Scott Lowe – Examining VXLAN – It’s taken me far too long to write this post, that’s for sure. Since the announcement of VXLAN at VMworld earlier in the year, I’ve been searching for additional information on these questions: “What is VXLAN? How does it fit into the broader networking landscape? Why did we need a new standard?”
Cormac Hogan – Upgraded VMFS-5: Automatic Partition Format Change – By now, regular readers of this blog will be aware that VMFS-5 supports a single extent volume size of 64TB. In an earlier post, I mentioned that newly created VMFS-5 partitions use a GUID Partition Format, GPT. This partition format allows for the creation of large partition sizes to cater for the new single extent 64TB VMFS-5 volume.
Andre Leibovici – Use Flash Drives (SSD) for Linked Clones, not Replicas – In my previous article EMC FAST Cache effectiveness with VDI I focused on FAST Cache benefits for VDI deployments. The tests I completed also generated a huge quantity of data that is tremendously valuable for better sizing of VDI environments.
Wanda He – SQL Server Rolling Patch Upgrade using Standby VM – SQL Server patching is a common use case for high availability deployments. When people think about minimizing down time for patch upgrades, most people will think of SQL Server failover clustering or SQL Server database mirroring. Those are the two SQL Server native availability features that support rolling patch upgrade. Did you know that you could also perform rolling patch upgrades with just a standby virtual machine (VM) if you are running SQL Server on VMware?
Duncan Epping – How to create your own .vib files – Today I was asked the question on how to create a VIB file (.vib). In our documentation it is mentioned that you can create a VIB file to add firewall rules to your ESXi host. As the .vib tool is not available yet to the general public I decided to dig in to it. I want to stress that I tested this in my own lab, it is not supported at all, but might give a nice insight in how these VIB are constructed.
