Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for August 2009

Primary and Secondary nodes, pick one!

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I get this question at least once every two weeks; Is it possible to handpick a primary node? Until now the answer has always been; No, this is not possible. But is this really the case? Can’t I manually promote a server to primary or demote a server to secondary? Those who have been paying attention might have noticed there’s a way to actually list the current primaries and secondaries from the HA command-line interface.

/opt/vmware/aam/bin/Cli (ftcli on earlier versions)
AAM> ln

Now that makes you wonder what else is possible… Lets start with a warning. I don’t know if this is supported. Lets assume it is not. Also keep in mind that the supported limit of primaries is 5, I repeat 5. This is a soft limit, so you can manually add a 6th, but this is not supported. Now here’s the magic…

To promote a node:

/opt/vmware/aam/bin/Cli (ftcli on earlier versions)
AAM> promotenode <nodename>

To demote a node:

/opt/vmware/aam/bin/Cli (ftcli on earlier versions)
AAM> demotenode <nodename>

VMworld Europe 2010 postponed to October

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The rumors were already floating around in the blogosphere but as a VMware employee I could not comment on it. The word is finally out…

Source
We are pleased to announce that VMworld Europe will be held in October 2010. The VMworld Europe conference will follow our Global VMworld conference, scheduled for San Francisco in September 2010, to ensure that we are able to roll out key initiatives to customers and partners more quickly and consistently worldwide. As the leading virtualization conference, VMworld will continue to offer its diverse global audience the latest information on how virtualization is revolutionizing the next generation of computing.

More information on the specific dates and location for VMworld Europe 2010 will be announced soon!

You’ve probably already read the comments of the bloggers on this decision and if not you might want to read these articles:

Personally I don’t know what the reason is for moving the conference to October instead of February. Of course I share some of the concerns mentioned in the blog articles above. I personally hope a new location will be chosen. Cannes was a nice location the last two editions but my guess is that Milan, Madrid, Barcelona and even Nice would be more appealing to most European attendees. (Definitely cheaper!) I guess we will just have to wait and see what the VMworld Europe team comes up with.

VMworld Party & Golden Gate Bridge Run

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One thing that everyone who is attending VMworld is always  curious about is the VMworld party. On twitter a couple of hours ago @vmworld revealed that the party will be held at Yerba Buena Gardens. Unfortunately they have not revealed yet who the legendary US/British rock band is that supposedly has been booked. We will just have to wait and see I guess…

Another thing I’m personally excited about is the Golden Gate Bridge Run. This is an initiative that also started on twitter. As some of us will be bringing our running shoes we decided to do a daily run. Another idea we had was to do the Golden Gate Bridge. If you are interested in joining head over to this blog post and leave a comment if you want to tag along. We might be getting every attendee a t-shirt, and are also looking in to getting this sponsored and donating to charity. Cool huh!

Automatic rescan of your HBAs….

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As some of you, and I hope all of you, have noticed by now when you create / expand / extent / delete a datastore a rescan of your HBAs will automatically be initiated. This however can lead to a “rescan storm” when you are building a new environment.

You can imagine that it’s pointless to rescan your HBA 25 times in a row when you are adding more than 1 new datastore. I can even imagine you would like to be in control; when, which server and at what time. This behavior was introduced with vCenter 2.5 U2 I believe but as I just found out can be disabled. Now keep in mind that disabling is not a best practice. This should be avoided as a default setting but will come in handy when you are building a new site.

  1. Open up the vSphere Client
  2. Go to Administration -> vCenter Server
  3. Go to Settings -> Advanced Settings
  4. If the key “config.vpxd.filter.hostRescanFilter” is not available add it and set it to false

Make sure to set it to “true” as soon as you are done because you would like to make sure the environment is consistent in the future when you or your customer is adding/removing/expanding a datastore.

Drummonds vs Crosby

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I was just watching the Drummonds vs Crosby debate. Many people have analyzed the videos already but the one worth reading is the article by Mr Stevie Chambers. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look it’s definitely worth it. One thing I would like to note is that in my opinion this was the wrong match. I don’t think Crosby is a performance expert. He seems to be more focused on: sales pitch, eula’s and features included in the hypervisor but not in Xenserver. In other words, Drummonds definitely won… knock out in the third round by EPT 😉

Now, my comment to Citrix… As Scott openly challenged you guys to show benchmark reports(Spec etc) and compare them to VMware’s reports please step up to the plate! That’s what ours and your customers would like to see!