Blog.
- September 20, 2018
NSX-V First Deployment: What to Actually Prepare For
NSX-V (for vSphere) is VMware’s software-defined networking platform for vSphere environments. It decouples network functions — switching, routing, firewalling, load balancing — from physical …
- July 31, 2018
vSAN for Small Business: Is the Complexity Worth It?
VMware vSAN entered the mainstream around 2016 as a hyperconverged storage option — using local drives in ESXi hosts as a shared storage pool, eliminating the need for a dedicated SAN or NAS. For …
- June 11, 2018
Rubrik Backup for VMware: Why We Replaced Veeam
Rubrik entered the backup market around 2014-2015 with a fundamentally different architecture than traditional backup software: a purpose-built hardware/software appliance with a policy-driven, …
- April 10, 2018
ESXi 5.5 to 6.5: The Upgrade Path Nobody Documents Completely
ESXi 5.5 reached end of general support in September 2018, creating real urgency to move environments that had been running the same version for three to four years. The upgrade path to 6.5 (the …
- March 19, 2018
Pure Storage Integration with vSphere: Getting the Most from All-Flash
When I first deployed Pure Storage in a VMware environment around 2017, the experience was different from anything I’d done with traditional SAN arrays. The management interface is genuinely …
- December 5, 2017
EMC VNX with VMware ESXi: Multipath Configuration and What Goes Wrong
EMC storage arrays (VNX and VNXe in particular) were a common pairing with VMware in the 2015-2019 era for mid-market organizations. They’re capable arrays with good VMware integration, but the …
- October 30, 2017
vSphere Clusters: Common Misconfigurations in SMB Deployments
vSphere cluster misconfigurations don’t always cause immediate problems. Sometimes they sit dormant for months before a host failure or upgrade event triggers a failure mode that the …
- September 14, 2017
vSphere DRS: From Manual to Fully Automated and the Lessons in Between
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is vSphere’s automated workload balancing engine. When configured appropriately, it silently keeps your cluster balanced without admin intervention. When …
- June 22, 2017
vCenter SSO: The Most Misunderstood Part of vSphere
vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) is the authentication backbone of the vSphere platform. It handles login to vCenter, manages identity sources, and issues tokens that vSphere services use to authenticate …
- April 3, 2017
Stale Data After a Failed vCenter Upgrade: How to Clean It Up
A failed vCenter upgrade is among the more stressful VMware events you’ll deal with. The VMs are still running, HA and DRS are still functioning on cached state, but vCenter itself is in an …