Tag Archives: Storage

HP Discover 2011 in Vienna

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I’m off to Vienna (Austria) to attend HP Discover next week. The idea is to go look at their kit and learn a bit more about what’s available and possible. I hope to discuss their offerings with them and I will have storage as my main focus. This is because things are about to get busy in that area for us.  I’ll also provide them with some feedback on our experiences, what we like, don’t like etc. Call it “the good, the bad and the ugly" of free (no I don’t need or want a free Amazon gift card to provide it) customer feedback if you like.

I appreciate a chance to provide feedback to vendors directly and I do think it is important. Not because I have that much to say or have such a big impact but because apart from sales figures it’s the best way to help them and thus us as customers to get good things enhanced and broken stuff fixed.

If there is one thing that a lot of vendors are missing is a better view of the opportunities in the SME market that has a need for enterprise level features but on a smaller budget. That does exist and that market can be tapped more than it is now. Sometimes it seems like the commercial offerings in this market are divided in small & large and the sizes in between are crushed or forgotten between those two markets. I hear this a lot from colleagues & friends as well, so it’s not just me. We’re not the huge budget crowd but make up for that in numbers. We’ll see what HP has to offer that segment of the market in 2012.

BriForum Europe 2011 & The Experts Conference Europe 2011

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Great news from the educational & conference front. First of all, I’m attending BriForum in London, United Kingdom in May (http://briforum.com/Europe/index.html).  That’s good news, normally we’d have to pop over the big pond to go to that one, so this is pretty neat. And timely, due to some prospecting I’m doing for Disaster Recovery,  Business continuity, application aware storage in a virtualized environment It’s a good match and I hope to get in to some educational discussions about the challenges we all face. Some of the storage vendors we’re interested in are there as well so there is certainly some potential to make it a good experience.

And just recently confirmed that The Experts Conference is coming to Europe. TEC2011 Europe will be held in Frankfurt, Germany from October 17th to October 19th 2011. This conference is high quality and created to fill the needs of the most experienced users, which is one of the reasons I would like to attend. The more you learn & grown the more you bump into the next level of challenges and being able to learn form high level content and interact with experienced speakers and attendees who are dealing with the same issues can be very rewarding. Attendees of TechEd have a way to measure the level of the sessions, well, they are all supposed to be Level 400 only. Quest is hosting this, so they certainly should be able to round up the expertise.  I’m going to make it to the new “track” at this conference and that’s “Virtualization & Cloud”. More information can be found here http://www.theexpertsconference.com/europe/2011/virtualization-cloud-training/overview/

The timing of these conferences is pretty good. As I said we’re doing a lot of prospecting right now and hope to get a lot of information from attending these. For anyone interested why I attend conferences and why I think they are valuable see mu blog post on this subject https://blog.workinghardinit.work/2010/06/05/why-i-find-value-in-a-conference/

Windows Hyper-V Server R2 SP1 is available for download

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Ever since Windows 2008 R2 SP1 became available people have been waiting for Windows Hyper-V Server R2 to catch up. The wait is over as last week Microsoft made it available on their website http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd776191.aspx. That’s a nice package to have when it serves your needs and there ‘s little to argue about. Guidance on how to configure it and how to get remote management set up has been out for a while and is quite complete so that barrier shouldn’t stop you from using it where appropriate. If you’re staring out head over to José Barreto’s blog to get a head start and here’s some more information on the subject http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794756(WS.10).aspx and naturally there are some tools around to help out if needed and the Microsoft provided tools are not to you liking http://coreconfig.codeplex.com/. So there you go, now you have a free and very capable hypervisor available to the public that gives you high availability, Live Migration, Dynamic Memory, Remote FX and they even threw in their software iSCSI target 3.3 into the free package so you can build a free iSCSI SAN supported by Microsoft. Live is good.

Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 for Windows Server 2008 R2 available for public download

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As TechNet subscribers, we had access to Windows Storage Server 2008 with Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.2  (also see Jose Barreto’s blog on this here). That was sweet but for one little issue. This SKU cannot be a Hyper-V Host. In order not to lose a physical host in the lab you could edit the MSI installer from the Windows Storage Server 2008 install media where you would delete the SKU check. Problem solved but not very legal so nobody ever did that.  You can install Windows Storage Server in a VM for the lab I know but that becoming very SkyNet like … Virtual servers providing virtual storage for virtual servers … and while a good option to have I like to have a hardware host.

Bring Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 along and Microsoft decided that we could have the iSCSI Software Target 3.3 software without constraints, except that you needed a TechNet/MSDN subscription, to install on W2K8R2. This is the one I’m running in my labs at the moment installed on a Physical Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise edition that also is a Hyper-V host. This provides all my iSCSI storage to both physical and virtual clusters. I used it to test MelioFS with FileScaler recently with a 2 node virtual cluster.

Today, Jose Barreto blogged about the public release of iSCSI Software Target 3.3 for Windows Server 2008 R2. This is very good news as now everyone has access to an iSCSI target for labs, testing, POCs, and even production. Thank you, Microsoft. Now with some luck, we could get some SMI-S support for it with SCVMM2012? Please?

If you need some help, Jose Barreto has a bunch of blog posts on configuring the iSCSI target, so I suggest you check out his site. As an added benefit, Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3 setup & configuration is scriptable using PowerShell.