Month: July 2014

SDS: Software Defined Storage solutions

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SDS

Software Defined everything. Still a very hot item in the ever strong developing IT landscape.

In the year 2012 ‘Software Defined’ looked like just another buzzword, but the market is changing direction more and more towards software defined solutions. The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) is nowadays supported by Software Defined Storage (SDS), Software Defined Network (SDN) and security solutions. All very cool stuff!! I want to take a closer look at SDS in this blog post.

So…What is Software Defined Storage? Everybody has an idea on what it should be. My idea of SDS matches the quote below:

Software-defined storage (SDS) is the process of using software-based techniques to create, deploy and manage storage resources and infrastructure. It enables abstracting or separating storage services from hardware devices by using software or programmatic access to extract and manipulate storage resources

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PowerCLI: provisioning a single vSphere host

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powercli

Last week I was working on an environment running VMware vSphere Enterprise licenses. The job at hand was to expand the compute environment with some new blades. Due to the lack of host profiles, I wanted to be able to provision a new host with all the necessary datastores from CSV and all the correct vSwitch settings.

The scripts connects to vCenter, and asks which vSphere host you want to provision using their hostname. I used 2 functions; The first is used to configure the vSwitch settings, the second to configure the NFS advanced settings along with creating the datastores from a CSV file.

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