B. Stephen Brunner's IT Storage Blog

The Future of Virtualization?

If there was one aspect of your life that you could virtualize, what would it be?

1> Your spouse?
2> To have the ability to vMotion yourself from one country to another?
3> The ability to snapshot conversations you have with your wife?  That way when you say something stupid, you roll it back, wipe out what you said, and pretend it never happened.

Way too funny!  These are three opening quotes from this "Future of Virtualization" clip.  Basically, after that opening – I was hooked.  What follows is about 3 minutes of what customers are asking virtualization to do in their business... what are the future things you would ask for? 

So you're running your business on SQL. What did others have to say about that recently?

Here is my interview with John Magnabosco.  Premier database consultant and DBA.  John recently co-hosted a huge training day for local companies.  It was an all day event with multiple sessions / tracks to sign up for.  In one building there was enough industry talent to solve the worlds IT problems 3 times over.  I was there as a guest speaker talking about virtualizing SQL server.  It was a great event.

John and I met at the Microsoft 2008 Launch event in Indianapolis.  We both had booths in the vendor session.  It's cool to have extended our networks together since then because we both are out trying to do the same thing.  To develop and find real IT solutions that grow the business.  Here is the interview I had with John after the IndyTechfest event last week.

Tell us about yourself.
I am a database consultant and a business owner. I have been developing applications with VB and SQL Server for over 13 years. My primary focus and interest has been SQL Server for many of those years.

In 2005, I co-founded the local SQL Server user group, The Indianapolis Professional Association for SQL Server (IndyPASS), and currently hold the President role. In 2006, I co-founded the technical conference IndyTechFest.

What is IndyTechFest?

Setting Up An Affordable ESX lab, With A Couple Of Old PCs

With the release of ESXi recently, you no longer need local storage for your ESX servers. By putting the ESXi code on a bootable USB Thumbdrive, you can easily turn your PC or Laptop into an ESXi server and learn ESX without having to dedicate any hardware. This enables you to create an ESX lab at home without any server hardware. If you repeat the process below for 2 different servers, you can actually create an ESX cluster and use many of the advanced features in VI3.5.

This document will show you how to setup an ESXi server using a bootable USB Thumbdrive with both iSCSI and NFS storage from a Celerra Simulator (if you are an EMC customer, you can download the Celerra (as a VMready appliance, from www.powerlink.com) and have "virtual storage" that is fully functional & great to learn about storage, how it works, and even for test and dev)).  If you are not a customer, just email me, and I will send you a link. The only hardware needed for this process is a 512MB USB Thumbdrive, your laptop, and the temporary use of a home PC/laptop.

Download setting_up_esxi1.doc

The document covers the following topics:

• Creating an ESXi bootable USB Thumbdrive
• Turning your home PC or laptop into an ESXi server
• Creating an iSCSI LUN and a NFS Export on a Celerra Simulator
• Discovering the storage in VMware and creating Datastores

This is a first draft of a document created by one of my engineers, while configuring ESXi at home, so feedback is appreciated as people try to duplicate the steps.  Some other Docs I have, setting up the virtual Celerra for example, are one's that I have been slowly modifying over the last year.

everything below was added added Nov 25, 2008

please view the comments section for new instructions on downloading the virtual SAN appliance & videos of how to do it.  Also, you can use these two guides (below) as a supliment to the videos in the comments section.  There may be a few typos on these docs, but they were the best I could come up with, on a limited time crunch.  Again, I would just go to my links saved in the comments section of this blog post, to watch the video(s).

Setting up the virtual SAN / NAS for the first time   Download Step1-Celerra Simulator-and-enable-CIFS

Setting up iSCSI drives for a windows host on the same IP network 

Download Step2-Set-Up-iSCSI-Celerra