Supermicro Build Day Live Wrapup

Another, very educational, Build Day Live event completed, and I still find that each event feels different. The Build Day Live with Supermicro felt like I was learning a lot about the company and not so much about the specific product that we deployed. I already knew that Supermicro is a server vendor in their own category, not an all-encompassing behemoth like some of the other big vendors but not just an assembler of components like some lower cost vendors. I knew that Supermicro designs and manufacture their servers and that their engineering is top notch. What I didn’t realize was that the engineering and manufacturing happens in San Jose for products shipped to US customers. I didn’t know how good Supermicro is at re-using engineering across product families using modular designs. I also had no idea that there are a complete range of Supermicro data center network switches.

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Datrium DVX Build Day Live Wrap-up

The Datrium Build Day was different from other Build Days in that we were live almost the whole time. During the Build Day live stream, we use pre-recorded videos so that you don’t need to watch the progress bar’s slow progress. The pre-recorded videos are usually interviews or demos of things that we don’t do during the live stream. The only time we needed the pre-recorded for Datrium was when we had to wait half an hour for VMs to migrate. We did also play the usual unboxing video, that was more to give the crew a break than because we were waiting for anything. So, does this mean that it takes three hours to deploy the Datrium solution to a four-node vSphere cluster? No, we could have done the deploy quite a bit faster. In a real deployment, the slowest part will be getting two SSD devices available in each ESXi server. The initial configuration of the storage node is a few minutes and the deployment to each ESXi server a few more. You can see the whole live stream in this video on YouTube. Over the next week we will get the remaining videos added to the DVX Build Day Live playlist.

Lakshmi and I discussing latent sector errors and RAID rebuilds

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LIVE BUILD DAY Oct 26 9AM PDT vBrownBag Build Day with HPE SimpliVity

Now that the dust has settled from VMworld, it is Build Day season again. On October 26th, we will be live streaming from HPE in Houston as we deploy SimpliVity into an existing vSphere environment. I am really looking forward to this one as it was working with SimpliVity that helped form the idea of[…]