I have spent a great deal of time lately working with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). This computing platform is really quite impressive with its power and flexibility, but my expectations about the platform have really changed since I completed the UCS training. During the training classes that I attended, both the design and install courses emphasized that the Cisco UCS platform would be a collaborative platform that would bring the different groups like Storage, Network, and Server each working their own functional area of responsibility within UCS based on role permissions. That sounded great. The network team can create and trunk the VLANS and the storage team could add the boot targets as well as assign the LUNS. This platform is a true collective effort by all teams right?
TVP Category Archives
All Paths Down!
I recently had the joys of helping deal with an All Paths Down (APD) situation which presented itself when removing a LUN from all the hosts in a cluster. If you do not detach the device first, which will also initiate an unmount operation before you physically unpresent the LUN from the ESX, it causes an APD situation to happen. ADP is when ESXi server no longer has any active paths to a device. When the device is no longer present and you rescan the adapters ESXi server will still retain the information on the removed devices and hostd will continue to try to open a connection to the disk device by issuing different commands like read capacity and read requests to validate the partitions tables are set. If SCSI Sense codes are not returned from a device (you are unable to contact the storage array, or the storage array that does not return the supported “SCSI codes”), then the device is in an All-Paths-Down (APD) state, and the ESXi host continues to send I/O requests until it times out.
News: VMware Welcomes Wanova – Is it a Mirage – does VMware finally get desktops?
VMware have announced the upcoming acquisition of Wanova. The combination of VMware View and Wanova Mirage will be an an industry first pairing that could well dramatically redefine the VDI market. It is increasingly common to find vendors acknowledging that a VDI-only solution is not enough. Citrix know it. Quest know it. Desktone know it. We’ve critiqued before that by having a VDI only view, VMware doesn’t “get” desktops. With their Wanova acquisition VMware gets desktops.
Multi-Tenancy: Who is the Tenant?
There seems to be a myriad of definitions of who is a tenant when it comes to secure multi-tenancy. This debate has occurred not only within The Virtualization Practice as well as at recent Interop and Symantec Vision conferences I attended. So who really is the tenant within a multi-tenant environment? It appears multiple definitions exist and if we cannot define Tenant, then how do you build secure applications that claim to be multi-tenant?
AppSense Hints at Future Direction with UV Suite 8.4, Data Locker and RAPsphere Acquisition
Much of the recent buzz around AppSense from AppSense Labs,the research division at AppSense that is responsible for StrataApps, DataLocker and DataNow, its hot new tools to support user installed applications and provide increased security in consumer cloud services. Nevertheless, AppSense has not forgotten its roots and has recently released a major update to its core user persona management platform UV Suite.
And then there were three – NxTop Enterprise morphs to XenClient Enterprise
How will Citrix acquisition of NxTop impact VARs and users? How will XenClient will be marketed longer term. Looks like Citrix will embrace IDV as there is a wider market share, and an admission that VDI will never be the sole solution: hybrid solutions are key to capturing as wide a desktop market share as possible.