Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for January 2009

HP’s Flex-10 and VMware ESX(i) support

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Recently a customer asked me if HP Flex-10 was fully supported for ESX(i) or not. For those that don’t know what Flex-10 is:

HP’s new Virtual Connect Flex-10 Ethernet module is the industry’s first interconnect that flexibly allocates the bandwidth of a 10 Gb Ethernet network port across four NIC connections. This eliminates the need for additional costly NICs, switches and cables while concurrently increasing bandwidth flexibility.

After checking the compatibility guide the answer was “Yes”. So what’s the point of mentioning it here? Well, although it was fully supported there is a mention in the KB about possible problems with HA and VMotion:

  • VI Client does not show NIC connnection is down when the uplink to external switch is down
  • VMware HA is not supported with ESXi 3.5 Update 3 (embedded and installable) hosts with uplinks connected to Flex-10 NICs.
  • VMotion migration of virtual machine May time out with the default migration timeout value of 20
  • ESX Server May fail to respond under the following configuration

I guess the tip of today: Always check the compatibility guide, but also check the KB cause problems like this might influence your implementation time, plan and even your design!

KB: Verify the health of ESX Server Operating System

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I was just skimming through the new KB articles and noticed this one “Verify the health of ESX Server Operating System“:

There are many ways to look at ESX host performance. This article focuses on quick assessment of the 4 main resources:

  • Disk Space
  • CPU
  • Memory
  • Network

The article refers to different KB articles for pinpointing and solving performance related problems. I suggest you add this article to your bookmarks cause it probably be updated on a regular base!

VI Toolkit 1.5 & Podcast!

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VMware released version 1.5 of the VI Toolkit for Windows today! Most of you probably already read about it by now, if you didn’t here is the download link, and the link to the release notes.

So much have been added that it would be pointless to blog about all the changes, 32 new cmdlets and 25 new options for existing cmdlets. Check the release notes and the documentation for info on all these additions! Be sure to also check out these video’s, they give you a great view on the endless possibilities.

Carter Shanklin will join the VMTN Podcast today to discuss this new Release so join the podcast, it will start in 45 minutes from now(wednesday 28 January)!

Train Signal

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Almost a year ago I wrote an article on a CBT by Train Signal. I really enjoyed watching the CBT and that says a lot coming from someone that never used to be a CBT fan. In the end the ease of learning when and wherever you want is what convinced me. Another reason to use a CBT instead of a classroom training is costs, which is most definitely a valid reason in these times of financial crisis.

If you’re not familiar with CBT’s check out this example:

I managed to get a discount for my readers, buy one of the virtualization related(VMware ESX, Server, Workstation etc) CBT’s and get a 25% reduction! All you need to do is head over to Train Signal and enter the following coupon code “YELLOWBRICKS”. And by buying a CBT you also support Yellow-Bricks.com!

Update your bookmarks: Dave Graham

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Update your bookmarks or add the following blog to your RSS Reader: Flickerdown.com by Dave Graham!

Dave is a technical consultant with EMC. As you can imagine Dave’s blog articles mainly deal about Storage and storage related topics like FCoE and 10GbE. But Dave also writes about the Cloud, which is also heavily tied to Shared Storage of course.

I just grabbed a couple of outtakes to give you an example of what Dave writes about:

source blog article
Storage within the cloud is meaningless without a measurable level of performance that it can be compared against. Since there are no established benchmarks that determine performance of storage within a cloud infrastructure, it is reasonable to apply tiering metrics to storage based on content valuation and service level agreements (SLAs) and utilize this as an overarching methodology to judge COSS storage capabilities based on application set.

source blog article
Policy is enacted on this movie object such that it is automatically moved from Tier 1 to Tier 2 after a fixed period of time and again to Tier 3 based on similar time constraints. Globally, policy is additional set for compression, encryption, deduplication, and optimizations and this is applied for content at rest as well as incoming data. Once data has been moved from tier to tier, there is no really process for retrieving that data and promoting it to a different tier based on access or usage patterns.

Now head over to Dave’s blog and start reading and commenting!