Welcome to the latest post in our series entitled ‘
Virtualization Changes Everything’
In our last post we discussed the CapEx savings provided by
data deduplication of both production storage capacity and storage array cache. Deduplication is fundamentally changing the data center and it appears that there’s more on the horizon. I’d like to share with you what I call ‘
Data Center Ethernet Acceleration’.
Overview
“"Some call it a software mainframe others call it cloud, it depends on when you were born" – Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware
When discussing multiple applications on a single hardware platform I prefer the term ‘software mainframe’. I think this is due more to my time working with VMware products rather than my age. I still recall my introduction to this concept back in 2001.
Continue reading "VCE-101: What's Next with Deduplication?" »
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.
Continue reading "I/O Efficiency and Alignment – the Cloud Demands Standards" »
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...
Continue reading "VI3 on NetApp Best Practices Update" »

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!
Continue reading "A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual NFS customers using VMware" »
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.
Continue reading "vSphere Introduces the Plug-n-Play SAN" »
Today’s post is one you don’t often find in the blogosphere, see today’s post is a collaborative effort initiated by Chad Sakac (EMC), which includes contributions from Andy Banta (VMware), Vaughn Stewart (NetApp), Eric Schott (Dell/EqualLogic), and Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand), David Black (EMC) and various other folks at each of the companies.
Together, our companies make up the large majority of the iSCSI market, all make great iSCSI targets, and we (as individuals and companies) all want our customers to have iSCSI success.
Continue reading "A “Multivendor Post” to help our mutual iSCSI customers using VMware" »
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.
Continue reading "VMware on NetApp Best Practices Update" »