Month: August 2013

Building a Haswell ESXi Server for VSAN

Building a Haswell ESXi Server for VSAN

For a few years I've been occasionally posting home ESXi "server " builds. The last one I did was for SandyBridge. I have two such hosts, and they've been working really well. But after attending VMworld this year in San Francisco and hearing about all the VSAN goodness, I'm going...

VMworld 2013: Software Defined Storage the VCDX Way

VMworld 2013: Software Defined Storage the VCDX Way

This was a great "put your architecture cap on" session by two well known VCDX's, Wade Holmes and Rawlinson Rivera. Software defined <insert virtualization food group here> is all the rage these days. Be it SDN (networking), SDS (storage), SDDC (datacenter) or software defined people. Well maybe not quite at the people stage but...

VMworld 2013: Virtualizing HA SQL Servers

VMworld 2013: Virtualizing HA SQL Servers

Twitter #VAPP5932; Presenter: Scott Salyer (VMware) This session was focused on the various Microsoft SQL server high availability options and how they mesh with vSphere and its HA options. Unlike Exchange 2013, SQL 2012 has several HA architectures to choose from. Some applications may only support one or two SQL HA...

VMworld 2013: Exchange on VMware Best Practices

VMworld 2013: Exchange on VMware Best Practices

Twitter: #VAPP5613, Alex Fontana (VMware) This session was skillfully presented and was jam packed with Exchange on VMware best practices for architects and Exchange administrators. Can you use Exchange VMDKs on NFS storage? Can you use vSphere HA and DRS? How can you avoid DAG failover with vMotion? What's the number one cause...

VMworld 2013: Distributed Switch Deep Dive

Twitter: #VSVC4699, Jason Nash (Varrow) Jason Nash is always a good speaker, and keeps the presentations interesting with live demos instead of death by PowerPoint. This was a repeat session from last year, with a few new vSphere 5.5 networking enhancements sprinkled in. vSphere 5.5 does not have any major...

VMworld 2013: vSphere 5.5 Web Client Walkthrough

Twitter: #vsvc5436; Ammet Jani (VMware), Justin King (VMware) This was a great session by Justin King where he conveyed a logical and compelling story why users should migrate to the web client for managing their vSphere infrastructure. Yes, vSphere 5.5 is REALLY the last version to have a Windows C#...

VMworld 2013: General Session Day 2

Today is the second full day of VMworld 2013, and the second keynote of the week. To start off the 0900 keynote Carl Eschenbach took the stage. A few minutes into the presentation they bring out Kit Colbert, a VMware engineer. Background Business relies on IT Focus on innovation Increasing...

VMworld 2013: Top 10 vSphere Storage Things to Know

VMworld 2013: Top 10 vSphere Storage Things to Know

Twitter: #STO5545, Eric Siebert (HP) This was the best session of the day, and highly informative. Eric Siebert is a fast talker, and his slides were packed to the gills with details (and I didn't even capture 25% of the content). This is the first session that I grabbed a...

VMworld: What’s new in vSphere 5.5 Storage

Twitter: #VSVC5005; Kyle Gleed, VMware; Cormac Hogan, VMware This session was a bit of a bust. The first 20 minutes storage wasn't even mention; it was a recap of vSphere 5.5 platform features. The next 20 minutes was a super high level storage feature overview, and the session ended 20...

VMworld 2013: vMotion over the WAN (Futures)

This was a pretty short (30 minute) session on possible futures of vMotion, which focused on vmotion between datacenters and the cloud. To be clear, these features are not in vSphere 5.5, and may never see the light of day. But maybe in vSphere 6.0 or beyond we will see...

VMworld 2013: Advanced VMware NSX Architecture

Twitter: #NET5716; Bruce Davie, VMware This was by far the best session of the day. While my background is not in networking, even I got excited about what software defined networking can do for an enterprise. The session was also a fire hose of NSX advanced details, and the standby...

VMworld 2013: What’s new in vSphere 5.5

Twitter:#VSVC4605 This session was a fire hose of the top vSphere 5.5 features. There's a lot that's new in this release, and they've addressed many of the vSphere 5.1 SSO headaches. So if you skipped vSphere 5.1 (like I did) for production environments, then get ready for the vSphere 5.5...