After skipping VMword Las Vegas, I’m very much looking forward to VMworld Copenhagen. Today I created my schedule and boy it was hard to choose between the many good sessions. A good start to build your schedule is this list provided by Duncan Epping which holds a number of deep technical sessions. But you’ll soon discover that there are many conflicts, so you’ll have to make some hard decisions.

I copied Duncan’s list and added the time slots to make it easier to select a session and I also added the “Attend” column to show you what my choices are. As I said, some tough choices because I would have loved to see Frank, Eric and Luc and “He Who Shall Be Named PowerCLI Man” on stage, but I hope reading their blogs and of course read the “VMware vSphere 5 Clustering technical deepdive” book will make up a little for not seeing the sessions. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  2 Comments »

Today Veeam released Backup Academy. It is a FREE resource to get started with backup technologies targeted at IT professionals who are just getting started with data protection. Users that complete the video series can also do a Backup Academy Exam and get a certificate when they pass.

Although created by Veeam, Backup Academy is product neutral and it is already a great source of information with video’s from well know industry experts like David Davis, Eric Siebert, Elias Khnaser, Greg Shields and Rick Vanover. Even Veeam’s competitors are encouraged to add their content to the Backup Academy. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  1 Comment »

In June 2011 I was part of the TechField Day #6 delegation and one of the companies we visited was VKernel. During the VKernel presentation we, the delegates, had a number of comments on the layout / GUI part of vOPS. Only a few months later, VKernel shows they have been using our feedback and of their customers and made some pretty good adjustments to the GUI with the release of VKernel vOPS 4.

Of course that is not the only change in vOPS 4. One of the biggest new features is that VKernel vOPS is now “Hypervisor Agnostic”, which specifically means that besides VMware vSphere, they now also support Microsoft Hyper-V and will be supporting RHEV in Q4 2011. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  No Comments »

Last evening I had a WebEx session with Tintri in which they told me about their “VM only” storage appliance VMstore and I must admit that I’m impressed with what they have to offer. I have not yet had the opportunity to test this appliance, all info in this blog post is from the WebEx session and documentation provided by Tintri.

What is Tintri VMstore?

It’s an easy to install storage box that comes in only one configuration: 8.5TB of usable data. In the box is a mix of SATA disks of flash disks. The storage is offered to your VMware environment as one big NFS datastore. By moving data back and forth from SATA to flash, VMstore will eliminate storage performance bottlenecks. (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  2 Comments »

In response to my blog post on “vSphere 5 – How to run ESXi stateless with vSphere Auto Deploy“, I received a comment from Rob Ellison, who ran into issues when PXE booting through a Cisco ASA firewall. In a second comment he explained how he solved the issue. Turned out there was an issue with the frame size of the gPXE client. Below is his solution to this issue. Should you have any questions on this specific issue, feel free to contact Rob. Thank you Rob for this solution.

Rob Ellison, Managed Hosting Technical Architect
Twitter: @robellison
Google Plus: Rob Ellison (more…)

by Gabrie van Zanten.  1 Comment »