Atlantis ILIO – Diskless VDI & Services Feature Review

My first introduction to Atlantis ILIO was at a User Group meeting in the UK last year. I had a chat with Jim Moyle who explained the Atlantis ILIO product to me. Their primary focus is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) storage and performance optimization solutions. In a nutshell, the ILIO software appliance sits in the I/O path between your hypervisor and storage and does what is essentially I/O acceleration. Since the appliance sits in the I/O path, it presents an iSCSI or NFS datastore at the front-end to the hypervisor, and at the back-end, it is presented with NFS, iSCSI…

VSA Cluster Service Considerations

Some changes have been made to the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) Cluster Service in version 5.1. Previously, the VSA Cluster Service was installed on the vCenter Server – there was no way to decouple it. However in VSA 5.1, the VSA Cluster Service is a stand-alone entity. It can still be deployed on the vCenter server, but it can also be deployed outside of it.

Tintri adds new VM-aware features and VAAI Support

During VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, I had a chance to catch up once again with the team from Tintri. My first introduction to Tintri was at last year’s VMworld, where they received runner-up in the ‘Hardware for Virtualization’ category by TechTarget for best of VMworld 2011. Well this year they went one better, and won the Best of VMworld 2012 Gold award in Hardware for Virtualization. And for good reason. Let’s see the enhancements to the Tintri platform over the last 12 months have brought.  

Heads Up! ESXi cannot distinguish between EagerZeroedThick & LazyZeroedThick

VAAI NAS introduced the ability to create LazyZeroedThick & EagerZeroedThick disks on NFS datastores. Without VAAI NAS, one can only create thin VMDKs on NFS datastores. For those of you who are using VAAI NAS plugins, there is an important note in the 5.0U1 release notes that you should be aware of. ESXi cannot distinguish between thick provision lazy zeroed and thick provision eager zeroed virtual disks on NFS datastores with Hardware Acceleration support

Virsto Software for vSphere Overview

I’d met Virsto Software at previous VMworld conferences, but never had a chance to have a meaningful discussion regarding their products and solutions. On a recent trip to the US, I had the pleasure of meeting with Eric Burgener at the Virsto offices in Sunnyvale. He kindly took the time to give me an overview of their Virsto for vSphere 1.5 product.