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Archives for June 2009

load balancing active/active SANs part II

Duncan Epping · Jun 26, 2009 ·

About a year ago I wrote about a script that would load balance your Active/Active SAN by evenly dividing LUNs on all available paths. A week ago I provided Kees van Vloten with this script so that it could be incorporated into a scripted install solution. Kees has enhanced the script and emailed it so that I could share it with you guys:


for N_PATHS in 2 4 6 8; do
# These are the LUNs with N_PATHS:
LUN_LIST=`esxcfg-mpath -l | egrep "^Disk.+has $N_PATHS paths" | awk '{print $2}'`
N=1
for LUN in $LUN_LIST; do
echo "LUN: $LUN, Counter: $N, Possible paths:"
esxcfg-mpath -q --lun=$LUN | grep "FC" | awk '{print $4}'
# Take the Nth path for this LUN
LUN_NEWPATH=`esxcfg-mpath -q --lun=$LUN | \
grep "FC" | awk '{print $4}' | head -n $N | tail -n 1`
# Make the Nth path the preferred path
esxcfg-mpath --lun=$LUN --path=$LUN_NEWPATH --preferred
echo ""
# Increase N (within the limit)
N=$(($N+1))
if [ $N -gt $N_PATHS ]; then
N=1
fi
done
done

Thanks for sharing,

VMware Studio 2.0

Duncan Epping · Jun 26, 2009 ·

There’s a brand new version of VMware Studio coming up. For those who aren’t familiar with VMware Studio it basically comes down to this: with VMware Studio you can create your own virtual appliances.

Or as VMware puts it:

VMware Studio provides mechanisms for authoring, on-site management, distributing and deployment of production-ready virtual appliances. ISVs, hardware appliance vendors, and developers use VMware Studio to configure and package their solutions in a standards-based Open Virtualization Format (OVF). VMware Studio also enables software providers and developers to leverage the industry’s leading virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure, and offers built appliances all the great management services that VMware Infrastructure delivers.

New features:

  • Windows Support (32 bit and 64 bit) 2003 & 2008 Server
  • Create multi-VM vApp and multi-VM VA
  • 64 bit support for SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 & 5.3, CentOS 5.2 & 5.3
  • Extensible in-guest Management Framework
  • OVF 1.0 support
  • Eclipse Plugin
  • Enable ESX, ESXi, VC, Server 2.0 and Workstation as provisioning engine
  • Automatic Dependency Resolution (Static)
  • Publish OVF to VC
  • Infrastructure enhancements – GUI and Builds
  • Studio-created VM as Input

VMware Studio 2.0 will be available on Monday! Better make sure to get it while it’s hot… even vStu is excited!

There’s more info to be found here.

New Sponsor: Train Signal

Duncan Epping · Jun 24, 2009 ·

Yellow-Bricks.com is proud to announce a brand new sponsor; Train Signal!

Train Signal is the leading provider of computer training software for IT Professionals covering Microsoft, Cisco, CompTIA and VMware.

Now I could write an article praising Train Signal but there’s no point. I don’t need to convince you guys Train Signal should. David Davis(one of Train Signal’s instructors) recently posted an 18 minute introduction on his blog(vmwarevideos.com) to the upcoming VMware vSphere video training course. Check it out:

Code Central

Duncan Epping · Jun 24, 2009 ·

I visit the VMTN Communities daily and recently noticed a new section called Code Central. I didn’t pay attention to it cause I thought it was a private section but apparently it is not. Nava Davuluri introduced this new section and his role within VMware recently in a blog article:

I’m Nava Davuluri, a new hire into Product Marketing. This is my third month at VMware and things are off to a great start! One of the highlight events at my job so far includes attending the new vSphere launch, where I got to see business leaders in computer technology talk about how VMware products are increasing efficiency(performance, power and hardware) control( security and service levels) and choice (hardware, OS and application architecture) for the next-generation of cloud computing. This has given me a perspective on how important these products are and also made me realize the importance of my role.

I was hired to manage the sample code arena for developers and system administrators that make up the majority of VMware developer community. My biggest goal here is to make your life easier. Yes!, by creating a community based sample code site where it will be easy to create, collect and share sample codes in one single straight forward page.

Some people have started adding scripts to this new section of the community already, take a look and contribute!

http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/codecentral
http://blogs.vmware.com/codecentral/

VMFS/LUN size?

Duncan Epping · Jun 23, 2009 ·

A question that pops up on the VMTN Community once every day is what size VMFS datastore should I create? The answer always varies,  one says “500Gb” the other says “1TB”. Now the real answer should be, it depends.

Most companies can use a simple formula in my opinion. First you should answer these questions:

  • What’s the maximum amount of VMs you’ve set for a VMFS volume?
  • What’s the average size of a VM in your environment? (First remove the really large VM’s that typically get an RDM.)

If you don’t know what the maximum amount of VMs should be just use a safe number, anywhere between 10 and 15. Here’s the formula I always use:

round((maxVMs * avgSize) + 20% )

I usually use increments of 25GB. This is where the round comes in to play. If you end up with 380GB round it up to 400GB and if you end up with 321GB round it up to 325GB. Let’s assume your average VM size is 30GB and your max amount of VMs per VMFS volume is 10:

(10*30) + 60 =360
360 rounded up -> 375GB

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About the Author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist and Distinguished Engineering Architect at Broadcom. Besides writing on Yellow-Bricks, Duncan is the co-author of the vSAN Deep Dive and the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book series. Duncan is also the host of the Unexplored Territory Podcast.

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