For those of you in the ESX space who are religious about your installation and deployment of Host Utility Kits (I hope you are!) 5.1 has just been announced! Hooray!

ESX Host Utilities 5.1 contain the following new features:

• Support for ESX 4.0 hosts.
• Support for role-based access control (RBAC) user names so that root access to storage controllers is not required.
• The mbralign program that fixes misaligned VMDK partitions.
• New timeout values added to config_hba to support software iSCSI initiators on 10 Gb Ethernet. Check the Interoperability Matrix for supported 10 Gb configurations.
• Updated SNIA API libraries for Emulex and QLogic adapters.
• An -expert option for the Host Utilities install command that installs the Host Utilities components but does not set timeouts or paths

And lots of other cool stuff, but these are the major high-lights, so get out there and download today! Hooray!

If there’s one thing about TechEd in my experience (Apparently, my experience isn’t everyones experience.. infact, I’m not sure ANYONE else experiences this ;)) is that it is a whirlwind adventure of constantly being on the run, on the go, and occasionally… getting heckled by the competition (Erk, can I call that ‘product’ competition? We don’t sell Laptops and Dell doesn’t sell storage [snicker ;)] :)

I like business cards, as they’re a good way to stay in touch with people you’ve met, definitely, right? Oh and Twitter, that’s good for it too.     But what if you don’t have any business cards? (ran out on the 1st day;)) I adopted the model of taking a photo of you and your badge.. Win?!

Because I wouldn’t want to publish anyone’s image and name without their permission, I’ll instead give you this one! (and this lovely story.. strangely retold many times throughout the show by others ;))

Meet mr Dell Guy, I didn’t catch his name (too blurry) but he definitely caught that I work for a competitor (Hey, I’m here as an attendee!) was my common response when assaulted! Even though I did have a number of lengthy and high quality NetApp related conversations, I had just as many good quality Education and Community conversations too.   But you don’t care about that! You care about the heckling! :)

Being at the front of the line, literally in the front as a drawing is called is always a good way to find out if you’re a winner, or… if you’re going to be publicly called out on.   Oh and a competitor being mic’d to a large crowd yelling out NetApp every other word, perhaps that is just good times. ;)

For what it is worth, I did not win the laptop they were giving away (Which mr Dell did say “You can’t win!”) as I scoff being a mere ‘attendee’ :)  Although if you’re interested I did win Flip Mino Ultra from Cisco (Notice Cisco in the background) – I’ll discuss that later in another story ;)

I wish I had more time to get around and enter into drawings or try to win mega-big prizes, but it was not in the cards.. I barely could pack all the swag I DID end up taking home, so no harm no foul! :)

Hey, are you going to TechEd? Stop by and visit NetApp (and me! :))

Join NetApp at Microsoft TechEd 2009

Booth 417

Join us at booth 417 to discover how you can do more and store less with NetApp. Guaranteed.* See how our comprehensive portfolio of storage and data management solutions can help you reduce costs, reach new levels of efficiency, and increase data protection in your Microsoft environment.

You’ll also have the opportunity to meet with our executives and technical experts. Together, we’ll look at how our innovative solutions for Microsoft Hyper-V™, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server®, and Microsoft SQL Server® can help your company go further, faster.

In addition to learning about NetApp® storage and data management solutions for Microsoft environments at the NetApp booth, you’ll get a free NetApp t-shirt and a chance to win an Amazon Kindle 2 and a $200 Amazon gift certificate in our daily raffle. You’ll also be entered to win our grand prize—a $5,000 AMEX gift card!

If you would like to get more in-depth information on our innovative storage and data management solutions for Microsoft environments while at TechEd, fill out the form to request a meeting with our executives or technical experts.

Furthermore, the kinds of things which will be covered?!

NetApp virtualization solutions for Hyper-V:  Enabling customers to realize the promise of a flexible, scalable, and efficient data center by eliminating common challenges with storage provisioning and data protection encountered when transitioning to a virtualized environment.
NetApp storage and data management solutions for Microsoft Exchange:  Helping customers reduce costs, increase availability and simplify management of their enterprise messaging systems.
NetApp storage and data management solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server:  Helping customers reduce costs and improve availability by improving ways of managing and protecting their data in collaboration portals and document repositories across the enterprise.
NetApp solutions for Microsoft SQL Server: Enabling customers to reduce costs and increase availability using our highly efficient, scalable storage and data management solutions.

NetApp Birds-of-a-Feather session

NetApp will be hosting a Birds-of-a -Feather session, “Gaining Efficiencies with Virtualization” on Wednesday, May 13^th from8:00 pm – 9:00 pm.

So, come on down, and I’ll be there as well! Feel free to tweet me, or find me around!

Yea, I know I just wrote this post yesterday NetApp System Manager (NSM) 1.0 FCS Released! DOWNLOAD NOWZ! and my good friend Steve also released this on the NetApp Blogs:  NetApp System Manager 1.0

But while demoing this to some folks who hadn’t seen it before I noticed something I completely overlooked before!

To which I immediately stated “ZOMG! This is cool!” Seriously.  How often have you been in the scenario of wanting/needing to know how much space you’d reclaim from purging a snapshot – Now it’s even easier! ZOMG! WOOHOO! etc. :)

Not to mention there is this super cool Deduplication visual as well!

The section on the left is “Before” deduplication, and the right is “After”

There is so much more in here that is so cool, but I had to call out these two things, because wow! Just Wow! That’s so cool!

NetApp® System Manager 1.0 – Download

Wow, seriously! The NSM (NetApp System Manager) is now available for public consumption! Yes that means you! The public!

Where do I get it? – Login to now.netapp.com and scroll down in your downloads list and look for “System Manager” like I have shown below!

So, what are the really cool things you can do in the NSM? Let’s take a look!

Here is an look at what systems I am managing – Oh look! It paired my clusters, oh my! :)

Over on the right side, when you have your cluster selected you’ll see four sections, Properties, Performance, Notifications and Reminders

If you click on the little Arrows you will get taken into detail of that particular entry – So if I select the HA Pair, I’ll get more depth on the HA Pair – Etc! :)

I think this is pretty self-explanatory – But what is really cool is – Click the little Arrow and…!

You get the same information, but in numbers instead of little graphs! So pretty cool!

Various notifications will appear here – in my case, it happens to be License notifications – This lab box has a couple of expired Eval Licenses – So now you’ll be able to see this at a glance!

And the last high-level point is Reminders! In this case, it would appear I have disks to assign!

Going back to the main cluster overview – You can also drill down into some depth on specific filers! Here are the main sections! Storage, Configuration, Diagnostics and A/A Config!

Each of these sections have some pretty cool things you can do, and are fairly straight forward

And lastly the Active/Active Settings!

I’m not going to go into too much because you can find it yourself when you install the tool, but one thing I wanted to point out which is pretty cool is the Deduplication option! – If you click on Volumes you will be able to start Deduplication right there from the GUI!

Or from a Volume itself..

So, I won’t bore you too much on the details, but feel free to drill down, ask any questions, check out the NetApp Communities where this will be discussed and this blog and twitter! :)

Oh, and don’t forget to download it! :)