3rd Party Software

As a vExpert, I am blessed to get 1000 CPU hours access to Ravello’s awesome platform and recently I’ve been playing with the AutoLab deployments tailored for Ravello. If you’re unfamiliar with Ravello’s offering (where have you been?!) then it’s basically a custom hypervisor (HVX) running on either AWS or Google Cloud that allows you to run nested environments on those platforms. I did say it’s awesome. As an avid home-lab enthusiast Ravello initially felt weird, but having used it for a while I can definitely see the potential to augment, and in some cases completely replace the home lab.

[<img class=“alignright size-medium wp-image-3968” src="/images/2014/02/pernixdata1.png" alt=“pernixdata” width=“300” height=“80” since vSphere 6 was released, simply because I can’t afford to wait on learning new versions until 3rd party software catches up. It makes you truly appreciate the awesome power of FVP, even on my less than spectacular hardware in my lab, when it’s taken away for a while. Now that FVP 3.0 has GA’d, I’m looking forward to getting my lab storage accelerated - it makes a huge difference.

Having just welcomed VMTurbo on board as a blog sponsor, I thought I’d do a quick posting on how to deploy their free Virtual Health Monitor appliance. Sign up for a free license here and download the appropriate version Deploy the VMTurbo Appliance Deploying the appliance is simply a case of importing the OVA downloaded. There’s nothing really to configure and it took 61 seconds in my lab environment, so it’s pretty quick!

Having finally got some SSDs to be able to use my PernixPro/PernixPrime NFR license, I thought it was about time to get PernixData’s FVP 2.0 running in my lab again. I haven’t used FVP in my lab since it was running in beta, so I was keen to see the awesome new features in action. It really is an easy install process and took me less than an hour to get my cluster up and running with VMs I/O being accelerated.

I was recently sent a copy of Christian Mohn’s new book “Learning Veeam Backup and Replication for VMware vSphere” to review, and as ever this is my honest opinion of this book. I am not receiving anything other than the copy of the book for this review. I don’t work for a vendor, so I have no axe to grind! Content The book starts of with explanations of basic backup strategies and explains principals like Grandfather-Father-Son media rotation and RPO/RTOs.

Recently I had the good fortune to be invited along to a blogger briefing with Satyam Vaghani CTO and Co-founder of PernixData. Those of you not in the know Satyam already has quite the track record, more notably for authoring 50+ patents, Principle engineer and Storage CTO for VMware (10 years). So it is safe to say he knows a thing or two about storage and related technology! Nine of us (bloggers) were in attendance.

I recently came across Infinio and after reading about the unique way it tackled the problem of increasing I/O and reducing latency I was curious to see how it would perform in my lab. A few things I would like to point out. First of all Infinio works only with NFS storage, secondly it does not require flash storage as it utilizes the host RAM instead however it provides only read acceleration.

Recently I have had the pleasure to use PernixData but I did come across a bit of a ‘gotcha’ after uninstalling it from my hosts. If like me you use iSCSI then you will likely spend a bit of time setting up your Path Selection Polices to suit your specific needs, so it was interesting to note the following. When you do uninstall and remove PernixData from your hosts your Path Selection Polices do not revert back to your original configuration rather they revert back to the default vSphere setting of MRU (Most recently used).

Since the keynote by Frank Denneman at the LonVMUG many months ago the PernixData product has been something I wanted to test to see what benefits it may or may not bring to our SQL environment, I did have the good fortune to briefly beta test it last year but this blog post will cover the current full version (FVP 1.0.2.0). I am aware that 1.5 is just around the corner and with it comes full support for vSphere 5.

It’s been a really great year so far and incredibly busy (no complaints though!) VMware products have featured very high on my to-do list so far this year, with new hosting and DR solutions either completed or well underway. The simplicity, resilience and strength of vSphere never gets old! I have also had the privilege to attend several London VMUG meetings all of which have been excellent! They have been superb opportunities to meet new people, put faces to Twitter names and learn more about current and forthcoming technologies orientated around visualization.