I don’t normally do articles off the back of someone else’s podcast episode, but I was listening to W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi discuss “To DRaaS or Not to DRaaS” on The Backup Wrap-up a little while ago, and thought it was worth diving into a bit on the old weblog. In my day job I talk to many organisations about their Disaster Recovery (DR) requirements. I’ve been doing this a while, and I’ve seen the conversation change somewhat over the last few years. This article will barely skim the surface on what you need to think about, so I recommend you listen to Curtis and Prasanna’s ..read more

Following on from my article on host removal, in this edition of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to cover SDDC removal on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform. Don’t worry, I haven’t lost my mind in a post-acquisition world. Rather, this is some of the info you’ll find useful if you’ve been running a trial or a proof of concept (as opposed to a pilot) deployment of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) and / or VMware Cloud on AWS and want to clean some stuff up when you’re all done.   Process Firstly, if you’re using VCDR and want to deactivate the depl ..read more

In this edition of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to cover host removal on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform. This is a fairly brief post, as there’s not a lot to say about the process, but I’ve had enough questions about that I thought it was worth covering.   Background I’ve written about Elastic DRS (EDRS) in VMware Cloud on AWS previously. It’s something you can’t turn off, and the Baseline policy does a good job of making sure you don’t get in hot water from a storage perspective. That said, there might be occasions where you want to remove a ho ..read more

It’s been a little while since I posted an update on what’s new with VMware Cloud on AWS, so I thought I’d share some of the latest news.   M7i.metal-24xl Announced It’s been a few months since it was announced at AWS re:Invent 2023, but the M7i.metal-24xl (one of the catchier host types I’ve seen) is going to the change the way we approach storage-heavy VMC on AWS deployments. What is it? It’s a host without local storage. There are 48 physical cores (96 logical cores with Hyper-Threading enabled). It has 384 GiB memory. The key point is that there are flexible NFS storage options to c ..read more

Happy New Year. Some of this news is old news now, but I’m posting it anyway. Let’s get random. Tom Hollingsworth had a good experience upgrading his Ubiquiti gear recently. I did the same with some Google Nest stuff and didn’t. That should tell you which one of us has a clue what he’s doing. I do like to hear about things actually working though. Speaking of things not working, it sounds like JB had a great time with one of Australia’s largest telcos recently. The poor customer experience just seems relentless at times. On to more entertaining things, the Netflix folks posted an interesting ..read more

Nexsan recently announced the Nexsan Unity NV6000. I had the chance to speak to Andy Hill about it, and thought I’d share some thoughts here.   What Is It? [image courtesy of Nexsan] I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again … in the immortal words of Silicon Valley: “It’s a box”. And a reasonably powerful one at that, coming loaded with the following specifications. Supported Protocols SAN (Fibre Channel, iSCSI), NAS (NFS, SMB 1.0 to 3.0, FTP), Object (S3) Disk Bays | Rack U 60 | 4U Maximum Drives with Expansion 180 Maximum Raw Capacity (chassis | total) 1.12 PB Raw | 3.36 PB ..read more

This is a quick post covering the steps required to configure a script VM for use in a recovery plan with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR). Why would you want to do this? You might be running a recovery for a Linux VM and you need to run a script to update the DNS settings of the VM once it’s powered on at another site. Or you might have a site-specific application that needs to be installed. Whatever. The point is that VCDR gives you that ability to do that via the Script VM. You can read the documentation on the feature here. Firstly, you configure the Script VM as part of the Recover ..read more

I had the opportunity to speak to Jason Lohrey and Robert Murphy from Arcitecta a little while ago about the company’s Mediaflux announcement. It was a great conversation, and I’m sad that I hadn’t heard about the company beforehand. In any case I figured I’d share some thoughts on the announcement.   What Is It? The folks at Arcitecta describe the Mediaflux Universal Data System as “a convergence of data management, data orchestration, multi-protocol access, and storage in one platform”. The idea is that the system manages your data across all of your storage platforms. It’s not just cl ..read more

Squeezing this one in before the end of the year. It’s shorter than normal but we all have other things to do. Let’s get random. Like the capacity and power consumption of tape but still want it on disk? Check out this coverage of the Disk Archive Corporation over at Blocks and Files. This was a great series of posts on the RFC process. It doesn’t just happen by magic. Tony did some troubleshooting with one of his tenant’s K8s container clusters recently. Jeff Geerling ran into some issues accessing media recently. It’s a stupid problem to have, and one of the reasons I’m still such a sucker f ..read more

Welcome to Random Short Take #90. I remain somewhat preoccupied with the day job and acquisitions. It’s definitely Summer here now. Let’s get random. You do something for long enough, and invariably you assume that everyone else knows how to do that thing too. That’s why this article from Danny on data protection basics is so useful. Speaking of data protection, Preston has a book on recovery for busy people coming soon. Read more about it here. Still using a PDP-11 at home? Here’s a simple stack buffer overflow attack you can try. I hate it when the machines shout at me, and so do a lot of o ..read more