Organizations are enthusiastically deploying server virtualization because of the immediate benefits it provides. As a result, deployment of server virtualization has never been higher - in spite of the economy. In fact, many organizations today have adopted "virtualize first" policies to help reduce capital (e.g., hardware, software, etc.) and operational (e.g., management) costs as well as improve underlying business processes....

By Simon Gallagher

Now that VMware are moving away from ESX classic (with service console) to the ESXi model I have experienced a couple of issues recently that got me wondering if NFS will be a more appropriate model for VM storage going forward. in recent versions of ESX (3.5 and 4) NFS has moved away from just being recommended for .ISO/template storage and has some big names behind it for production VM storage.

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The Cisco guys do a killer job on these tight, concise TechWise TV episodes… The one this Thursday is on Vblocks.  Hari is the main man in the VCE solutions squad in Santa Clara, and Vblock builder – a great resource to listen to, talk to and get to know. You can register here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns339/ns638/ns914/html_TWTV/t...

From the Punching Cloud blog

Over the course of past week I was asked a couple of storage related questions in regards to VMFS volumes and LUN partitions. The topic of the questions were based on something that folks with experience, and knowledge of VMware virtualization platforms are aware about.

Virsto Software has developed a Microsoft Hyper-V add-on that speeds up access to data in virtualized data centers.

I thought I was done blogging about VMware Partner Exchange 2010, but, twist my arm, there seems to be enough public knowledge about an upcoming feature of vSphere that I thought I would briefly... This is a summary only. Visit http://vmetc.com for full content.

I’ve been asked by a few customers about the location of the VMware ESX\ESXi LUN masking feature and how the LUN masking is done at the VMware ESX\ESXi level in version 4.
In VMware ESX 3.0/3.5 the settings for LUN masking were available in the UI via the Advance Software settings under Disk -> Disk.MaskLUNs as shown in screenshot below.

VMware ESX\ESXi 3.x Disk.MaxLUNs Settings

For all the cloud computing hype, few business customers are actually storing data on Web-based platforms.

  I found this very clever feature in the StarWind vSAN product that allows you to allocate a chunk of physical memory on a host (i.e real RAM) and present it out as an iSCSI target – imagine the possibilities for running virtual machines from that? watch this space \ Posted in Starwind

EMC spent $2.1 billion on data deduplication market leader Data Domain, but other companies weren't so successful with their acquisition plans in the storage industry in 2009.