Hot Adding Disk Shelves to your NetApp controllers

Increasing storage capacity in a production or even a lab environment can be tricky. You need to make sure that all the stakeholders are aware of this effort, but more importantly, you need to make sure that you increase capacity in a non-disruptive manner. Over the past couple of weeks, I had to add extra disk …

Configuring DNS services in AWS

In the last blog post, I wrote about how we can configure Active Directory Domain Service in the Azure Cloud. So this time I decided to focus on AWS and walk through the steps that are needed when you are facing the following two scenarios: Configuring a custom Active Directory(AD) domain and DNS servers for …

Configuring Active Directory Domain Services in Azure Cloud

The first question that people might have after looking at the title of this blog post is: "Why would I need to configure AD Services in Azure if it already offers a managed service?" I was thinking the same thing when I ended up configuring AD services on my VMs in Azure. The reason I …

Best Practices for running VMware vSphere on NetApp ONTAP

Running VMware vSphere on NetApp ONTAP is as good a combination as peanut butter and jelly. And it’s not just me who is saying that NetApp and VMware have more than 50000 joint customers that are eating that sandwich. In this blog post, I have listed most of the best practices that you should consider …

Load Balancing in AWS

You just need load balancers when you want to balance traffic across two or more instances, right ?? Nope, there is so much more than just the act of sending traffic across two or more instances that are sitting behind the load balancer. And particularly in AWS, Elastic Load Balancers are a key part of …

Cisco FlexVPN Configuration

I have been familiar with the concept of an IPSEC Tunnel for quite some time but I never had a chance to play with it. That changed when I got the opportunity to configure a FlexVPN Tunnel in my lab. What is FlexVPN, you ask? It is Cisco's latest implementation of the IPSEC Tunnel that uses …

Blue/Green Deployment on AWS

Coming from an Infrastructure side of things, I had never heard of the Blue/Green Deployment technique before I started following AWS technologies. For those rookies who are in the same boat as me, this post will focus more around what a Blue/Green Deployment technique is and what AWS technologies we can use to implement this …