NetApp Communities vPodcast
Wow! Just got a message from Nick Howell yesterday (by the way if you don’t follow him on Twitter or read his blog, you should). So the message was about the new NetApp Communities vPodcast. It sounds very cool, let’s see what is it really:
Description: A monthly podcast about all things Virtualization at NetApp, covering Citrix, Hyper-V, RHEV, and VMware, and everything in-between!
So if you are interested in the virtualization technologies above, even if you are run them on NetApp or not, worth to check out. You can monitor the scheduled calls from the page on Talkshoe, and also will be able to download the mp3’s of the recorded audio directly from the site, as well as subscribing to the vPodcast within iTunes to sync with your iDevices.
So here are the details about the format:
- The Podcast is audio-only. No slides, no video.
- The call will be recorded live.
- There will be a text chat room that you can optionally participate in (HIGHLY recommended… this is truly where the fun conversations happen, and I will pull fodder from this conversation to discuss on the call)
- Skype and VoIP fully supported as well, for those calling in internationally
Listen, Share, Enjoy! See you there.
VSC for XenServer
Here we go! You may ask what is this: NetApp Virtual Storage Console for Citrix XenServer is a plug-in for XenCenter that empowers Citrix administrators to provision, deduplicate, resize, and destroy storage repositories. They can also clone tens of thousands of VMs almost instantaneously with NetApp FlexClone technology.
You can now find it on the NetApp webpage:
http://www.netapp.com/us/products/management-software/vsc/vsc-for-xenserver.html
DataSheet:
http://media.netapp.com/documents/ds-3360.pdf
How is it working? Check out this 3 minutes YouTube video to see:
VSC 4.1 External Beta is available
Virtual Storage Console provides integrated, comprehensive storage management for VMware vSphere infrastructure, including discovery, health monitoring, capacity management, provisioning, cloning, backup, restore, and disaster recovery. I have several posts about its features on this site from cloning to backup and recovery.
The latest version – 4.1 – is now available as External Beta. You can join, download and test the new features and capabilities. To name a few: Read more…
Heads up: KVM and RHEV
The tagline of this blog is “covering storage, backup and virtualization stuff”. From the virtualization space I did not include anything else than VMware, this could change in the future. VMware is still the market leader and provides a great amount of features, but other players are very interesting too.
This post is only a short heads up, provides a few resources NetApp published recently. All of these Technical Reports has been released in the past few months. For both KVM and RHEV there’s a Best Practices Guide and a Deployment Guide.
Cool new features in VMware View 5.1
Yesterday VMware announced the new version of its VDI product, VMware View 5.1. There are some important new features – from my point of view, which is basically NetApp/VMware integration. Cormac Hogan (aka @VMwareStorage on Twitter) published an article on the official vSphere blog, it describes all the important storage related features.
Let me focus on VCAI, this is the most impressive one for me. View Composer API for Array Integration enables View administrators to create virtual desktops using NetApp FlexClone technology directly from the View Composer. This feature is using VAAI – vStorage API for Array Integration – to offload the clone creation to the storage array. Creating virtual desktops with FlexClone is not a new thing, it exists in the Virtual Storage Console (NetApp vCenter plugin) for a long time, having integration with the mostly used connection brokers. Cormac describes the benefits offloading the clone creation in his article, so you can save CPU on the ESXi hosts and also network bandwidth. Please note, this feature is a Technology Preview in VMware View 5.1.
Rapid Cloning Utility now checks the partition alignment
Yesterday I was playing around a little bit with the new NetApp Virtual Storage Console 2.1.1 which was released last week. I wanted to create a couple of clones (actually 100), and I got an error message. I didn’t realized as a big thing, then I forgot it as my phone was ringing… But wait, it’s something new. So let’s see the error message:
VSC 2.1.1 for vSphere 5 is out
vSphere 5 has been released a few weeks ago and now you can download the Virtual Storage Console to monitor, clone, provision and backup, using NetApp storage. VSC is available on NOW at no cost. The most important change is it supports vSphere 5. It is also compatible with VMware View 4.6 and 5 as well as Citrix XenDesktop 5.0.
You can download and see the full list of changes on the NOW page.
Documentation:
- Release notes
- Installation and Administration Guide
- Provisioning and Cloning Administration Guide
- Backup and Recovery Administration Guide
I’ll test the old and new features in the near future, and post my experiences here.
