My original home lab was a collection of Pentium 3 Gateway mini-PCs that I'd install Windows 2000 Server or Fedora Linux onto for practice. Eventually I had a AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400 with 2GB of RAM and would load 3-4 VMs on it with VMware Server.
As the years progressed I upgraded to 2x whitebox...
Even easier is to upgrade from the command line with esxcli:
esxcli software sources profile list --depot=https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml
esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.7.0-<latest dated image>-standard -d...
I work for an array vendor so my input is biased, but HCI and VSAN in particular just isn't the panacea it claims to be. Long winded post coming up....
1. Simplicity - I used to manage HP EVAs, EMC VNXs, and other storage products back in the day. They were a management headache and it required...
A 32 node cluster would take an entire day to upgrade? Is this with moving data during each host going into maintenance mode? All flash or hybrid? What FTT? Any data services enabled? What's baseline latency and how is it affected with hosts going offline?
Dude, VSAN is steaming garbage. Just quit banging your head against a wall and buy a cheapo used Synology box or build a FreeNAS box. You'll have far less sleepless nights. Trust me, you've only just started to find all the problems and idiosyncrasies VSAN has to offer.
When I first got the VCP3 it didn't help at all. My company had a lot of favoritism and because I was newer others got to focus on VMware even though I knew much more than they did.
When I was laid off the VCP did help me get a job at a VAR as a Virtualization Engineer.
Recently purchased a UAP AC Pro for extra speed and don't need this AP anymore. Comes with AP, wall mounting equipment, and power converter if you don't have POE.
This is the UAP AP Pro, not UAP AC Pro which means it's 802.11n speeds NOT 802.11ac.
$SOLD
What I usually hear is people want HCI for 3 main reasons:
1. Ease of scale
2. Single pane of glass to manage the entire stack
3. Direct access to storage resources by VM and App Admins, no need for Storage Admins to get in the way
Most of these reasons are directly related to storage...
Hybrid or all flash?
Nimble's pretty easy to maintain but you'll want to do some planning on how you want to carve up volumes based on the VM's you'll put on them. Nimble has you choose a block size when you create a volume and certain block sizes are optimized for SQL, Exchange, general...
The wear on the touchpad and keyboard in the picture shown is the only scuffs I can find. Everywhere else is essentially brand new condition. Side ports are all clean.
Specs: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook-pro-core-i7-2.5-15-dual-graphics-mid-2015-retina-display-specs.html
Had this laptop 2.5 years and have since upgraded. Laptop has been completely factory reset and sits at the Welcome wizard screen of OSX High Sierra.
Outside...
If you want to renew maintenance but wait on getting the included controller upgrade just talk to your sales team. They can help.
However, if your renewal isn't until late 2018 or after, I think you'll want the new controllers.
I'll be the first to admit our mix of digital marketing, inside sales, and outside sales ends up being a mess to customers. Each has their own purpose but when all 3 are simultaneously hounding one customer, it's too much. Sorry you had that experience.
I work for Pure and they're worth taking a look at, too. All flash, zero decision making required (no RAID levels, all features always turned on - dedupe, compression, encryption), and a super compelling business model. Maintenance never goes up, lifetime warranty (not until product is EOL but...