Virtualization is an essential part of modern IT infrastructure that presents many routine management tasks to sysadmins, among them increasing virtual hard-drive space when necessary. In my line of work, because of expanding log files, scaling for growing processes, and new tasks for existing servers, this is something I do at least once a month.Here’s how to do it in a Microsoft Server Hyper-V hypervisor running Windows Server 2016 using either Hyper-V Manager or Failover Cluster Manager.To read this article in full, please click here
The ethtool utility on Linux allows you to view and change some of your network-driver and interface-card settings, especially for wired devices. These include their speed, whether the interface uses auto-negotiation, and whether it runs in half- or full-duplex mode. Ethtool also provides an easy way to view or troubleshoot your network interface.More than likely, ethtool is already available on your Linux system. However, to check, you can use one or both of these commands:$ which ethtool
/usr/sbin/ethtool
$ sudo ethtool —version
ethtool version 5.13
To get a sense of how this utility can control settings, run a command like the one below. The -h means “help”. You’ll likely find yourself looking at 10 pages or so of syntax like what is shown here.To read this article in full, please click here
Tape is definitely not the best choice for primary recovery, but it does have features that make it a credible option for restoring systems and data that have fallen victim to ransomware without having to pay the ransom.The cloud has many more upsides than tape as a recovery tool in general, but there are circumstances where tape should be seriously considerd, and ransomware recovery is one of them.How to choose the best NVMe storage array
When cloud’s not good enough
Using the cloud for ransomware recovery—or not—has become somewhat of a religious discussion in many circles. Choosing the cloud offers many positive things, including cost, speed, and immediate availability—all great advantages when responding to a ransomware attack.To read this article in full, please click here
For the longest time, single-socket servers were the bottom of the server hierarchy, using "server" chips weaker than what you might find on a desktop. There were even servers that used the Atom processor. These were departmental servers doing the most menial of tasks, like file and print serving.But that's changing. Driven by high-core-count processors, and no doubt a desire to reduce costs, single-socket servers are getting some hefty workloads. AMD has led the way on this with its 32-core and 64-core EPYC processors that can do more with one chip than what a five-year-old dual-socket server can do. Dell has the servers available.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM announced the general availability of the industry’s first magnetic tapes and drives based on the LTO-9 Ultrium specification for massive data capacity and resilience.The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) 9 spec features a 50% improvement in capacity over LTO-8, which translates to 18TB native capacity, or 45TB after data is compressed. Fujifilm and Sony announced media last month, but IBM is the first with a drive.To read this article in full, please click here
Most of us don't often think about swap space unless we run into a problem on our systems that suggests we don't have enough. Even so, viewing and gauging the adequacy of swap space on a system is not overly complicated, and knowing what's normal for your system can help you spot when something is wrong. So let's check out some commands that can help you look into your swap space. But first, let's review some fundamentals.What swap space is and how it's used
Swap space is disk space that acts something like an extension of memory. It gets used when the system's physical memory (RAM) is full and the system needs more memory resources. It's called "swap" because the system will move some inactive pages in memory into the swap space so that it can accommodate more data in RAM. In other words, it provides a way to free up RAM on a busy system.To read this article in full, please click here
VMware and Lenovo have collaborated on edge computing systems, with the goal of making them more robust and resilient.
Tech Spotlight: Edge Computing
4 essential edge computing use cases (Network World)
Edge computing's epic turf war (CIO)
Securing the edge: 5 best practices (CSO)
Edge computing and 5G give business apps a boost (Computerworld)
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft take their clouds to the edge (InfoWorld)
As part of the deal, Lenovo's Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) will pre-load VMware's edge software on its ThinkSystem SE350 Edge servers, a pair of ruggedized servers designed specifically for edge deployments. This includes vSphere, vSan, and Tanzu.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the export command. It's a bash built-in that allows command line variables to be available to a child process – a second shell or a script that you run.
IBM is keeping the faith for Unix just like it is for mainframes. It has announced a new Unix-based server, the IBM Power E1080, the first in a family that is based on the POWER10 processor.IBM announced the POWER10 processor last year. Designed on a 7nm process, it is expected to deliver up to a three-fold improvement in capacity and processor energy efficiency within the same power envelope as IBM POWER9.It features a new technology called Memory Inception that supports multi-petabyte memory clusters for massive memory-intensive workloads along with end-to-end memory encryption with quadruple the number of AES encryption engines per core compared to IBM POWER9.To read this article in full, please click here
The Linux sleep and wait commands allow you to run commands at a chosen pace or capture and display the exit status of a task after waiting for it to finish. Sleep simply inserts a timed pause between commands. Wait, on the other hand, waits until a process completes before notifying you that it has finished.Sleep
The sleep command pauses for a specified time. It’s generally used in a script, but works on the command line as well. In the example below, sleep pauses a minute between the two date commands.$ date; sleep 60; date
Wed Sep 8 12:10:40 PM EDT 2021
Wed Sep 8 12:11:40 PM EDT 2021
Summarizing your command-line usage on Linux
The sleep command takes the numeric argument as the number of seconds. You can, however, ask it to sleep for various amounts of time by adding another character to the argument:
1m = 1 minute
2h = 2 hours
3d = 3 days
$ date; sleep 1m; date
Wed Sep 8 12:16:38 PM EDT 2021
Wed Sep 8 12:17:38 PM EDT 2021
In fact, you can sleep for less than a second if you need.To read this article in full, please click here
Amazon Web Services and NetApp have teamed up to tie NetApp’s on-prem storage and its proprietary OS for storage-disk arrays to AWS’s managed file-storage service, FSx.Called Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, the service provides things like capacity scaling, maintenance, and updates so on-prem staff doesn’t have to. Performance management with automatic tiering between local storage and fully elastic AWS storage is provided by AWS as well.
Learn about backup and recovery:
Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference
How to pick an off-site data-backup method
Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet?
The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space
This is not a new area for AWS, which offers two similar services for Windows File Server and the Lustre HPC file-storage system. FSx for Windows File Server is a native Windows file system that offers Windows file storage in the cloud, while FSx for Lustre offers scalable, high-performance storage for HPC applications.To read this article in full, please click here
Western Digital has announced a new disk drive architecture that combines flash memory with high-density hard-disk drives plus a small CPU to manage everything.If this sounds familiar, it is. Several years ago there was an effort by WD and other hard-disk drive (HDD) makers to build hybrid hard drives, with small flash drives acting as a cache for the hard disk, but those efforts failed, said Ravi Pendekanti, senior vice president of HDD product management and marketing at WD.Now see how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency
“There was a huge pitfall in those [drives],” he told me. The drives didn’t know what kind of data they had, so they didn’t know that hot data was frequently accessed and should be written on to the flash drive, while warm or cold that wasn’t accessed as much should be written to the disk.To read this article in full, please click here
Self-driving cars must possess the ability to recognize road conditions, make decisions and take appropriate action, all in real time. This requires on-board artificial intelligence (AI) that ensures vehicles are able to “learn,” along with super-fast processing power.Tesla unveiled a custom AI chip back in 2019 and soon began manufacturing cars with it. Now Tesla has unveiled a second internally designed semiconductor to power the company’s Dojo supercomputer.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years
The D1, according to Tesla, features 362teraFLOPS of processing power. This means it can perform 362 trillion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), Tesla says.To read this article in full, please click here
The Linux set command allows you to change the value of shell options or to display the names and values of shell variables. Rarely used, it is a bash builtin, but is quite a bit more complicated than most builtins.If you use the command without any arguments, you will get a list of all the settings—the names and values of all shell variables and functions. Watch out though! You’ll end up with a torrent of output flowing down your screen. There are just short of 3,000 lines of output on my Fedora system:$ set | wc -l
2954
The top of the list looks like what you see below, but the output gets considerably more complicated as you move through it.To read this article in full, please click here
The traditional data center is built on a three-tier infrastructure with discreet blocks of compute, storage and network resources allocated to support specific applications. In a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), the three tiers are combined into a single building block called a node. Multiple nodes can be clustered together to form a pool of resources that can be managed through a software layer.
Hyperconverged-infrastructure resources
8 reasons to consider HCI for your data center
How to backup HCI
Making the right choice: HCI hardware or software?
HCI: It’s not just for specific workloads anymore
Instead of a server with 50 cores, 128GB RAM and 1TB of storage, you can have 500 cores with 1.2TB RAM and 10TB of storage across 10 nodes, presented as a pool of resources to mix and match into services that deliver the specific performance characteristics and back-end resources needed for the job at hand. Configuration can be done on the fly, through an easy-to-access interface that lets you build or scale your solution.To read this article in full, please click here
As part of its Architecture Day, Intel spent a lot of time discussing its next generation PC microprocessor microarchitecture, Alder Lake, which marks a radical change for Intel. The question for us in the data center is will the design make its way to the server? If past is prologue, then yes, in time.Alder Lake is due later this fall in three versions: desktop, mobile, and ultra portable. It will come with up to 16 cores and 24 threads and support for PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory plus other features.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI"
Here’s where it gets interesting. The desktop part with 16 cores is actually a split between eight performance cores—P-Cores—and eight efficiency cores—E-Cores. The mobile and ultra-mobile parts also use this dual-core design but with fewer cores. The P-Core is for compute tasks, while the E-Core is assigned background tasks like email syncing and antivirus checks. This is hardly a new idea. Arm has done this for years with its big.LITTLE core designs.To read this article in full, please click here
During a recent training exercise in a non-production environment, I built a Cisco ISE virtual server using VMware vSphere and succeeded troubleshooting an issue, which demonstrates the value of this type of exercise. It also shows how important it is for network engineers to have clear priorities and keep their eye on the goals set for the task at hand.In this exercise, the build of the virtual server gave me the option of using one of two datastores that we’ll call Datastore One and Datastore Two. It also provided the option of choosing from multiple ESXI host machines to launch the virtual server on, and we’ll designate them with letters such as Host A, Host B, etc. Some of the hosts could associate only with Datastore One, and the rest could associate only with Datastore Two.To read this article in full, please click here
Hard disk giant Western Digital and Japan-based Kioxia Holdings are said to be in advanced talks to merge in a deal that could be valued at over $20 billion.Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said a deal could be reached as soon as mid-September. It would be a stock transaction and current WD CEO David Goeckeler would be CEO of the combined company.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years
This is not the first time there has been talk of a potential merger for Kioxia. In March, the Journal reported that both Western Digital and memory manufacturer Micron were looking at a possible acquisition of Kioxia in a deal that might have been valued at about $30 billion.To read this article in full, please click here
IBM has introduced a new CPU for its Z Series mainframe that’s designed for transactions like banking, training, insurance, customer interactions, and fraud detection.The Telum processor was unveiled at the annual Hot Chips conference and has been in development for three years to provide high-volume, real-time inferencing needed for artificial intelligence.The Telum design is very different from its System z15 predecessor. It features 8 CPU cores, on-chip workload accelerators, and 32MB of what IBM calls Level 2 semi-private cache. The L2 cache is called semi-private because it is used to build a shared virtual 256MB L3 connection between the cores on the chip. This is a 1.5x growth in cache size over the z15.To read this article in full, please click here