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I just wanted to let you know that Satyam Vaghani will have some big announcements at VFD5 Wednesday June 24.

The announcement will be live streamed. So tune in on Wednesday at 21:30 CET

Link: http://techfieldday.com/event/vfd5/

 

I recently acquired two Intel NUC5i5MYHE for my home lab. This specific model features Intel AMT/VPRO technology. This means that you can connect to the NUC remotely via IP independent of the operating system installed on it. This has several benefits

– Power On , Power Off , Reset the NUC
– Hardware information
– Remote Console access

 

My plan was to run the Intel NUC’s headless. I don’t have any monitor or keyboard connected to it. So I needed the AMT / VPRO technology. When I installed the NUC’s the first time they were both connected to my living room TV through HDMI. The NUC only got Mini Display Port 2 interface – so I had to use a mini display port to HDMI adapter. This worked perfectly and I also tested the AMT technology and got the remote console to work.

Once i put the NUC’s in the closet and powered them on the remote console was black. I did not get any picture when connecting. I had just seen this work when connected to my living room TV… Maybe that was the issue I thought, maybe it don’t send anything out of the display port when it does not see a monitor connected. After some google activities I found the following used for MAC minis to run them headless. It is called Fit-Headless and is a small HDMI dongle you plug-in to a HDMI port, then the MAC Mini / NUC will think a monitor is connected and remote console will work.

 

Of course I could not just connect this to the NUC since I did not have HDMI in it. So I also bought an adapter like this:

 

The result was perfect. Once I rebooted my Intel NUC’s with the display port to HDMI adapter and Fit-Headless connected I got the console back and it was not black. I use VNC View Plus that can connect directly to the IP address.

 

 

 

 

So if you want to run the NUC and use Intel AMT / VPRO you need either a monitor connected, or use a dongle that “fakes” it.

I had been considering for some time what home lab hardware to get. Luckily there are plenty of home labs blog post in the community that gives you inspiration. For a home lab everybody wants unlimited CPU, RAM and Storage resources. But because it is a home lab (it runs in your home) you have to consider space, power usage, noise, price. Once you factor in these four constraints you will be on the road to finding the lab that fits you.

I wanted my home lab to run 24/7 – so power usage and noise were two important factors for me. I also would love to be able to run the home lab headless (no monitor) but still be able to connect through IP to the screen.

After considering my options I ended up with the following configuration:

• Intel NUC5i5MYHE with i5-5300U processor and Intel VPRO/AMT technology
• 16 GB DDR3L Kingston Memory
• Kingston E50 240GB SSD
• 32GB Sandisk Cruzer fit USB Key

I already had a two disks Synology DS211+ NAS running at home. So that is used as a NFS datastore for the virtual machines. The Cruzer fit usb key is used for ESXi installation and the Kingston E50 240GB SSD is used with PernixData as a read & write acceleration in front of the Synology.

With PernixData doing its magic my Synology NAS is perfect for what it does, storing the virtual machine. Just look at the screenshot below. NAS experienced 148 ms of latency but the VM experienced 0,71 ms. That is the power of decoupling performance from capacity.

 

 

If you are looking at a home lab the NUC can be a good choice. But you have to be able to live with only 16GB of RAM pr. NUC and a Dual-Core processor. Luckily with VMware I can always scale out and add more NUCS to the vSphere cluster when I am in lack of resources.

Right now this is what the home lab looks like.

 

The voting has been going on for a few weeks now. Last day to cast your vote is March 16th. You can check out the contest and vote here. So better get your vote in before it is too late.

PernixData FVP 2.5 was announced earlier this week. Your favorite acceleration software just got even better.

• DFTM-Z – With Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory (DFTM), FVP is the only storage acceleration software that lets users cluster server RAM, providing the fastest acceleration with complete fault tolerance. DFTM-Z augments this capability with adaptive memory compression to enable the performance of RAM to be delivered at the price of flash.

• Intelligent I/O Profiling – Provide virtualized applications with guaranteed excellent and predictable performance by identifying I/O profiles that are not good candidates for server-side acceleration and automatically bypassing them.

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) – Increase visibility to the FVP environment by granting appropriate access to authorized individuals.
• Remote Network reads on NFS – After a vMotion the accelerated data is still available for reads over the network.

You can download the software from the support portal at http://support.pernixdata.com (requires login)

If you don’t have a login and want to try PernixData FVP in your lab/demo/production environment request a free trial at http://info.pernixdata.com/trialreg

 

I am glad to share with anyone interested that now PernixData is Vblock ready. This means you will be able to leverage PernixData in your Vblock environments with full support from VCE.

You can read more about it on the PernixData Blog: http://blog.pernixdata.com/fvp-software-is-vblock-ready/

 

Så er der næsten gået et år siden sidste år hvor VMUG Danmark afholdte deres første konference i Bella Center. Det var sådan en success at den kommer tilbage igen i år. Det kommer til at foregå torsdag d. 20 November

Det er gratis at registere sig og det kan du gøre her: http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=5239

Jeg har kigget på listen over talere og det ser rigtig godt ud! Vi kan blandt andet glæde os til at gense

– Duncan Epping fra VMware der taler om hvad VMware kommer med i fremtiden af produkter (manden bag www.yellow-bricks.com)

– Cormac Hogan fra VMware der taler om VSAN.

– Kamau Wanguhu fra VMware der taler om NSX

Vil man også høre om andre ting kan man høre det sidste nye fra bla. Veeam og PernixData.

– Preben Berg taler om Veeam og automatisering af backup med vCO og REST API’et.

– Frank Denneman taler om PernixData og virtualiseringen af Flash og RAM for at skabe lavere io latency og flere iops foran et eksisterende disk system.

Jeg håber at se en masse af jer derude den dag. Se den fulde agenda her: http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=5244

 

If you are from Scandinavia this post is for you, please read on

I am happy to announce the PernixData together with Arrow ECS will be having morning seminars in Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm and Helsinki. The topic is using flash in the datacenter and where should it belong.  We have been so lucky to have Frank Denneman visit the Nordic’s and share his insightful perspective

The schedule for the week:

September 15th: Copenhagen – sign up
September 16th: Oslo – sign up
September 17th: Stockholm – sign up
September 18th: Helsinki – sign up

What is the seminar about

Using storage arrays for both performance and capacity is regarded as a natural design by many. This is easy, but almost always introduces issues with storage performance, regardless of the environment size.

Flash storage is seen as savior to storage I/O bottlenecks, but implementing flash can be confusing. Should it go in your SAN? Servers? Both? Furthermore what key features (e.g. write acceleration, clustering, etc.) are required to turn flash into an effective tool for accelerating storage performance across an entire data center?

Join us for this talk where Frank will highlight:

• Pros and cons of various flash deployment methodologies
• Best practices for using flash to accelerate storage performance
•  How to measure results and ROI

We look forward to seeing you there!

It is almost unbelievable. I remember 7 years ago when I was using Veeam FastSCP to transfer files to/from my ESX servers and Vizioncore vRanger was the program to use for Backups in a virtual environment. Now 7 years later no one talks about vRanger and Veeam is almost the de-facto standard for backups in a virtual environment. Veeam has more than 100.000 customers world wide and now they are moving to the next level by having their own backup and availability conference VeeamON in Las Vegas.

This is a huge accomplishment and it all came by having a great product, that simply worked and did what it should in a great but simple manner.

If you want to know what is going on the virtual world when it comes to availability you should spend your days at the Cosmopolitan in  Las vegas October 6th till October 8th.

If you are a current Veeam customer and want to improve the way you leverage their product click the picture below and sign-up! I highly recommend it.

 

 

 

This is a featured blog post by Mads Fog Albrechtslund orginally posted here

If you want to check out Veeam Backup Go here: http://www.veeam.com/vm-backup-recovery-replication-software.html

Disclaimer: I have received this book as a free review sample, with the only requirement that I would write a review of it here on my blog and post short reviews of it on amazon.com, goodreads.com and books.dzone.com. These should be unbiased and I was in no way obligated to write positive reviews.

The book is available in both eBook and Print versions from Packt Publishing

I know Christian Mohn, the author of “Learning Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware vSphere” from Twitter (@h0bbel), his blog vNinja.net and I have also listened to a few of his podcasts, vSoup, which he does regularly with co-presenters Ed Czerwin (@eczerwin) and Chris Dearden (@ChrisDearden). [Read more…] about Featured: Book Review – Learning Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware vSphere