Product Review

VMUG Advantage Subscription – VMware License Keys for your Lab

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New to this years 2015 VMUG Advantage subscription is an addition called EVALExperience . It gives subscribers 365 day license keys for the majority of VMware products. It is perfect for running these solutions in your home lab without a 90 day trial period. EVALExperience is on top of the discounts you receive as a VMUG Advantage member. Current pricing is $200 a year. Check it out! Here are the products you get keys for: VMware vCenter Server Standard for vSphere 6 VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™ Enterprise Plus VMware vCloud Suite® Standard VMware vRealize™ Operations Insight™ VMware vRealize Operations™ VMware vRealize Log Insight™ VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon® VMware Horizon® Advanced Edition VMware Virtual SAN™ VMware Virtual SAN™All Flash Add On Here is what the portal looks like, this is where you download media and keys:   Edit 6/8/2015: Updated product list above. Additional Reading: VMUG Advantage Discounts and Perks: http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=6238

StarWind Virtual SAN: A Storage Solution for your virtual environment

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One important thing you need for your virtual environment is storage. If you have a single ESXi host then using local storage is just fine but if you have multiple hosts and want to use features such as vMotion, High Availability (HA) , and DRS you need shared storage. In my quest to find a storage solution I started out using my Synology DS411slim. It works fantastically but I am very limited with speed and drive size due to the 2.5″ drive limitation. With the cost very high for a new Synology unit it left me seeking an alternative solution, that is where StarWind Virtual SAN steps in. StarWind Virtual SAN presents a servers local storage as a iSCSI LUN and even performs VMware VAAI functions. There is a free edition StarWind offers that is perfect for home labs, test and dev environments. You can download and receive your license key here: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free Prerequisites: At a minimum all you need is some local storage and a network connection as you will be presenting it out as iSCSI. Luckily I have a Dell PowerEdge R520 that will become my virtual SAN server. For better performance, you should have storage running on a RAID (5,10, etc) and multiple network connection that will be dedicated for iSCSI traffic. I have eight 300GB 10k SAS drives using RAID 5, I carved 300GB for my boot drive which left …

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