VM-Aware

I found a fantastic article that talks about a free method of monitoring the event viewer for NMV related warnings. I know this functionality should be included in the product, but until it is try using blat as described in this article.

IBM have quietly and I mean quietly announced the release of the new Mid-Enterprise storage range, the XIV storage range has had two press releases here and here.

This is one of the most low key announcements I have ever seen from any vendor about something so important to their hardware product line.

If you want some more information about the capabilities of the XIV range then check out these two links:

The Storage Anarchist

Blocks & Files

Eric Siebert has compiled two more excellent Top Ten lists:

Storage in VMware

Get More Technical with VMware

Not much more to say, just that they are as excellent as I’ve come to expect.

Blocks & Files, an excellent storage related blog, has started a multi-part blog post about IBMs forthcoming storage range - XIV.

I implement IBM storage on a fairly regular basis and have mostly excellent experiences, but some of the ranges are either getting long in the tooth, or are just not as feature rich as they could be.

It is interesting to see that IBM seem to be addressing these issues with XIV being a replacement for the entire enterprise level storage.

Read all the articles here, here and here.

3Par have announced some back-end storage enhancements that can greatly improve the usability, scalability and performance of VMware VDI. Thin Copy Desktop has some of the following enhancements:

Automated Disktop Image Creation & Management - Storage level snapshots that are VMware VDI aware. This will apparently make desktops available in seconds instead of minutes/tens of minutes

Fast & Granular Recovery of Desktop Images - Recovery of desktop images in seconds via the use of scheduled snapshots

Greater Performance - Using Virtual Copy snapshots, which can share the same cache pages for common data within a snapshot tree. In the case of booting, most of the data is common among the virtual desktop boot images, requiring only a single copy in cache to potentially support hundreds of booting clients

You can read all about it here.

I have almost completed an installation of DataCore’s SANmelody storage virtualisation product and wanted to find out about how the wider SQL Server (in my case) community feel about storage virtualisation.

It just so happened that one of the articles I ended up reading was written by the always excellent Brent Ozar. It discusses the topic using real life use cases and quite a lot of detail.

For the customer I have implemented DataCore, they don’t quite need to worry about some of the issues that Brent points out, but some of the points are certainly worth considering.