IBM

When Should I Upgrade to VMware vSphere 6?

by

I’ve been asked a few times about when I’m planning to upgrade to VMware vSphere 6. Truth is, I don’t know. A Magic 8 Ball would say “reply hazy, try again.” Some people say that you should wait until the first major update, like the first update pack or first service pack. I’ve always thought that approach is crap. Software is a rolling collection of bugs. Some are old, some are new, and while vendors try to make the number of bugs go down the truth is that isn’t the case all the time. Especially with large releases, like service packs. The real bug fixing gains are, to borrow a baseball term, in the “small ball” between the big plays. …

Read More

Coho Data

by

Over the last year or so I’ve been fortunate to work with a bunch of great folks over at Coho Data, who are coming out of stealth mode with the debut of their storage product, the DataStream[0]. I’ve got a write-up over at The Virtualization Practice on the device, but I’ve also got a prerelease unit running in my lab, and I’ve been liking it a lot. Neither Coho nor EMC nor Nutanix will like this comment, but if an Isilon got frisky with a Nutanix cluster the DataStream might well be the love child. Scale-out architecture and great software smarts on value commodity hardware. For both personal and technical reasons I’ve always liked the Isilon products, and they’ve done …

Read More

AIX 6.1 & 7.1 Daylight Savings Time Issue

by

If you’re running IBM AIX 6.1 or 7.1 at various SP & TL levels you might want to pay attention to a potentially big timezone/DST issue that my AIX coworkers have been struggling with this week. In short, the Daylight Savings Time code doesn’t work right and causes the time to change at incorrect times. In many cases a reboot is required to make things work correctly. The support document from IBM says: AIX systems or applications that use the POSIX time zone format may not change time properly at Daylight Savings Time start or end dates. Applications that use the AIX date command, or time functions such as localtime() and ctime(), on these systems may be affected. … You …

Read More