My colleague Cormac posted an article about this already, but I figured it was important enough to rehash some of content. As many of you have experienced there was an issue with ESXi 5.0 in iSCSI environments. Booting would take a fair amount of time due to the increase of the amount of retries in the case creating a connection [...]

I was doing performance troubleshooting with Frank Denneman this week and we wanted to use “vscsiStats” to verify if there was any significant latency. We checked multiple whitepapers before we went onsite and our primary source was this excellent article by Scott Drummonds. After start vscsiStats and receiving a “successful started”  we waited for 15 minutes and verified if we [...]

I was just reading up on the enormous amount of articles I had waiting in Google Reader. I try to keep up to date as much as possible but sometimes there’s just not enough time. I just noticed an excellent article of Mike La Spina on COMSTAR. COMSTAR is part of OpenSolaris and on the OpenSolaris website it described as [...]

Update your bookmarks, EMC’s Chad Sakac recently started blogging and already wrote some cool article. Check out his blog and add it to your RSS reader and/or bookmarks. A couple of outtakes: I’ve been working with 10 joint VMware/EMC customers this week in NY, NJ and Houston (phew!), and was in Australia the week before last where there were 2 [...]

VMware just uploaded a cool PDF about configuring an iSCSI SAN. This particular PDF is created by EMC and deals about an EMC Celerra iSCSI SAN but there’s more than enough useful info in there for those who don’t own an EMC iSCSI SAN. The cool thing about the Celerra is the possibility to use “network load balancing”. Where most [...]

When exploring VCB 1.1 I noticed some new features. One of the most prominent is the option to run VCB from within a VM. I can hear most of you think what’s the point of that and how about that HBA / iSCSI connection you need. Well if it’s of any use I will leave in the middle because I [...]

Support for Jumbo Frames is one of the major new features for ESX 3.5. Especially for the people who are using an iSCSI SAN configuring jumbo frames could be very beneficial. Instead of having an MTU(maximum size of transmitted packet) of 1500 an MTU of 9000 would be possible. That would cut out a lot of the iSCSI overhead. But [...]