Loose beginnings of a daily, weekly or monthly (haven't decided yet) posting on tidbits of information that need not be an actual post but need to be inked.

Each blogger has his own way of capturing this type of information, I personally deem it pretty useful. So I’m bringing it in house and stamping it with the Battle Ponderings label, W1 for week one…although think loose, think casual, think subject to change at any time. Here we go..

• Navisphere Flare 29 Released-Here are a few enhancements to the latest release of FLARE below although most exciting is all this “VM-Awareness” as @sakacc calls it. Couple of vids here and here.
  • 2-port 10Gbs iSCSI I/O modules
  • VLAN Tagging
  • Drive spin down for the following SATA drives (00548797, 00548853, 00548829)
  • LUN shrinking for FLARE or metaLUNs, OS must support it of course
  • I/O module upgrades from 4gb FC mods to 8gb FC mods and 1gb iSCSI to 10gb iSCSI mods
• EMC White Papers Released
  • White Paper: Disaster Recovery of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on EMC Celerra iSCSI using EMC Replication Manager and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager — Best Practices Planning
    • This white paper discusses the best practices and guidelines to successfully implement disaster recovery solutions for Microsoft Exchange Server by using EMC Replication Manager with EMC Celerra in a VMware environment. It also discusses the technical reasons for these implementation techniques.
  • White Paper: Disaster Recovery of Oracle Fusion Middleware with EMC RecoverPoint — Applied Technology
    • This white paper outlines how EMC RecoverPoint provides cost-effective local and remote replication of Oracle Fusion Middleware as part of a disaster recovery solution that includes Oracle Data Guard database replication.
• Long distance VMotion-Sweet profanities spill from my beak. This VCE partnership is tight and getting tighter. If you haven’t seen this vid documenting geo dispersed VMotion and Storage VMotion then clearly your MNN involvement has clouded your brain. Hmm..I have a specific customer this would be perfect for now if only I could convince them.
• VMware Data Recovery 1.0.2 released-Man who hasn’t been holding their breath for this point release. Well I haven’t, but I am over-enthusiastic about this product. Its got a few giant steps to go to become lead pack dog to its peers but nonetheless its a step in the right direction. Here are the issues resolved in this release. Linkage here…
  • Various Integrity Check Issues
    • Under certain circumstances, integrity checks reported damaged restore points and cannot load session errors. For example, such problems might be reported if:
      • A combination of simultaneous overlapping backups and integrity checks are started.
      • A backup is stopped before completion because the backup window closes. In such a case, the deduplication store records transactions, but the closing of the backup window prevents recording the transaction to the catalog.
      • When integrity checks failed in such cases, Data Recovery would mark restore points as damaged or report that the backup session could not be found. Data Recovery integrity check now handles these conditions properly, so these problems no longer occur.
  • Connections Using Alternate Ports not Supported

    By default, connections to vCenter Server use port 443. If vCenter Server is configured to use an alternate port, Data Recovery continued to attempt to connect using the default port. This caused the Data Recovery plug-in to report authentication failures when attempting to connect to the Data Recovery appliance. Alternate vCenter Server port configurations are now supported.

  • Multiple VMDKs with the Same Name not Handled Properly

    A virtual machine can have multiple VMDK files with the same name that are stored on different LUNs. In such a case, Data Recovery would only restore one of the disks. Data Recovery now restores all disks.

• HOWTO: Leverage NFS snapshots on Celerra – the “Cheap and Dirty” Way-Where does @Sakacc find the time..Only he can answer that. Anyways here is a great vid on how to dirtily snap your NFS datastores and make them visible within your root FS from your vSphere client. Not sure I knew about this server_param beaut…
  • server_param server_2 -facility cfs -modify showChildFsRoot -value 1
• HOWTO: Leverage NFS snapshots on Celerra – the “Fancy VMware/App integrated” Way- This is all about app integration with Replication Manager’s assistance, a must for local replication on all CLARiiONs be it Snapsure, SnapView, SAN Copy, Recoverpoint, etc.
• VMworld comprehensive linking-No I wasn’t there but for the love of VMware I wish I was : ) Regardless anybody who is anybody has seen this but hey one more won’t hurt. Umm..thanks Duncan.
• VMware View Manager 3.1.2 released-I only mention this because I partook in a POC for a client of ours this week. VDI, slick as ever just doesn’t contribute much to my MOJO. That will change when people actually care more about the problems VDI solves. For now lets dance..
  • Fixed Issues
  • What’s New-Namely virtual printing multi-session support. This is actually pretty sweet, saw this first hand.
• VMware white paper Released
  • Understanding memory resource management in VMware ESX Server
• EMC Recoverpoint Usability Testing – Wednesday of this week I had the chance to take part in some RecoverPoint Usability testing. It was fascinating I must say, my first. Gave me the chance to *maybe* sway future layout and functionality for a product I so dearly love. Hey and I got to talk RecoverPoint with one of the Kashya developers, uber-cool if I must say so myself. Wait to you see the next generation management framework, all I will say is why aren’t you an EMC customer again?
• Cisco Partner Datacenter Round Table-Interesting closed meeting that I attended @ Cisco’s campus in RTP on Thursday. Although primarily sales oriented I did get some insight into how hard Cisco is pushing UCS and how important partner commitment is to the proliferation of said strategy.

Well that’s it, enjoy your weekend people there’s more to life than work. Try to remember all those souls lost 8 years ago today. Cherish those moments with your kids, your wife, before your time has passed. I assure you my epitaph will not say “Here lies a man that worked all the time”. It’s days like today that make me reflect on how fortunate we all are for what we have.