‘ve written about Cisco UCS B-Series blade servers in my three previous articles. I covered how to rack and stack them, make sense of the Cisco UCS Manager software, and configure ports for the environment. In this article I focus on getting various pools created so you can create service templates and get your blade servers running. If you haven’t…
I’ve taken you through racking and stacking Cisco UCS B-Series blade servers and provided an overview of UCS Manager. In this article, we’ll start doing some of the configuration necessary to get the blades not only up and running, but also connected to your IP and storage networks so you can actually use them. How to configure Cisco UCS…
In my previous TechRepublic article I described how to rack and stack Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) B-Series blade servers. In this article I’ll delve more into how to configure theUCS Manager (UCSM) software for initial use. The UCSM can be intimidating, because there’s a ton of configurable features with the blades; I’ll concentrate on getting to know…
Cisco UCS B-Series blade servers are increasing in popularity for various reasons. Some people like Cisco’s cabling innovations, reducing the ever-increasing rat’s nest of cables necessary within a data center. Others appreciate the amount of computing power you can fit into 6U (6 rack units), which is the size of one UCS chassis. There’s also the…
DevOps is here to stay, and a lot of infrastructure engineers (myself included) should start jumping on board to avoid getting left behind. (Learn more about DevOps by reading my TechRepublic article about Gene Kim’s book The Phoenix Project.) To read more click here.
Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is a feature that has been around for a while within VMware virtual machines. CBT is available if you’re running ESX 4.0 or higher with hardware version 7 or higher on the VM. Basically, VMware can keep track of disk sectors that have changed since the last backup. When that VM is backed…
VMware released a new bundle last year called the VMware Horizon Suite (PDF). This suite goes beyond that of just virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) provided by VMware Horizon View(formerly VMware View) and includes physical and virtual desktop management as well as file and folder management and sharing technology. This is basically everything anyone looking for a good End…
One of the biggest improvements made to VMware’s vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) in version 5.5 is that the limitations of hosts and virtual machines has increased, and vCSA 5.5 can support up to 100 hosts and 3,000 virtual machines. This opens the possibility for larger SMBs to start using the appliance-based vCenter and lose the businesses’ Windows…
One of the biggest improvements made to VMware’s vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) in version 5.5 is that the limitations of hosts and virtual machines has increased, and vCSA 5.5 can support up to 100 hosts and 3,000 virtual machines. This opens the possibility for larger SMBs to start using the appliance-based vCenter and lose the businesses’ Windows…
If you felt the pain of installing vSphere 5.1 Single Sign-On (SSO) when it first came out, you know it wasn’t easy for various reasons. It was brand new, and we were all used to really easy upgrades from VMware. Another reason is VMware was using RSA tools that were very locked down, so if you didn’t…