Northtech Consulting Limited

04 Feb 2015

What’s New: VMware Virtual SAN 6.0

The new VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 is a second-generation hypervisor-converged enterprise-class storage solution for vSphere-virtualized infrastructures that combines the compute and storage resources of vSphere hosts. With it’s two supported architectures hybrid and all-flash, Virtual SAN 6.0 is able to satisfy the demands of all virtualized applications, including business-critical applications. Virtual SAN 6.0 is a VMware-designed storage solution that makes software-defined storage a reality for VMware customers that delivers radically simple, hypervisor-converged storage for virtual machines. Download the White Paper

02 Feb 2015

By Yendis

VM Resource and Availability Service

VMwareAvailability, fling, Resources, tools

The engineers at VMware have released a cool tool that enables you to perform a what-if analysis for host failures on your infrastructure. You can simulate failure of one or more hosts from a cluster (in vSphere) and identify how many: VMs would be safely restarted on different hosts VMs would fail to be restarted on different hosts VMs would experience performance degradation after restarted on a different host With this information, you can better plan the placement and configuration of your infrastructure to reduce downtime of your VMs/Services in case of host failures. To Get started :- Open hasimulator.vmware.com to…

31 Jan 2015

By Yendis

vCenter Server 5.5 – Update 2d

VMwarepatches, vCenter

VMware have just released an update to its vCenter Server. vCenter Server 5.5 Update 2d - Build 2442329 vCenter Server 5.5 Update 2d Installation Package - Build 2442328 vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 Update 2d - Build 2442330 Please make sure to review the release notes and download from vmware.com While this is a minor release it does resolve many issues previously experienced as summarized here: vCenter Single Sign-On VMware Directory Service consumes excessive memory Backup and restore of vCenter Single Sign-On database might not replicate the data between primary and secondary nodes correctly Attempts to logout through the vCloud Automation…

28 Jan 2015

By Yendis

VMWARE EVO:RAIL DEMO

VMwareEVO RAIL

VMware EVO: RAIL combines compute, networking, and storage resources into a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance to create a simple, easy to deploy, all-in-one solution offered by VMware qualified partners. Download the Technical White Paper

23 Jan 2015

By Yendis

VMware Labs – vMaxGuide

VMwareAndroid, fling, tools

vMaxGuide is an Android application which provides the maximum supported configurations of the following vSphere versions: vSphere 5.5 vSphere 5.1 vSphere 5.0 vMaxGuide also provides a comparative view of components across the three versions of vSphere along with the comparison of virtual Hardware versions of Virtual Machines. Users can swipe between the different platforms displayed and select the component of interest. The app also provides a message to the user on certain components, marked by [*], which requires certain condition to reach the maximum supported configuration. Download vMaxGuide

20 Jan 2015

By Yendis

Windows Server Technical Preview – Storage Replica

Microsoftreplica, storage, windows

Storage Replica enables storage-agnostic, block-level, synchronous replication between clusters or servers for disaster recovery, as well as stretching of a failover cluster for high availability. Synchronous replication enables mirroring of data in physical sites with crash-consistent volumes ensuring zero data loss at the file system level. Asynchronous replication allows site extension beyond metropolitan ranges with the possibility of data loss. To help you get familiar with Storage Replica, we have a downloadable guide to provide you with step-by-step instructions for evaluating the Stretch Cluster and the Server-to-Server scenarios. These are both designed for Disaster Recovery and provide “over the river”…

11 Jan 2015

By Yendis

Using an Azure VM as a DAG Witness Server

Microsoftazure, DAG, exchange

I’m happy to announce support for use of an Azure virtual machine as an Exchange 2013 Database Availability Group witness server. Automatic datacenter failover in Exchange 2013 requires three physical sites, but many of our customers with stretched DAGs only have two physical sites deployed today. By enabling the use of Azure as a third physical site, this provides many of our customers with a cost-effective method for improving the overall availability and resiliency of their Exchange deployment. You can learn more about the deployment and configuration process, as well as learn about our best practices in the TechNet Library…

08 Jan 2015

By Yendis

Microsoft Exchange Server Performance on VMware Virtual SAN

VMwareexchange, performance, vSAN

Microsoft Exchange Server is a commonly found email server and is considered a business-critical application by many organizations. Virtualized instances of Exchange Server can be successfully deployed using VMware vSphere 5.5 and it has been shown that Exchange Server performs well in a virtualized environment with shared SAN storage. With the release of VMware Virtual SAN, the next logical step is to study the performance of Exchange Server on this storage platform. This white paper shows that virtualized Exchange Server 2010 on vSphere 5.5 with VMware Virtual SAN scales well while maintaining very good application response time as more Exchange…

06 Jan 2015

By Yendis

Register for VMware’s Online Launch Event

VMware

This event is so BIG that VMware is offering broadcasts around the globe the entire week of February 2…and continuing the excitement throughout February. All event registrants will automatically receive access to additional content, engagement, and activities via our online event platform. Register Here

01 Jan 2015

By Yendis

NSX vSphere – Getting Started

VMwarensx, vsphere

This document provides step-by-step examples that demonstrate how to set up the following network services in NSX for vSphere: Logical Switches Logical Distributed Router Distributed Firewalls Logical Centralized Routers (Edge) with Dynamic Routing and with many-to-one NAT Logical Load Balancers (Edge) At the end, you'll have the following logical network deployed in your lab: L2 bridging, VPN, and service composer are not covered in this document. Likewise, integrations with third party vendors, such as Palo Alto Networks, Symantec and F5, are not covered here.