Rubrik Basics – Edge Deployment

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any basic how-to articles, but I’ve recently been doing some work with Rubrik Edge in the lab and thought I’d run through the basics. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.

If you’re unfamiliar with Rubrik Edge, it’s Rubrik’s RO/BO solution in the form of a virtual appliance that comes in 5 and 10TB versions. The product page is here, and the datasheet can be found here. It runs on VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, and Microsoft Hyper-V, so it’s pretty handy in terms of supported hypervisor deployment options. The cool thing about Edge is that you can deploy on reasonably small amounts of hardware, which can be a fairly common scenario in edge deployments. You can also have 100 (I think) Edge appliances replicating data back to a Rubrik physical cluster. You can’t, however, use it as a target for replication.

In any case, I’ll be posting a few of these basics articles over the next few weeks to give readers a feel for how easy it is to get up and running with the platform.

Updated Articles Page

I recently had the opportunity to deploy a Nasuni NMC and filer in the lab and thought I’d run through the basics. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.

Updated Articles Page

I recently had the opportunity to upgrade my Cohesity lab environment using Helios and thought I’d run through the basics. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.

Updated Articles Page

I recently had the opportunity to configure multi-tenancy in my Cohesity lab environment and thought I’d run through the basics. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.

Updated Articles Page

I recently had the opportunity to deploy a Vembu BDR 3.9.1 Update 1 appliance and thought I’d run through the basics of getting started. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.

Updated Articles Page

I recently had the opportunity to deploy a Rubrik r344 4-node appliance and thought I’d run through the basics of the installation. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.

Updated Articles Page

I recently had the opportunity to deploy a Cohesity C2500 4-node appliance and thought I’d run through the basics of the installation. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.

Updated Articles Page

I recently replaced one of my NAS devices at home (after over 8 years of pretty solid service) and thought I’d run through the installation process. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page covering the deployment of the QNAP TS-831X.

Ravello – Basics – Deploying an ESXi instance

I’ve been using Ravello a bit recently, thanks primarily to their kind offer of free time for vExperts. I thought it would be worth while doing a few posts on what you need to do to get started. While this information is available via a number of sources already, I thought I’d update it a little to reflect the steps required when using the latest version of the dashboard and ESXi 6. Documentation is also a good way for me to learn things, and it’s my blog so I can afford to be self-indulgent.

In any case, the original steps I followed are here. The article I did is available here. Justin Warren did a nice series on using Ravello, and his post on “How To Import OVA/OVF Into Ravello” was particularly useful. Emad Younis also has an excellent article on deploying the vCenter Server Appliance 6 on Ravello – you can read it here.

I like what Ravello does, so much so that I put a little badge on my blog. And I think there’s a crapload of cool use cases for this technology. If you’re a vExpert and not taking advantage of Ravello’s offer – what’s wrong with you? Get on there and check it out.

Updated Articles page

I’ve added a little 50-pager to the articles page on vCenter Server 5.1 installation and configuration. I was rebuilding my lab recently and thought it might be useful to document the steps required.