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 …

VMware Virtual Volumes Deep Dive

Oct 24, 2014 vvols vsphere

How vVols Will Help The constraints and issues which VVOLs address include, LUNs introduce constrains such as the quantity of LUNs we can present, having lots of LUNs each with unused space is in efficient as such we currently shared VMs on data stores and this gives a lack of granular control for passing storage …

NetApp FAS IOPS Theoretical Maximum & Workload Aggregate Load Balancing

Aug 26, 2014 netapp performance

To achieve good performance for a virtualized workload your Storage Area Network (SAN) should deliver high IOps with a predictable low latency. If you are using a good flash system where IOps (Input/Output Operations Per Second) effectively become an unlimited resource then latency will probably be your limiting …

Scrum Team Demystified

Aug 26, 2014 devops

While I worked with Agile as a software tester when the concept first came out in 2002 shortly afterwards I joined a new company in a new role in Infrastructure, IT operations if you will. My recollection of Agile is that it was not a process at all; rather, it’s a set of principles summarized by the Agile Manifesto. …

Optimal TCP Window Size For Long Distance WAN Link

Jul 24, 2014 tcp

If you have a requirement to copy large amounts of data along way around the world you may find that despite your link being 60Mb/s if its 5,000 miles away you only can transfer files at much less like 10Mb/s. The cause of this is generally the TCP Window Size is optimized by OS and FTP clients by default to work on …

Setup Hanlon

Apr 4, 2014 hanlon

Since the company I work for CSC got a new CEO then CTO its changed direction and the latest change has been to participate with the Open Source community. With this news shortly followed an updated version of a tool our new CTO Dan Hushon worked on at EMC with Nicholas Weaver it was formerly called Razor and the new …

HP C7000 Interconnect Bay Mapping

Mar 27, 2014 hpe

Here I address the most common query people have when using HP C7000 chassis, namely how do the bay mappings work. Half Height Blades HP supply blades which occupy single or double slots, the single height blades map in the following way. Device Interconnect Bay Mapping OnBoard NIC1 Bay 1 OnBoard NIC2 Bay 2 …

Windows Server 2012 - SAN Performance

Mar 3, 2014 windows performance

In a newly deployed Windows Server 2012 HyperV environment with around sixty nodes, running a couple of hundred Windows Server 2012 virtual machines running various applications. We found the EMC VMX storage which underpinned this became massively busy with Write IO at around 3am, the Write IO was mostly coming from …