Eric Sloof

Storage Virtual Appliances unlock the resources of the ESX server and provide a virtual SAN that enables datastores to be shared. By leveraging an available virtual machine, SVAs provide a shared storage environment without having to install a complex shared storage system.

Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA)

Storage appliance software running under VMware ESX® as a virtual machine. SVA takes control of and virtualizes Direct Attached Storage (DAS), for example internal disk drives and/or externally attached array.

• Presents it to VMware ESX over iSCSI as a virtual SAN .
• This fully enables all features which normally require an expensive external SAN High Availability and VMotion.
• Dramatically lowers the cost of deploying a server virtualization environment.
• Traditionally you would purchase 2-3 physical servers, then have expense of purchasing SAN storage.
• Now you can have a SAN using the server’s internal storage!

I Jumped in my car and I’m heading to Frankfurt, on my way to the VCDX Design Exam. This exam consists of a combination of multiple choice questions, drag and drop items and design scenarios that utilize a tool somewhat like Visio. It’s four hours in length to allow time for me to comment on each item. Saturday 9:30 it’s show time.

The VMFS forensic investigator and fellow vExpert Mike La Spina posted a great article about some unrevealed storage secrets. His article “Understanding VMFS volumes “ contains  everything you should, want or ought to know about the UUID, snapshot’s and devices.

Understanding VMFS volumes is an important element within VMware ESX environments. When storage issues surface we need to correctly evaluate the VMFS volume states and apply the appropriate corrective actions to remediate undesirable storage events. VMFS architecture is not publically available and this certainly adds to the challenge when we need to correct a volume configuration or change issue. So lets begin to look at the components of a VMFS from what I have been able to decrypt using direct analysis.

http://blog.laspina.ca/roller/Ubiquitous/entry/understanding_vmfs_volumes

Besides writing the new book “VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration”, Eric Siebert also created a new version of his VMware vLaunchPad. The dark ages are behind us. You can get a glimpse of a new shiny version here.

Keith Hill received some requests to turn his Effective PowerShell blog posts into booklet form which he has done.  He expects that this document will grow over time as he adds new items.

I am a big fan of the “Effective” series of programming books from Effective COM to Effective XML. Without trying to be too presumptuous, I wanted to capture some of the tidbits I have picked up over the last couple of years using Windows PowerShell interactively and writing production build and test scripts. These items were written for PowerShell 1.0. Where appropriate I have added PowerShell 2.0 Update sections to discuss how the item is affected by the upcoming 2.0 release. As a final note, a number of the PowerShell code snippets shown use functionality from the PowerShell Community Extensions which can be downloaded from http://www.codeplex.com/PowerShellCX.

Via Arne Fokkema over at ICT-Freak.nl

Virtual Computer is on Track to Deliver First PC Lifecycle Management Solution based on Bare-Metal Client Hypervisor at the end of March 2009.

According to NxTop beta tester Steve Dale, director of IT at Camiant, “NxTop addresses our organization’s most challenging pain points. Every user here has a notebook PC and like many organizations, managing backups in a notebook-centric environment is a major challenge, now with NxTop it’s a snap. An added benefit of NxTop is the convenience of abstracted hardware which allows me to manage a single image for operating system (OS) deployment rather than many images that are hardware specific. I’m also enjoying the ability to run two OS simultaneously and the security of full disk encryption built into the solution.”