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.
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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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.
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Storage Field Day 4: Avere Systems
I’ve been invited as a delegate to Storage Field Day, in its 4th edition in San Josè, California. I met Avere Systems and I learned about their solution; our host has been their CEO and founder, Ron Bianchini.
Avere original idea has been to optimize NAS by eliminating performances problems and latency using their design, called Edge-Core. This solution can optimiza NAS, by sitting in between users and the Filer in the backend.
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Add a Flash storage in an existing environment
I’m reading lately a huge amount of informations regarding Slash storage. Articles, blogs, whitepapers, written by analysts, bloggers and companies that produce and sell any solution based on NAND memories. Each of them have their own solution: all have been designed to cure the long-standing problems involving the slowness of storage based on spinning disks; but at the same time the way they solve the same problem is completely different one from the other.
In an existing environment, the introduction of a given solution is a choice requiring special care.
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Reclaim disk space after an in-place upgrade to Windows Server 2012
After an update to Windows 2012 where you do not reinstalled the system but you choose an in-place update, you could have a high decrease in free space. With few and easy maintenance activities you can reclaim serveral GB of disk space.