Yesterday, at 02:13am (CET), I got an awesome e-mail: Dear Patrick, I am pleased to welcome you to the PernixPro program! I’m very happy to be part of this program! PernixData | PernixPro This program is similar to the VMware vExpert or Microsoft MVP program. It’s designed to spread the magic of PernixData FVP. I am totally convinced of PernixData FVP. Because of this, I’m very pleased to be part of the program.

When talking to SMB customers, most of them don’t want to talk about their backup strategy. It’s paradox: They know that data loss can ruin their business, but they don’t want to invest money into a fully tested recovery concept (I try to avoid the word “backup concept” - Recovery is the key). Because of tight budgets and lacking knowledge, many customers use traditional concepts in a virtualized world. This often ends in traditional backup applications with agents deployed into guest OS, and backups that are written to tape (or worse: On USB disks).

A free StoreOnce VSA, like the well known 1 TB StoreVirtual VSA? That would be too cool to be real. But it is real! Since February, HP offers a free 1 TB version of their StoreOnce VSA. I totally missed this announcement, but thanks to Calvin Zito I noticed it today: Can you protect your data for free? Introducing the new free 1TB StoreOnce VSA http://t.co/71464n0iZp — IT Godfather (@CalvinZito) April 19, 2015 The link leads to another blog post from Ashwin Shetty (Can you protect your data for free?

There’s a world below clouds and enterprise environments with thousands of VMs and hundered or thousands of hosts. A world that consists of maximal three hosts. I’m working with quite a few customers, that are using VMware vSphere Essentials Plus. Those environments consist typically of two or three hosts and something between 10 and 100 VMs. Just to mention it: I don’t have any VMware vSphere Essentials customer. I can’t see any benefit for buying these license.

What a great show by Eric Siebert, David Davis, Simon Seagrave and their special guests Scott Davis from Infinio and John Troyer from TechReckoning! If you missed it, watch the recording! First, I want to thank Eric for his work. If you read tweets like these, you will get a bad conscience. https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/579867795833233408 https://twitter.com/ericsiebert/status/578746970753269761 This is the seventh year that Eric has organized and conducted the annual Top vBlog contest. He put so much work into this contest and this should be be recognized.

Some days ago I talked to a colleague from our sales team and we discussed different solutions for a customer. I will spare you the details, but we discussed different solutions and we came across PernixData FVP, HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization, HP 3PAR Adaptive Flash Cache and DataCore SANsymphony-V. And then the question of all questions came up: “What is the difference?”. Simplify, then add Lightness Lets talk about tiering. To make it simple: Tiering moves a block from one tier to another, depending on how often a block is accessed in a specific time.

A customer of mine is currently refreshing his branch office server infrastructure. A part of this project is to demote the Active Directory Domain Controllers, that are currently running in each branch office. The customer has multiple branch offices and each branch office has an Active Directory Domain Controller which is acting as file-/ print- and DHCP server. Each branch office has its own Active Directory site. The Domain Controller and the used IP subnets are assigned to the corresponding AD site.

Some days ago a colleague and I implemented a small 3-node VMware vSphere Essentials Plus cluster with a HP 3PAR StoreServ 7200c. Costs are always a sore point in SMB environments, so it should not surprise that we used iSCSI in this design. I had some doubt about using iSCSI with a HP 3PAR StoreServ, mostly because of the performance and complexity. IMHO iSCSI is more complex to implement then Fibre Channel (FC).

Sometimes you have to update the OS of your DataCore Storage Server, or the server is crashed and you have to reinstall it. In both cases, a configuration backup is the starting point. The procedure remains the same, regardless if it’s an update or a reinstall after a server crash: Install Windows Server OS Copy configuration backup file to C:\Program Files\DataCore\SANsymphony\Recovery Install DataCore SANsymphony-V Take a backup You can take the configuration backup on different ways:

On February 25, 2015 PernixData released the latest version of PernixData FVP. Even if it’s only a .5 release, FVP 2.5 adds some really cool features and improvements. New features are: Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory-Z (DFTM-Z) Intelligent I/O profiling Role-based access control (RBAC), and Network acceleration for NFS datastores Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory-Z (DFTM-Z) FVP 2.0 introduced support for server side memory as an acceleration resources. With this it was possible to use server side memroy to accelerate VM I/O operations.