Application Protection: There’s Something Happening Here

There’s something happening here What it is ain’t exactly clear There’s a man with a gun over there Telling me I got to beware Yes, it’s blasphemy to simply change a classic like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What’s It Worth” – but I will anyway to prove my point. There’s something happening here If you haven’t [...]

EMC PowerPath vs MPIO – Take the High Road

Guest post by Mark Prahl If you live in New England like I do, you have experienced some of the wettest weather on record in recent times. And, if you live in an old town like I do dating back to before the American Revolution, you know that some of those old paved paths can [...]

The Windows IT Pro Community Has Spoken! EMC Takes Gold… and Silver!

Best Hardware: Storage Gold Community Choice Award for EMC CLARiiON “Great build quality, powerful performance, and low price—the CLARiiON series is a winner.” http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/review/2010-Windows-IT-Pro-Editors-Best-and-Community-Choice-Awards/3.aspx Best SharePoint Product Silver Community Choice Award for EMC SourceOne http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/sharepoint/Editors-Best-Awards-and-Community-Choice-Awards-Announced-for-2010.aspx

Windows Geoclusters, Stretch-Clusters, and RecoverPoint/CE Failover

Taking a page out of Chief EMC Blogger Chuck Hollis‘ playbook, I’m attaching the graphics from entire PPT file that I thought would be important to highlight for this blog and its readers.  Some of the graphics didn’t fit to the page as well as I thought it would (I need to shrink them further). [...]

Cool Infographic Poster for Hyper-V

Step 1.  Download large infographic poster here (or click on the picture). Hat tip to Techhead for sharing this one. Step 2.  Find a BAP (Big A–* Printer) This thing is 40 inches by 25 inches! Maybe send it to your local photo developer or print shop. Or maybe just download the PDF and keep [...]

CLARiiON/CX SCOM Management Pack

Did you know that EMC has a SCOM management pack for the CLARiiON?  Yes, you can indeed get CLARiiON alerts through SCOM. The idea behind it is you set up a Windows host as a CX event monitoring station.  The station grabs events from the CX and inserts them into its event log.  The pack can [...]

Automating Perfmon with Perfcollect

[ Post by Paul Galjan ] When I started here at EMC, I was pleased to see that most of us would use actual host data (perfmon) to perform size out our storage.  We have a variety of cool tools that will analyze perfmon output and help visualize trends, size out replication bandwidth required and [...]

Large Scale Hyper-V Clusters, Cluster Enabler, and VPLEX

I talked with Partner Engineering Manager Txomin Barturen about how to get ultimate scale from Hyper-V with Cluster Shared Volumes. He also spoke about his session on multi-site Windows Clustering Configurations and EMC’s Cluster Enablers which plug directly into Microsoft’s clustering framework and well as EMC’s storage virtualization and transportation appliance, VPLEX. Recorded at Microsoft [...]

Virtual Winfrastructure – EMC and Hyper-V

I’d like to help introduce a new blogger in the house at EMC. Adrian Simays will be blogging and advocating EMC’s approach towards Microsoft’s Hyper-V. His blog, named Virtual Winfrastructure, aims to highlight the fact that EMC has a large group of people and projects dedicated to Microsoft’s Hyper-V.  We also have a lot of [...]

W2K8 R2 Hyper-V Live Migration with Exchange 2010, SQL 2008 R2, SCVMM, and EMC CLARiiON NQM

Longest title ever?  Thankfully I abbreviated SCVMM down from System Center Virtual Machine Manager.  Anyway… Microsoft has announced their launch dates for Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, and Exchange 2010. EMC will be there to support them in many cities including Baltimore, NYC, Irvine, Raleigh, St Louis (to name a few). I was asked to [...]

Windows 7 Release Dates Set

Microsoft has confirmed the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) (aka general availability) date for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 as October 22, 2009.  RTM/GA code will be delivered to partners and TechNet/MSDN subscribers at the end of July. According to an informal survey on ZDNet, this could mean the beginning of a delay period for [...]

How to Build an Efficient Application Infrastructure through Virtualization

I couldn’t figure out how to embed this into my blog, but this is a great, short video which shows how EMC is working with Microsoft to virtualize applications like Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint.  It’s only ten minutes long and showcases one of EMC’s great technologists, Brian Martin, as he speaks with Microsoft’s Jim Schwartz.

Windows Server 2008 Foundation

The low end of Windows 7 – Starter Edition – has already been discussed quite a bit across the blogosphere, and its big brother is a bit jealous.  Like the future desktop version, Windows Server 2008 Foundation is intended to go lower (in price and functionality) than prior releases of the operating system.  Get em [...]

Maximum LUN Size for Windows Servers

Sometimes people ask hypothetical questions of EMC’s field TC’s (technical consultants) just to see what we say.  Here’s one example of a hypothetical question that a few of us were discussing internally: Question: What is the maximum size of a LUN you can present to a Windows server? Answer: 2TB or 16TB or 256TB or [...]

Thin/Virtual Provisioning and Windows 2008 Formatting Confusion

If you are going to use a disk array that supports thin or virtual provisioning, make sure you understand that a full format in Windows 2008 will cause the “thin” volume to become fully allocated or “thick.”

New Whitepaper on Windows 2008 R2 and Hyper-V Live Migration

Windows Server 2008 R2 & Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 – Hyper-V Live Migration Overview & Architecture can be downloaded from here:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fdd083c6-3fc7-470b-8569-7e6a19fb0fdf&DisplayLang=en. Description: One of the most highly anticipated new features in Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper-V™ is live migration. This document describes the live migration feature of Windows Server® 2008 R2 Hyper-V™ in [...]

Windows 2008 R2 Beta Testers: Free Licenses of Sanbolic Melio FS

Sanbolic offers an interesting proposition for Windows 2008 Server/Hyper-V users today: replace NTFS with Melio FS.  Melio FS is similar to VMFS in that it is a clustered filesystem allowing for multiple servers/VMs to access a shared LUN at the same time. Sanbolic is aware of the upcoming Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV’s) feature in Windows [...]

Demo: Hyper-V Live Migration using EMC SRDF/Cluster Enabler

How EMC’s SRDF/CE provides Live Migration and Disaster Recovery protection of Hyper-V virtual machines between Symmetrix storage arrays in a non-disruptive manner, including bidirectional failover and failback across geographically dispersed clusters.  Peter Griffin would describe this functionality as frickin sweet!

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta Released

Like a stealth bomber flying too low to be detectable by radar, Microsoft’s Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 was just put into public beta status .  Because of all the hoopla over Windows 7 this piece of very interesting beta software was very much overlooked. This edition adds: Support for VMotion-like “Live Migration” Support for Failover [...]

How to Get Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

How to Get Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta

Predictions – Microsoft in 2009

I’m not feeling up to the challenge of predicting what Microsoft will do in 2009. Instead I will link you to some of more experienced Microsoft prognosticators, Mary Jo Foley and Todd Bishop.

Consolidated versus Distributed

Deconsolidation is a step back in time.

Native VHD Support in Windows 7?

Long Zheng writes about Native VHD support in Windows 7. To me, it meant a rapid step-up in their virtualization strategy.  Today, if you want to try out a VHD you have to download Virtual PC or Virtual Server. Microsoft has packaged up dozens of these VHD files ranging from Exchange to SQL to SharePoint [...]