New Job

After two years of working for Enventis as a consultant focusing on Data Center technologies (primarily EMC VNX and Cisco UCS) am moving back into a role that is more fulfilling.  Starting on February 25th I will begin working at QLogic.  My title is Associate Principal Enterprise Applications Architect, which really means that I will …

How to create a customized OpenVPN Client Installation for Windows

While on a recent trip I decided that should finally setup the VPN on my Endian Community Firewall.  Using a forum article from endian firewall unofficial support forum I was able to get a VPN connection up and running fairly easy. However, I started thinking about how to distribute the OpenVPN client software with the necessary …

Server Virtualization

After 5 years in SAN storage industry with a virtualization focus, I recently shifted gears to just virtualization in the context of servers, storage, and infrastructure.  This has been an eye opening experience, the most enlightening part of this re-focus has been the incredible efforts that Cisco has put into the engineering of the Cisco …

VMworld 2010 Solutions Exchange Theater Presentation

VMworld 2010 is just around the corner in San Francisco.  I have been gearing up for the show for the last month, collecting material, deciding which sessions to attend, and preparing systems for giving remote demos of Xiotech’s fleet of hardware and software offerings.  Every year brings new challenges and opportunities for learning and this …

How to survive desktop virtualisation: Don’t mess up and make everyone hate you

This is a webcast that I presented on with Tony Lock from Freeform Dynamics on common pitfalls of desktop virtualisation and what you need to do to avoid them.  Please take some time and review the recorded version of the webcasst. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/22/virtual_desktop_unleashed/

BriForum Day 2

Day 2 of BriForum has enlightened me even further on why VDI has not penetrated the nearly as fast or deeply into end user environments.  The appear to be two main causes that have either cause implementations to stall of fail in the marketplace and while both have technical aspects, one also political issues the …

BriForum Day 1

This week I am attending BriForum.  BriForum is a technical conference that draws attendees worldwide for a focus on application and desktop virtualization.  This is eight time that this conference has taken place and is the brain child of blogger Brian Madden (www.brianmadden.com). The day started early at 7am with breakfast and a high energy …

Interesting VDI facts

Most of the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) sizing and performance papers found from the virtualization companies and storage companies state that for sizing purposes a range of 5-20 I/O per seconds (IOPs) should be used.  Using this range as ESG Labs did in their Lab report on HP LeftHand P4000 SAN – Optimizing Virtual Desktop …

The required first post

Every blog must have must start somewhere with the required first post.   Here at Storagehacker.com it was decided that this first post should give a little background on the focus of this blog.  Storagehacker.com will focus on the topics of storage products with a focus on uses in Server and Desktop Virtualization.  While I work …