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E8 Storage Announces InfiniBand Support Extending High Performance Compute (HPC) Options for New and Existing Customers

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Big news from growing storage player, E8.  Bringing InfiniBand to its blazingly fast storage solutions. In a very welcome move E8 have announced added support for InfiniBand to their storage solutions for customers looking to leverage the blazing speed of the centralized NVMe flash only storage, in storage intensive workloads via the speed of InfiniBand.

This will allow local flash storage speeds from networked centralized storage ensuring sufficient IOPS for even the most intensive workloads.

Their press release follows

E8 Storage Announces InfiniBand Support Extending High Performance Compute (HPC) Options for New and Existing Customers

 

Support for the solution highlights the close alignment with Mellanox Technologies and delivers unrivaled performance and ultra-low latency     

SANTA CLARA, CALIF., April 17, 2018 – E8 Storage today announced availability of InfiniBand support to its high performance, NVMe storage solutions. The move comes as a direct response to HPC customers that wish to take advantage of the high speed, low latency throughput of InfiniBand for their data hungry applications. E8 Storage support for InfiniBand will be seamless for customers who now have the flexibility to connect via Ethernet or InfiniBand when paired with Mellanox ConnectX InfiniBand/VPI adapters.

As our economy becomes more digitally-defined, HPC environments play a critical role in unlocking and harnessing the transformational power of data,” commented Scott Sinclair, senior analyst at ESG. “InfiniBand connectivity combined with the full potential of flash as delivered by E8 Storage is an almost unstoppable partnership in terms of speed, low latency and scalability. Together, this makes E8 Storage and Mellanox a powerful combination for data center implementations and for databases that drive financial trading systems, real-time data analytics, and healthcare applications.”

The announcement also strengthens E8 Storage’s long-standing technology partnership with Mellanox that originally enabled the integration of E8 Storage’s rack scale flash architecture with selected Mellanox adapters. Today, this relationship allows E8 Storage systems to attach directly to existing RDMA high performance networks over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) or InfiniBand connections and makes E8 Storage’s full support of InfiniBand possible especially in HPC environments where the majority of InfiniBand adoption is occurring. Like Ethernet, the InfiniBand products perform at 100Gb/s allowing enhanced scalability as E8 Storage solutions are deployed.

According to the most recent Top 500 supercomputer rankings (Nov 2017), InfiniBand is the second most-used internal system interconnect technology. Further, in a recent evaluation by Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing for HPC products at Mellanox Technologies, Mellanox accounts for 62 percent share of the compute clustering of the true HPC systems.

“We are very pleased that E8 Storage is expanding this partnership to offer full support for our InfiniBand products. Working closely together, our combined products can deliver the lightning-fast and highly scalable network necessary to power data intensive applications, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that now drive today’s economy,” stated Scot Schultz, Senior Director, HPC/AI and Technical Computing, Mellanox Technologies.

“Today we demonstrate once again that E8 Storage’s architecture can expand, evolve and always extract the full potential of flash performance,” comments Zivan Ori, co-founder and CEO of E8 Storage. “Partnering with market leaders like Mellanox that deliver the very best network connectivity technology ensures we continue to meet and, frequently, exceed the needs of our HPC customers even in their most demanding environments.”

E8 Storage software and appliances with InfiniBand support are available now, contact E8 Storage or your reseller for information on pricing.

E8 Storage is also a sponsor of the IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS) User Group which will be held in London from April 18-19, 2018. The event features Spectrum Scale filesystem experts sharing the latest updates. To schedule a meeting with executives, visit https://e8storage.com/events/.

 

About E8 Storage

E8 Storage is a pioneer in shared accelerated storage for data-intensive, high-performance applications that drive business revenue. E8 Storage’s affordable, reliable and scalable solution is ideally suited for the most demanding low-latency workloads, including real-time analytics, financial and trading applications, transactional processing and large-scale file systems. Driven by the company’s patented architecture, E8 Storage’s high-performance shared NVMe storage solution delivers 10 times the performance at half the cost of existing storage products. With E8 Storage, enterprise datacenters can enjoy unprecedented storage performance density and scale, delivering NVMe performance without compromising on reliability and availability. Privately held, E8 Storage is based in Santa Clara with R&D in Tel Aviv, and channel partners throughout the US and Europe. For more information, please visit www.e8storage.com, and follow us on Twitter @E8Storage and LinkedIn.

 

Who wouldn’t be excited by faster access to their data? i know i am!

Thanks for reading

Tchau for now!

VMware

How To Properly Shutdown vCenter Appliance 6.5

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OK so this may seem like a stupid thing to post about but I have been out of the VMware game for a little over a year now.  I have been dabbling in it a bit again as we are building a lab at work. I installed the vCenter Appliance today and I needed to shut it down to move it to a different host (No vMotion license for the work lab).  I just went into the built in web client on my ESXi server that had VCSA on it and chose to shutdown the guest OS.  It did power it down so when I brought it up on the other ESXi host it did not come back up as I expected it to.

Yes, I did it wrong as I had forgotten about the management interface of the VCSA, which is located at https://<vcenter FQDN or IP>:5480.  Once you login as the root account for the VCSA, there is a nice SHUTDOWN button on the far right at the top.  Isn’t that nice?

The moral of the story?  Don’t just shutdown your VCSA from the vCenter client, use the management console on the VCSA itself to shut it down.  Lesson learned!

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Installing ESXI 6.5

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OK, So its been a while and now the holidays are over i’m back on it, so after discovering that there were significant changes between ESXI 6.0 and 6.5 I decided it was time to start over with 6.5.

so without further ado lets rebuild my virtual lab and get a hypervisor installed.  As a reminder, I’m building my lab within VMware Workstation Pro 12 so upon firing it up I hit the handy “Create new Virtual Machine button”, bringing up the “New Virtual Machine Wizard”

Defaults should work in the majority of cases so i figured lets go with that…

Hitting Next brings up the Guest OS selection page,  pointing it at the downloaded iso of VMVisor-installer 6.5

Give the machine a name, the disk location is set automatically, but you can change it here if you like.

You can change disk capacity here if you like, I left it at defaults in the knowledge that more than likely as my virtual environment grows i will need to provision more space, but i want to see how to do that.  Moving on…

Gives a summary of my selections and the opertunity to go back, or to edit the hardware configuration, being happy i clicked Finish

To be greeted by the installer boot loader, which automatically boots from the cd unless you intervene. But as that’s exactly what i wanted I let it go.

after a couple of minutes watching the installer screen.

I got a compatibility warning, but as im installing within a VMware VM I was pretty confident i need not worry about that, so hit enter to continue.

Accept the ELUA (F11)

Select the disk to install to.

Keyboard layout..

And set a root password.

Again you get an opertunity to sanity check your selections before hitting F11 to install.

A couple of minutes later its installed, and you get a useful reminder to remove the installer disk before rebooting.

And Hey Presto! a running hypervisor!

 

This process was beautifully simple for anyone with basic IT skills,  and remarkably fast, a real advantage when i think about enterprise level infrastructure, any new hardware can be installed with a hypervisor ready to e integrated into an existing setup within minutes and requires no special knowledge. Overall a very slick and smooth proces for which VMware should be congratulated.

So the first step in my virtual lab is done and i look forward to creating VM’s on my hypervisor.

Thanks for reading

Tchau for now

Phil

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Repost: Avere Systems is Acquired by Microsoft

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Big congratulations to Avere Systems, who recently announced their acquisition by Microsoft. Avere is a company I’ve followed since inception in 2008. Their technology started as an edge NAS filer, extending data centre content to branch offices. Over time, the platform became virtual and moved to the public cloud. Today, vFXT (the cloud instance of the filer), enables customers to present their data to cloud resources and use the benefit of public cloud analytics and processing, without having to commit to the wholesale migration of data to public cloud storage.

Interesting blog post over at architecting.it and shows Microsoft’s commitment to developing the hybrid cloud and its applications, check it out!

https://blog.architecting.it/avere-systems-acquired-microsoft/

 

I hope you all had a the best of holiday seasons, and i should be back again soon.

Tchau for now!

Phil

 

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Looking Forward to 2018

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Looking Forward to 2018….

2017 was the year of virtualization, the days of buying dedicated hardware is coming to a close. and I can only see this continuing as the power of virtualization is clear for all to see, dedicated task orientated servers are relics from the past being phased out in all sectors.

Virtualization and the resilience and IT agility it brings are undeniable and being widely embraced.

Hardware is becoming more and more unified, with compute and storage solutions being sold as comodities, with virtualization providing the functional granularity and separation of servers and services.

Recent Developments such as Scale Computing’s HC3 Unity will start to shift the paradigm from in house private clouds to public cloud allowing public cloud to be leveraged to fill performance gaps in peak load situations – using Hybrid cloud technology, Which for me is a very exciting prospect, negating the need for over-provisioning available compute resources as organizations can worry less about peek load than average load when buying compute hardware.   Knowing that their private cloud infrastructure has seamless integration with the public cloud. What IT department inst going to jump at the chance of spending less on hardware and gaining redundancy in the deal!

“Throughout 2017 we have seen many organizations focus on implementing a 100% cloud focused model and there has been a push for complete adoption of the cloud. There has been a debate around on-premises and cloud, especially when it comes to security, performance and availability, with arguments both for and against. But the reality is that the pendulum stops somewhere in the middle. In 2018 and beyond, the future is all about simplifying hybrid IT. The reality is it’s not on-premises versus the cloud. It’s on-premises and the cloud. Using hyperconverged solutions to support remote and branch locations and making the edge more intelligent, in conjunction with a hybrid cloud model, organizations will be able to support highly changing application environments” –said Jason Collier, co-founder at Scale Computing.

“This will be the year of making hybrid cloud a reality. In 2017, companies dipped their toes into a combination of managed service providers (MSP), public cloud and on-premises infrastructure. In 2018, organizations will look to leverage hybrid clouds fororchestration and data mobility to establish edge data centers that take advantage of MSPs with large bandwidth into public clouds, ultimately bringing mission critical data workloads closer to front-end applications that live in the public cloud. Companies will also leverage these capabilities to bring test or QA workloads to burst in a MSP or public cloud. Having the ability to move data back and forth from MSPs, public clouds and on-premises infrastructure will also enable companies to take advantage of the costs structure that hybrid cloud provides.” – Rob Strechay, SVP Product, Zerto

 

The Big challenge for IT admins now is designing their virtual infrastructure around their organizational needs. for me there are 2 main challeges to this, designing the virtual networks to optimize performance of virtualized services, ensuring the virtualized servers can comunicate with their storage effectively, and that IO operations are optimized for their needs, across enterprise storage.

2018 Must continue this trend,  but this will bring its own challenges, in order for the hybrid cloud to be able to offer true seamless integration of private and public clouds, the performance critical services such as databases are hosted predominately in-house with optimized storeage

“From a storage perspective, I think what will surprise many is that in 2018 we will see the majority of organizations move away from convergence and instead focus on working with specialist vendors to get the expertise they need. The cloud will be a big part of this, especially as we’re going to see a major shift in public cloud adoption. I believe public cloud implementation has reached a peak, and we will even see a retreat from the public cloud due to hidden costs coming to light and the availability, management and security concerns.”  – Gary Watson, Founder and CTO of Nexsan

“2018 will be the year that DR moves from being a secondary issue to a primary focus. The last 12 months have seen mother nature throw numerous natural disasters at us, which has magnified the need for a formal DR strategy. The challenge is that organizations are struggling to find DR solutions that work simply at scale. It’s become somewhat of the white whale to achieve, but there are platforms that are designed to scale and protect workloads wherever they are – on-premises or in the public cloud.” – Chris Colotti, Field CTO at Tintri

Disaster Recovery is another great benifit to the the hybrid cloud, you can have an exact replica of your in-house cloud on the public cloud ready to failover at a moments notice, Natural Disasters need not take down public facing services, and must be taken seriously in this ever changing world…

 

It’s 2018 and computers are fundamental to the core of buisiness worldwide, theres no debate and its been so for a long time. but that doesnt necessarity mean its being done in the best way…

“In 2018, we will continue to hear a lot about companies taking on this journey called ‘digital transformation.’ The part that we are going to have to start grappling with is that there is no metric for knowing when we get there – when a company is digitally transformed. The reality is that it is a process, with phases and gates – just like software development itself. A parallel that is extremely relevant. In fact, digital transformation in 2017, and looking ahead to 2018, is all about software. The ‘bigger, better, faster, cheaper’ notion of the 90s, largely focused around hardware, is gone. Hardware is commoditized, disposable and simply an access point to software. The focus is squarely on software and unlimited data storage to push us forward. Now the pressure is on the companies building software to continue to lead the way and push us forward.” – Bob Davis, CMO at Plutora

“The total volume of traffic generated by IoT is expected to reach 600 Zettabytes by 2020, that’s 275X more traffic than is projected to be generated by end users in private datacenter applications. With such a deluge of traffic traversing WANs and being processed and stored in the cloud, edge computing — in all of its forms — will emerge as an essential part of the WAN edge in 2018.” – Todd Krautkremer, CMO, Cradlepoint

“As enterprise data continues to accumulate at an exponential rate, large organizations are finally getting a handle on how to collect, store, access and analyze it. While that’s a tremendous achievement, simply gathering and reporting on data is only half of the battle in the ultimate goal of unleashing that data as a transformative business force. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities will make 2018 the year when enterprises officially enter the ‘information-driven’ era, an era in which actionable information and insights are provided to individual employees for specific tasks where and when they need it. This transformation will finally fulfill the promise of the information-driven enterprise, allowing organizations and employees to achieve unprecedented efficiency and innovation.” – Scott Parker, Senior Product Manager, Sinequa

Now My Phd was in molecular informatics, and our research group was dedicated to providing novel aplications for computing, processing data in order to extract principle factors, and this to me seems to have strong parallels with this concept of Digital Transfomation and will be something i follow closely this year..

Happy 2018 to you all,

Thanks for reading

Tchau for now…

Phil

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New Tintri FlexDrive Lets Customers Expand All-Flash Storage Capacity One Drive at a Time

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New Tintri FlexDrive Lets Customers Expand All-Flash Storage Capacity One Drive at a Time

Organizations simply insert drives and click-to-expand storage capacity

Exciting news for Tintri customers, and potential costomers alike,

Tintri, a leading player in  enterprise storage solutions have announced this morning an exciting development allowing much more granular and affordable storage for enterprises.

Traditionally when an enterprise requires more storage for their cloud platform they would have to purchase large expensive storage arrays in order to seamlessly expand their storage capacity, and typically they would have to buy more storage than required to fill their requirements,  this storage array would then need to be integrated into their existing infrastructure requireing additional IT manpower and time.

Now with Tintri FlexDrive, additional storage can be added as little as one drive at a time, existing and new Tintri customers can buy a(n aditional)  VMstore array with a single drive in it allowing for future capacity increases,

this array can be added to existing VMstore infrastructure and deployed in the virtualization environement with a single click within the Tintri Interface, allowing provisioning of storage with their management interface with fine grain QOS controling the input/output operations of individual vdisks.

This ability to add single drives for me is very exciting, allowing aditional IT agility at a much lower cost of implimentation and capital cost for the disks themselves.

If a company knows it can expand its storage at any time IT managers can react to demand and over-provision by smaller amounts safe in the knowledge that additional space is only click away.

This must be the furture of enterprise storage and be very apealing for IT managers.

I will leave you with this mornings press release below:

Tchau for now.

Phil

December 18, 2017 09:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Tintri, Inc. (NASDAQ: TNTR), a leading provider of enterprise cloud platforms, today announced Tintri FlexDrive, a storage expansion feature that enables customers of Tintri all-flash storage arrays to increase system capacity to meet a specific storage need, by adding as little as one drive at a time.

Conventional storage architectures require customers to increase capacity by adding multi-drive RAID groups or drive shelves. Put simply, customers must buy capacity in bulk, typically purchasing more storage than is needed. This adds unnecessary capital expense, rack space and cabling complexity. And once capacity is added, expert administrators still must create LUNs and/or volumes to contain virtual machines.

Tintri’s approach to expansion is distinguished by its granularity. Since Tintri operates at the VM-level and eliminates the need for traditional storage constructs such as RAID groups and shelves, customers can purchase a partially populated EC6000 all-flash array and:

1. Add capacity in increments as little as one drive—inserting the drive(s) into any available disk slot
2. Click a single “expand” button in the Tintri interface
3. Gain immediate access to new capacity and deploy virtual machines without any further configuration

This entire process requires no additional rack space or cabling, is completely non-disruptive and takes only a few minutes. Tintri FlexDrive allows customers to purchase capacity in exact relation to need and requires no expertise to deploy.

“We have made yet another storage process far simpler and more cost effective,” said Kieran Harty, CTO and co-founder of Tintri. “The introduction of larger flash drives means that a single drive equates to potentially dozens of TBs, reducing the need to add an entire shelf of flash. Tintri FlexDrive changes the way customers should expect to expand capacity—don’t deal with the cost and complexity of multiple drives or shelves when you can add capacity in proportion to business need.”

Tintri makes it simple for customers to anticipate their need for capacity—Tintri Analytics predicts resource requirements up to 18 months into the future. And now Tintri has incorporated an expansion estimator into its standard user interface so that users can model the impact of adding drives. The estimator uses historical system workload profiles to guide customers to the number of extra drives required, so they can add the best number to meet target capacity.

Tintri FlexDrive software for EC6000 systems will be included at no charge to customers with current support contracts via the Tintri OS 4.4.1 release available later this month.

Tintri VM Scale-out

Tintri FlexDrive complements Tintri’s existing approach to scale-out. In May 2016, the company announced VM Scale-out technology. When a customer adds a Tintri system to their footprint, it is treated as a single, federated pool; Tintri automatically optimizes the placement of every individual virtual machine across the newly expanded footprint.

About Tintri

Tintri (NASDAQ: TNTR) offers an enterprise cloud infrastructure built on a public-cloud like web services architecture and RESTful APIs. Organizations use Tintri all-flash storage with scale-out and automation as a foundation for their own clouds—to build agile development environments for cloud native applications and to run mission critical enterprise applications. Tintri enables users to guarantee the performance of their applications, automate common IT tasks to reduce operating expenses, troubleshoot across their infrastructure, and predict an organization’s needs to scale—the underpinnings of a modern data center. That’s why leading cloud service providers and enterprises, including Comcast, Chevron, NASA, Toyota, United Healthcare and 20% of the Fortune 100, trust Tintri with enterprise cloud.

For more information, visit www.tintri.com and follow us on Twitter: @Tintri.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release includes forward-looking statements concerning new products and products features and the expected availability and performance of our products. These forward-looking statements are not historical facts, and instead are based on our current expectations, estimates, opinions, and beliefs. The accuracy of such forward-looking statements depends upon future events, and involves risks, uncertainties and other factors beyond our control that may cause these statements to be inaccurate and cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements, including risks detailed in our Registration Statement on Form S-1 and our latest Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q that have been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect actual results or subsequent events or circumstances.

© 2017 Tintri, Inc. All rights reserved. Tintri, the Tintri logo and Tintri FlexDrive are registered trademarks or trademarks of Tintri, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective holder(s)

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repost: VMware ESXi Release and Build Number History as of Dec 15 2017

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Repost: VMware ESXi Release and Build Number History as of Dec 15 2017

The following listings are a comprehensive collection of the flagship hypervisor product by VMware. All bold versions are downloadable releases. All patches have been named by their release names. Please note that the ESXi hypervisor is available since version 3.5.

 

So I am still learning and when i went to download esxi i was unable to download version 6.5  and it would only allow me to download version 6, being a newbie and assuming there were no major differences beween version 6 and 6.5, I did so.

But now with hindsight i understand that was not the case and i am reposting this excellent article on VMwares build history to help you avoid falling in the same trap

VMware ESXi Release and Build Number History

So what’s the difference?

the main difference apears to be with vSphere, having moved from a client app system to a HTML5 interface,  now  seeing as its a complete interface change it would be better to learn that.  But have no fear all is not lost, i now have the perfect opertunity to look into upgrade paths and learn about that!

Anyway keep tuned for the next insallment

Tchau for now.

Phil

 

 

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FAQ: Discontinuation of third party vSwitch program (2149722)

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While looking at NSX resources, I ran across this , and thought it was worth sharing.

 

Thus, if your running a third party vSwitch, migrate…

”

FAQ

What is happening with VMware’s third Party Virtual Switch Program?

VMware is discontinuing its third party virtual switch (vSwitch) program. VMware plans to deprecate the APIs in vSphere used by third party virtual switches in the future.

 

What third party vSwitch offerings will no longer be supported on vSphere?

The third party vSwitches available for vSphere include Cisco Nexus 1000V, Cisco VM-FEX, HPE 5900v and IBM DVS 5000v

What should customers do?

Customers are encouraged to migrate from third party distributed vSwitches including Cisco Nexus 1000V, Cisco VM-FEX, Cisco AVS, HPE 5900v and IBM DVS 5000v to vSphere Distributed Switch.

 

”

 

FAQ: Discontinuation of third party vSwitch program (2149722)

Document Id

2149722
Article : 2149722
Updated : May 23, 2017

Total Views : 363

Categories :

Troubleshooting

Language :
English

Product(s):

VMware ESXi

VMware vCenter Server

VMware vCenter Server Appliance

Product Version(s):

VMware ESXi 5.5.x

VMware ESXi 6.0.x

VMware ESXi 6.5.x

“Resolution

VMware is announcing discontinuation of its third party virtual switch (vSwitch) program, and plans to deprecate the VMware vSphere APIs used by third party switches in the release following vSphere 6.5 Update 1. Subsequent vSphere versions will have the third party vSwitch APIs completely removed and third party vSwitches will no longer work.

This has no impact on existing use of third party vSwitch on supported vSphere release. It also has no impact on support already purchased from VMware or the support lifecycle for the product. For more information on the end of support for this product, see the VMware Lifecycle Product Matrix.

The third party switch APIs will work and be supported up to vSphere 6.5 Update 1.

VMware recommends migrating from third party distributed vSwitches including Cisco Nexus 1000V, Cisco VM-FEX, HPE 5900v and IBM DVS 5000v to vSphere Distributed Switch.

To assist in vSwitch migration, VMware offers a free migration tool for migrating from Nexus 1000v to VDS. In addition, VMware’s Professional Services Organization can provide services to customer to migrate from third party vSwitch to VDS.”

More on this https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2149722

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Scale Computing Release HC3 Unity

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Scale Computing have teamed up with Google to leverage it’s Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to bring ultimate IT agility.

In recently announced news Scale Computing and Google have teamed up to bring us HC3 Unity an extension to Scale’s excellent Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution HC3. This seamlessly integrates HC3’s on premises cloud solution with the off premises cloud solution using Google’s hardware accelerated nested virtualization.

reposting Scale Computing’s announcement:

“Today we announced HC3 Cloud Unity℠, a new partnership with Google that has been two years in the making. Both companies have committed significant resources and technology to make this happen, and we’re super excited to announce it.”

So what is it? Simply put, HC3 Cloud Unity puts the resources on Google’s cloud onto your local LAN.  It becomes a component in your infrastructure, addressable locally, which your applications can inter-operate with in the exact same way they would with any local system.

The impact on operations is significant. For example, this takes the concept of cloud-based disaster recovery to a whole new level, because again, those cloud resources are part of the local LAN. This means the networking nightmare that is typically present in DR is gone, and an application which fails over to the cloud resource will retain the same IP address that it had before — and all the other systems, users, and applications will continue to communicate with the “failed” resource as though it never moved.

This also enables you to think about DR in a completely different way. Usually we think of DR as “site failure” — and certainly that could hold true here.  But, in addition, we can now think of using this type of cloud-failover for individual apps and not necessarily entire sites.  Again, since those apps failover into the same LAN, retaining IP addressing, they will work in either location.

Those are two concepts, simplified networking and DR, that we think customers will gain immediate benefit from. In addition, those examples should point you to something very new and exciting: true hybrid cloud. With everything on the same network, an application which may use several VMs can have those VMs spread across both their on-premises systems and the cloud, without any change in configuration or use.  Furthermore, moving an application to the cloud is as simple as live migrating a VM between on-prem servers, because from a networking perspective, the cloud is “on prem.”

To accomplish this we have combined technology with Google, and both sides have also introduced new tech. On the Google side, this uses the resources of their cloud combined with newly launched nested virtualization technology.  On the Scale side, we are using the HC3 platform with Hypercore and our SCRIBE SDS layers, and have now added SD-WAN capabilities to automatically bridge the networks together into the same LAN.

The end result, in-line with all Scale products, is extreme simplicity. These cloud resources are there on your LAN. Any VM can access them, use them, and move in or out of the cloud without reconfiguration or cloud awareness. We know our customers are often running a wide mix of workloads, some of which may be older, legacy systems. Whether old or new, these apps can now run in the cloud with a simple click in the UI.

When we first were approached by Google two years ago, we both immediately saw the similarities of our platforms and approaches. From KVM to software-defined storage, there was a lot that was already “in alignment” that enabled our platforms to work so seamlessly together.

Delivering this type of hybrid cloud functionality is the road we’ve been driving our customers down for a long time. From first coining the term “hyperconvergence” in 2012, to now bringing customers into this cloud-converged environment, we will continue to innovate to meet customer needs while maintaining the ease of use and interoperability that is fundamental to the Scale platform.”

Google released a blog post detailing its compute engine and its beta nested virtualization here

 

HC3 Unity promises to merge an on premises virtual network of HC3 with a virtual network on GCP creating a single, ultimately flexible, virtualization platform.  This will allow (assuming sufficient internet bandwidth) virtual machines an applications running on site to migrate off site as needed, as well as being able to lease compute or storage capacity from google at times of high load. Facilitating optimum utilization of on site hardware, with maximum overprovisioning knowing that GCP can pick up the slack when the in house hardware cant cope.

This for me is a game changer, having the power, scale and reliability of google cloud in house changes the paradigm. Infrastructure as a service (Iaas) is here to stay, IT departments can forget about hardware and concentrate on what matters for the clients and users – the application.

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Installing a server on our hypervisor with vSphere 6.0

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Installing a server on our hypervisor with vSphere

So, where are we?

We have a virtual server with exsi hypervisor running on as a base for a virtual lab,  now as a (out of touch) windows domain admin i think installing windows server to refresh myself is a good a place as any to start. Since the last time i administered a domain was when server 2008 R2 was new and starting to get adopted, i figure ill grab myself a evaluation copy of windows server 2016 and see whats new. So I’ve grabbed an ISO of that and im ready to get started.

So here i am, a vSphere front screen,  now Inventory, Administration and Recent Tasks, seam like reassuring fields to have connecting to a hypervisor, especially when you can see power events in t the tasks pane.  looks like i’m good to go.

Now as a noob, I must confess it isn’t entirely obvious where to go to start creating virtual machines, but hey,  i figure inventory is the most likely of the options presented to me.

so opening inventory i find:

 

After that brief moment of confusion, everything is much clearer now another MMC-like window with a nice explanation of what a virtual machine is and a nice “create new virtual machine link”

that’s more like it, now i’m happy again, so lets do that and create a Virtual machine  for windows server 2016.

Up comes another great Wizzard,  prompts you for each configuration option.  Now this is so quick and easy i am basically going to accept defaults at every stage where possible, after all a vanilla 2016 install must be one of the most common tasks performed and i want to see how it does.

Just calling it testvm for now

again default storage location.

I changed from the default, to server 2016 (64bit).

Default nework configuration looks good to me.

again I accept the defaults, reducing the disk to 10Gb assuming i can always grow it if necessary

Click finish, and in a blink of an eye, its done and all i have to show for it is a new item under inventory;- testvm

looks like it worked, lets see if we can get windows installing on it

nice to not the create virtual machine task is registered in recent tasks, lets click on testvm and see what we can do,

first thing i notice is we get a toolbar with play pause and stop buttons,  hitting the play button.

does very little. apart from putting a play icon over the virtual machine, and adding a power on virtual machine event in the task log.

ok makes sense, its for virtual servers, which are usually headless and remote, and from past playing with virtual machines at cambridge i know i need to connect to the console of the virtual machine. lucky for me in the new toolbar one of the icons has a hover over tooltip that says “launch the virtual machine console”, so i hit it:

and i’m greeted by a failed pxe boot screen,  again makes sense i haven’t given it an install media and the VM is network booting by default. very useful for remote installs..

so we need to give the virtual machine a install media, i have an iso and as i’m too lazy to burn it i will try and mount it, so closing down the console and shutting down the vm, lest see if we can mount the iso to install from.  Right clicking on the testvm i have an option to edit settings..

now under CD/DVD drive Device type we have client device with a message telling us to power on the device then click on the connect cd/dvd button in the toolbar.

sounds sensible, lets try that..

on the 3rd reboot i worked out to press F2 to enter the bios of the VM in order to give me enough time to mount the ISO to boot from it.

now im not going to talk you through installing windows, i’m sure you are capable of that,   and in my next post i will mention any hurdles i had.

off to install windows, hope you enjoyed it.

Tchau for now

Phil

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