Intro If you grew up in Oklahoma like I did, you know the first sign of a tornado isn’t the siren. It’s the sky going deep grey blue, the air suddenly changing from muggy to dry and cool, and your dad walking onto your front porch with his hands on his hips looking up at […]
Beam Me Up, Scotty: Teleporting VMs from vSphere to OpenShift with MTV and Pure FlashArray
Intro I have a major confession to make. I’m not a Star Trek fan. It’s not for a lack of appreciation of the series, it’s more fate that my childhood was filled with Star Wars, Pokemon, Spongebob, and Invader Zim. So when I was researching some fun analogies for this blog, I started to regret […]
Cloning SQL Server on Openshift: How Pure Snapshots Make Dev Environments Disposable
Intro Array-based snapshots are one of the most powerful features in a database administrator’s toolkit. Once a DBA gets a taste of the speed and simplicity of cloning a database without actually moving any of its bytes, they scream “Great Scott!”, grow white hair, and pace around with a frantic Doc-Brown energy their manager finds […]
The Unofficial Beginner’s Guide to OpenShift Virtualization with iSCSI and Pure FlashArray
Intro If the post-Broadcom migration was a prism splitting white light into a spectrum of options, a bright red ray of light would be Red Hat, battle-tested in the enterprise grade linux operating system now moving into the infrastructure platform space. While it might not have the exotic appeal of NVMe/TCP, iSCSI has earned its […]
Wiring Active Directory into OpenShift Without Losing Your Mind
There is a special kind of chaos that appears the moment someone says, “Can we just hook OpenShift up to Active Directory?” On paper, it sounds simple. In practice, it usually means certificates, bind accounts, LDAP filters, group mappings, and at least one moment where you stare at the authentication operator wondering if it is […]
Configuring the Portworx Operator to use Multiple FlashArrays on OpenShift
Journey into the Jungle You’ve just hacked your way into a new, uncharted OpenShift jungle. It’s humid, foreign, and has a faint, lingering scent… “is that the smell of an old used hat?” you think to yourself, “Or perhaps just the musk of a thousand unoptimized containers?” You wipe the sweat from your brow, your […]
Beginner’s Guide to OpenShift Virtualization with NVMe-TCP Pure FlashArray
Intro Back in early 2024, most of us assumed the post-Broadcom migration would look like the flow of the Columbia River into the Pacific Ocean: a massive, singular current of users moving predictably from one giant ecosystem into another. We expected one “winner” to catch the wide swath of people exiting the VMware stage. Instead, […]
The Gamers Guide to Setting Up Your Own Local LLM with Ollama
Intro I’m venturing outside my usual writing territory today, but occasionally it’s fun to hop outside the world of infrastructure. My recent deep dive into AI has sparked an idea, gamers like myself might find this information surprisingly useful! I recently built my dream gaming rig, now I can finally play top-tier games at maximum […]
Migrating from vVols to VMFS/NFS: Your Post-Deprecation Roadmap
Intro It’s not common that tech companies “un-invent” the future, but that’s sure what this feels like. The tech world just got a major curveball, and we all need to decide how to swing. The big question now is: What does this mean for customers, and what are the options? After dozens of customer conversations […]
How to Install the Pure Storage VAAI VIB using VMware vLCM
My colleague, Russell Pope, and I have been creating a blog series about Pure Storage FlashArray’s NFS capabilities for VMware, part 1 is here and part 2 is here. It’s been a great experience, especially for me, as most of my background is in block storage. As we delve into our VMware integration, I wanted […]