Yesterday Fletcher Cocquyt posted a rather interesting photo on his Twitter account:
This is, as far as I know, the first public sighting confirming the existence of the “mystic” project Marvin that VMware is working on. The text reads “Introducing the worlds first 100% VMware powered hyper converged infrastructure appliance.” I guess some of the VMware engineers forgot that the VMware campus get external visitors from time to time…
So what is it? Well, there aren’t many details available but Marvin is indeed a registered trademark, by VMware. According to the trademark registration, it’s purpose is pretty clear:
A little over a month ago I announced the Want to Win a Google Chromecast contest and finally the winner has been selected. Since there was a grand total of 5 submissions, and one of them was immediately disqualified for a distinct lack of Ninja-presence, I decided to just do a random draw. The submitted photos were numbered by the order they appeared in on my post as I took this screenshot.
While upgrading a vShield Manager 5.1.1 install to 5.1.4 at a client, I ran into an issue with logging in after a completed upgrade. The username and password used to log in, and subsequently upload the upgrade file, was no longer working after the upgrade finished and the vShield Manager appliance had been rebooted.
I have a free Google Chromecast to give a way to one lucky winner. As part of being voted into the top 50 VMware & virtualization blogs I was lucky enough to win one for myself, and as an added bonus I get to give away one to one of my readers too! To be able to find a worthy winner of it, I’ve decided to host a contest. Since I do enjoy a bit of photography, and the site name is vNinja, the contest rules is as follows:
Eric Siebert has yet again pulled through, and organized his annual top VMware & virtualization blogs vote, and the results are now in. Congratulations to everyone involved, be it bloggers, podcasters or otherwise engaged in making this possible.
This year, Eric hosted a live Google Hangout session with John M. Troyer, David M. Davis and Rick Vanover where the top lists were revealed, be sure to check it out:
This rather tongue-in-cheek title, is a play on Maish recent VSAN - The Unspoken Truth post where he highlights what he thinks is one of the hidden “problems” with the current version of VSAN is it’s inherent non-blade compatibility and current lack of “rack based VSAN ready nodes”.
Of course, this is a reality; If you base your current infrastructure on blade servers, VSAN probably isn’t a good match as it stands today. Chances are that if you are currently running a blade-based datacenter, you have traditional external storage on the back end of that, and that you for quite some time will be running a form factor that VSAN simply isn’t designed for. I don’t disagree with Maish in that conclusion, not a bit.
Remember, it’s all fun and games until someone loses a certification
VMware has announced a Recertification Policy for it’s VMware Certified Professional program, effective as of March 10, 2014.
In short, it means that you are no longer a VCP(x) for life, but need to recertify every 2 years, unless you take a VCAP exam during the same period. If you do not upgrade your certification, your VCP status is revoked. For all the details, have a look at Recertification Policy: VMware Certified Professional.
Once again, it’s time to vote for the top VMware & virtualization blogs. As usual Eric Siebert has opened up the floodgates and set up a voting system, and once again managed to create a lot of work for himself.
So, let’s all make it worth his while and get as many votes in as possible! There are a lot of blogs listed, this time there are over 300 in total.
Cast your vote, and get more information about the process:
The Dell PowerEdge VRTX shared infrastructure platform is interesting, and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to borrow one from Dell for testing purposes.
One of the things I wanted to test, was if it was possible to run VMware VSAN on it, even if the Shared PERC8 RAID controller it comes with is not on the VMware VSAN HCL, nor does it provide a method to do passthrough to present raw disks directly to the hosts.
About the author
Christian Mohn works as a Chief Technologist SDDC for Proact in Norway.
See his About page for more details, or find him on Twitter.
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