NetApp - The Virtual Storage Guy

vSphere on NetApp Book Available at VMworld

This morning the VMworld bookstore opened and for the first time NetApp customers are able purchase a NetApp technical book! Early reports state that sales have been solid, so if you’re interested in a copy I’d suggest you grab one soon. Should you miss your opportunity to grab one the books will be available for sale in the next few weeks on Amazon.com.

Meet me and the co-authors Mike, Larry, & Peter at the NetApp booth. We are all on hand to answer your most technical questions.

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...

vSphere Introduces the Plug-n-Play SAN

With today’s release of vSphere, VMware has introduced numerous new features and technologies all designed to advance the virtual evolution of our data centers. With this release VMware and their storage alliance partners have delivered Plug-n-Play SAN storage connectivity. As you begin downloading the final bits, refreshing your labs and planning your upgrade path to vSphere I’d like to dig into the considerations of and how one can deploy a robust, reliable, and greatly simplified P-n-P SAN architecture with vSphere and NetApp.

VMware on NetApp Best Practices Update

As one might imagine

Several of us within NetApp receive a fair amount of feedback around the content in our VMware on NetApp Best Practices Technical Report, TR-3428.  A few of the areas where we receive a large amount of inquiry are related to the frequency of the updates to the document and requests for notification of when updates are posted. I’d like to use this post as my way of saying we hear you, to follow up on these questions and ask for some feedback as we move forward with the document and begin work on our ESX 4.0 on NetApp Best Practices document.

An update has been posted

Version 4.4 went live on November 24th around midnight EDT.  As this is update closely followed version 4.3, which posted in November, I’d like to share with you some of the key updates and additions to the content that have been introduced in the past 30 days.