DIY Storage: Risk, Cost, and Benefit
September 16, 2013 13:20 PM
Buying commodity hardware can save you a lot of money when building your own SAN. Plus, it isn't as risky as you might think.
DIY Storage: Using Virtualization To Cut Costs
September 10, 2013 14:01 PM
While building my own storage system as a pilot project at work, I figured out how to stretch my budget via virtualization. Here's what I did.
Microsoft ReFS and Oracle ZFS: How They Compare
July 25, 2013 11:55 AM
Microsoft's ReFS and Oracle/Sun's ZFS file systems are designed to remedy errors that might otherwise corrupt data. Here's how they stack up against one another.
DIY Storage Part 4: Building Redundancy
July 16, 2013 14:08 PM
In building my own SAN to meet some storage needs at work, I figured out how to overcome problems on the path to redundancy and high availability. Here's what I learned works for creating a HA array.
DIY Storage Part 3: Pricing Pitfalls
May 28, 2013 13:20 PM
In building my own SAN as a pilot project at work, I learned firsthand about how vendors can make it difficult to budget creatively. Here are some of the roadblocks I ran into (and workarounds to avoid them) when trying to reduce storage costs.
DIY Storage Part 2: Picking the Right SAN Software
April 04, 2013 16:02 PM
I’m building my own SAN as a pilot project at work. I looked at seven storage software packages, including commercial and open source products. Here’s how I decided which was right for me.
DIY Storage: Why I Built My Own SAN
March 29, 2013 14:36 PM
I built my own SAN to meet some storage needs at my job. In a series of posts I’ll cover the reasons why, how I did it, and the hardware and software I used.
Recovering From RedoLog Corrupt Errors On VMware ESX/ESXi
March 11, 2010 14:50 PM
RedoLog corrupt errors are a common issue on VMware ESX/ESXi machines where machines are snapshotted and the datastore is allowed to run low on space. Use this step by step guide to get your machine back in business.
Snapshot Caveats On VMware VI4
February 17, 2010 09:00 AM
A typical morning in IT: The phone rings first thing in the morning and a mail server is down. Since e-mail is the lifeblood of every organization, this is the type of problem that can seriously ruin your day. The cause: A VMware ESX snapshot gone awry and the disk files have used up all available space on the datastore. On powering up the virtual machine, I was greeted with an error message that the "RedoLog" was corrupt and the machine needed to be powered off. My subsequent investigation into what went wrong and how it could be fixed revealed to me that the net was woefully inadequate in describing the problem and providing a remedy.
The Do's And Don'ts Of Virtualizing Database Servers
January 21, 2010 00:24 AM
Virtualization conveys numerous benefits to traditional x86/64 bit server environments, but everybody knows that virtualization and heavily utilized databases don't tango; at least that's the consensus. By utilizing some simple best practices and taking advantage of smart features in vSphere, you can harness the flexibility, load balancing and high availability features of virtualized database servers.
Smartphone Virtualization: Useful Or Useless?
January 04, 2010 13:00 PM
The virtualization industry has been on fire with news of VMware's latest experimental venture: Smartphone Virtualization. The technology has been targeted at the mobile professional who currently carries two phones, one for personal and one for business use. VMware touts that with a real hypervisor on board, our prototype telecommuter of tomorrow will be able to switch seamlessly between two different installed operating systems on the same phone. With Gigahertz processor cell phones on the market and storage into the 100GB mark, it seems reasonable to virtualize phone technology. Getting deeper into the logistics, however, it starts to sound like more trouble than it's worth.
Harnessing vSphere Performance Benefits For NUMA: Part 2
December 14, 2009 17:32 PM
In my last post I talked a great deal about native support for NUMA in vSphere on enabled Opteron and Nehalem processor platforms. NUMA is a strong technology in and of itself, but it really starts to shine when teamed with other supporting technologies. In this post, I'm going to cover the details of integrating next generation networking and interrupt technologies to improve storage and networking performance. I'll focus on MSI-X, but future posts will cover VMDq, RSS and Multiple Queue's in more detail, as all these technologies work closely to distribute load to multi-core CPUs and dramatically improve system performance.
Harnessing vSphere Performance Benefits for NUMA
December 05, 2009 19:31 PM
Non Uniform Memory Access or NUMA is becoming increasingly commonplace on the next generation of very powerful servers. What does this mean for virtualization applications on the latest VMware incarnation? Serious performance increases for NUMA equipped systems.
Updating ESX To vSphere 4
December 04, 2009 08:00 AM
It's no secret that the latest version of VMware's virtual infrastructure is bigger, better, faster and more capable than ever, but along with the new feature set comes a whole load of complexity. vSphere 4.0 has a ton of features designed to bring system performance to the next level, but it requires a little tweaking to get the most out of them.
