Preston did a great job of talking about the difference between Outage vs Outrage. It usually comes down to one letter.
I like Time Machine, and I like the way Howard explains Apple concepts in his blog posts, so this article “How does Time Machine make a backup?” really hit the spot.
My friend Vincent has made it to 100,000 hits on his blog, and I really hope he gets a lot more. He’s a smart chap.
Happy New Year (to those who celebrate). Let’s get random.
Those of you who know me well will know I’m a big fan of Debian. I find running manual apt commands on my various Raspberry Pis therapeutic, but an automated approach is probably better. This is a great article on how to configure automated security updates on Debian automatically.
I miss Tru64, and Solaris for that matter. I don’t miss HP-UX. And I definitely won’t miss AIX. Read about the death of Unix over at El Reg – Unix is dead. Long live Unix!
The I3.metal is going away very soon. Remember this is from a sales perspective, VMware is still supporting the I3.metal in the wild, and you’ll still have access to deploy on-demand if required (up to a point).
Welcome to Random Short Take #81. Last one for the year, because who really wants to read this stuff over the holiday season? Let’s get random.
Curtis did a podcast on archive and retrieve as part of his “Backup to Basics” series. It’s something I feel pretty strongly about, so much so that I wrote a chapter in his book about it. You can listen to it here.
More William Gibson content is coming to our screens, with the announcement that Neuromancer is coming to Apple TV. I hope it’s as well done as The Peripheral. Hat tip to John Birmingham for posting the news on his blog.
It’s been a while since I looked at Dell storage, but my friend Max wrote a great article over at Gestalt IT on Dell PowerStore.
I love Backblaze. Not in the sense that I want to marry the company, but I really like what the folks there do. And I really like the transparency with which they operate. This article giving a behind the scenes look at its US East Data Center is a fantastic example of that.
And, to “celebrate” 81 Random Short Takes (remember when I used to list my favourite NBA players and the numbers they wore?), let’s take a stroll down memory lane with two of my all-time, top 5, favourite NBA players – Kobe Bryant and Jalen Rose. The background for this video is explained by Jalen here.
Take care of yourselves and each other, and I’ll hopefully see you all on the line or in person next year.
We’re not done with backup and recovery yet though. This article from Ben Liebowitz on setting up immutable backups for Vembu using S3 was comprehensive.
Tom Hollingsworth wrote a great article on clearing out the cruft in your home – specifically the electronic kind. I have a cupboard full of cables I tell myself I’ll need at some point, but I really need to just get rid of them. In my defence, I did unplug my LaserDisc player last weekend. Baby steps and all that.
Speaking of streaming, this article covered some of the best mechanisms to purchase digital content with. I still prefer buying discs, but I’m a bit weird too.
Finally, I’ve been a fan of John Birmingham’s writing since I was a misspending my youth at university in the 90s, so it makes sense that I’d enjoy his food reviews too (mainly because it’s not just about food). It should come as no surprise that I, too, love pork rillette.
I (sadly) haven’t touched Rubrik in around a year now, but I couldn’t resist linking to Frederic’s post on Active Directory recovery with Rubrik. Great how-to article as always.
This short, sharp piece from JB is the best. Too often I’ve found myself grinding through a TV show because I had high hopes for it, or so many people told me it was great. What I should have realised is that amateur TV critics (i.e. your friends and colleagues) are often like home theatre enthusiasts who have bought their first subwoofer. Whether it’s good or bad, that’s the choice they made, and they need you to endorse that choice so they can feel better about it as well.
Finally, the blog turned 15 years old recently (about a month ago). I’ve been so busy with the day job that I forgot to appropriately mark the occasion. But I thought we should do something. So if you’d like some stickers (I have some small ones for laptops, and some big ones because I can’t measure things properly), send me your address via this contact form and I’ll send you something as a thank you for reading along.
Welcome to Random Short Take #76. Summer’s almost here. Let’s get random.
The nice folks at StorPool have announced StorPool Storage v20. I was lucky enough to catch up with Boyan and the team recently, and they told me about their work on supporting NVMe/TCP, StorPool on Amazon AWS, and NFS File Storage. It’s great stuff and worth checking out.
Long term retention – all the kids are doing it, but there are some things you need to think about. Preston has posted a great article on it here.
Speaking of Tony, he’s finally back blogging, with this succinct piece on DHCP with NSX VLAN segments.
Lots going on at VMware Explore 2022 in San Francisco this week. Danny Alvarez has put together a series of links covering the major announcements. I hope to get time to cover the major VMware Cloud on AWS news in the next few weeks.
Welcome to Random Short Take #75. Half the year has passed us by already. Let’s get random.
I talk about GiB all the time when sizing up VMware Cloud on AWS for customers, but I should take the time to check in with folks if they know what I’m blithering on about. If you don’t know, this explainer from my friend Vincent is easy to follow along with – A little bit about Gigabyte (GB) and Gibibyte (GiB) in computer storage.
Jeff Geerling seems to do a lot of projects that I either can’t afford to do, or don’t have the time to do. Either way, thanks Jeff. This latest one – Building a fast all-SSD NAS (on a budget) – looked like fun.
You like ransomware? What if I told you you can have it cross-platform? Excited yet? Read Melissa’s article on Multiplatform Ransomware for a more thorough view of what’s going on out there.
Speaking of storage and clouds, Chris M. Evans recently published a series of videos over at Architecting IT where he talks to NetApp’s Matt Watt about the company’s hybrid cloud strategy. You can see it here.
Speaking of traditional infrastructure companies doing things with hyperscalers, here’s the July 2022 edition of What’s New in VMware Cloud on AWS.
In press release news, Aparavi and Backblaze have joined forces. You can read more about that here.
I’ve spent a lot of money over the years trying to find the perfect media streaming device for home. I currently favour the Apple TV 4K, but only because my Boxee Box can’t keep up with more modern codecs. This article on the Best Device for Streaming for Any User – 2022 seems to line up well with my experiences to date, although I admit I haven’t tried the NVIDIA device yet. I do miss playing ISOs over the network with the HD Mediabox 100, but those were simpler times I guess.
My friend Vincent always does a great job of breaking down tasks into smaller, more manageable tasks. He’s also very good at explaining how to get things done in a succinct fashion. Here’s an article he wrote on using the NetApp Command Line to create a SVM with a CIFS/NFS share.
In this episode of Things My Customers Have Asked Me (TMCHAM), I’m going to delve into some questions around resource management for VMs running on the VMware-managed VMware Cloud on AWS platform, and what customers need to know to make it work for them.
Distributed Resource Scheduler
If you’ve used VMware vSphere before, it’s likely that you’ve come across the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) capability. DRS is a way to keep workloads evenly distributed across nodes in a cluster, and moves VMs around based on various performance considerations. The cool thing about this is that you don’t need to manually move workloads around when a particular guest or host goes a little nuts from a CPU or Memory usage perspective. There are cases, however, when you might not want your VMs to be moving around too much. In this instance, you’ll want to create what is called a “Disable DRS vMotion Policy”. You configure this via Compute Policies in vCenter, and you can read more about the process here.
If you don’t like reading documentation though, I’ve got some pictures you can look at instead. Log in to your vSphere Client and click on Policies and Profiles.
Then click on Compute Policies and click Add.
Under Policy type, there’s a dropdown box where you can select Disable DRS vMotion.
You’ll then give the policy a Name and Description. You then need to select the tag category you want to use.
Once you’ve selected the tag category you want to use, you can select the tags you want to apply to the policy.
Click on Create to create the Compute Policy, and you’re good to go.
Memory Overcommit Techniques
I’ve had a few customers ask me about how some of the traditional VMware resource management technologies translate to VMware Cloud on AWS. The good news is there’s quite a lot in common with what you’re used to with on-premises workload management, including memory overcommit techniques. As with anything, the effectiveness or otherwise of these technologies really depends on a number of different factors. If you’re interested in finding out more, I recommend checking out this article.
General Resource Management
Can I use the resource management mechanisms I know and love, such as Reservations, Shares, and Limits? You surely can, and you can read more about that capability here.
Conclusion
Just as you would with on-premises vSphere workloads, you do need to put some thought into your workload resource planning prior to moving your VMs onto the magic sky computers. The good news, however, is that there are quite a few smart technologies built into VMware Cloud on AWS that means you’ve got a lot of flexibility when it comes to managing your workloads.
In home theatre news, this article on XLR vs RCA – which cable is better? makes for good reading, particularly if you’re starting to convince yourself that you need to take things in a certain direction.
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