The iSER extension has the lowest latency and lowest CPU utilization thus more performance. It basically extends the iSCSI protocol to include RDMA support. iSER stands for “iSCSI Extensions for RDMA”. It is an extension of the data transfer model of iSCSI, a storage networking standard for TCP/IP. It uses the iSCSI components while taking […]
Runecast Analyzer 4.1 and Center for Internet Security (CIS) analyzes your environment for any security risk according to CIS standards
The latest release of Runecast Analyzer 4.1 has been released recently and brought an interesting feature that allows you to run automated CIS Benchmarks. One might ask what is CIS Benchmarks? Those are industry-standard checks which are making sure that your infrastructure is secured against known security vulnerabilities. Runecast Analyzer 4.1 and Center for Internet […]
VMware Per-CPU Pricing going up to x2 for CPUs with over 32 cores
This is information which came out as a bomb yesterday and we have already tweeted that. VMwarePer-CPU pricing is going up. Imagine that you want to go for a new infrastructure VMware and that you like the new AMD EPYC™ 7742 CPUs from AMD which has 64 cores. Well, you just find out that you’d […]
Log-structured Write-Back Cache (LSWBC) by StarWind – How it Works?
StarWind software is constantly working on improving its flagship product StarWind Virtual SAN. During the development cycle, they have experimented with LSFS, but finally preferred LSWBC which optimizes small random writes and is able to use RAM and an SSD pool to boost performance, and additionally eliminate completely the need for full-resync after a node […]
Free Physical and Virtual Machine (VM) converter utilities you have to keep
VM (V2V) or Physical to Virtual (P2V) conversion isn’t something new. Since virtualization has started there were tools that were used for one or the other. Today’s post will list three principal tools that are still updated (kind of) and developed to maintain the possibility of conversion tasks. Note that while many admins have already […]
FreeNAS 11.3 New Release
Popular storage operating system (OS) that many administrators are using within their IT environment for storage, has released a new update. FreeNAS 11.3 has quite a few new improvements which are worth to look at. The OS uses FreeBSD distro and ZFS as a file system allowing you to set up snapshots and replication to […]
How to use vSphere Update Manager to update ESXi with the latest VMware Tools?
When you install ESXi host and keep the settings by default, VMware tools are “sitting” on a local ESXi. The ISO files for Windows and Linux containing the latest drivers are in “vmtools” and “floppies” directories on ESXi hosts. This is ok. But if you want to have always the latest version of VMware Tools […]
vRealize Network Insight 5.1 Released
VMware has released a vRealize Network Insight 5.1. vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) supports a large number of vendors which are switch/router vendors. We name a few like Dell, Cisco (ACI, Nexus), Arista, Juniper. Also firewalls such as Palo Alto, Checkpoint, Cisco ASA, Fortinet. vRNI has also Azure support which gives you visibility on application dependency mappings, […]
VMware OS Optimization tool now supports Windows Server 2019
One of the very popular “Flings”, a free utility from VMware Labs got an update recently. One of the interesting updates is support of Windows Server 2019 and also two new templates for Windows 10. The VMware OS Optimization Tool (OSOT) is a powerful utility that we have already reviewed on this blog several times, […]
StarWind VSAN has a high level of customization
I don’t think that I have to re-introduce StarWind company to our readers. Their software solutions were simple but effective for many years. Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions are also provided by StarWind and since this year they are also present in the Magic Quadrant by Gartner. Gartner’s study says that “StarWind VSAN offers a high […]