Hitachi Data Systems announces the availability of specific integration for VMware’s vCenter called “Hitachi Storage
Manager for VMware vCenter”. Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi Data Systems jointly developed this functionality in which this will
be installed as a separate plug-in for VMware vCenter. Customers upgrading to vSphere 4.1 and vSphere 5.0 using the
Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2000, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform or Hitachi Universal Storage Platform V will
automatically be able to leverage the capabilities of this key integration.

The Hitachi Storage Manager plug-in for vCenter supports both:

• VMware vSphere 4.1 and vCenter 4.1
• VMware vSphere 5.0 and vCenter 5.0

Key features of the plug in include:

• Provisioning of new datastores into the AMS2000 (VSP and USP-V in a future release)
• Capacity utilization for datastores
• Provide a self-service solution that allows customers vSphere administrators to easily manage Hitachi storage through the vCenter Console.
• Enable Joint Customers of VMware and Hitachi Data Systems to provide an end-to-end solution for management of their VMware Infrastructure on Hitachi Storage.
• Close a key integration and competitive gap that other Vendors have existing vCenter integrations.
• Correlation between VMware datastores, ESX hosts, virtual machines and storage resources on the AMS2000, VSP and USP-V systems

Please refer to http://www.hds.com/go/vmware or any local HDS representative for more information about Hitachi Storage Manager Plugin for VMware vCenter.

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With vCD 1.5, you can now manage both private and public as a hybrid mode from the administration with secure federated. It allow you to subscribe, manage, relocate and provision anywhere you prefer, could be internal infrastructure or public cloud provider you choosen and manage in same console. I went through the hands on lab session for this topic and found the setup was great.

It took me sbout 1.5 hours to complete the lab and the lab instruction is clear and no customization required. I would like to thank the folks from vmware who creted the lab and allow me to try it out. Every configuration is web base and wizard base, which allow the administrator to setup and configure easily. Hybrid cloud no longer a concept, whih I believe is real and many users will seriously consider it in the future.

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One of the key area they highlighted was the stoage protocol they choosed, which is NFS rather than iscsi and FC SAN, which was mainly due to the flexibility of volume shrink or resize that could support on the fly. I am agreed with their statement as personal thought, for large scale deployment, NFS are much easier to manage compare to Iscsi and FC environment.

NFS is pure ethernet ip base, which certified and proven in many of the large scale deployments worldwide. With 10G ethernet today, performance throughput on the NFS will no longer concerns over the performance. If you had not evaluated NFS as an option in your deployment currently, you may want to take a try on it.

Especially on virtual desktop environment, workload offload is a must to be considered move forward to improve the consolidation ratio and maximize the the performance out of the infrastructure build. If you had not considered about this, you should immediately look into this as security can be another major bottlenecks to your infrastructure today, and of courses all the business units are always concern about it.

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3. Arista Network for Virtualization vEOS vs Cisco Nexus 1000V

10Gbps Ethernet no longer as a dream to most enterprise environment. It had become affordable, and realistic to be adopted while users decided to build the virtualization or private enterprise cloud. I had always highlighted that network had become major component of the success for cloud or virtualization, therefore the manageability on the virtual switch had become equally important as well. Previously, Cisco Nexus 1000V is the only choice to perform virtual switch layer management. If you do not want to go for it, you have another choice here. Arista had a similar offer which is vEOS, that allow virtual traffic direct integrate and visible over to the Arista Physical Network switches.

Below are some table comparison within vEOS VS Cisco Nexus 1000V. There are some similarity but will not be the total same approach been taken.

Here is the table shown that some details functionality Compare to Cisco Nexus 1000V.

If you are planning for large scale deployment on 10G environment for production network and IP base storage network, you may also consider Arista as a good fit which they offer low latency and work well with most IP base storage vendor in the market. For more information, please refer to the official link here.

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here is the latest Intel Xeon E7 Data sheet. You can view the full copy over here.

Once again, I believe the consolidation ratio will be significant increase in most of the virtualization project in future.

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According to the link here www.theregister.co.uk,  it should able to push the total memory up to 1TB per 2 U machine in single chassis. The C260M2 will come with 2 x 10Gb Ethernet and 4 x gigabits NICs, which is very sufficient for most of the deployment today on stand alone or virtualize environment. Cisco claimed it will ship the B230 M2, B440M2 with Intel E-7 base chip set. Once again, I am very excited for this to reach the market as it will transform the server infrastructure and virtualization infrastructure deployment in the future.

You can read more from the original post here.

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Here is the interesting video from CA describe in high level what Applogic can do, and do believe I had done the demo in my company event recently and proven is work. If you are interested, you can contact me personally to further try out this solution. It work as a charm.

For more informaiton of applogic, you can view from the official URL http://www.3tera.com/AppLogic

Few day back, I found a brand new Virtualization related Magazine – VirtualizeTips Magazine from Brian and Mike. Good jobs!

This is a project that I’ve been working on for a couple of months now and finally was able to bring it together. My dream for this is to produce something monthly if possible. I like the magazine format because it offers something different than just reading RSS feeds and blog posts. For the people that travel or use iPads or other tablets I hope this gives you something else of interest to read.

Initially the focus of the magazine will be heavily focused around VMware technology but as time passes I hope to be able to incorporate other Virtualization topics into the mix. The content will include interviews, how-to articles, reviews and community based topics.

This edition has articles that cover HP BladeSystem Matrix, Designing with VAAI, new VMware certifications, storage and networking articles and Kendrick Colemans home lab and several other topics.

I think it’s good to share to everyone if you’re not aware of. Many thanks to all those who have contributed especially Brian & Mike. Keep your spirit!

You can download the 1st edition of VirtualizeTips Magazine in PDF here or here.

Here is the sample screen shot