Category Archives: General

AWS Surprises – No VMotion

Posted on March 31, 2020 by Alastair

In my on-premises VMware experience, VMotion was a game-changing technology, so I was very surprised to find that there is no equivalent for EC2 instances on AWS. The basic premise with VMotion is that it divorces a Virtual Machine (VM) … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Comments Off on AWS Surprises – No VMotion

AWS Surprises – Change is Constant

Posted on March 12, 2020 by Alastair

Being comfortable with change is an integral part of a career in IT, I like the saying that “if you don’t like change, you will have to accept being irrelevant.” The thing is that the rates of change are very … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Comments Off on AWS Surprises – Change is Constant

Vendor Briefing – Retrospect

Posted on March 5, 2020 by Alastair

I associate Retrospect as an end-point backup solution and have the Dantz brand attached in my head. I am about a decade out of date on both the product and the company. After a changing ownership a few times (including … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Comments Off on Vendor Briefing – Retrospect

A Phase Complete, Learning about Cohesity

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Alastair

Today marks the end of me documenting my journey of documenting my learning about Cohesity, so I thought it might be useful to recap some of the things I learned. Probably the most significant thing is that simplicity is the … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Comments Off on A Phase Complete, Learning about Cohesity

AWS Surprises – No VM Console Access

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Alastair

In a vSphere environment, connecting to the “physical” console of a VM is natural. Whether you need to change the BIOS settings or choose to boot from the network or watch the operating system boot, the VM console is a … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Comments Off on AWS Surprises – No VM Console Access

AWS Surprises – Reduce your bill by giving AWS more responsibility

Posted on February 14, 2020 by Alastair

This article is part of my series on how AWS surprised me as I transitioned from an on-premises vSphere specialist to teaching AWS courses. In a previous life, I worked for an IT outsourcing company here in New Zealand, much … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Comments Off on AWS Surprises – Reduce your bill by giving AWS more responsibility

Protecting Physical Servers with Cohesity

Posted on February 11, 2020 by Alastair

Cohesity started with data protection and management for virtual machines and can also help customers who have valuable data and applications in physical servers. Like every other physical backup product, there is an agent to install and then register with … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Vendor Briefing – Formulus Black

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Alastair

New servers in your data center can have a lot of RAM DIMMs in them, or some RAM and some Persistent MEMory (PMEM) such as Optane DIMMs. Either way, there is a lot of fast capacity that might help solve … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Comments Off on Vendor Briefing – Formulus Black

AWS Is a Land of Surprises

Posted on January 21, 2020 by Alastair

As I started working with and writing about AWS, there were a few things that surprised me about how different AWS is from on-premises vSphere. As I have been teaching AWS official courses, I have continued to notice things that … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 1 Comment

AWS Surprises – It Is Not All about VMs

Posted on January 21, 2020 by Alastair

This is the first in a series of posts about things that surprised me when I started to work with AWS services. This particular surprise was one of the first, back in 2013, I was still teaching VMware courses and … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Comments Off on AWS Surprises – It Is Not All about VMs