Journey into the Jungle You’ve just hacked your way into a new, uncharted OpenShift jungle. It’s humid, foreign, and has a faint, lingering scent… “is that the smell of an old used hat?” you think to yourself, “Or perhaps just the musk of a thousand unoptimized containers?” You wipe the sweat from your brow, your […]
Beginner’s Guide to OpenShift Virtualization with NVMe-TCP Pure FlashArray
Intro Back in early 2024, most of us assumed the post-Broadcom migration would look like the flow of the Columbia River into the Pacific Ocean: a massive, singular current of users moving predictably from one giant ecosystem into another. We expected one “winner” to catch the wide swath of people exiting the VMware stage. Instead, […]
The Gamers Guide to Setting Up Your Own Local LLM with Ollama
Intro I’m venturing outside my usual writing territory today, but occasionally it’s fun to hop outside the world of infrastructure. My recent deep dive into AI has sparked an idea, gamers like myself might find this information surprisingly useful! I recently built my dream gaming rig, now I can finally play top-tier games at maximum […]
Migrating from vVols to VMFS/NFS: Your Post-Deprecation Roadmap
Intro It’s not common that tech companies “un-invent” the future, but that’s sure what this feels like. The tech world just got a major curveball, and we all need to decide how to swing. The big question now is: What does this mean for customers, and what are the options? After dozens of customer conversations […]
How to Install the Pure Storage VAAI VIB using VMware vLCM
My colleague, Russell Pope, and I have been creating a blog series about Pure Storage FlashArray’s NFS capabilities for VMware, part 1 is here and part 2 is here. It’s been a great experience, especially for me, as most of my background is in block storage. As we delve into our VMware integration, I wanted […]
How to Convert a pRDM to a VMDK: The Simple Step-by-Step Guide
Intro I’d like to address the rumor—which I apparently started myself—that I am the official RDM evangelist. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In that same spirit, I thought this was a great opportunity to show how I’ve helped customers migrate off of RDMs. This particular customer wanted to move away from RDMs as […]
How-to: Convert a vVol Data Disk to an RDM After a Storage vMotion
From vVols to RDMs: A Strategic Migration Guide The announcement of vVol deprecation in VCF 9.0 had sysadmins everywhere checking their calendars to make sure it wasn’t April 1st. Nope, it’s just another Tuesday in IT, where ‘stable’ is a four-letter word and your five-year plan now has a shelf life of about five minutes. […]
Raw Device Mappings Aren’t That Bad… Change My Mind!
Intro Okay, you see the title, and I know what you’re thinking: ‘This guy’s about to defend a technology that belongs in a museum next to a dial-up modem.’ And you’re not wrong to be skeptical. For years, the industry has treated Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) like a fossil from the Jurassic period, a relic […]
Beat the Final Boss: A Unofficial Guide to Proxmox & Windows TPM Snapshots on Pure NFS
Intro Ah, the hypervisor migration. That special project where you trade a familiar environment for a brave new world of command lines and wiki pages. It’s all fun and games until you hit those Day 2 operations that were once muscle memory. Suddenly you need to recover that critical, TPM-enabled Windows VM after an admin […]
Migrating FlashArray iSCSI Networks: A Practical Guide for vSphere Admins
Let’s be honest, one of the biggest cheat codes in IT is working directly with customers. They have a knack for asking the best questions! The kind that skip the theory and get straight to the practical, real-world challenges. Learning a new technology can make me feel like I’m fumbling around in the dark, but […]