Followers of my blog will have seen a number of articles posted recently about storage vendors that I managed to catch up with at this year’s VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas. In the last in this series of articles, I managed to spend some time with the folks from GreenBytes. The timing was very opportune, as GreenBytes just made a major announcement to their portfolio, namely their new vIO, the virtual storage appliance version of their IO Offload Engine solution for desktop virtualization. I met up with Michael Robinson (VP, Marketing), Jeff Eberhard (Sr. Systems Engineer) and Steve O’Donnell (CEO) of GreenBytes to get the low-down on their current product offerings and to learn a bit more about their very recent vIO announcement.
Category Archives: appliance
Heads Up! Nutanix NOS v2.6.4 now available
Nutanix have informed me that they have a new release available – Nutanix OS 2.6.4 (NOS is the new name for the previously named Nutanix Complete Cluster). They are looking for all their customers to proactively move to this new release. Although Nutanix also have NOS 3.0 release on the cards, existing customers will first need to move to version 2.6.4 in order to be in a position to migrate to 3.0. If that is not reason enough, the 2.6.4 release also includes the following new features:
Heads Up! Valid Static Address Ranges in vSphere 5.1
If you are planning to upgrade to vSphere 5.1, you need to pay attention to this, especially if you have assigned static MAC addresses to your virtual machines. After upgrading to vSphere 5.1, VMs with statically assigned MAC address may fail to power on with the error: “The MAC address entered is not in the valid range.”
New updates from Nutanix – NOS 3.0 & NX-3000
Yesterday I had the opportunity to catch up with a very good friend of mine, Ray Hassan, who is now part of the Nutanix team in the UK. Ray took some time out of his very busy schedule to give me an overview of the new Nutanix platform, the NX-3000. He also gave me the low-down on the new Nutanix OS (NOS) 3.0 features. I don’t think Nutanix need much of an introduction these days. Although they are still a relatively young company, they have already made a significant impression in the storage space, and have won many awards for their innovation, including awards from VMware’s very own VMworld.
I too have blogged about Nutanix in the past. Earlier this year, I did a post on their vSphere integration features, including new NFS & VAAI support. I was now curious to see what enhancements they introduced in the NX-3000 series and NOS 3.0 release.
Heads Up! VSA & Quad Port NIC Support
There was a recent discussion on the forums around the supportability of quad port NICs when deploying the vSphere Storage Appliance. There is an error thrown by the installer when the ESXi host only has a quad port NIC. The error states that the VSA installer ‘Failed to configure network on host’ because it ‘Could not find 2 NICs on the system’. However there is a workaround to allow VSA to install when the ESXi host(s) only contain a single quad port NIC. This is only available on VSA 5.1.x.