Spiceworks announced today the integration of A.I. into their platform to bring an increasingly personalized experience to the approximately 20 million people who utilize Spiceworks quarterly. Fast Answer pages is the first application, and groups the best answers for frequently asked questions together for quick access. To read more about how Spiceworks plans to utilize A.I. see the press release after the jump.
Ok, So lets get a Virtual machine running on ESXi, and what better to start with than a windows server? So I jumped on Microsoft’s evaluation center website and grabbed a copy of server 2019.
With iso in hand (on disk anyway) lets connect to an ESXi host and start building.
Firing up Vmware Workstation and a n ESXi 6.7 hypervisor within, once booted we have a helpful message on screen – to manage this host go to http://192.168.0.29..
now as this is my home lab and i don’t have a planned infrastructure, my host DHCP’s, in a production environment running critical services, i would have assigned addresses, but for now that doesn’t matter.
So connecting to the server via chrome:
Throws a security warning, being a machine i “built” on my local network, I trust it and ignore the warning.
Doing so gets you to a login page.
Logging in takes you to the ESXi home page with at a glance information about the server.
Clicking on virtual machines in the left shows we have no VM’s as yet, so no time like the present, lets make use of the helpful looking “Create/Register Virtual Machine” button..
Predictably this brings up a list of options for adding a virtual machine to ESXi, either via deployment or addition of existing VM’s, or via creation of a new virtual machine. In this instance i’ll go for the latter.
Taking you to page 2 of the new VM wizard, where i give the VM a name and select the OS type, note server 2019 is not in the list yet, but i am very confident that selecting server 2016 will have no issues whatsoever.
Next page we select a datastore for the VM
Finally a customize settings screen, with a warning about overprovisioning disk, selecting thin provisioned allows me to continue, and while i’m here, lets mount the windows server 2019 ISO.
scrolling down to CD/DVD drive, selecting Datastore ISO file hitting browse.
Selecting the Server ISO i have already uploaded to the datastore and hitting OK.
Takes us back to a summary screen where we can make any changes if necessary, otherwise click finish to create the VM.
Doing so drops us back into the Virtual Machines tab with the new addition of Server 2k19 test VM.
Clicking on the green play button to power on the machine, brings up a boot options screen, selecting the CD-ROM to boot the windows iso.
Brings up the reassuring message
and into the classic windows installer interface.
Choose your edition, (my powershell skills are not up to scratch yet so i shall go with Standard Edition with Desktop Experience)
Accept the License Agreement
Being a clean install i selected advanced
Told it to install to the only available disk
And off the installer goes
So once again a very smooth process to install windows server 2019 on ESXi, with absolute minimal user intervention required, and i’m very much looking forward to playing with server 2019.
Thanks for reading, until next time!
As I sit here watching some college football and trying to size up my expectations for SpiceWorld 2018 next week, along with what I hope to get out of my opportunity to attend, I keep trying to compare it to other conferences I’ve been to. In terms of attendance it seems bigger significantly than Infoblox’s Bloxfest 2017 which was an intimate gathering of a few hundred, but significantly smaller than any recent VMware VMworld. That puts it in the same ballpark of a conference like Dell’s Dell World, Juniper’s NxtWork, or Palo Alto Networks’ Ignite in the two to five thousand range for attendees, which IMO is a good sweet spot. Big enough to attract a good number of sponsors and presenters, while still allowing for people to not get lost in the shuffle between sessions.
For expectations I’m anticipating similar themes to Ignite, A.I./machine learning playing a big part in efforts to product corporations and end users from ever evolving threats as traditional A.V solutions become increasingly ineffective. With IoT devices showing no signs of disappearing or shipping with any semblance of security baked in, I’m fully expecting to see two or three vendors on the expo floor with security gateway products though I hope to be surprised by some new ideas on securing IoT devices. I know there will be one company in attendance focusing on securing cloud workloads as I saw RedLock on the sponsor list, hoping to see others as well. Much like backing up data, securing the data is often overlooked when companies shift applications and services to cloud providers. As a Palo Alto Networks customer I’m particularly interested to speak with the people from Redlock given the recently announced $173M acquisition.
So what am I hoping to get out of attending? An understanding of where SpiceWorks fits into the IT ecosystem tops the list as they’re a company that I don’t often think of. I also hope to learn some new things in regards to security as the roles of network engineers and infosec continue to commingle. And BBQ. No trip to Austin is complete without a meal (or 10) from the numerous purveyors of delectable smoked meats.
Long time no post! Since my last post I’ve gotten deeper in touch with my networking roots, and obtained my Juniper JNCIS-ENT and Palo Alto Networks PNCSE certifications. It’s from that intersection of networking and security enforcement in my day job that my interest in attending Spiceworks’ SpiceWorld 2018 conference in Austin, TX for the first time springs. I’m excited to listen to keynotes by Bruce Scheier and Frank Abagnale, and attend some breakout of the multiple sessions covering a variety of security topics. See you in a couple weeks in Austin, and check back here for follow up posts!
As a matter of disclosure, Touchdown PR is providing me the opportunity to attend at no cost.
Resiliancy and avoiding unplanned downtime is a driving force for all of us in enterprise computing, Downtime can cost businesses vast sums of money.
So it’s very interesting to see the results of the 2018 IT resiliancy servey…
US Signal’s 2018 IT Resiliency Survey Reveals that 70 Percent of US Business Respondents Have Experienced Unplanned IT Disruption in the Last 12 Months
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., Sept. 11, 2018 – US Signal, a leading end-to-end IT solutions provider, today announced the results of its 2018 IT Resiliency Survey. The survey reveals that 70 percent of respondents from U.S. businesses experienced at least one unplanned IT disruption over the last 12 months. With this confirmation comes mounting concern—66 percent believe they are vulnerable to IT disruption, with one in 10 stating they feel very vulnerable to these interruptions.
US Signal’s 2018 IT Resiliency Survey uncovered the four most common forms of IT disruption, ranked in order as:
The survey goes on to reveal that although 58 percent of businesses state that they have a disaster recovery plan in place, they feel there is room for improvement. In addition, one in five respondents admitted that they are not sure how often their disaster recovery strategy is updated—and 8 percent do not have one to begin with.
These findings imply that many businesses have not yet come to grips with planning, implementing or reviewing disaster recovery strategies and that some could benefit from third-party support in either developing, managing or maintaining their disaster recovery plan.
Ensuring that corporate disaster recovery strategies are in line with new compliance legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), was a key concern within the survey, with nearly one quarter of U.S. businesses revealing they were either not confident or were unsure that their current plan was strong enough to meet compliance requirements. GDPR compliance is a key requirement for all businesses that interact with EU citizen data, with high fines and prosecution possible from the European Union Courts if adherence is not maintained.
“The results of US Signal’s 2018 IT Resiliency Survey should sound a wake-up call to businesses across the country. Disaster recovery strategies have to be planned, tested, implemented, modified and updated on a regular basis, and it’s clear that this is not happening in many instances,” said US Signal President Stephen Oyer. “Companies need to recruit the right ITtalent either in-house or through external consultants and invest in the best IT solutions to stay ahead of the game – whether that’s planning for natural disasters or fighting off the latest malware or virus. If they fail to do so, businesses risk being hit by the high costs associated with unplanned IT downtime.”
To learn more, view the full survey here: https://ussignal.com/it-resiliency-results.
About US Signal’s IT Resiliency Survey
US Signal’s IT Resiliency Survey was carried out in July and August 2018 and is based on information gathered from more than 50 IT professionals from a cross-section of sectors. The insights were collected via Survey Monkey.
About US Signal
US Signal is a leading IT solutions provider, offering connectivity, cloud hosting, colocation, data protection, and disaster recovery services – all powered by its wholly owned and operated, robust, fiber network. US Signal also helps customers optimize their IT resources through the provision of managed and professional services.
Ok, We all like fast storage, and E8 are blazing new trails with their shared NVMe storage solutions, facilitating distributed storage at mind bending speeds, Utilizing the massively parallel capabilities of the NVMe protocol. With massive overhead in the NVMe protocol E8`s potential for expansion and optimization make them a storage provider to watch.
read more in their recent press release :
E8 STORAGE SETS ANOTHER NEW RECORD THIS YEAR IN INDEPENDENT BENCHMARK TEST
E8 Storage to demonstrate record-breaking performance at Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2018
SANTA CLARA, Calif., August 7, 2018 – E8 Storage today announced that the company’s high-performance, shared accelerated storage solution has set a new record for the SPEC SFS® 2014performance benchmark. As the only shared NVMe storage solution to break the 1ms overall response time (ORT) threshold, E8 Storage has once again beat all other previously published SPEC SFS2014_swbuild test results. The solution leverages a single E8-X24 array in combination with an IBM Spectrum Scale 5.0.1 high performance cluster, without requiring any special performance tuning on the storage subsystem.
More specifically, E8 Storage delivers the industry’s lowest sub-millisecond overall response time (ORT) of 0.57ms, while meeting previous records on the number of builds. The record-breaking results validate E8 Storage’s vision to bring high performance, low latency and simplified storage management without compromising on reliability, availability or scalability. The configuration powers financial trading systems, real-time data analytics, and genomics sequencing research. Demonstrations of the record-breaking configuration will take place during FMS 2018 at booth 745.
“E8 Storage’s architecture is designed for NVMe and we can use any industry standard drive, allowing us to deliver the power behind innovation, with the lowest possible latency at a much lower TCO than many other cache memory solutions,” says Zivan Ori, co-founder and CEO of E8 Storage. “With the SPEC SFS® 2014 validation, we are delighted to have achieved these ground-breaking results, which showcase our ability to power, accelerate and scale high performance applications, so customers can quickly and efficiently extract value from their data.”
Available since April 2018, the E8-X24 also set multiple STAC-M3™ benchmark records, with the fastest tests performing 17x faster than the previous results. These independently verified, record-breaking speeds reaffirm E8 Storage’s vision to extract the full performance of flash for massive scalability of data hungry applications such as data centers with data- and transaction-intensive applications.
For a copy of the full results visit: https://www.spec.org/sfs2014/results/res2018q3/sfs2014-20180706-00041.html
For more information on purchasing E8 Storage appliances, please contact [email protected].
About E8 Storage
E8 Storage is a pioneer in shared NVMe 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, genomics and large-scale file systems. Driven by the company’s patented architecture, E8 Storage’s high-performance NVMe over Fabrics certified storage delivers record breaking performance at half the cost of existing storage products. When performance matters, enterprise data centers turn to E8 Storage for unprecedented storage performance, density and scale, 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.
I have been given the opportunity to blog about a new product from Unitrends. The new product is called VM Backup Essentials, or vBE for short. Certain bloggers were provided a blogger release which I am going to post below. I will add my comments under each section as I downloaded the product into my lab to install and test out the features of this product.
vBE (short for VM Backup Essentials), converges enterprise-grade backup software, ransomware
detection, and cloud continuity into a powerful, easy-to-use, all-in-one platform priced 30% less than
comparable products. An “All-in-One Solution” vBE provides a disruptive approach to backup – with complete vertical integration (including the cloud), fast time to value and an all-in-one solution provided by a single vendor with industry-leading customer service. vBE includes all the software and features you would find in an enterprise-level data protection and recovery solution.
vBE includes operating system, security, backup software, WAN acceleration, replication, cloud integration, and archiving.
With an easy to use interface lost file recovery is one of the most common tasks performed by IT on an
emergency basis and can chew up many hours of your time. vBE ensures easy file recovery. It takes less than five minutes to recover a lost file with vBE, from login to full restoration. The UI is easy and intuitive enough that any member of IT can recover a lost file without having to consult a manual or receive special training.
Easily set all aspects of protection using an advanced, intelligent feature called SLA policy automation.
vBE’s SLA Policy automation intelligently sets your backup schedule based on your RTO and RPO goals.
Built-in one-glance, one-click dashboards and reports keep you fully up-to-date on the health and status
of your backup and continuity strategy.
The UI is fairly easy to navigate. I was able to easily add my lab vCenter instance so I could select any of the VMs for backup. I chose to backup one of my Windows VMs once so I could test file recovery as mentioned in the section above. After the backup was complete, I deleted the downloaded files in my Downloads folder. I selected the server from the Recover tab and clicked the Recover Files option. This will mount the backup for use in the File Level Recovery tab. This will mount them as a CIFS share that you can visit to download the files back to the server they were deleted from. You can also use iSCSI to mount the backup into the server if preferred for file level recovery. It would be nice to choose the files in the mounted job and tell it to restore back to the same server so you can do it from one interface
vBE comes with Deep Cloud Integration. The cloud is an ideal way to ensure geographic resilience,
especially those without a secondary location that need to protect copies of their data. vBE easily
manages protection for your VMware workloads in hyperscale clouds such as Google or AWS. However anyone that has worked with hyperscale clouds knows it can be complex and very expensive. vBE has its own purpose-built continuity cloud designed for long-term retention and DRaaS, as well as great integration with AWS and Google. Offloading cloud backup and recovery to experts gives you 100% confidence you will recovery when you need to and let’s you focus on those tasks only you can do – work with your business partners to improve company performance.
As I have no cloud options to test, all I can verify are the options in the UI. Under the Configure tab, you can add Cloud based storage as a target for backup and recovery. Currently the options ads Google Cloud Storage, Amazon (S3) and Rackspace Cloud Files.
Licensing to rival all other vendors!
vBE is licensed for $105 per socket and covers VMware virtual machines only. Base prices include one
year of 24x7x365 support with an annual renewal available.
Support terms of 3 or 5 years can be chosen at the time of initial purchase or support plan renewal.
My only comment on this claim is that this pricing is much cheaper than what I have seen out there for comparable products. I do not use these products on a daily basis anymore but I remember the pricing from one vendor I used to use was in the $700 to $1,000 price range per socket. If the performance of this Unitrends product matches up to the other backup vendors then this pricing will be a game changer, in my opinion.
Points of note:
A 30-day free trial is available from https://www.unitrends.com/products/vm-backup-essentials
Simply download, deploy, and quickly start backing up all VMware workloads as it includes everything
required for data and application protection and advanced features.
As my lab is small I am not able to fully test every feature of this product but my overall impression is very positive. Being able to test it out for 30 days for free is a great way to see if it will work for protecting your VMs.
WhereScape has released a product to help companies migrate existing data warehouses, vaults and marts to Snowflake. The name of the product is WhereScape® Migration Express™ for Snowflake. Their goal is to make this migration fast and easy for organizations. For more information, check out the press release below.
WhereScape Announces WhereScape® Migration Express™ for Snowflake
New automation offering helps Snowflake customers fast-track data infrastructure migration projects with fewer resources and faster time to value
PORTLAND, OREGON – June 7, 2018 – WhereScape, the leading provider of data infrastructure automation software, today announced the availability of WhereScape® Migration Express™ for Snowflake. This new offering enables organizations to simply, rapidly and efficiently migrate existing data warehouses, data vaults and data marts from legacy data platforms to Snowflake – the data warehouse built for the cloud.While traditional approaches to data infrastructure migration demand months of effort by development teams,
WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake puts the delivery of successful migration projects within the reach of individual developers in weeks or even days. By automating the repetitive, time-intensive tasks associated with migration, organizations can increase developer productivity, standardize efforts with best practices, compress timelines, limit project risk and lower overall cost.
“WhereScape’s automation capabilities combined with Snowflake’s built-for-the-cloud architecture enable any organization that wants to be data-driven,” Snowflake’s Chief Technical Evangelist, Kent Graziano said. “By automating the migration of data and data models, WhereScape reduces the complexity, effort and cost for organizations with legacy data and data infrastructure to consider when moving to Snowflake. WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake makes it possible for these organizations to reap the benefits of Snowflake sooner.”
With metadata and development and data mapping wizards, WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake automates the migration of existing data and data infrastructure from other data platforms such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata and others. These automation capabilities reduce project complexity and the database knowledge needed by developers. WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake also includes many advanced capabilities to manage and optimize data transfers, and the ability to easily refresh data intermittently throughout the migration period.
WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake is part of the WhereScape® automation for Snowflake offering, a collection of automation solutions to help Snowflake customers fast-track the design, development, deployment and operation of Snowflake projects.
“While IT executives recognize the advantages of moving data infrastructure to the cloud, and moving to Snowflake specifically, the migration of existing data and data infrastructure can seem like a herculean task to consider,” WhereScape CEO, Mark Budzinski said. “WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake provides IT leaders with an executable roadmap that doesn’t demand extensive staffing or contracting and greatly reduces the risk involved in choosing to evolve.”
As part of the Snowflake Data for Breakfast tour, WhereScape co-hosted an event in Minneapolis, MN, and shared the results organizations are achieving through automation. The tour brings IT leaders together with cloud thought leaders, experienced analytics practitioners and innovative technologists for insights on today’s cloud architecture and technology.
You can learn more about WhereScape Migration Express for Snowflake and the entire WhereScape automation for Snowflake offering here.
About WhereScape
WhereScape helps IT organizations of all sizes leverage automation to design, develop, deploy, and operate data infrastructure faster. More than 700 customers worldwide rely on WhereScape automation to eliminate hand-coding and other repetitive, time-intensive aspects of data infrastructure projects to deliver data warehouses, vaults, lakes and marts in days or weeks rather than in months or years. WhereScape has offices in Portland, Oregon; Reading, UK; Auckland, New Zealand; and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.wherescape.com.
All products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
With the release of vSphere 6.7, The interface looks a bit different.
Thus , I thought I would do a write up on how to change a ESXi Host’s Hostname and DNS in vSphere 6.7 within vCenter.
We are going to use the HTML 5 interface.
Lets expand to the host I just installed, and added to the cluster. In this case it is esxufss02.
Next, Lets click the Configure Tab.
Next, Lets click into Networking > TCP / IP Configuration.
Next, Click Default under TCP/IP Stack. And Click Edit.
Next, enter the information, and click ok.
Enjoy.
Roger L
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!
