Rob Steele

Breaking down the different VxRack Node types

I’ve been asked quite a bit lately on VxRack node types and options so I wanted to go over what is available and some of the options. First lets start off with the VxRack 1000 Flex options. At a high level there are 3 vxrack node types that can be configured in a VxRack solution; Dense Compute, Dense Storage, and a Storage only node.  Each of these nodes have a couple variations in order to…

If you are looking for the magic formula to win the lottery you have come to the wrong place. However today we will have some fun with some of the Powerball’s previous winning numbers so we can better decide on how we want to make our picks for the upcoming drawing.

Before we get started lets take a step back and get a basic overview/understanding of how powerball works. Drawings are held…

It’s not often I get to sit down and enjoy some online gaming these days. But when I do, I expect a pretty simple end user experience and shortest time to actually play a game. My most recent Xbox One game purchase was Halo 5 Guardians and I have had some issues connecting every time with what seems to be a generic error message: Could not find a server that was suitable for all members of your…

Google Trends for #Monday and the days of the week!

As I’ve been building out the framework for “Attack the Week” I started to become curious as to which days of the week were most searched for, commented about, or even tweeted about. Since I’m building a framework for Mondays, I was curious as to which days people are actually interested in. My initial thoughts were that Fridays were going to win in a land slide, but it turns out that its not…

Happy Monday let's Attack the Week ! #AttackTheWeek

Well today is Monday and I thought it would be a good idea to try something new. I’ve been reading the Tim Ferriss classic: “The Four Hour Work Week” and have looked at some normal everyday actions with a new set of eyes. Mostly in an effort to become more effective with my time, I was thinking this morning of a quote I like: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four…

Windows 10 IoT Raspberry Pi 2 Setup Tutorial #IoT

After researching tons of use cases and features of IoT devices and machine learning techniques, I decided to go ahead and purchase my first Raspberry Pi 2. I primarily want to explore setting up sensors and streaming that sensor data to various cloud providers.  I’ve also looked at a couple projects dealing with some mesh networking that looked interesting, but for this project we will be…

New Blog: VMware Photon on vCloud Air

Tonight I wanted to provision one of VMware’s newest open source projects on [eafl id=657 name=”vcloud info” text=”VMware vCloud Info”]. Photon is a minimal Linux container host OS. It is designed to have a small footprint and boot extremely fast on VMware platforms. Photon is optimized for vSphere and validated on VMware product and provider platforms. Photonsupports the following container…

Announced today at #XboxE3 was a couple pieces of good news and one I have mixed feelings about. First lets get onto the good stuff !!! The first and probably the best news by far is the fact that Xbox One will now have backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games ! I can’t stress how much this stressed me out when I first found out that my collection of games was now useless. Now Microsoft has…

Cisco Live 2015 – ABC Guide

Cisco Live is coming around again this year and in order to get all of the information to you I thought the easiest way to organize it would be to do it alphabetically. So here is my attempt to give you all you need to know about Cisco Live 2015 in ABC order…

Cisco Live Aerosmith

This years musical guest at the customer appreciation event will be Aerosmith !

Cisco Live Blog

Check out all of the…

First and foremost I want to thank the EMCElect of 2014, I had a great year and learned quite a bit on utilizing social media for the greater good of the community. I’ve always had social profiles and dabbled with social media but this past year I truly learned the value and benefits of social media. It allowed me to meet, interact, and learn from the top experts in IT. I’ve developed new…

EMC VSPEX BLUE KEYNOTE RECAP

Incase you missed the EMC VSPEX BLUE announcement earlier today, you can still access the launch presentation here. The VSPEX BLUE offering is a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance that integrates VMware’s EVO: Rail software stack with EMC’s management software. In  keeping with the EVO:Rail reference architecture, each VSPEX Blue appliance has four server nodes in a 2U rackmount form…

VMware vCloud Air from Beta to Now

I was given the privilege to test out what was formally called VMware vCHS on demand, and up until the beta phase of OnDemand you would have to size and buy chunks of resources if you were going to use the VMware vCHS service. When they announced the beta on demand program I was nothing but excited and intrigued as to how this new service would pan out.

Having the ability to spin up cloud…

What are Clan Tokens in Advanced Warfare ?

I’m just getting started / familiar with Call of Duty Advanced Warfare Clans and noticed that there is a “Clan Tokens” metric. I’ve looked in multiple locations in the game and had to resort to search online for answers to what they are and what they are used for. I would assume they would be used for some item unlocks or can be used for events. I’m not a big fan of assuming so here are some of…

VMware CBT may not be giving your backups accurate data.

If you are currently using VMware vSphere and you are utilizing CBT (Change Block Tracking) for you backups you may be at risk of bad backups. Luckily this issue only effects vmdk files that have grown over 128GB in size, so this should narrow down your scope of affected backups. This issue can be reproduced by expanding a virtual disk (vmdk) file with Change Block Tracking (CBT) enabled. Your…

#Shellshock Bash and #Bashbug Vulnerability

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Heartbleed vulnerability with OpenSSL and how it has affected most of the applications and systems across the internet. Well a new vulnerability has appeared and is potentially much worse. While this vulnerability is new to the public it has been a “bug” for over 25 years and is just now being exploited on a much larger scale.

Shellshock Video:

Her…

(LIVE PLACE HOLDER BLOG) I will be adding to this throughout the day as new information is found.

Word on the internets is: VMware is coming out with a new Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance. I plan to use this page to centralize any and all information I find out about this appliance.

The converged infrastructure market will hit $17.8 billion in 2016, up from $4.6 billion in 2012. Converged infrastructure will account for 12.8 percent of total storage, server, networking and software…