond, you won't be able to escape vendors pushing their converged fabric products. FCoE is being adopted by all major server and network manufactures at a rapid clip. I think vendors like Brocade will have a tough time in...

Who’s your blade server daddy?

A couple of weeks ago Gartner released their October 2009 magic Quadrant for blade server report. If you have been tracking blade servers, you know the market has been rapidly adopting new technology due to the tidal wave of server virtualization. 10Gb Ethernet, 8Gb Fibre Channel, 10Gb FCoE, and 4x...

SAN Zoning best practices – Be prepared for bunnies!

Today in my vSphere class a question came up about zoning a fibre channel SAN. Best practices from most storage vendors and security specialists recommends WWN single initiator/single target zoning. What the heck does that mean? First, it means a lot of zones--they multiply like bunnies! An initiator is your...

Don’t partition your ESX LUNs!

Under some circumstances you may feel the need to partition an ESX LUN, so you can create two or more datastores. Why? Let's say you have a small branch office with a single ESX host and it's only using internal storage from a RAID controller. And for some reason you...

Bye bye SSL protection, hello man in the middle!

There's a scary article on Slashdot about a SSL attack that was revealed that this year's DEFCON hacker conference. Now there's been a certificate issued for PayPal which aids in exploiting the hole. This is the null-prefix attack! SlashDot The Register SSL Hacking tools here. And while we are at it..let's defeat...

VMware Workstation 7.0 Release Canidate available!

Quick, run, don't walk to the Workstation 7.0 release candidate download! Full Windows 7 Host and Guest support including the ability to run Aero! Improved 3D Graphics for Windows guests with OpenGL and Shader Model 3.0 support Support for many new OSs including Windows Server 2008 R2, Debian 5, and...