We’re just two months into 2017, and it already feels like the year is flying by! The 2017 vExpert announcements came out today – you can read it here, and for the 3rd year in a row (well, really 2.5 since I forgot to renew at the end of 2015 and made it in the 2nd half of 2016) I’m honored to be included in the list …

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Back in November 2015 I wrote a post about FEX Topologies with the Cisco Nexus platforms, and at the time the Nexus 5K/6K line was the only model that would support the active/active FEX topology (FEX-AA), which was unfortunate in designing redundant connectivity for downstream devices. But with the release of NX-OS …

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Continuing our journey with testing out Nutanix AHV functionality for one of our partners, one of things we wanted to get deployed was Prism Central. Prism Central is very similar to VMware’s vCenter, defining Prism Central as “software provides centralized infrastrcuture management, one-click simplicity and …

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Welcome back to my series on our journey of testing Nutanix and Mellanox. Part 1 & 2 of the series focused on Nutanix AHV networking and integrating with Mellanox, so we’re going to shift in Part 3 and look at the AHV configuration for getting Data Protection going and performing a failover test. As part of our lab …

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Welcome back to my short series on our journey of testing Nutanix and Mellanox. Following up on Part 1 of the Nutanix and Mellanox Series, I’m going to dive deeper into the Nutanix network configuration for use with the Mellanox SX1012. Nutanix Network Configuration Following the Nutanix AHV Best Practices Guide for …

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As I wrote about in the last post that started our journey with Nutanix and Mellanox, we will be testing AHV DR replication for one of our partners while evaluating the use of the Mellanox SX switch platform for a lower cost 10/40Gbe switch. The NX-1050 Block was pre-configured at another location, so all network …

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I’ve been given the opportunity to do some testing with 2 Nutanix blocks and a Mellanox SX1012 switch for one of our customers, who is looking to do some disruptive changes to the platform they deploy their software onto. Background Currently, we partner with this customer to do your typical 3-Tier infrastructure …

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I was fortunate to do my first EMC Unity install today (Unity 300 specifically), and Unity follows the path of the VNXe installation sequence, pretty easy. This blog post is about as short as the Unity install is 🙂 Initializing the Unity array uses the ‘ _same’_Connection Utility that the VNXe uses, though the Unity …

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What a week we’ve had, and really I mean Yesterday! Finally home after a 3rd straight week in NY doing some fun installs for one of our partners. Being home in SC in the summer always feels good. Like being in an oven good. We started off the morning with the announcement from Nutanix and Cisco that Nutanix now runs on …

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It’s been over 6 months since I last had NSX working in my home lab, and with a rebuild I decided it was time to wrap up Part 2 of my NSX in a home lab blog post. In Part 1 of my Deploying NSX series, we covered the prep of NSX in the environment, including deploying the NSX Manager appliance, deploying NSX Controllers …

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