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.

Dell-Quest deal will strengthen Dell enterprise services and force shakeout in desktop virtualization market

According to Bloomberg News Dell is in discussions to acquire Quest Software in a bid to strengthen its enterprise software services portfolio. Dell has been shopping, with five acquisitions announced so far this year, to add software, computer storage and networking gear to its lineup of PCs, which account for 52% of its sales. With PC sales flat and margins thin, Dell has been seeking to broaden its services portfolio and directly challenge HP which has suffered multiple missteps in recent months.

End User Computing: Protecting Data From the Device

Some of us have multiple cloud endpoints in the form of mobile devices all trying to access our personal and corporate data to do our daily jobs. These incredibly useful devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) are now a part of our organizations life. So how do we protect our data from them. IBM recently took a draconian measure of banning Siri from their employees iPhones. Yet, how can they enforce such a measure?

Filling the Gaps: Focus on Application Security

Symantec and others are providing more products that fill the gaps in current End-to-End Hybrid Cloud Security. These solutions range to improved log analysis through multi-layer security for critical systems. If these solutions are rolled out would we finally have secure environments? Would we be approaching the dream of secure multi-tenancy? But first what are the products that have come to light?

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.

Liquidware enhance ProfileUnity with FlexApp: User Installed Apps – What's in a name?

Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity 5.0 with FlexApp offers an option for user-installed applications (UIA) technology. This new feature offers VDI users the option to seamlessly install their own applications into any non-persistent Windows environment without affecting master images or underlying systems. We take a look what FlexApp delivers, where it is headed and consider it in the context of Citrix Personal vDisks and AppSense StrataApps