The Virtual Storage Guy

NetApp has released the Virtual Storage Console 2.1 (VSC); our VMware vCenter plug-in. Behind the scenes the VSC is actually a framework from a number of sub-plug-ins (VSC, Rapid Cloning Utility and SMVI) delivered in a single installation. We created this sub-plug-in architecture as a way to enable new plug-ins without having to create multiple [...]

Two of the mostly highly rated sessions presented at VMworld 2010 were TA8133: Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for VMware & TA8623: Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge. I believe part of the reason these two sessions were so highly rated was that they both presented the role and future direction of storage in a shared [...]

  It has been one year to the date since the last time I authored a post on the topic of partition alignment. I think its fair to state this issue has gained awareness over the last year thanks to posts from a number of industry experts such as Duncan Epping, Aaron Delp, and Chad [...]

Today my good friend Duncan Epping surprised me by shooting me an IM notifying me that he was posting on the impact of partition misalignment and asked if I’d care to comment. Fortunately for me I had time to do just that and this post is an expanded version of what I shared in the [...]

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 [...]