VMware

VCDX – Mock Design – How to attack it?!

October 13, 2018 Jason Grierson 1

Hey, Just wanted to make a quick blog post around some tips and tricks around the mock design question in the VCDX exam.  In the past this gets over looked due to prioritizing your presentation or not practiced enough.  I get a lot of feedback from VCDX candidates either stating this is where they felt they fell a little short in their first defense, or I get a lot of questions on how to attack it. My aim for this blog post is to help give some tips from my experience on how to attack the mock design question and as always generate conversation some good conversation around it.  As the more ways you see people attack it the better […]

Storage vMotion Thin to Thick Lazy Scripting #vExpert #PowerCLI #PowerShell #vSphere

August 29, 2018 Bilal Ahmed 1

Well hello, there party people! I recently came across an issue where the customer had just configured alerting to look for Thin Provisioned VMs, and to my and their dismay it came back with over 300 VMs across 2 sites in staging and production that were like this. Now they have Dell Compellent SANs and these Thin Provision at the storage layer too, so it was basically thin on thin! Now the key points here were: Let’s figure out why this happened Let’s fix the issue for the currently deployed VMs and for future deployments Now we did some digging and it appears the Devs and their automation scripting were the cause of the issue. In their scripts, they had it […]

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The Evolution of Storage – A VMUG presentation (Dutch)

May 17, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

Back in March, I shared a presentation with Duncan Epping during the NLVMUG. This VMUG is one of the biggest and oldest VMUGs in the world. I presented the current state followed by Duncan, who is very well positioned to cover all the things that are still work in progress. A month ago the NLVMUG Usercon published the presentation video on YouTube. Enjoy this presentation.

Flashblog: DCIS-Cube

May 12, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

Over the last couple of months I had been involved in the development of the ‘DCIS-Cube’, the new architecture that will be used as a ‘portable’ and easy deploy-able system by NATO’s Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency). Portability and the ease of deployment of infrastructure in regions of deployment have always been challenging for the NCI. When they have to deploy a small datacenter to support a mission somewhere on the globe, they have to ship a couple of racks with hardware to that specific place.  Apart from the logistical nightmare of moving a ton of hardware,  they are struggling with the actual deployment of all that hardware as well. As every single mission has different requirements they can’t prepare the solution somewhere […]

First impressions: VMware HCI assessment

May 11, 2018 Stijn Depril 2

VMware launched a new HCI assessment tool. Last week Duncan Epping reached out to me. He had a customer asking him if he could have a look into the environment so they could better size the environment with VSAN. I got in contact with the customer on Friday and on Tuesday we had a call in which we discussed the whole environment. Even Mister Epping is impressed with it. Customer reached out a week ago, wanted to know if vSAN would be an option for them. Connected them with @sdepril and within 3 days a full report was produced using the new VMware HCI Assessment tool. It is really powerful! Read more about the tool here: https://t.co/G8u6gpPaCz — Duncan Epping […]

Back 2 VSAN Basics

April 26, 2018 Stijn Depril 0

I see VSAN “in the wild” on a daily basis and very often I get questions about the basics of VSAN. Don’t get me wrong, questions are absolutely a good thing!  What I also see, is that people often ignore the practices and assume it will be OK with a next/next/finish. You guessed it right: This doesn’t go well! Therefor I have decided to start with ‘a VSAN basics’ blog series. What is VSAN What’s important to run VSAN well And why is it important for the success of your project Let’s start with a bit of history For the last decades we have been procuring new storage in the same way as we used to do in the previous […]

Mapping the VCDX Defense Genome Part 3: Is All Flash a Trap?!

January 5, 2018 Jason Grierson 0

Hey everyone, So prior to the holidays I was helping mentor some new VCDX candidates for their re-defenses and was coming across a few trends that I wanted to discuss a little as they started creeping up over and over again.  These trends were All Flash SAN’s, Oversized Compute, and questions being asked that were not part of the candidates design.  We’ll get into the last point a little more but first lest tackle the first two. All Flash SAN Is All Flash SAN a VCDX trap?  No of course not the All Flash SAN is obviously a silver bullet when it comes to storage as it greatly reduces the complexity of the storage system while giving amazing performance.  Gone […]

Bitdefender – True Agentless protection

June 13, 2017 Kim Bottu 0

Last week I was in London at the InfoSecurity convention having a look what is happening in the security world. If you have never attended InfoSecurity, it is a free event where most of the presentations are a bit loaded on the marketing side.  Of course there are always exceptions. The 2-hour workshops are truly gems. At least the workshops which I did attend to. What if you could protect VM’s without agents or without any other piece of installed software? The workshop which really caught my attention was the workshop presented by Andrei IONESCU and Adrian Liviu ARSENE who are both employed by Bitdefender: ‘Data Center Security – HYPERVISOR INTROSPECTION’. Starting with explaining how external and internal threats are evolving they quickly moved on to explain how their […]