Copyright © 2014 - IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved.
@VMware Completes Software Defined Enterprise and Shakes Up Software Defined Storage
March 9, 2014
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The last week has been big in the world of Software-Defined Storage. VMware has launched the final pillar of the Software Defined Enterprise, Virtual SAN, and just the day after Nutanix announced that it had been granted the patent for its ground breaking software defined storage technology. The VMware launch completes its vision of the Software-Defined Datacenter and Enterprise with all of the major pillars in place, and at the same time intends to shake up the existing SDS market. I have a lot of friends working at VMware and I congratulate them on this major milestone. This launch will broaden the options for customers and keep the other companies in the SDS and hyper-converged field, including the industry leader (where I work) Nutanix, in check. We will all have to innovate and differentiate in different ways, and try to keep ahead and stay focused. Fortunately there is plenty of market out there for us all and the market is still growing. More than anything though this major launch again validates the entire hyper-converged, scale out software-defined storage mixed with compute architecture and the market as a whole. So how do I think this is going to play with the VMware partnership and other storage vendors, including the likes of Nutanix?
Using Nutanix Container Reservations and a FreeSpace Container for Availability and Capacity Planning
March 9, 2014
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Over the past week I was discussing vSphere 5.5 best practices with regards to Nutanix with Josh Odgers (Fellow VCDX and member of the Nutanix Solutions and Performance Engineering Team), who is putting together a comprehensive paper on vSphere 5.5 best practices for Nutanix. One of the topics that came up in our discussions was availability and capacity planning, such as the number of node failures to tolerate, and how to make capacity planning easy and ensure you can always meet your failure tolerance. Unlike many storage architectures there is no fixed limit to the number of node failures a Nutanix environment can sustain before data protection may become an issue. It all comes down to your design and how much free space there is to re-protect your data. If for example you have a 64 node Nutanix cluster that is 80% full, you can potentially survive the loss of a more than 10 nodes (from a storage perspective) before your ability to re-product the data becomes an issue. But even at small scale, say 3 nodes, what is the best way to avoid trouble and be able to plan for capacity and failure, and ensure your data is protected?
Categories: Nutanix
Availability, Capacity Planning, Container, Nutanix, vSphere
Choosing the Right ASM Allocation Unit for a Virtualized Oracle Database
February 28, 2014
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Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management) is a volume manager and file system provided by Oracle for use with Single Instance and Real Application Cluster (RAC) databases. Although it supports single instance databases I’ve seen it more commonly used with RAC. ASM provides a high performance and simplified way of managing disks and placing data files and other files for DBA’s. It probably comes as no surprise that Oracle recommends ASM over other options such as OS included or third party volume managers, file systems and raw devices. The ASM Allocation Unit is a fundamental unit of storage and management in any ASM disk group. But which Allocation Unit size should you choose for your Virtualized Oracle Databases?
Vote For The Best Virtualization Blogs at vSphere-Land.com
February 24, 2014
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Once every year Eric Siebert puts the list together of all of great virtualization blogs that are written and updated constantly in support of the great community around VMware and virtualization that has been adopted. This is the annual event that gives you an opportunity to show your support and appreciation for all the hours that the bloggers put in, and for you to vote for your favourite and the best virtualization blogs in the world. The list grows ever longer every year, and the number of voters grows ever longer every year also. I love brining you information and advice on virtualizing business critical apps, monster vm’s and everything else vSphere. This is one way I can give back to the community that has been so good to me. If you appreciate what I and the other bloggers do, then please vote for our blogs on the official article at vsphere-land.com.
Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware
Top Blogs, VMware, vSphere
#Exchange on VMDK on NFS – Support the Movement! #VMwarePEX
February 12, 2014
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A group of interested parties from a cross section of industry vendors has started a discussion around the merits of supporting Exchange Server on VMDK’s on top of NFS. Technically there is no reason why it should not be supported. It works great and Exchange and Windows don’t even know they’re virtual. They just talk SCSI to their virtual disks. Supportability might be a concern so having some sort of a certification or QA program is important. But provided robust, performant and reliable storage systems are used and Exchange continues to use block SCSI protocol to a VMDK why does it matter that the underlying protocol to the physical storage is NFS? I believe this provides choice to customers, and in fact many customers have been choosing this for a long time and running Exchange like this in production. They’ve continued to get support under their premier agreements. But I believe this should be extended to all customers for any qualified storage platforms. If you agree and you want to see choice of protocol provided the abstraction is solid and proven then support the movement. Vote Exchange on VMDK on NFS!
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This post appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
#VMwarePEX Day 1 Keynote Wrap Up of Software Defined Enterprise
February 12, 2014
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VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) kicked off today in sunny San Francisco with a great keynote presentation from a number of key VMware executives. This year VMware introduced a new term to the partner community, the Software-Defined Enterprise. SDE is where every component of IT is virtualized, abstracted, pooled, and automated. VMware spoke about their Network Virtualization and Software-Defined Storage initiatives. This article will cover some of the highlights.
Nutanix Enterprise IT Disruption as a Service, Raises $100M in Funding including from SAP Ventures
January 15, 2014
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I awoke this morning to the news that hit the presses overnight that Nutanix and it’s legendary radically simple Google like infrastructure had really delivered on the promise of disruption of the enterprise IT infrastructure market. Raising $100M in series D funding, including from SAP Ventures, and having delivered over $100M in just 2 years of sales. This cements Nutanix as the leading disruption agent of enterprise datacenters and the fastest growing company of the last decade.
Categories: Business Critical Applications, SDDC, Software Defined Datacenter
Nutanix, SAP
VMware vSphere 5.5 Virtual Storage Adapter Performance
January 13, 2014
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A number of you have shown an interest in the relative performance of the different virtual storage adapters that are available in vSphere 5.5. I haven’t seen anything published by VMware so I thought I’d do my own testing in my home lab. This is a very brief article to share with you the results I found. Read more…
Categories: Business Critical Applications, VCDX
LSI SAS, Performance, PVSCSI, SATA, VMware, vSphere 5.5
Nutanix: The Big Red Easy Button for Oracle Databases – Part 1
January 10, 2014
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As you may have read in my article New Adventure to Redefine Radically Simple Architecture for Business Critical Apps with Nutanix I’ve started working at Nutanix. My primary role as part of the Solutions and Performance Engineering team is to help develop the platform, solutions reference architectures, and best practices for Business Critical Applications. One of the areas I’m working on right now is Oracle on Nutanix.
Nutanix really is the big red easy button for infrastructure. The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform provides a hyper-converged Google like web-scale scale-out infrastructure for the masses. Even though it’s a scale-out architecture the unit of scale is large enough for monster VM’s including Monster Oracle Databases. Nutanix is a Gold level Oracle technology partner and considers Oracle a very important use case for the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. I’ve been working with a number of customers that are already running Oracle on Nutanix successfully and as part of this work we’ll be documenting some case studies as well as solutions architectures that you can all benefit from. But right now I wanted to start a series of blogs to document my thoughts, some of the considerations, and benefits of running Oracle on the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform.
Categories: Business Critical Applications, SDDC, Software Defined Datacenter, VMware
Nutanix, Oracle, VMware, vSphere
Long White Clouds 2013 Year End Review
January 2, 2014
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Another year has flown by, and what a year it was, and now we’re in a new year and I’m a year older and hopefully a little wiser, we never learn less. The great thing about being in the IT industry and especially being involved with Virtualization, Cloud and Software Defined Datacenters, there is always so a lot to learn and things are changing at an ever faster pace. All the time the economics and customers benefits are rapidly increasing all the time. I mean we don’t just do things because they are cool and technically interesting, there has to be an ROI for our customers, partners and customers organizations. It was great for me to personally be involved in revolutionizing many customers economics of delivering IT infrastructure and applications services throughout 2013, especially with the many Unix to VMware migration projects I was involved with. So this article will reflect on some of the highlights of 2013.
Categories: Business Critical Applications, CA SSL Certificates, Cloud, SDDC, Security, Software Defined Datacenter, VCDX, VMware
FUD, HPC, Hyperconverged, Oracle, SAP, SDDC, Unix, vForum, VMware, VMworld, vSphere
Mako Networks
Mako Networks
Your Author: Michael Webster, VCDX-066, vExpert
IT Solutions 2000 Ltd
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