This regular series features highlights from the week. I was pretty busy at the Exec Event this week, but did sneak out a few posts about VMware hardware compatibility (SATA/PATA and FCoE CNAs) as well as a review of the Samsung pico-projector I bought for Tech Field Day 4.
VMware
VMware ESX SATA and PATA Compatibility Cheat Sheet
The VMware ESX hardware compatibility list is awesome but it’s kind of hard to wade through. It’s super-detailed, but difficult to navigate if one is browsing for compatible hardware. Although SATA and especially PATA aren’t exactly mainstream in enterprise datacenters, they’re the most-likely storage attachment for labs and tinkerers like me.
VMware ESX FCoE CNA Compatibility in Plain English
VMware has one awesome hardware compatibility list, but its thoroughness can be daunting. It’s fairly easy to search for a specific piece of hardware, but it’s difficult to tell what’s supported in a general sense. I’ve boiled down certain key hardware categories into a general plain-english list of what’s in and out of the ESX HCL. Let’s kick things off with FCoE CNAs.
I’m Open-Sourcing My 2011 Storage For Virtual Environments Seminar!
TechTarget contacted me late last year to return and present a series of One-Day Storage Decisions Seminars. The topic this time around is Storage for Virtual Environments, something I’m very interested in. In fact, I presented a similar series a few years back. But it’s important to stress that I’m neither a practitioner nor the world’s greatest expert on the topic. So I need your help!
Zero Page Reclaim: Savior of Thin Provisioning?
On the storage side, arrays can only use the information they have to deallocate: The data that’s stored on them. They don’t know what application is using it, what file system it is. But, somewhere along the line, someone had a big idea and said, “wait a second, what if we look for pages that are all zeros?” We’ll talk about pages a bit later, but for now, let’s talk about zeros. A zero is kind of a smoke signal coming up from over the hills that says, “there’s nothing valuable here.”
