NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

NetApp: Microsoft’s Storage Solutions Partner of the Year

I apologize as I’ve been traveling today which has led to a delay in getting this post posted. Hopefully you’ve heard today's news that NetApp was announced as Microsoft’s Advanced Infrastructure Storage Solutions Partner for 2009. I’d like to extend congratulations to the Microsoft and NetApp teams for earning this recognition.

What’s the right LUN size for a VMFS datastore?

I can’t tell you how often we are asked this question and the answer has many variables including the amount of aggregated I/O of the servers being virtualized onto the datastore, the storage protocol used in connecting to the datastore, etc.

Vote for the Top 5 VMware Blogs

Eric Siebert has asked the VMware community to make their voices by submitting their votes in a survey of the top 5 VMware related blogs. If you’re a reader of this blog and you haven’t casted a vote please head over to vSphere-Land and do so, it will only take a minute.

Got an iPhone? Got VMware? Heard of VManage?

Taking a break from the serious posts and stumbling thru the web when low and behold I learn of VManage, which is as far as I know, the first VMware management tool for the iPhone.

I’m sure from the blog posts its easy to tell I’m a bit of a VMware fan; however, my affection for my iPhone may not be as clear. Let’s just say I have a 3GS on preorder waiting to be picked up tomorrow at 8:00 AM EST.

I/O Efficiency and Alignment – the Cloud Demands Standards

I was surprised to read in the relatively recent EMC report: VMware ESX Server Optimization with EMC® Celerra® Performance Study that when it comes to aligning the partitions inside of virtual machines EMC has diametrically opposed recommendations based on the storage protocol and storage array which one deploys with VMware. I have to say that such recommendations raise a red flag that I believe needs some additional light shed on it.

VI3 on NetApp Best Practices Update

Today we've published a minor update to our VMware on NetApp: Storage Best Practices Technical Report TR-3428. After posting the blog announcing version 4.4 I received a number of comments and emails asking to share and comment as we publish future updates, so without further adieu here's the highlights of version 4.5.1...

A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware

We were quite a bit surprised to see how popular our “Multivendor iSCSI” post was. The feedback was overwhelming and very supportive of industry leaders partnering to ensure customer’s success with VMware. While writing that post, we (Vaughn Stewart from NetApp and Chad Sakac from EMC) discussed following up the iSCSI post with one focused on deploying VMware over NFS. The most difficult part around creating this post is that we couldn’t do it with our iSCSI-focused colleagues.

Since the original post, we’ve been busy assisting our customers and partners. We apologize for the delay, so without further ado we present to you the followup: a “Multivendor NFS” post for our joint customers. One of the goals of this post is to dispel the FUD customers often hear around NFS. Heck, if EMC and NetApp can agree – then you KNOW this post is FUD-Free!