PowerPath To The Virtual People
Posted by Stephen in Computer history, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 22. Apr, 2009 | View Comments
Hiding in the shadow of the huge VMware vSphere 4 announcement was a very interesting introduction by EMC: PowerPath/VE. As I mentioned in my post on storage changes in vSphere 4, PowerPath/VE plugs into the new pluggable storage architecture (PSA) found in vSphere 4 versions of ESX and takes over the decision-making and heavy-lifting tasks related to communicating with storage systems.D
Storage Changes in the VMware vSphere 4 Family
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 21. Apr, 2009 | View Comments
VMware officially launched their next-generation (version 4) enterprise family of products today under the “vSphere 4″ name. As I’ve been doing for the last few major ESX releases, I’m focusing this post on the storage changes present in vSphere 4.
Iomega Grows Up and Moves Out of the House
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 16. Apr, 2009 | View Comments
Iomega’s StorCenter Pro ix4-200r sports iSCSI and NAS plus VMware ESX support – it’s a small business or lab monster!
Iomega has been a staple of the desktop computing environment for decades, but the company’s products have never been quite at home in even small corporate data centers. That changes today with the introduction of the [...]
Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 31. Mar, 2009 | View Comments
Like clockwork, VMware has cranked out another update to their flagship enterprise product, ESX 3.5. The last update came out in early November, 2008, and included some major new functionality. What’s in store this time to intrigue storage folks? Not much.
For more information on earlier updates, see my articles:
Storage Fixes in VMware ESX Server 3.5 [...]
EMC LifeLine Spreads To The Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-100
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 05. Feb, 2009 | View Comments
As I expected, EMC’s Iomega subsidiary today rolled out the StorCenter Pro ix4-100 a big brother to the popular but plain StorCenter ix2 NAS device. This new model add hot-swappable drives (there are four now), RAID-5, and a longer warranty to make it suitable for small office use. It uses a blacked-out version of the [...]
Essential Reading for VMware ESX iSCSI Users!
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage on 26. Jan, 2009 | View Comments
Update: Check out the latest multi-vendor iSCSI post!
I usually don’t write about other peoples’ articles on this blog, preferring to stick to my own independent work. But this time I’m making an exception.
If you use or are interested in VMware ESX 3.x and iSCSI, you simply must go read Chad Sakac’s post on the topic. Co-written [...]
EMC Makes Iomega Relevant Again
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage on 07. Jan, 2009 | View Comments
Pity poor old Iomega. The company responsible for hot products like the Zip drive and coulda-beens like the Clik drive was stumbling in the early part of this decade, unable to distinguish itself from all of the other providers of commodity external storage devices for consumers. Although the company had built the Zip into a [...]
Storage Changes in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 3
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 07. Nov, 2008 | View Comments
Just over three months after releasing Update 2 for ESX 3.5, VMware has released Update 3. That last Update brought major storage changes like VSS support, hot VMFS extension, Storage VMotion across Fibre Channel and iSCSI, and support for 10 Gb Ethernet and 8 Gb FC support.
For more information on Update 2, see my article, Storage [...]
QLogic and Emulex Deliver 8 Gb Fibre Channel For VMware ESX
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 30. Jul, 2008 | View Comments
As I mentioned on Monday, VMware’s Update 2 for ESX 3.5 includes support for 8 Gb Fibre Channel HBAs. This is an important development, so I went looking through the official ESX I/O Compatibility Guide to see which HBAs in particular were supported, but none were listed.
This was pretty puzzling, but Rich from VM /ETC and [...]
Storage Fixes in VMware ESX Server 3.5 Update 2
Posted by Stephen in Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage on 28. Jul, 2008 | View Comments
VMware just released Update 2 for VMware ESX Server 3.5 (Virtual Infrastructure), and it includes some storage fixes of note:
Support for Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for filesystems Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 guests. This means VMware services like VCB and SRM can now signal Windows Server to quiesce filesystems before creating a clone [...]
