If you are designing a new project with PernixData, you can have a cluster where not all ESXi servers have a Flash memory (a PCIe card or an SSD); however, there are some design considerations you need to keep in mind, both during the installation part or while using this software.
Category: Tech
Everything tech: deepdive on the most important technologies, tips and tricks for everyday’s work, tutorial, step-by-step guides, videos and manuals.
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SanDisk FlashSoft 3.1 for vSphere: tests
In a previous article, I wrote about the server-side caching solution Sandisk FlashSoft 3.1 for vSphere, its features and how to install and configure it in a vSphere environment. In this article I will show the results of some performance tests I did.
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A closer look at SanDisk FlashSoft 3.1 for vSphere
Ho scoperto per la prima volta FlashSoft in occasione di Storage Field Day 3 a Denver: FlashSoft era stata acquisita da SanDisk nel Febbraio 2012, ed è stata sinceramente una sopresa scoprire che il colosso delle memorie Flash possedeva una divisione Enterprise, fatta di soluzioni come appunto FlashSoft e altre. Penso che come me, molti di voi hanno sempre abbinato il nome SanDisk alle memorie per dispositivi o alle chiavette USB…
Ho finalmente potuto dedicare un pò di tempo a studiare questa soluzione. Questo primo articolo è una descrizione del prodotto e delle sue caratteristiche.
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Configure an HP server to use SSD and PernixData
I recently installed for the first time PernixData FVP at a customer. He has three HP Proliant DL380 G7 servers, each one with an integrated Smart Array P410i disk controller. There are some suggested configurations coming from Pernix in order to optimize the usage of SSDs, and if you are one of their costumers there is a technical document you can request. Some of these steps and configurations are really useful anytime you are going to use SSDs on ESXi.
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Solidfire: a “quality” storage
Da quando è uscita dallo stealth mode nel 2009 ho sempre osservato con interesse Solidfire, perchè hanno un prodotto storage veramente particolare, differente da tutti gli altri produttori, e di sicuro interesse per chi come me lavora nell’ambito dei service providers. Alcune settimane fa ho avuto una piacevole chiaccherata con alcuni loro rappresentanti, ed ho potuto finalmente approfondire la mia conoscenza sul loro prodotto.
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My new “I/O Test Virtual Machine”
Being able to perform reliable I/O tests on a storage system is something that can digress into art. And it’s both the art of defining trustworthy and repeatable methods, but sadly more often the art of configuring ad-hoc tests in order to make the measurement tool say what the vendor want to be said; faking I/O tests is one of the easiest tasks, and often you only need to omit certain parameters in the published results as latency or block size in order to make them completely different.
I choose to follow a different path and I created my own solution. I have no claim this is going to be the best one. But I think is a simple way to run reliable tests, and most of all it creates easily repeatable tests, so you can then compare the results.
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Veeam Backup Validator: check the consistency of your backup files
Among the several features of Veeam Backup & Replication, there is one of them probably unknown to 99.99% of its users, basically because it’s a tool usually executed only by the technical support staff. It’s the Validator, a small command line tool located into the installation folder of the software.
Its main use case is to verify the consistency of a backup created with Veeam Backup & Replication.
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Howto configure a small redundant iSCSI infrastructure for VMware
I’ve seen often many users asking in forums how to properly configure a network in order to deploy a iSCSI storage, especially in really small environments.
So, I created this post in order to explain how I usually configure a system with an HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 iSCSI storage and a small cluster with 3 vSphere servers. If you are using a different storage, you would probably have to change some configuration, but the principles are always the same.