Docker is making waves, especially among those in system administration, developer-operations, and cloud/virtualization roles. Here we attempt to explain Docker’s most disruptive feature without expecting prior knowledge of Docker’s underlying technologies. In a virtualized datacenter, we have one OS per VM and the hardware is virtualized for each VM. We may have any number of VMs running services (web hosting, backup services, Oracle, or others) on the same physical machine. Through the abstraction of hardware and OS data to files, we can migrate VMs across physical machines and increase the efficiency of cycles previously left idle when using a single … Read More
Deploying FreeNAS as iSCSI SAN for VMware vSphere
Shared storage among vSphere/ESXi hosts is required for many features in VMware’s vSphere. Traditional solutions for shared storage include VMware vSAN, VMware VSA and commercial SAN. VMware vSAN, VMware’s latest offering (currently in beta), requires at least 3 hosts with a SSD/HDD pair dedicated to vSAN. Built into vSphere Kernel, vSAN beta requires at least vSphere 5.5 and vCenter Server 5.5 and is targeted toward enterprise level customers looking for an alternative to traditional commercial SAN systems. VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) is targeted towards small to medium businesses and is deployed on either two or three vSphere hosts. Each host in the … Read More