What is Virtustream xStream Cloud

Jul 21, 2015 virtustream

If you are an IT consumer with Enterprise workload it is a risk moving this workload to the cloud, how can you guarantee your potential future cloud provider is delivering you the service you require and once there how can you measure how well they are achieving delivering that service. What Is A Micro VM (uVM) A Micro …

Configuring Network Core Dump With PowerCLI

Jun 17, 2015 powershell vsphere

The VMware vSphere Network Dump Collector service enables a host to transmit diagnostic information via the network to a remote netdump service, which stores it on disk. Network-based coredump collection can be configured in addition to or instead of disk-based coredump collection. This may be useful in stateless …

Docker On Photon On vCloud Air

Jun 4, 2015 docker

There has been a lot of industry noise around Docker and VMware project Photon so these have been on the agenda to explore as well. I generally perform my little research projects running nested ESXi on VMware Fusion on my laptop, but VMware are offering £300 of free service credits for trialing vCloud Air OnDemand. …

Log Insight for VMware Integrated OpenStack

Apr 23, 2015 vrli openstack

vRealize Log Insight is not a product I have had much to do with up to now, but that changed a few days ago when I was asked to perform an evaluation of how Log Insight might help with the management and administration of VMware Integrated OpenStack environment. So lets start what is vRealize Log Insight, in essence it …

OpenStack Windows Image

Apr 23, 2015 openstack vsphere vm guest customization

While looking at OpenStack as the control plane for vSphere it appears there isn’t too much detail and I found it tricky to create my first OpenStack image. Here are the steps I followed. Create vSphere Donor Windows Virtual Machine Use vSphere web client wizard to create new hardware v10 virtual machine in …

Intel NUC Cluster Hardware

Apr 16, 2015 nuc

I have worked most of my professional life with systems built with Intel x86, x64. Often there is little hardware available in the work environment to learn and try out new things. I enjoy learning by doing and to begin to better understand the technology looked to build a cluster of Intel NUCs. My goals of cluster …

Post To Slack From Powershell

Apr 9, 2015 powershell

Working in a technical team distributed across multiple time zones makes it difficult to collaborate and keep everyone on the same page. I’ve used various communications tools to try and help with this and today the team I am working with started to look at Slack. Slack seems ideal for our needs as it provides easily …

Ansible For Windows Managed Nodes

Jan 27, 2015 ansible windows

On starting to look at learning using Ansible to manage Windows hosts, first step was to setup a test lab. Setup an Ubuntu 14.04 or CentOS 7 and a Windows 2008 R2 virtual machines. Install Ansible (Ubuntu) apt-get install software-properties-common apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible apt-get update apt-get install …

Is the future of sysadmin to be an SRE?

Jan 22, 2015 devops

I recently came across the role SRE, I didn’t know what this was so researched it a little and found that it refers to Site Reliability Engineers after reading around the subject here is my considered opinion. The classic sysadmin role could be defined in generic terms as “IT operations staff responsible …

NetApp Cloud OnTap For AWS

Dec 12, 2014 aws netapp

NetApp has often been a pioneer of bleeding edge concepts in storage. When designing data ONTAP and the WAFL file system they were the first to look at creating a virtual control plane for data. They also pioneered fully non disruptive upgrades when the introduced clustered data ONTAP. They then introduced ONTAP Edge …