server

Using AWS Simple Email Service (SES) as an SMTP relay for different software solutions

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

Many software solutions allow for sending reports, warnings, alarms and many other communications via email. This is a great feature to keep track of what’s happening to your installations without having to log into all of them, but having an email server at our disposal these days is not so common anymore. that’s what happened to me last week, and since I was tired to use my personal Gmail account to send myself emails, I decided it was time to find a different solution and to test AWS SES.

An introduction to Microsoft Scale Out File Server

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

Last week I attended the E2EVC Conference in Brussels. It’s an independent conference about virtualization, filled with technical sessions about many different technologies and platforms: there were some VMware sessions, but the majority of them were about Citrix and Microsoft. It was a great opportunity for me as a “VMware guy” to learn about “the other sides” of the virtualization world. Among the available sessions, Microsoft Scale Out File Server (SOFS) seemed from the beginning an interesting topic; I went to listen to two sessions and I was finally able to get a better knowledge of SOFS.

A new server for my lab

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

My Lab is built basically as a production environment: it has 3 * 1RU Rack servers, gigabit switches and a couple of iSCSI/NFS Storage array. It nothing as a home lab, it’s noisy and it consume a good amount of electricity. I was lucky enough to have a good friend with some free space in his racks inside a datacenter, and he’s hosting my hardware gear for free. As time goes by however my hardware is becoming old and start to show its limits. At some point, I decided it was time for a hardware refresh.

Why I don’t like blade servers

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca 28 Comments

After the recent release of VMware VSAN, there has been a series of blog posts from some of my peers talking about the design considerations that VSAN has brought. If you read them in the order they were published, you can follow the conversation that is going on: VSAN – The Unspoken Truth by Maish Saidel-Keesing […]