This extremely small form factor WE8 Unit, the 5818v, offers dual monitor support as standard, is VESA mountable, and has optional internal 812.11b/g/n wireless.

After unboxing and powering on the 5818v,
my first impressions are pretty good

Pros:

• The boot time was around 25s, not bad!
• The low power consumption 10-15W!
• The default of dual monitor support!
• I love the design, feels robust
• The use of Win8 allows you to use a array of USB devices
• Wide choice of brokers:
  VMware View with PCoIP, 2X Client, LeoStream Connection Broker, Red Hat Spice, Virtual Bridges Verde, Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect,Citrix Receiver with HDX, Citrix VDI-In-a-Box, HyperV or Quest vWorkspace
• Includes IE10, for example: I used VMware blast protocol to login to my VMware View Desktop thru HTML5. Worked great! no sound tho.

Cons:

• I pluged in a radio plug to get Desktop sounds to my audio system, Only got crappy internal thin client speaker sound. At least this was the case on my demo unit, I don’t know if this is something that needs to be configured in Windows to work?

Configuration

After Unpacking the 5818v and booting the device you need to pick your language, choose your color scheme and a give the device a new computer name.
After that I installed a new 2008R2 VM to install the 10Zig Manager to manage the device. The management interface was very easy to setup, detected the 5818v right away and I was able to manage the device thru the management software.

To log into the thin client device as full adminstrator you need to hold shift and log off. Hold the shift key until you see the Windows 8 screen again. There is a tiny icon on the lower left corner. Login as Administrator with password admin

Oh Crap, Windows 8, How do I find anything?

Use your Windows button – C <- This will give you access to network, configuration panel and power off /reboot options
Microsoft people would say that removing the start menu and introduce metro would improve things? I don’t agree.

Testing

I am testing this device on my Lab VMware View 5.2 environment. My environment consist of a couple of Windows 7 VM, Tuned to perform.
I did run a couple of tests to compare the 10Zig 5818v device with the 10Zig V1200-P device that I own. note: The V1200 has the Tera2 Chip. The 5818V does not have PCoIP hardware acceleration.

First Test: Worked all day on both devices, using ms office, created powerpoint presentation. created visio drawing. browsing the web. not much multimedia.
5818v: Worked Great.
V1200-P: Worked Great.

Second Test: run multimedia, a 3 minute 1080p small windowed youtube movie.
5818v: Reasenable view. lots of movie hickups, not 100% perfect. will be good enough for office workers.
V1200-P: Perfect, movie viewed without hickups.

Final Thoughts

The 5818v device is beautiful! It uses very low power and is very easy to manage. Best of all the use of WE8 (and so the full set of Windows 8 drivers) on this thin client allows you to use a array of USB devices from IP phones to wireless keyboards/mice. Also the device has 3 year warranty!

If you use VMware View as your desktop broker with PCoIP? and you don’t require the use of full blown USB devices, I would recommend you to use the Tera2 Client. It’s cheaper and more powerfull on multimedia (with PCoIP). otherwise use the 5818v!

also check out James Preston’s posts. He did a nice serie of posts on the 5818v

Disclaimer: I am not paid by 10Zig to write this review. I was send a device for a couple of days to review.

The post 10Zig 5818v Windows Embedded 8 Thin Client Review appeared first on vClouds. 10Zig 5818v Windows Embedded 8 Thin Client Review

Yesterday Fusion-IO acquired NextGen Storage. Both CEOs are here talking to us right now!

Presenter 2: Starboard Storage

Starboard Storage has 3PB under management. Handling 4,000 AD users at a single site
25% of customers use FC, 70% use NAS, 90% use block.

Starboard announced today version 3.2 of the Starboard OS along with new Starboard AC2000, AC4000 and AC4500 hybrid storage systems. The new AC Series systems include CacheControl, which delivers up to eight times better SSD read cache efficiency than traditional storage using flash as a cache. The software includes plug-and-play SSD performance scaling, multiple write cache accelerators, inline cache compression, dynamic storage pooling and a suite of all-inclusive enterprise features.

The new flagship AC4500 can have up to four write caches, 12.8 TB of effective read cache (with 2:1 compression) and scale up to more than a half a Petabyte of storage. Starboard eliminates the management complexity of RAID groups, and customers can manage Fibre Channel, iSCSI, CIFS, and NFS workloads with one storage platform.

Presenter 3: PernixData

PernixData has a beta product called Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP). FVP is storage to aggregate server-side flash into a scale out data acceleration tier to provide dramatic storage performance to unmodified applications over existing storage devices. 1. non-intrusive data acceleration.

1. It’s biggest advantage: It’s not running in a VM. it’s running native inside the hypervisor. no changes are required for the VM or your storage.
2. Transparent remote data access on VM migration. The FVP layer is VMware cluster wide, write data replication zero, one or two hosts. low latency is required.

PernixData FVP v1.0 to be released this summer

Flash Format innovations

• prevents write amplication, overwrites
• extremely low metadata overhead
• per-vm data stuctures and capacity mgmt
• handles mis-aligned writes
• extremely low transactional overhead compared to flash in primary storage

Presenter 4: SanDisk FlashSoft

Flashsoft is a software caching solution not tied to any particular hardware.

The post Storage Field Day 3 #SFD3 Day 2 appeared first on vClouds. Storage Field Day 3 #SFD3 Day 2

Today’s first presenter is Exablox.

Exablox OneBlox is the industry’s first scale-out object-based appliance that is accessible with Server Message Block (SMB) and Common Internet File System (CIFS) network protocols for organizations of all sizes. Exablox was in development for the last 2 years.

Today at Storage Field Day 3 they are out of stealth mode.

Exablox, One System = Cloud management and Scale out object storage appliance.

Exablox Design Principles:

• Easy to manage
• Easy to grow
• Enterprise Functions
• Low Costs

Introducing Exablox with Douglas Brockett, CEO

Exablox Tech Talk with Tad Hunt, Co-Founder and CTO

Exablox OneBlox Demo with Sean Derrington, Sr. Director of Products

Presenter 2: Cleversafe

Cleversafe is an 8 year old storage company from Chicago. Cleversafe Stores and Analyzes Big Data. Cleversafe Offers Limitless Big Scale Cloud Storage Data Software and Hardware.
The typical Cleversafe customer has a minimum storare requirement of 1 PB, or 1 PB target in the short period.

Cleversafe Introduction with Russ Kennedy

Cleversafe dsNet Manager Demonstration

Cleversafe dsNet Share Demonstration

Cleversafe dsNet Analytics Demonstration

Presenter 3: Marvell Dragonfly

Marvell Dragonfly is a family of PCIe card solutions to be used as building blocks for next gen storage systems designers. up to 8GB DDR3 RAM, dual capasitors, NAND flash.

Marvell DragonFly Introduction

What Is Marvell DragonFly?

Marvell DragonFly NVRAM High IOPS Demonstration

Introducing the Marvell DragonFly NVDRIVE and NVCACHE

Comparing Marvell DragonFly Cached HDDs To Native SSDs

A demonstration of the performance improvements that can be achieved using Marvell NVCACHE and rotating media compared to native SSD storage.

Presenter 4: Cisco MDS

Raising the bar for Storage Networks. MDS 9000

Introducing today, The Cisco MDS 9710, Multilayer Director. 3x performance of any director.

Cisco MDS 9710 Component Details

Cisco MDS Architecture

Cisco MDS Management

Unveiling the Cisco MDS 9710 Hardware

The post Storage Field Day 3 #SFD3 Day 1 appeared first on vClouds. Storage Field Day 3 #SFD3 Day 1

Storage Field Day 3 Details

The next event I’m attending is Storage Field Day 3  (April 24 thru 26 April). You can Join me and 13 other delegates for a three day deep dive into a large collection of interesting storage technologies from a variety of vendors at different stages of their lifecycle. Some are well known and established throughout the market. We will have a “secret company” presenter at Storage Field Day 3. This is a stealth company getting their first exposure at Tech Field Day!!!

On this Storage Field Day there are eight presenting sponsors:

Presentation Calendar

Most presentations are streamed live on this page, at TechFieldDay.com, and at some delegate and presenter web sites. After the event, the following pages contain video recordings of these presentations.

All presentations take place in Denver (GMT – 7 time zone). If you live in Europe can use your evenings to watch the live presentations and engage with the delegate group. If you any have questions during the presentations you can contact me at twitter @mbroeken  or contact any other delegate from the impressive delegate list:

• Justin Paul, http://jpaul.me, @recklessop
• Chris Wahl, http://wahlnetwork.com, @ChrisWahl
• Howard Marks, http://www.deepstorage.net, @deepstoragenet
• Enrico Signoretti, http://juku.it/en, @esignoretti
• Arjan Timmerman, http://www.vdicloud.nl , @Arjantim
• Rick Schlander, http://vmbulletin.com, @vmrick
• Marco Broeken, http://www.vClouds.nl, @MBroeken
• Luca Dell’Oca, http://www.virtualtothecore.com, @dellock6
• Brandon Riley, http://www.virtualinsanity.com, @BrandonJRiley
• Matt Simmons, http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com, @standaloneSA
• John Obeto, http://www.absolutelywindows.com, @johnobeto
• Ilja Coolen, http://www.iljacoolen.nl, @iCoolen
• Roy Mikes, http://www.mikes.eu, @teovmy
• Lauren Malhoit, http://www.adaptingit.com/ @malhoit

The post Storage Field Day 3 is just one week away! #SFD3 appeared first on vClouds. Storage Field Day 3 is just one week away! #SFD3

Quick Tutorial

Here’s a quick tutorial to install the agent in NexentaStor and the plugin in VMware ESXi.

** IMPORTANT NOTE **
This is in NO way supported in a production environment.

1. Download and extract the contents of the zip file
   http://downloads.nexenta.com/cdn/beta/VAAI-NAS/nas_vaai_installer_1.0-128.zip
2. Run the NASVAAIInstaller.exe
3. Choose ‘Install Nexenta NAS VAAI agent and plugin
4. Enter the hostname or IP of the NexentaStor host and the root credentials and click Next
   The operational log should tell you if the installation was successful or not
5. Click Next
6. Enter the root credentials for the ESX host you want to install the plugin. This performs the following:
   • Sets the VIB acceptance level
   • Checks for currently installed plugin (and upgrades it if it exists)
   • Installs the plugin and prompts for a host reboot
   You may go back and add another ESXi host.

Read the rest of the post at Matt Vogt’s blog…  he wrote a nice tutorial how to auto start the NAS_VAAI Service.

The post Nexenta 3.1.4 and beta Nexenta NFS VAAI Plugin released appeared first on vClouds. Nexenta 3.1.4 and beta Nexenta NFS VAAI Plugin released

Being one of the first companies with VM-aware storage, Tintri is ahead of the game by far. VMware is also pushing the adoption of VM-aware storage with their upcoming virtual volumes API (vVOLS). However, word on the street is that the Virtual Volumes project is taking such a huge amount of time for every vendor to implement. My advice; If you need VM-aware storage now; don’t wait for Virtual Volumes… I don’t think it will be implemented in any array any time soon.

Tintri’s VMstore

The real magic of Tintri’s VMstore is being aware of every single VM you run. By integrating with vCenter and tracking unique identifiers per vDisk, the system can correlate what blocks make up a VM. This enables the array to do a lot of smart things, like taking snapshots and clones on a per VM-level granularity. In the upcoming 2.0 release replication on a per VM-level granularity will be added.

Per VM flash consumption

The Tintri VMstore T540 has about 1,8TB of usable flash capacity (post-RAID), with inline deduplication and compression the logical amount of data that can be stored on flash is much higher. Non-VM-aware storage would just fill up the available flash capacity and then start evicting the least recently used (LRU) or least frequently used (LFU) blocks of data. Usually this happen in fairly large chunks of multiple megabytes even up to gigabytes at a time.

Tintri is able to very granularly determine the per-VM working set or skew as some might call it. The working set of a VM is a usually relatively small part of the VM that is really active and responsible for most of the produced IO’s. Tintri determines the per VM working set on an 8KB basis. This allows the working set of every VM on the system to reside on flash. The non active part of VM’s if necessary will be placed on the traditional spinning disk.

Proportional scheduling

Traditional storage works with a First In First Out (FIFO) IO queue, the result maybe that certain VM’s using lots and lots of resources, because they produce a lot of IO’s. This can starve other VM’s doing only a few IO’s. A nice example would be combining low latency virtual desktops and high bandwidth database servers on one storage solution. The virtual desktops would most likely suffer from high latency due to the fact that the database server is doing lots of IOs and consuming lots of resources. The end result would be unhappy end users, this is the reason why most vendors will advise separate storage for VDI projects.

It’s like going to a grocery store and having to wait inline for others to pay for the weekly groceries while you have only one item, the reason why some stores have separate lines for people with ten or less items. Tintri uses proportional scheduling for IO’s, another unique VM-aware feature, which basically means they have a separate IO queue per vDisk and every queue gets the same priority. Combined with the smart placing of the working set on flash, this results in a sub-millisecond latency for all VMs on the appliance, even when using a mix of virtual desktops and virtual servers.

Performance reserves

Since Tintri keeps track of performance statistics and resource usage on a per vDisk level and we know the impact on the appliance (CPU usage, network bandwidth usage and required IO’s) the device is able to tell the administrator what percentage of total systems resources is being used per vDisk/VM, they call this the performance reserve. Subtracting all the performance reserves from the total available performance results in available performance.

On the Tintri dashboard it will show the administrator how much performance is being used and how much more performance is available. This takes the guessing out of capacity management and helps businesses to be confidently about how much more VM’s they can run on their infrastructure. This helps with agility and time to market, since no complex calculations have to be done, the storage just tells you what you need to know.

Replication and remote cloning (per VM!)

The upcoming 2.0 release of Tintri’s operating system will support replication with VM granularity. Replication will support one-to-one, bi-directional or many-to-one topologies and other exciting topologies will be added in subsequent releases. Replicas like clones can be made from the current VM state or an earlier snapshot, different retention policies will be available on the source and target sides. Snapshots, clones and replicas can be crash or VM consistent, and the scheduling can be done on the appliance down to per VM level granularity. With replication enabled, it is possible to create a clone of a VM and have it built on a remote appliance.

If the VM has been replicated to the targeted appliance before, the last common replica will be used and only delta’s will be transferred. Data gets deduplicated and compressed before sending it over the WAN, on a global scale. So deduplication for replication works on the appliance and between appliances, even in a many-to-one scenario. The Tintri 2.0 UI will show you some new ubercool metrics to visualize how much network bandwidth you save due to dedupe and compression!

Tintri Dashboard, easy and full of valuable information

Every metric on the dashboard is clickable to zoom in for more details. I personally never have seen a dashboard where you can see every important metric you need!

Next Page: Tintri Performance Tests and Technical Deep Dive

The post My take on Tintri, VM-Aware Storage appeared first on vClouds. My take on Tintri, VM-Aware Storage

With the acquisition of VirtualSharp, PHD Virtual delivers transformational technology for virtual backup and disaster recovery assurance providing the easiest, most affordable solutions for data protection and business continuity, automatically certifying achievement of Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).

The acquisition of Virtual Sharp by PHD Virtual might be a potential game changer in the DR Automation market… I know PHD has a nice amount of clients and their pricing is competitive. This may be a good cheaper choice next to Zerto and VMware SRM.

ReliableDR Architecture

ReliableDR orchestrates the DR processes out of the secondary site, with very little overhead on the primary site. It interfaces with the hypervisor in the primary datacenter in read-only mode to collect configuration information. Administrators can then define replication specifications in ReliableDR that include business rules for each asset in the entire IT service stack, including storage, VMs, OS, backend, middleware and frontends. These business rules are used by ReliableDR to certify the operational condition of each component and prevent recovery threats arising from configuration drift.

ReliableDR Editions and Main Features

Take a look at the new Disaster Recovery Assurance solution:

Ben Cuppello of VirtualSharp Software explains how Disaster Recovery Assurance fully automates DR testing and guarantees the recoverability of your business-critical applications and IT.

I think I will give it a testdrive soon.

Give ReliableDR a try: http://www.phdvirtual.com/try-it-now/phd-reliableDR

The post PHD Acquires VirtualSharp and adds ReliableDR to their Portfolio appeared first on vClouds. PHD Acquires VirtualSharp and adds ReliableDR to their Portfolio

Just found out there is a brand new 5.1 version which you can select from the dropdown:

Features

The Auto Deploy GUI is a vSphere plug-in for the VMware vSphere Auto Deploy component. The GUI plug-in allows a user to easily manage the setup and deployment requirements in a stateless environment managed by Auto Deploy. Some of the features provided through the GUI include the ability to add/remove Depots, list/create/modify Image Profiles, list VIB details, create/modify rules to map hosts to Image Profiles, check compliance of hosts against these rules and re-mediate hosts.

Download the Auto Deploy GUI here

The post Updated Fling: Auto Deploy GUI now supports vSphere 5.1 appeared first on vClouds. Updated Fling: Auto Deploy GUI now supports vSphere 5.1

One of the biggest challenges VMware View administrators face in large deployments is desktop pool maintenance. Commonly each desktop pool has Active Directory security groups with the number of users a given desktop pool will support. As employees leave/join the organization, security groups require maintenance to ensure the number of users in each group correctly match the amount of desktops available.

VMware View Pool Manager allows VMware View administrators to easily manage users across desktop pools and security groups for large deployments.
This tool allow administrators to bind an Active Directory connection and specify:

• How many users there should exist per group (based on VMware View pool size)
• Floating or Persistent deployment
• Source Security Groups (all users to be distributed to pools)
• Destination Security Groups (All groups the users may be assigned to)

Why is this tool awesome?

Because View administrators do not have to waste hours adding, removing and maintaining users, desktop pools and security groups while ensuring each security group does not hold more users than the amount desktops in a given pool.

Download the tool from VMware Fling website here.

The View Pool Manager fling was build by Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) Amazing Job Andre!

The post New Amazing Fling: View Pool Manager appeared first on vClouds. New Amazing Fling: View Pool Manager

The past couple of years we have seen the number of vExperts increase from 252 back in 2009 to 326 in 2011 to 434! vExperts in 2012. I wonder how much people will make it this year to the vExpert title as the number of bloggers also increased massively in 2012!

vExperts who participate in the program have access to private betas, free licenses, early access briefings, exclusive events, free access to VMworld conference materials online, and other opportunities to interact with VMware product teams. They also get access to a private community and networking opportunities.

As with last year, there are three paths to being designated a vExpert. Each path takes into account the accomplishments and activities over the last year.

Evangelist Path
The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, VMTN contributors, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can also apply via the Evangelist path. A VMware employee reference is recommended if your activities weren’t all in public or were in a language other than English.

Customer Path
The Customer Path is for leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have been internal champions in their organizations, or worked with VMware to build success stories, act as customer references, given public interviews, spoken at conferences, or were VMUG leaders. A VMware employee reference is recommended if your activities weren’t all in public.

VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning through accreditations and certifications and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements. A VMware employee reference is required for VPN Path candidates.

So, If you think you did a lot of good work for the VMware community last year. Please apply for vExpert 2013: http://bit.ly/vExpert2013application
The deadline for applications is April 15, 2013 at midnight PDT.

If you think someone should apply. You can recommend someone to apply for vExpert 2013: http://bit.ly/vExpert2013recommend

Please note: You can apply without a recommendation, and extra points are not given for multiple recommendations, so please don’t lobby for multiple people to recommend you as “votes.”

The post Apply and Become VMware vExpert 2013! appeared first on vClouds. Apply and Become VMware vExpert 2013!