When Onboard Administrators go bad ... - an important heads-up for HP Blade Enclosure users

We recently had a very unpleasant event with one of our HP Blade Enclosures. Four of the eight ProLiant BL620c G7 servers suddenly lost access to the SAN storage for no apparent reason. By looking at the logs of the Onboard Administrators (OA) and Virtual Connect (VC) FlexFabric modules we found out that something really bad happened inside the enclosure, and it took us some time and the help of HP Support to permanently fix that.

Free backup for free ESXi: Thinware vBackup vs. Trilead VM Explorer

VMware ESXi with the free license (also known as vSphere Hypervisor) is a great way to get started with server virtualization and run your own hypervisor at home or in small environments. As soon as you have some sort of "production" workload running in VMs you will start thinking about how to protect them from data loss. You need backup ... but unfortunately with the free ESXi license VMware has disabled some functionality that is important for efficient backups of VMs: VADP (vStorage APIs for Data Protection) and CBT (Changed Block Tracking) are the features that all modern software products for VM backups make use of.

Nevertheless there are several solutions available to back up VMs running on free ESXi. And best of all these are available for free themselves. Here are your options.

Sponsor news 01/2014

From now on I will post news and updates from my blog's sponsors in irregular intervals. This is not only a tribute to my sponsors, but also a service to my readers, because this will get you fresh news and information and lots of opportunities for e.g. free webinars, to win cool swag etc.

So here is this year's first edition of my sponsor news ...