Tintri

Cloud is a hot topic these days. Public cloud solutions are available in all shapes and sizes and from all sorts of vendors. However, public cloud isn’t for everyone. A lot of organizations have a heavy investment in their own enterprise cloud. This investment might be in custom applications, or possibly in policies and procedures one may require for compliance. With that in mind, today Tintri announced some new improvements aimed squarely at enterprise cloud. In this post, I am focusing mainly on the improvements made to their scale-out solution. ...

I’m happy to announce that Tintri has recently signed up as a sponsor for my site. A BIT OF BACKGROUND In the saturated storage market, Tintri is a vendor that stands out with their unique ability to provide VM-aware storage (VAS). Whether you are using their Hybrid Array or their All-Flash Array, with Tintri’s VAS there is no need to worry about LUNs anymore. You can use their solution to complete common tasks such as dealing with noisy neighbors, or reviewing latency from the array, across the network, and onto the host. Their interface is simple, intuitive, and frankly, one of the most visually pleasing that I have seen from a storage vendor. ...

I have Tintri storage in my environment, and one of the aspects that I love about it is the visibility it provides into our vSphere environment. The VMStore itself has all sorts of great dashboards and analytics, but the integrations don’t end there. Tintri has a vCenter plugin which extends some features over to the vSphere client. Installing this plugin is not something that I commonly do. After all, if I find myself regularly blowing away my vCenter, then I probably have other issues. With that in mind I wanted to document the installation process so that a) if / when I need to do this again, I can do it quickly enough and b) if it is helpful to others, then great. Note that most of the below is for the VCSA vSphere 6 appliance, not a windows based install. I do have a file path for a Windows configuration file listed below. ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post covering Tintri’s recently announced synchronous replication. At the time, I was also given a walkthrough of another upcoming feature: snapshot replication to S3 data stores. This is another big feature that I was glad to see previewed at VMWorld, and even more excited to see an in-depth demo of. For a quick bit of background, S3 is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service which is an object storage system. Although S3 was designed by Amazon, there are many providers out there that offer S3-compliant data stores. This is definitely an emerging market, and the fact that you can have cloud-capable data stores in your datacenters has it’s own curiosities. All of that, however, is beyond the scope of this post - I just wanted to point out that AWS is not the only S3 provider. ...

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a ‘cozy’ conference call hosted by Tintri. I say cozy because excluding Tintri staff, there were less than 10 of us customers and users who were invited. The purpose was to give us a demo of some of Tintri’s recently announced products and features, and the small size definitely gave it a nice touch. There was also no shortage of talent on the presentation end to take us through these new additions. ...

After some delays on my end (primarily due to a trip to the UK … not that I am complaining), the second SouthWest Ontario Veeam Users Group is in the books. By all accounts, it was a great success. Attendance was somewhere around 50 folks, the feedback was great, and the company was fantastic. As a bit of background, we ended up having about twice as many folks as we originally anticipated from when I started planning this in June. It got to the point where we had to close registration - an interesting problem to have! Given that, the venue that we chose wasn’t quite sized as well as we would have liked. The main issue at hand was some audio problems, but we didn’t let that get in the way. ...

I am very excited to announce that the next Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) has been booked for August 18th, 2016. Based on the attendance at the last meeting, most of the attendees came from the Greater Toronto Area. With that as a consideration, the next meeting will be held at: Rib Eye Jack’s Ale House 6531 Mississauga Rd Mississauga ON L5N1A6 Phone: 905.820.6300 Time: 11:30 - 2:30 ...

I recently came into a situation where I wanted to update the CA certificate on my Tintri T820 with a new one from Active Directory. As I went through the process I realized it was not just a point and click process, so I opted to grab some screen shots and document the process. To get started, you should (not mandatory but highly recommended) check to see what algorithm your AD is using. Mine was still using SHA1, which has already been deprecated by some of the newer web browsers (*ahem* Google Chrome, I’m looking at you). I figured if I was going to go through this process now, I might as well follow the best practice and upgrade to a newer, more secure algorithm. ...