WilliamLam.com

Dual Intel M.2 Optane 4801x in Supermicro E300-9D

by // 11 Comments

For those that have been following along, I have been testing the Supermicro E300-9D (SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP) kit in my home lab which I have written about here. One of the last things I was looking into was storage expandability with this platform, especially since Supermicro has a PCIe Add-On Card (AOC-SLG3-2M2) which can add two additional M.2 devices supporting 2260 (60mm), 2280 (80mm) & 22110 (110mm) form factors.

At the same time, our friends over at Intel had just given me access to a couple of their pre-release Intel M.2 Optane 4801x devices which were then released right before the holiday last year. For those wondering why Optane is so interesting, especially from a vSAN perspective, check out this blog post here from my good buddy Pete Flecha over in our Storage and Availability Business Unit (SABU).


This was actually perfect timing as I was also interested to see if there were any high performance and supported M.2 devices that could be used for for vSAN Caching and this device would definitely fit the bill! When I had initially received all the components, I was scratching my head as the AOC was too big to fit horizontally in the E300-9D.

[Read more...]

1,000th post - The story behind virtuallyGhetto

by // 11 Comments


After publishing my previous article, I realized my next blog post (this article) would be number 1,000, which is pretty insane! It has been an amazing 8 years of sharing and engaging with the VMware community and I just want to thank everyone that has supported me over the years.

Although I have a number of technical blog posts in the backlog, I thought I might do something fun and different for post #1,000. One question that I have gotten over the years, especially when talking to customers and partners in-person is, what is the story behind the name of my blog, virtuallyGhetto? I sometimes even get funny looks as customers are introducing me to their colleagues and management team when they mention the name of my blog 🙂

[Read more...]

Automating downloads from Customer Connect (formally MyVMware)

by // 5 Comments

I recently came across a really cool project called vmw-cli which was built by Andrew Obersnel, an Engineer who works over in our Network and Security Business Unit (NSBU) at VMware. This CLI tool enables you to login to MyVMware and based on your entitlements, download any VMware binary or application just like you would using a web browser but now you can completely automate it from the command-line! The CLI is written as a Node.js application and you can consume as a CLI which requires Node.js to be installed or you can just run it as a Docker Container.

UPDATE (01/24/22): There is now a new VMware Customer Connect CLI (vcc) that is OSS as part of the VMware Labs Github repo. For more details on how to use this new CLI, please check out the README in the repo.

In the example below, I will take you through on how to use vmw-cli using the Node.js CLI method. If you prefer to use the Docker Container, you can simply refer to the Github project page for more details.

[Read more...]