BernieT wrote a nice blog about why you should enable write cache. Check out his findings, below a short outtake. Explaining Write mode (basic’s). Write through -> When a write request is received by the RAID controller, the controller will not respond to the O/S with a “write success” until the data is written to the physical disk/s. Write back [...]

I received an email stating the following: Microsoft Cluster Server is supported with VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1. Support is similar to ESX 3.0.1 with the following additions: Both 64 bit and 32 bit Windows 2003 guests are supported with MSCS. Boot from SAN for VMs using MSCS is now supported. Majority Node Set clusters with application-level replication (for example, [...]

Ernst, a regular poster of the Dutch VMug, posted a script for load balancing paths to an active/active SAN. What it does is select the next path for a LUN, in other words if there are four paths LUN1 will be reached via Path1, LUN2 via Path2 etc. The script, also available for download here: #!/bin/bash for PATHS in 2 [...]

At the VMworld I had the opportunity to talk with the Lefthand guys about their products. I hardly see these products in the Netherlands but read some great reviews about their products. One of their products that really caught my attention was and is their Virtual San Appliance or VSA in short. I received a demo copy at VMworld and [...]

On the Storage Nuts & Bolts Blog on the NetApp website there’s a sneakpreview on the Snapshot Manager for VI3 by NetApp. Here a couple of outtakes from the original article. Be sure to check the original article because there are also a couple of screenshots in there. Although from the sound of it, it appears that SMVI is related [...]

There’s a nice article about “round-robin” load balancing on SystemsArchitech which got me a bit dazzled about this new functionality: esxcfg-mpath – lun <*.lun> —policy custom –H minq –T any –C 0 –B 2048 The policy states that the LUN should utilize a custom policy that determines which (of two) HBA to utilize based on the minimum queue length. This [...]

Netapp just announced a new product “SnapManager® for Virtual Infrastructure”: SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure enables customers to protect their VMware environments with automated data protection and recovery of their virtual machines. SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure dramatically reduces human error and increases server utilization for application workloads by eliminating the interruptions and performance impact caused by traditional server-hosted backups and restores. [...]