02 Jun 2017
By Yendis Lambert

Azure ASR for IaaS virtual machines

Microsoft, , ,
Microsoft this week announced the public preview of disaster recovery for Azure IaaS virtual machines (VMs) using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). You can now easily replicate and protect IaaS based applications running on Azure to a different Azure region of your choice within a geographical cluster without deploying any additional infrastructure components or software appliances in your subscription. This new capability, along with Azure Backup for IaaS virtual machines, allows you to create a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery strategy for all your IaaS based applications running on Azure. As you move production applications to the cloud, Azure natively…
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02 May 2017
By Yendis Lambert

Azure IaaS Virtual Machines Temporary Drives

Microsoft, , ,
I’ve seen many posts on forums asking for more detail on the temporary disks assigned to Azure IaaS Windows and Linux VMs so here is a quick post explaining what they are. When you create a VM either in the portal or command line utilities (i.e. PowerShell) you automatically receive an additional drive or mount point which is available for you to use at no additional cost for storage or transactions.  The primarily use case is to provide faster storage (IOPS and Latency) but although this sounds great it isn’t to be used for any data that you wish to…
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09 Feb 2017
By Yendis Lambert

VMware vExpert 2017

VMware,
The vExpert 2017 Announcement has been made by VMware and I’m honoured and pleased to say I have been awarded the accolade for the fifth year running. I would like the thank Cory (@vCommunityGuy) and the team at VMware for all their hard work vetting the individuals that apply. Looking forward to working with many vExperts and attending the many VMware events throughout 2017.
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29 Nov 2016
By Yendis Lambert

vSphere 6.5 Storage

VMware,
This technical white paper describes the various features of the new vSphere 6.5 Core Storage in detail Storage Limit Improvements Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) Improvements VMFS-6 UNMAP Storage I/O Control vSphere VM Encryption New Virtual Storage Hardware NFS ISCSI Improvements
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29 Nov 2016
By Yendis Lambert

What’s New in VMware vSphere 6.5

VMware
VMware vSphere® 6.5 is the next-generation infrastructure for next-generation applications. It provides a powerful, flexible, and secure foundation for business agility that accelerates the digital transformation to cloud computing and promotes success in the digital economy. vSphere 6.5 supports both existing and next-generation apps through its 1) simplified customer experience for automation and management at scale; 2) comprehensive built-in security for protecting data, infrastructure, and access; and 3) universal application platform for running any app anywhere. With vSphere 6.5, customers can now run, manage, connect, and secure their applications in a common operating environment, across clouds and devices. This paper…
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30 Aug 2016
By Yendis Lambert

VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware, ,
With the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), VMware laid out the vision for the architecture of the hybrid cloud. SDDC redefines the architecture and operational model of the data center, enabling IT to complete the transition to hybrid cloud and maximize its benefits. In an SDDC, compute, storage, and networking services are decoupled from underlying hardware infrastructure and abstracted into logical pools of resources that can be more flexibly provisioned and managed.   To accelerate the customer journey to SDDC, VMware has introduced VMware Cloud Foundation™, a new unified SDDC platform for the private and public cloud. Cloud Foundation brings together…
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25 Jul 2016
By Yendis Lambert

Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere Availability and Recovery Options

VMware, ,
Running Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere offers many options for database availability and disaster recovery utilizing the best features from both VMware and Microsoft. For example, VMware vSphere vMotion and VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) can help to reduce planned downtime and balance workloads dynamically, and VMware vSphere High Availability (HA) can help to recover SQL Server databases in the case of host failure. At the application level, all SQL Server features and techniques are supported on vSphere, including AlwaysOn Availability Groups, AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances, database mirroring, and log shipping. SQL Server availability features can be used inside of a virtual machine just as you would…
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31 May 2016
By Yendis Lambert

VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Deduplication, Compression, and Erasure Coding

VMware, ,
Hyper-Converged solutions featuring all-flash storage are the future as they continue to decrease in cost and offer dramatically better performance when compared to magnetic disks. Virtual SAN is optimized for modern all-flash storage with efficient near-line deduplication, compression, and erasure coding capabilities that lower TCO. Deduplication and compression enable considerable capacity savings across the entire Virtual SAN cluster — especially in environments where standard OS builds (templates and clones) are used and where there is abundant data commonality such as file shares. RAID-5/6 erasure coding reduces capacity consumption by as much as 50% versus RAID-1 (mirroring) with the same levels of availability for FTT=1 and FTT=2 Virtual SAN…
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31 May 2016
By Yendis Lambert

VMware Logon Monitor

VMware, ,
VMware Logon Monitor monitors Windows user logons and reports a wide variety of performance metrics intended to help administrators, support staff, and developers troubleshoot slow logon performance. Metrics include, but are not limited to, logon time, CPU/memory usage, and network connection speed. VMware Logon Monitor also receives metrics from other VMware products which provide even more clues about what is happening during the logon flow. While other VMware products are not required to benefit from VMware Logon Monitor, some VMware products may be active during user logon. The Horizon Agent, Horizon Persona Management, and App Volumes are examples and will…
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22 Mar 2016
By Yendis Lambert

Azure IP address 168.63.129.16

Microsoft, ,
Have you ever wondered what this IP address is?  Well 168.63.129.16 is a virtual public IP address that is used to facilitate a communication channel to internal platform resources for the bring-your-own IP Virtual Network scenario.  Because the Azure platform allow customers to define any private or customer address space, this resource must be a unique public IP address.  It cannot be a private IP address as the address cannot be a duplicate of address space the customer defines.  This virtual public IP address facilitates the following things: Enables the VM Agent to communicating with the platform to signal it…
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