More information on SearchMyVM is available from VKernel’s web site.

• SearchMyVM
• Searching Microsoft Support via Quicksilver
• CompareMyVM
• Embotics V-Scout
• OVF Format Released, VMAN Initiative Launched

Hyper9 does have a few prerequisites or requirements for potential beta participants:

• Must be using VMware ESX 3.0 or higher and VirtualCenter 2.0 or higher
• Must have at least 2 VMware ESX servers
• Must have at least 20 virtual machines (VMs)

In addition, if selected, program participants must agree to install the software within 5 days of receiving it, and users from Hyper9 competitors are not eligible (duh!). Once installation is complete, users will need to notify Hyper9 at an e-mail address to be provided to them.

Do you meet the requirements? If so, and you’re interested in participating in the beta, post a comment below. Be sure to use a valid e-mail address!

• Hyper9 Beta Invitations
• Spouse Activities Confirmation
• Comment Spam
• Hyper-V Clustering Scenarios
• VIR353: Planning for Server Virtualization with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

Case in point: today Google announced official support for CalDAV with Apple iCal. If you’ve followed my blog for any significant length of time you’ll recall that I used Google Calendar back around the VMworld 2008 timeframe, with iCal and CalDAV, to help coordinate vendor meetings and such. So, today, I decided that starting in January, I’d move all my calendaring to Google Calendar and manage it via CalDAV from iCal. So I go out to the Google Help site and look up the instructions for connecting iCal to Google Calendar via CalDAV.

Alas, the old instructions are gone; all that remains are new instructions that say “Use our new tool!” Hey, this is a nifty tool and all, but I’d prefer to do it manually. Where’s the information on doing it manually? Gone, apparently.

After far too long using Google to search for information on how to manually configure iCal to use CalDAV to talk to Google Calendar—and primarily getting results back that were from Google and had no such information—I finally stumbled across this page that described how to use Google Apps and CalDAV support with iCal. Piecing together bits of information from there and the previous time I configured iCal, I was able to make it work.

For the benefit of everyone else out there who prefers to do things the hard way, here’s the information you need to manually configure iCal to use CalDAV with Google Calendar.

1. In iCal, select iCal > Preferences… and then click on Accounts.
2. Click the + sign to add a new account.
3. Specify a description. For username, add your Google Calendar login information, like “username@gmail.com”, and put in your password.
4. Expand the “Server Options” section to expose the Account URL setting.
5. For Account URL, specify “https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/[Google Calendar ID]/user”. Note that it’s actually “/user” there at the end, not your user name. The Google Calendar ID in brackets is visible in Google Calendar by going to the settings for a calendar and looking toward the bottom of the Calendar Details tab. You’ll see some funky junk like “asdfjklasdfjklasdjklasdjkl@group.calendar.google.com” or similar. That’s the Google Calendar ID.
6. Click Add.

That should be it. Note that these instructions work for any calendar you create in Google Calendar, but they don’t work for Google Apps users. Google Apps users should follow the link above for information.

By the way, it’s also worth mentioning that CalDAV accounts like this are synced to your iPhone, too. Handy.

• More on my VMworld 2008 Schedule
• CentOS 5 Active Directory Integration Problem
• Semi-Automatic Account Maintenance
• Report of Logons from Security Logs
• Using Samba in Linux-AD Integration

The new functionality being announced by FalconStor today is actually two-fold:

1. First, FalconStor will now offer NFS and CIFS access to the deduplication repository through its file interface deduplication system (FIDS), enabling NAS-based disk-to-disk (D2D) backup solutions to integrate seamlessly with the FalconStor data repository. D2D backup solutions that are designed to write to NFS or CIFS can now dump backup data to a FalconStor appliance and take advantage of the deduplication functionality.
2. Second, version 5.1 of the FalconStor VTL software adds support for 8Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb Ethernet, enabling faster backups via these high-speed technologies. For backup solutions that utilize a “traditional” VTL, FalconStor can now offer higher throughput in those environments.

Overall, FalconStor’s system continues to retain or enhance features like many-to-one data replication, global deduplication across multiple appliances, and availability as a virtual appliance.

More information should be available on FalconStor’s web site, although at the time of publication of this article their site had not yet been updated.

• NetApp Adds Deduplication to Their VTL
• Quick Guide to Setting up NetApp Deduplication
• Storage Short Take #4
• Embotics V-Scout
• Using NetApp Deduplication with Block Storage

• Stephen Foskett has a nice round-up of some of the storage-related changes available to users in VMWare ESX 3.5 Update 3. Of particular note to many users is the VMDK Recovery Tool. Oh, and be sure to have a look at Stephen’s list of top 10 innovative enterprise storage hardware products. He invited me to participate in creating the list, but I just didn’t feel like I would have been able to contribute anything genuinely useful. Storage is an area I enjoy, but I don’t think I’ve risen to the ranks of “storage guru” just yet.
• And in the area of top 10 storage lists, Marc Farley shares his list of top 10 network storage innovations as well. I’ll have to be honest—I recognize more of these products than I did ones on Stephen’s list.
• Robin Harris of StorageMojo provides some great insight into the details behind EMC’s Atmos cloud storage product. I won’t even begin to try to summarize some of that information here as it’s way past my level, but it’s fascinating reading. What’s also interesting to me is that EMC chose to require users to use an API to really interact with the Atmos (more detailed reasons why provided here by Chad Sakac), while child company VMware is seeking to prevent users from having to modify their applications to take advantage of “the cloud.” I don’t necessarily see a conflict between these two approaches as they are seeking to address two different issues. Actually, I see similarities between EMC’s Atmos approach and Microsoft’s Azure approach, both which require retooling applications to take advantage of the new technology.
• Speaking of Chad, here’s a recent post on how to add storage to the Celerra Virtual Appliance.
• Andy Leonard took up a concern about NetApp deduplication and volume size limits a while back. The basic gist of the concern is that in its current incarnation, NetApp deduplication limits the size of the volume that can be deduplicated. If the size of the volume ever exceeds that limit, it can’t be deduplicated—even if the volume is subsequently resized back within the limit. With that in mind, users must actively track deduplication space savings so that, in the event they need to undo the deduplication, they don’t inadvertently lose the ability to deduplicate because they exceeded the size limit. Although Larry Freeman aka “Dr Dedupe” responded in the comments to Andy’s post, I don’t think that he actually addressed the problem Andy was trying to state. Although the logical data size can grow to 16TB within a deduplicated volume, you’ll still need to watch deduplication space savings if you think you might need to undo the deduplication for whatever reason. Otherwise, you could exceed the volume size limitations and lose the ability to deduplicate that volume.
• And while we are on the subject of NetApp, a blog post by Beth Pariseau from earlier in the year recently caught my attention; it was in regards to NetApp Snapshots in LUN environments. I’ve discussed a little bit of this before in my post about managing space requirements with LUNs. The basic question: how much additional space is recommended—or required—when using Snapshots and LUNs? Before the advent of Snapshot auto-delete and volume autogrow, the mantra from NetApp was “2x + delta”—two times the size of the LUN plus changes. With the addition of these features, deduplication, and additional thin provisioning functionality, NetApp has now moved their focus to “1x + Delta”—the size of the LUN plus space needed for changes. It’s not surprising to me that there is confusion in this area, as NetApp themselves has worked so hard to preach “2x + Delta” and now has to go back and change their message. Bottom line: You’re going to need additional space for storing Snapshots of your LUNs, and the real amount is determined by your change rate, how many Snapshots you will keep, and for how long you will keep them. 20% might be enough, or you might need 120%. It all depends upon your applications and your business needs.
• If you’re into Solaris ZFS, be sure to have a look at this NFS performance white paper by Sun. It provides some good details on recent changes to how NFS exports are implemented in conjunction with ZFS.

That’s it for this time around, but feel free to share any interesting links and your thoughts on them in the comments!

• Using NetApp Deduplication with Block Storage
• Provisioning LUNs for Use with Deduplication
• Quick Guide to Setting up NetApp Deduplication
• Managing LUN Space Requirements with NetApp Storage
• A Couple More Articles Published

The second part of the session delved into some NetApp-specific information:

• NetApp has a PVR-only tool called HyperVIBE that helps to coordinate storage array Snapshots with the hypervisor, providing VSS integration to quiesce the VMs before taking a Snapshot on the NetApp array. This is only supported on Server Core and requires a special release of SnapDrive 6.0. (It’s only available via PVR, so don’t go searching the NetApp web site for a free download.)
• The various members of the SnapManager family—SnapManager for SQL, SnapManager for Exchange, and SnapManager for Sharepoint—are all fully supported on Hyper-V, but only for iSCSI LUNs.
• NetApp SnapDrive 6.x is supported both on Hyper-V hosts as well as guest VMs. On the parent partition, it can manage both Fibre Channel LUNs and iSCSI LUNs; on a child partition, it can only manage iSCSI LUNs.
• Version 5.x of the Host Utilities Kit is strongly recommended for use with Hyper-V, and supports Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and mixed connections. It runs on either the parent or child partition, although it seems to me that it would only make sense to run it on the parent partition.
• Data ONTAP DSM 3.2R1 is the supported and recommended DSM for MPIO support with Hyper-V. On the parent partition, it supports and manages Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and mixed paths, but in a child partition it only supports iSCSI paths. It’s also only supported in child partitions running a server OS (so no Windows XP or Windows Vista support in child partitions).

For more information, readers can refer to TR-3701 and TR-3702. Note that updated versions of TR-3702 are expected to be released in the coming months to address additional product integrations.

• Storage Protocol Performance Whitepaper from NetApp
• A Collection of Hyper-V Links
• Proving VMware Over NFS
• VIR358: Hyper-V Architecture, Scenarios, and Networking
• VIR367: Hyper-V Security and Best Practices

So, over the next few days, look for blog posts about some of the sessions that I attended during NetApp Insight. They all be tagged Insight2008, in case you would like to browse them that way.

Note that a fair number of these sessions discuss timelines or targeted feature sets for future products. None of the information I post here should be taken as any sort of commitment from NetApp as to when a product will be delivered or what features it will contain. Just like any other company, things still in development may change before they are released. (No, NetApp did not ask me to say that—in fact, they are not reviewing this content at all. I’m just trying to help good sense prevail.)

• At NetApp Insight This Week
• VMworld 2006 Day 3 and Wrap-Up
• NetApp Insight Posts
• Comparison of WAFL and ZFS
• NetApp Suing Sun over ZFS

• Any iPhone App Recommendations?
• Apple iPhone
• ActiveSync on the iPhone
• OmniFocus for iPhone First Impressions
• The Adventures of OmniFocus Bonjour Sync

(Yes, I know the holiday isn’t until Thursday, but I’m leaving with my family for a short out-of-town vacation and wanted to go ahead and wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving before leaving.)

To those readers who do not celebrate Thanksgiving but do celebrate something similar, I wish you a very enjoyable holiday as well.

• Happy Thanksgiving!
• Happy Thanksgiving!
• A Short Break
• Happy July 4th!
• Finally Back From Vacation

The OmniGraffle update brings one feature that I have especially been anticipating: the ability to import Windows Metafile images in Visio diagrams. This extremely useful feature, first hinted at here back in March, will tremendously ease Visio compatibility and should open up lots of Visio shapes to be used in OmniGraffle that previously were not usable. I tested this functionality this morning on a complex NetApp-VMware-IBM BladeCenter diagram from a co-worker, and it works as advertised. Future tests will see how well this functionality works in bringing Visio stencils into OmniGraffle. This is a free upgrade for current OmniGraffle 5.0 customers.

The OmniFocus update brings this GTD application’s official 1.5 release, and with it synchronization with OmniFocus for iPhone. Now that both the Mac and iPhone versions support Bonjour sync—although this is not without its own travails—I find myself using them more and more. If you’ve been following the pre-release versions of OmniFocus (the so-called “sneaky peeks”) then you won’t find many new features in this official release, but users who have been waiting for the official release to upgrade are in for a real treat. As with OmniGraffle, this OmniFocus upgrade is a free upgrade for existing OmniFocus 1.x customers.

• OmniFocus for iPhone First Impressions
• Any iPhone App Recommendations?
• NetApp OmniGraffle Stencils
• The Adventures of OmniFocus Bonjour Sync
• OmniGraffle Just Keeps Getting Better