So I won a Flip Video Camera a couple of months back from Netapp for submitting a story regarding Netapp and how it made my IT life better. I submitted a video with it trying to win a Nintendo Wii, didn't win but here's the video if you're interested.

As the title suggests, I have a face for radio and a voice for books!

http://communities.netapp.com/docs/DOC-4395

Cheers,

Chris

I love the new host profiles utility in vSphere 4.

Host profiles allow you to build a golden ESX configuration, create a baseline against that configuration, and have it applied to new ESX servers that get put into the cluster. You can have a bunch of different baselines/configurations depending upon your need.

I've been hearing more and more about how larger implementations should be NFS. Most of Netapp's virtual tools (RCU etc) are released first with NFS support and other protocols are added on after the fact. So should you be doing NFS?

I've talked before on this blog about how network bandwidth isn't really a constraint as you won't do anywhere close to 1Gb/sec of storage IO on a single ESX server, but you might at the Netapp, so make sure you're doing a multi vif (more than one nic active at a time).

Netapp probably has this as a best practice anyways, but its something to keep in mind.

Whenever you clone a volume, clone it from a manual snapshot. If you do it from a scheduled snapshot, that scheduled snapshot will not be replaced when new snapshots occur. This is because the snapshot is busy as a clone is based off of it.

Something to keep in mind going forward.

Cheers,

Chris

Hello everyone,

I've been away from this site for a while, but I'm going to start posting more content.

I'm currently implementing vSphere 4 on Netapp 7.3 and completely loving it.

vSphere 4 represents a no risk upgrade for version 3 customers. The look and feel is very similar, there is no large "retraining" required as it works as its supposed to.

Hey Everyone,

I've turned off comments, etc, as I was getting too much spam and CAPTCHA wasn't catching any of it.

So if you have something you want me to cover, please feel free to E-mail at the following:

cgreen4life the at symbol rogers.com

Thanks,

Chris

So, I've been going through some of the details of DeDupp, hoping that with the release of 7.3, it would be more viable.

Unfortunately, there has not been many changes with DeDupp in version 7.3 except for the name!

The key areas that I was hoping they would address are the aggregate based deduplication and deduplication of snapshots. Both are not currently available.