Booting My ESXi Host From An SD Card

I use my home lab to both learn about new technologies and to challenge my own biases on how things “should” be done. I have always used SATA drives to boot my ESXi hosts with and never gave it much thought that perhaps there was a better way. Then I read this post by Bob Plankers over at the The Lone Sysadmin and thought “Now that just makes sense, and especially for a home lab!” My logic here is pretty si

One Ship Does Not A Fleet Make

Imagine a nation that establishes a colony on the other side of a vast ocean. The nation requires raw materials that the colony has in abundance. Likewise, the colony requires manufactured goods that the nation can produce easily with its factories. A trade route is established with a single ship going back and forth across the ocean. The ship loads its cargo holds with raw materials while docked at the colony’s

My New Role With Coho Data!

This Monday I announced that I had joined the team at Coho Data as a Principal Sales Engineer. Many of you congratulated me, and I thank you for your kind sentiments. This is certainly an exciting change for me! I have been asked why I decided to make the change, and I can answer that question with two words: Software Defined Yes, Atlantis Computing has a software defined solution for storage as well. I am grateful

Learning Enterprise Class Storage Solutions–SAN vs NAS

When it comes to enterprise class storage solutions you have a lot of choices out there. Not only are there a plethora of storage manufacturers to choose from, but many storage manufacturers offer a plethora of products from their brand that handle storage in a plethora of different ways. If you were to ask any of these manufacturers if their solution is the one that is right for you I guarantee that the answer wil

Learning Enterprise Class Storage Solutions–RAID

The first part of this series focused on what I consider to be the basic building block of all enterprise class storage solutions – the hard drive. In this segment I am going to cover RAID which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. The reason why I am focusing on RAID as the next step is because it is the logical combining of individual hard drives into a single virtual drive. Note that I used the ter