February 2011 - TBL Networks

Sean Crookston Awarded VCAP-DCA

Posted on February 25, 2011 by Steve Glissman

TBL Networks’ Solutions Engineer Sean Crookston recently attained the title of VMware Certified Advanced Professional in Datacenter Administration (VCAP-DCA). Sean is only the 47^th person worldwide to achieve this elite virtualization certification.

The VMware Certified Advanced Professional 4 – Datacenter Administration (VCAP4-DCA) is designed for Administrators, Consultants and Technical Support Engineers capable of working with large and more complex virtualized environments and can demonstrate technical leadership with VMware vSphere technologies.

Sean put together many hours of study and research to reach this achievement. Sean has documented much of this work on his website – www.seancrookston.com.

Congratulations to Sean Crookston, VCAP-DCA #47.

Follow Sean Crookston on Twitter at www.twitter.com/seancrookston

Follow TBL Networks on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tblnetworks

What I Learned – EMC VNX and The Green Hornet

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Steve Glissman

Virtualization. Storage. Seth Rogen? You might not associate movie theaters and superheroes with Unified Storage, but for one day, TBL Networks found a way to bring them together. On February 17th, TBL Networks’ Harley Stagner and EMC’s Steve Woods provided an exclusive presentation the new EMC VNX series of storage solutions at Movieland at Boulevard Square. Following the presentation, the attendees watched a private screening of The Green Hornet.

Here are a few things that I learned from the EMC VNX/Green Hornet event.

– The VNX series is the new mid-tier storage platform built for the demanding virtualized data center. It has a fully redundant, multi-controller design that scales and scales.

– Just because you have giant bucket of popcorn, you are not obligated to eat the entire bucket.

– Even if you ask nicely, Steve and Harley will not add select scenes from Black Swan to their presentation.

– The VNXe series has a series of best practice wizards so you can configure your storage with just a few clicks.

– I am a sucker for any technology that comes with a wizard.

– Movieland is not planning to screen The Cannonball Run as part of their MOVIES & MIMOSAS® series.

– The VNX series provides the broadest range of unified storage platforms in the industry.

Thanks to everyone who came out to hear Harley and Steve and to watch the movie. Special thanks to the team at Movieland for a providing a great facility and experience.

Solving the Virtual Desktop Puzzle Part 3

Posted on February 23, 2011February 11, 2019 by admin

In this series we’ve already looked at virtual desktop storage efficiency with “linked clones” and user profile management options. In this post we will discuss another piece of the desktop image that can potentially be offloaded to the network. The applications.

Remember that in a virtual desktop environment one of our goals is to make the “gold” master image as vanilla as possible. We do this by offloading unique components of the desktop off of the image and onto the network. VMware has a way to virtualize your applications so that they can be offloaded onto a network share. This means that the applications can be streamed to the user when they log in to their desktop. So, the desktop becomes disposable and the user gets the appropriate applications when they log into any virtual desktop. So how can we do this?

We do this with a VMware product called ThinApp. It even comes bundled with the VMware View Bundled licensing. ThinApp allows us to package an application as a single executable file. All of the DLL’s and bits that the application requires at runtime are packaged in this single executable file. So, nothing actually gets installed on the desktop in order to run the application. Once the application is packaged it can run from the desktop hard drive, an external hard drive, a cd, a dvd, and even from the network. Basically, if you have an operating system and a place to store the packaged ThinApp’ed application, you can run it.

If you run the packaged application from the network, then each user can have the application streamed to their virtual desktop instance when they log in. There is also the added benefit of the packaged applications running on the appropriate storage tier if we are running a tiered storage solution. So, we’ve taken care of the user profiles and applications to make the desktop image as vanilla as possible. Our user profiles and our applications can be centrally managed along with our desktops. We can now treat multiple desktops as a single pooled unit. No more Microsoft patch Tuesday woes, no more uncontrolled virus or spyware outbreaks, and fewer user desk side trips.

Death toll for Cisco MCS?

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Patrick Tredway

Cisco has begun sunsetting their media convergence servers (MCS) server line which has been supporting Unified Communication applications for nearly a decade. This sunsetting began about eighteen months ago with the removal of all HP based MCS servers, leaving only IBM. The removal of HP based MCS servers was timed shortly around the announcement of Cisco’s new home grown Unified Computing (UCS) line of servers. The UCS platform is purpose built for virtualization and offers quite a bit of cost savings and efficiencies over the traditional platforms.

Beginning with the 8.0 and continuing into the 8.5 releases, Cisco’s collaborative products are being certified for co-resident operations in virtual environments. Specifically, the UCS C210 and B200 platforms have been selected to replace what used to be MCS 7835 and 7845 servers. With a price point coming in just under the cost of a single MCS 7845, the C210 server can support four 7845 equivalents on a single piece of hardware.

Add into that, the advent of the Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing (CUWL) model, the UCS line allows for the to standing up and testing new services which organizations had previously been entitled to under CUWL but may have been hardware constrained in completing.

With all of that…why buy another MCS?

Two Great Things Come Together

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Alan Sears

“You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” “You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!” Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups iconic marketing from the ‘80s demonstrates what can happen when two great things come together. So what is the latest combination creating excitement? Cisco Collaboration and Cisco Virtualization solutions. With its 8.5 release of the suite of communications software, Cisco now fully supports virtualizing its voice applications across the entire product portfolio on its Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. Virtualizing applications is nothing new. The benefits in operating expenses and consolidation of resources is well documented on this website and others. However, when those applications are the ones providing communications services to your entire enterprise from one or two centralized locations, then you have a chocolate-in-peanut-butter event.

While clearly this development is going to reduce the investment in hardware to support intricate Cisco Collaboration deployments, it’s the flexibility in design and adaptability of operation that has me comparing it to my favorite flavor merger. The ease of migration and replacement of hardware when the server is just a file on storage makes the last 10 years of rebuilding servers from scratch seem like a bad dream. Disaster recovery plans for business continuance are greatly simplified and easily assured with virtualized communications systems. And as Cisco continues to certify VMware advanced functionality for moving live virtualized servers from one hardware host to another without interruption in service – either at the push of a button from human intervention or automatically in response to system logic for resource availability or component failure – then the mixture only gets sweeter.

So which combination is my favorite? It’s hard to say for sure, which is saying a lot for those who know me well… or know my dog Reese.

Kevin Pendleton and Sean Crookston Achieve EMC Technical Architect Certification

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Steve Glissman

Kevin Pendleton and Sean Crookston, have been certified as EMC Technical Architects by EMC. To receive this title, Kevin and Sean completed rigorous coursework and specialist exams designed by EMC. As EMC Technical Architects, Kevin and Sean are now certified application architects with a focus on preparing the architecture of an enterprise content management solution based on business requirements.

Congratulations again to Kevin Pendleton and Sean Crookston on becoming EMC Technical Architects.